I've read that book and one other on the Kasparov / Deep Blue publicity stunt and oome to the following conclusions:
1. IBM behaved badly because they were desperate for a win.
2. Kasparov didn't behave much better and didn't know enough about their behavior to mount a decent argument against them. He knew he'd been cheated, just not how to put it.
3. IBM got their publicity and dared not rematch under properly controlled conditions for fear of a loss. Hence the marketing spin of Kasparov's bad faith acting, which isn't too hard to believe but hey, it's marketing people on the other side so the brunt of evidence stacks against them.
4. Finally: IBM did cheat. Meatspace players can go home and study before the next game, but not swap their whole heads out for new models which is the rough equivalent of what the IBM team did. Kasparov had a point in what he said, he just made it in such a poor way that he got little sympathy. Besides, a lot of players wanted to see him get his comeuppance and sympathy was in short supply, judging from some of the comments I read and heard back then. But that doesn't change that what the IBM team went beyond the pale.
I know of at least one place that uses Lynx on terminals for multiple clerks to enter orders over the net! Last I heard, they provided about eighteen percent of the supplier's revenue. The supplier has tried many times to get the client to move away from Lynx, even to the point of giving them a computer and program to try out. No dice. Now go tell the CIO of the supplier about Zeldman and watch him sputter and fume about having to include 1.0 standards for one client!
Did Deeper Blue really win?
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Awari Solved
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· Score: 2
Did Deeper Blue really get a fair win? Wasn't there some sort of controversy at the time concerning whether it was fair play for the IBM guys to change its programming during the match?
I buy SysAdmin at shops because the mail delivery here is atrocious; I've tried subscribing to magazines in the past and it never has worked. I was annoyed at the diminishing page count in SysAdmin. The Perl Journal and Elizabeth Zinkann's book review column were the main reasons I continued buying it. They dumped the latter at the beginning of the year and now they're removing the remaining reason. I'll still browse it and buy a copy now and then if it has a really superior article on some topic I consider vital but I'm no longer compelled to complete the set.
I'm OS-agnostic, pretty much, and three of my friends were convinced by the "Switch" ads to go to the local SuperMegaComputerCenterStore and look at Apple product on Monday. They convinced me to go along with them.
All of them were sold on buying Macintoshes Monday night (not by my efforts, just by sitting in front of them and using them.) One of the three ordered one that night for pickup Friday since only a demo was in stock of what he wanted, the other two were going to wait and see if they could get better deals after Wednesday.
Then they heard about.Mac and the stupid free e-mail accounts going away and Apple charging for the bugfixes. The one who already ordered canceled his order and the other two are not considering Macs anymore. Which is somewhat sad for Apple's marketing department, if you think about it: here they managed to lure in three customers, fully ready to plop down their dosh for product, and then by going on the cheap and behaving like other computer companies, Apple lost a couple of points of differentiation that it sorely needed to help justify its pricing. The customers saw that mac.com email as a kind of exclusive club that only Macintosh owners could join, a paid-for fringe benefit that came with the higher hardware price. Likewise the insanely great software and free bugfixes. Take it all away and all you have to compete with is quality, which doesn't necessarily win in this marketplace.
Pray that the screenwriter (who worked on Se7en) is adapting, or at least heavily influenced by "The Dark Knight Falls" by Frank Miller.
Now that would be something worth seeing! And if you look at the director's comments in the article it's not out of the question that this is the story they may be telling...
We had a supplier who switched from Apache on some flavor of UNIX to IIS/SQL Server on at least two WinNT boxes. BIG mistake, whoever did the work for them set it up so that Netscape browsers were denied online transactions.
We gave them a few months to try and fix it, meantime we phoned in our orders but we weren't going to switch to IE internally. Their IT head was stubborn and the business owner bought the marketing line about how much money he'd save. I'm sure it wasn't the only factor but they're gone now. I spoke to one of their workers who bailed to another company and he told me that they'd lost more customers than just us over the Apache-to-IIS conversion and general unworthiness of the new system and that the client loss plus absorbing the costs of the upgrade and running maintenance costs of a system that never worked as well as the old one took the company down.
All this so the CEO could have a pretty GUI to look at instead of a character-based terminal! Somebody should've bought him a Mac, put pretty pictures on it and told him they reflected some sort of reality and to leave the IT work to the pros.
>> Maybe I can't speak for the majority of Slashdot users out there, but with every Windows version I owned I thought: 'This is going to be my last Windows version. I'll make the switch after that. This new crap has crossed the line.' And EVERY time I went back and bought the new crap because I could get my apps running easier, because I could play my favorite games, or simply because the UI allowed me to be more productive.
Well, THIS Slashdot user works for a Microsoft Solutions Provider and therefore has access/company purchasing/training on all the Microsoft I can stand, even though I usually work the Unix side of the fence for them. And even though I'm an up-to-date MCSE, at home I back-revved all the Windows boxes to Win98SE. Contrary to what you hear from the Church of Bill, Win2K and its variant/mutant children are NOT more stable, fun or rewarding to use and they're a lot more pesky to nail down regarding matters of spyware, privacy control and consumers' rights in general. And although I have in the past helped maintain my (computer non-literate) friends' boxes for free, I have advised all of them that I will not touch any box with WinXP on it and I'd rather not bother with Win2K unless they have some killer app that absolutely demands it. I have convinced many to backrev to Win98 and without exception, they have benn happier after doing so.
The new crap crossed the line a while back, around the time the Media Player patches screwed up every other manufacturer's multimedia applications on the box. Enough already! I've got most of my friends dual-booting to Slackware, and whenever their boxes' damned internal Winmodems are supported some of those boxes are going to not be running Windows much, if at all.
1. Burden of proof would be on the plantiff, I think
2. Microsoft has lots of lawyers to generate lots of paperwork to bury opposition and waste time
3. During which time they'll continue usual merry ways of embrace/extend/co-opt
4. And even if they lose in court, they can appeal and spin the wheel for a different judge and dump the sentence to nearly nothing or stall until it's all meaningless anyway
They are experts at manipulating the perception of the public and lawmakers that their products should be used and that if there is a problem, something other than Microsoft is to blame.
They have been convicted of breaking the laws of their own country and will probably get off lightly even though they show no remorse, are frankly insulting to the judge, and continue their illegal actions.
They can make Big Wins by these tactics. Technological quality has very little to do with how well a product fares in the market these days. How many years have programmers known how to do bounds checking and NOT let buffer overflow errors occur? and what is the most common bug in Microsoft software? (Outlook, anyway)
If they win this round, kiss general purpose computers goodbye forever. It won't be right away, but this strategy is solid and puts the right Big Players in the right places.
>>Why doesn't the media do aniversaries for things like travelgate, filegate, Vince Foster, etc...?
Probably because those things got investigated up and down seven ways from Sunday by a bunch of guys who really wanted to nail Clinton and they couldn't find enough to convince the country to toss him out, while Nixon had to run out of office fast enough to keep his pension?
And if the media thought they could rally enough support for anniversary specials on those things, trust me, we'd have 'em out the wazoo. Even Robert Ray doesn't care about those things anymore...
Don't kid yourself; business relationships in the United States are extremely personal, at least until it is to the business' advantage to pretend that the relationship is NOT personal.
Most workers in the U.S. spend more time tending their business relationships than they do their personal relationships with their friends, their spouses, their children. Not content to simply perform the job for which their time has been leased, they will attempt to mold their (allegedly) off-work hours to suit their employers' whims: go to employer's 'events', favor hanging about with the people with whom they've already spent most of the day working whether or not those people would be the sort they'd normally care to associate, even old friendships gradually will wither and die if a competitor is involved. The worker will even try to mold his psyche to something more to the employer's liking by litening to motivational tapes and buying ghost-written biographies of heads of companies who either managed to inherit wealth or be in the right place to lead a parade they didn't necessarily start.
American business demands much more than just time-and-quality-work for money-and-benefits. Loyalty to the company is sometimes demanded to the point of near-worship. You bet it's personal. At least until the equation reverses and the employee expects a consideration that's not covered, pro or con, in the Policy manual. Then you will hear that "the age of the paternalistic American company is over", "only the interests of the shareholders can be considered", and a lot of other things that translate to: don't make it personal. And yet we get puzzled when some postal worker starts spraying away with a gun or a fast-food worker decides to cut open something other than a carton of fries after the morning Corporate Hymn.
Before the libertarians start piling on about how anti-American this screed sounds, it isn't. What I mean to point out is a wretched, hypocritical duality that is driving at least some people bonkers in the U.S.: you can't give someone only what you like of the old-style Japanese culture with its worker loyalty without the other part, which was "we hardly fire anybody and we'll take care of you". Business can't just take what it wants from Column A and ignore Column B and expect to maintain a sane workforce. There's a balance that's being ignored. Each individual business needs to decide how personal things are allowed to be, and it needs to be that personal both ways, and not just with expectations flowing in one direction.
I've had greatly rewarding business relationships of both kinds: ones with clearly defined, rigid limits and parameters for major multinationals and ones with more closely held local companies where the employess could go out and carouse with the owners. I've either been smart or lucky because I've negotiated certain hard limits and exclusions on my time in advance; my skill set is sufficiently in demand that I can do that. Some companies were frankly aghast that I held them to those pre-negotiated limits even though they'd advertised themselves as having had "family values" (isn't it funny how so many that yell "family" the loudest are those who will take you away from it the most?) I countered that perhaps I should start looking elsewhere if they were unhappy with what I'd negotiated; nobody's ever taken me up on that.
As far as accepting counter-offers goes: I agree with those who have said that the only loyalty in business is that flowing from employee to employer. Regarding the other direction, with few exceptions:
Considering what you're going to want from us: support (in the form of code, friendliness, help and buying your product), and considering Caldera's past, which I hope you'll agree is has some rough spots at best --
I can't really disagree with anything you've said, but still:
The word I used was disillusioned. I sent them money, I didn't get all the product contracted for, and whoever answered the phone (Margaret?) didn't care too much about it. I was under the illusion that they cared about their fans; I no longer have that illusion, hence dis-illusioned.
I don't dislike them. I'll still be sad when they're gone and I'm glad when they release a new album. I just don't rush out to buy it on the day of release anymore; I wait for a used copy to show up at the the local reseller.
I used to really like TMBG, and I still do but just not as much in a daily-quoting, obsessive kind of way.
John F. had a really great idea back in the 90's to send out ten CD EP's a year (by new artists and old) for $42, and he even threw in a cool extra now and then. BUT: like all mail-order, problems happen, only some of which I can blame on him and the lady who ran the operation with him. One year I didn't get the extra goodie, which was a CD by TMBG, and I let her know that it hadn't arrived. I don't know if she thought I was trying to scam an extra copy out of them or something but they wouldn't send a replacement. I signed up for the next year anyway, but at the end of that year when I tried to re-up no luck even though I left them messages several times. Hello CD-of-the-Month still existed for another few years but I guess they didn't want to sell any more to me -- and by association, I became somewhat disillusioned with TMBG's output. Still wish I had the rest of the Hello CDs, though.
Funny, I haven't seen the RIAA back off a smidgen from its goal of labeling anybody who even uses the *legal* provisions of the Home Recording Act as contemptible thieves and people who share MP3s via P2P as cutthroat pirates. And they do still want to get legislation to help outlaw general-purpose home PCs (with the help of the MPAA, of course.)
Maybe the industry marketers are clucking their tongues and looking numb at conventions but they're still paying Hilary Rosen, Ernest Hollings and Billy Tauzin to push their agenda, and push it hard.
(I re-posted this comment: it's mine, but for some reason it came up as anonymous, and I like to sign what I write)
Am I missing something here? Or are these guys just loopy?
This article and the one from last week seem to be saying the same thing: that since it's politically inconvenient for spectrum to be limited, the authors will just declare physics to be null and void and there will no longer be such a thing as wave interference.
Sure, if you can convince everybody to destroy all their old equipment and replace it with new equipment that uses software scanning you can get more virtual bandwidth out of the same spectrum. But it's not going to be infinite and a few jerks with a few kilowatts of transmit power are going to be able to cause a bunch of problems with this scheme. And considering how much luck there was getting much consensus among shortwave users about trivia such as dropping morse code requirements for licensing, how much cooperation does anyone anticipate on something as blue-sky as this mess?
GWB may be legal, but he wasn't elected. Well, maybe by five votes on their Supreme Court but not by their voters.
September 11th may or may not have happened, but it would have been a lot less likely -- the Clintonistas managed to repel at least a couple of attacks while the Commander-in-Chief was getting blowjobs from that fat intern so there's at least some truth to charges of the Bushites being asleep at the switch.
It wouldn't be soft 'n' pretty but their economy wouldn't be as far in the tank because the U.S. tends to run better when the president and congress are in the hands of different parties and they can't pass paralyzingly costly packages to deplete their budget.
And the slashdotters who aren't getting laid? Too obvious a punch line to point out who they're going to be getting it from.
P.S. Mike Powell IS an appointee of GWB and IS administering virtual Monicas to the Baby Bells and other potential contributors until they bring forth their "donations". Ah, the wonders of the legal bribery of the U.S. electoral system! Don't like the way the current laws are rolling? Convicted of abuse of monopoly? Be a big donor and Get Out Of Jail Free! (or at least be able to say to the judge with a straight face that the penalty would have a negative impact on your business model -- isn't that what a punishment is supposed to do?) The U.S. is adjacent to Mexico in more ways than one these days...
>> I mean, certainly it was covered somewhere. The local paper should have picked up on it.
I worked at newspapers for seven years, and if you really think a newspaper would have cared enough about this story to print it and enrage one of their bigger advertisers, you haven't been around newspaper publishers enough. Beyond that, most of the newspapers around now have cut their staffs sufficiently that unless a story is handed to them pre-written as a press release, already screened for legality and correctness they won't bother with it. Investigative reporting is nearly dead except as a cooperative venture between multiple news organizations and even then it's rather tepid. Does that make this guy's ground-floor view of the reason for the program's cancellation absolutely true? No, but it doesn't make his account of the event automatically internally invalid or even suspect -- and just standing there yelling "liar! liar!" at him does't exactly make your case too strong, either. Although I do respect you more for at least signing your post.
I'm not defending the guy, but your computations may be waaaay off based on an assumption that may or may not be valid. I got hired to teach classes inside some of the Intel campuses and depending on when this happened and where it happened, they used Banyan servers for at least some, if not most, of their e-mail system.
So what difference does that make? If you send the same message to 29,000 people on a Banyan system, you get ONE copy of the message on each server designated as a mail server and a set of pointers to the recipients. The pointers go away as the message gets read and deleted and the message is finally deleted when the last pointer is gone. (It's actually a bit more complicated than that, but that's the general idea.) If Intel was still using Banyan at the time this happened (and it's not unlikely they were, although they didn't make it too public, some divisions were asking Y2K questions and Banyan the company was all but gone by then) and unless Hamidi did it in a way to purposely generate excess diskspace and bandwidth, the totals per message would be much less. Can't get exact without knowing how many servers, distribution lists, and formats of the StreetTalk object names but it's doubtful that any one message got past 6MB distributed on all the servers even if they had all the logs cranked up to maximum verbosity.
Of course, all bets are off if they'd migrated to something less efficient.
>>Look, I'm not trying to elicit sympathy for the telemarketing companies.
Comes to the same thing, though. If you answer at all, realize that you're dealing with a person, but the person has rented their time to a Bad Thing which should not be aided. Keeping the call short is aiding the Bad Thing. Wasting time (if you can afford it yourself) makes the phone selling less profitable, less likely to flourish, and your number much less likely to ever be called again by that company or its minions. So if you have the time and the attitude for it, waste their time. Yes, it'll be much less profitable, but then perhaps they'll move on to some more honest work.
Re:Salesmen are only motivated by money?
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Managing Einsteins
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· Score: 1
Salesmen are human, but they willingly listen to motivational tapes in their cars. (At least, this behaviour has been apparent in all but one I've known.) I would argue that they may be longing to devolve to some subspecies earlier than homo sapiens, and that it might explain some of their more mammalian behaviour patterns. Heck, some of the ones I've worked with probably would have marked their territory with urine if the company handbook hadn't had explicit prohibitions against it.
I was actually involved in presales on some hardware for some clustering and which eventually ended up running on UNIX but Microsoft was involved in the early meetings. They sent along the usual contingent of sell-em-anything sales droids but there was an honest engineer with the group who said:
"It's not really accurate to refer to this arrangement of servers as a wolf "pack". A pack is an organized group with a leader working towards a defined goal using a plan with a visible, known structure. These servers just sort of hang out together. It would be more accurate to call them "wolf buddies"."
Microsoft didn't get to put their software on the solution but I did tend to put more credence in what that particular engineer would tell me about the capablities of Microsoft products.
I'm typing this on a fairly current Athlon that dual-boots Windows and Linux with a DVD player and many cool doodads available to hang off the USB ports, but...
but...
for some strange reason when I was cleaning the basement I came across an old laptop and booted it up to see what was on it. Nearly ten years old: a 386SX with only a meg of RAM, a doublespaced 20 MB hard drive and DOS 5 with WordPerfect 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3, SmartTerm 5, Wolfenstein and Windows 3.1/Quicken 3.
Know what? The little sucker was fast. Booted fast, apps came up quickly, responded quickly. In terms of speed it beat the Athlon running in Windows mode, although not in Linux mode.
I don't necessarily want to go back to the days of 2400 baud modems and BBS's, but that little laptop brought home some of the lecture points in a way I would not have thought possible.
When the car manufacturers wanted to differentiate their vehicles in the U.S. when I was a toddler, they added chrome and fins. Didn't make them run any better, just an attempt to make 'em look snazzier.
So yeah, I like all the cool stuff I've got hanging off my Athlon/DVD computer but if I can actually get my document typed faster using WordPerfect 5.1 instead of Microsoft Office 2000 doesn't that mean that when I boot the Athlon into Windows I'm running something with fins?
Slashdot Mirror
I've read that book and one other on the Kasparov / Deep Blue publicity stunt and oome to the following conclusions:
1. IBM behaved badly because they were desperate for a win.
2. Kasparov didn't behave much better and didn't know enough about their behavior to mount a decent argument against them. He knew he'd been cheated, just not how to put it.
3. IBM got their publicity and dared not rematch under properly controlled conditions for fear of a loss. Hence the marketing spin of Kasparov's bad faith acting, which isn't too hard to believe but hey, it's marketing people on the other side so the brunt of evidence stacks against them.
4. Finally: IBM did cheat. Meatspace players can go home and study before the next game, but not swap their whole heads out for new models which is the rough equivalent of what the IBM team did. Kasparov had a point in what he said, he just made it in such a poor way that he got little sympathy. Besides, a lot of players wanted to see him get his comeuppance and sympathy was in short supply, judging from some of the comments I read and heard back then. But that doesn't change that what the IBM team went beyond the pale.
I know of at least one place that uses Lynx on terminals for multiple clerks to enter orders over the net! Last I heard, they provided about eighteen percent of the supplier's revenue. The supplier has tried many times to get the client to move away from Lynx, even to the point of giving them a computer and program to try out. No dice. Now go tell the CIO of the supplier about Zeldman and watch him sputter and fume about having to include 1.0 standards for one client!
Did Deeper Blue really get a fair win? Wasn't there some sort of controversy at the time concerning whether it was fair play for the IBM guys to change its programming during the match?
Next, Gerard Jendras posts links to solutions of the Universal Field Theory, the I.R.S. Tax Code, and How To Pick Up Girls!
Seriously, how long until Go or Go-Moku is cracked? And how many people will damage themselves if chess is ever solved?
I buy SysAdmin at shops because the mail delivery here is atrocious; I've tried subscribing to magazines in the past and it never has worked. I was annoyed at the diminishing page count in SysAdmin. The Perl Journal and Elizabeth Zinkann's book review column were the main reasons I continued buying it. They dumped the latter at the beginning of the year and now they're removing the remaining reason. I'll still browse it and buy a copy now and then if it has a really superior article on some topic I consider vital but I'm no longer compelled to complete the set.
I'm OS-agnostic, pretty much, and three of my friends were convinced by the "Switch" ads to go to the local SuperMegaComputerCenterStore and look at Apple product on Monday. They convinced me to go along with them.
.Mac and the stupid free e-mail accounts going away and Apple charging for the bugfixes. The one who already ordered canceled his order and the other two are not considering Macs anymore. Which is somewhat sad for Apple's marketing department, if you think about it: here they managed to lure in three customers, fully ready to plop down their dosh for product, and then by going on the cheap and behaving like other computer companies, Apple lost a couple of points of differentiation that it sorely needed to help justify its pricing. The customers saw that mac.com email as a kind of exclusive club that only Macintosh owners could join, a paid-for fringe benefit that came with the higher hardware price. Likewise the insanely great software and free bugfixes. Take it all away and all you have to compete with is quality, which doesn't necessarily win in this marketplace.
All of them were sold on buying Macintoshes Monday night (not by my efforts, just by sitting in front of them and using them.) One of the three ordered one that night for pickup Friday since only a demo was in stock of what he wanted, the other two were going to wait and see if they could get better deals after Wednesday.
Then they heard about
This could be good.
Pray that the screenwriter (who worked on Se7en) is adapting, or at least heavily influenced by "The Dark Knight Falls" by Frank Miller.
Now that would be something worth seeing! And if you look at the director's comments in the article it's not out of the question that this is the story they may be telling...
We had a supplier who switched from Apache on some flavor of UNIX to IIS /SQL Server on at least two WinNT boxes. BIG mistake, whoever did the work for them set it up so that Netscape browsers were denied online transactions.
We gave them a few months to try and fix it, meantime we phoned in our orders but we weren't going to switch to IE internally. Their IT head was stubborn and the business owner bought the marketing line about how much money he'd save. I'm sure it wasn't the only factor but they're gone now. I spoke to one of their workers who bailed to another company and he told me that they'd lost more customers than just us over the Apache-to-IIS conversion and general unworthiness of the new system and that the client loss plus absorbing the costs of the upgrade and running maintenance costs of a system that never worked as well as the old one took the company down.
All this so the CEO could have a pretty GUI to look at instead of a character-based terminal! Somebody should've bought him a Mac, put pretty pictures on it and told him they reflected some sort of reality and to leave the IT work to the pros.
>> Maybe I can't speak for the majority of Slashdot users out there, but with every Windows version I owned I thought: 'This is going to be my last Windows version. I'll make the switch after that. This new crap has crossed the line.' And EVERY time I went back and bought the new crap because I could get my apps running easier, because I could play my favorite games, or simply because the UI allowed me to be more productive.
Well, THIS Slashdot user works for a Microsoft Solutions Provider and therefore has access/company purchasing/training on all the Microsoft I can stand, even though I usually work the Unix side of the fence for them. And even though I'm an up-to-date MCSE, at home I back-revved all the Windows boxes to Win98SE. Contrary to what you hear from the Church of Bill, Win2K and its variant/mutant children are NOT more stable, fun or rewarding to use and they're a lot more pesky to nail down regarding matters of spyware, privacy control and consumers' rights in general. And although I have in the past helped maintain my (computer non-literate) friends' boxes for free, I have advised all of them that I will not touch any box with WinXP on it and I'd rather not bother with Win2K unless they have some killer app that absolutely demands it. I have convinced many to backrev to Win98 and without exception, they have benn happier after doing so.
The new crap crossed the line a while back, around the time the Media Player patches screwed up every other manufacturer's multimedia applications on the box. Enough already! I've got most of my friends dual-booting to Slackware, and whenever their boxes' damned internal Winmodems are supported some of those boxes are going to not be running Windows much, if at all.
1. Burden of proof would be on the plantiff, I think
2. Microsoft has lots of lawyers to generate lots of paperwork to bury opposition and waste time
3. During which time they'll continue usual merry ways of embrace/extend/co-opt
4. And even if they lose in court, they can appeal and spin the wheel for a different judge and dump the sentence to nearly nothing or stall until it's all meaningless anyway
They are experts at manipulating the perception of the public and lawmakers that their products should be used and that if there is a problem, something other than Microsoft is to blame.
They have been convicted of breaking the laws of their own country and will probably get off lightly even though they show no remorse, are frankly insulting to the judge, and continue their illegal actions.
They can make Big Wins by these tactics. Technological quality has very little to do with how well a product fares in the market these days. How many years have programmers known how to do bounds checking and NOT let buffer overflow errors occur? and what is the most common bug in Microsoft software? (Outlook, anyway)
If they win this round, kiss general purpose computers goodbye forever. It won't be right away, but this strategy is solid and puts the right Big Players in the right places.
>>Why doesn't the media do aniversaries for things like travelgate, filegate, Vince Foster, etc...?
Probably because those things got investigated up and down seven ways from Sunday by a bunch of guys who really wanted to nail Clinton and they couldn't find enough to convince the country to toss him out, while Nixon had to run out of office fast enough to keep his pension?
And if the media thought they could rally enough support for anniversary specials on those things, trust me, we'd have 'em out the wazoo. Even Robert Ray doesn't care about those things anymore...
Don't kid yourself; business relationships in the United States are extremely personal, at least until it is to the business' advantage to pretend that the relationship is NOT personal.
Most workers in the U.S. spend more time tending their business relationships than they do their personal relationships with their friends, their spouses, their children. Not content to simply perform the job for which their time has been leased, they will attempt to mold their (allegedly) off-work hours to suit their employers' whims: go to employer's 'events', favor hanging about with the people with whom they've already spent most of the day working whether or not those people would be the sort they'd normally care to associate, even old friendships gradually will wither and die if a competitor is involved. The worker will even try to mold his psyche to something more to the employer's liking by litening to motivational tapes and buying ghost-written biographies of heads of companies who either managed to inherit wealth or be in the right place to lead a parade they didn't necessarily start.
American business demands much more than just time-and-quality-work for money-and-benefits. Loyalty to the company is sometimes demanded to the point of near-worship. You bet it's personal. At least until the equation reverses and the employee expects a consideration that's not covered, pro or con, in the Policy manual. Then you will hear that "the age of the paternalistic American company is over", "only the interests of the shareholders can be considered", and a lot of other things that translate to: don't make it personal. And yet we get puzzled when some postal worker starts spraying away with a gun or a fast-food worker decides to cut open something other than a carton of fries after the morning Corporate Hymn.
Before the libertarians start piling on about how anti-American this screed sounds, it isn't. What I mean to point out is a wretched, hypocritical duality that is driving at least some people bonkers in the U.S.: you can't give someone only what you like of the old-style Japanese culture with its worker loyalty without the other part, which was "we hardly fire anybody and we'll take care of you". Business can't just take what it wants from Column A and ignore Column B and expect to maintain a sane workforce. There's a balance that's being ignored. Each individual business needs to decide how personal things are allowed to be, and it needs to be that personal both ways, and not just with expectations flowing in one direction.
I've had greatly rewarding business relationships of both kinds: ones with clearly defined, rigid limits and parameters for major multinationals and ones with more closely held local companies where the employess could go out and carouse with the owners. I've either been smart or lucky because I've negotiated certain hard limits and exclusions on my time in advance; my skill set is sufficiently in demand that I can do that. Some companies were frankly aghast that I held them to those pre-negotiated limits even though they'd advertised themselves as having had "family values" (isn't it funny how so many that yell "family" the loudest are those who will take you away from it the most?) I countered that perhaps I should start looking elsewhere if they were unhappy with what I'd negotiated; nobody's ever taken me up on that.
As far as accepting counter-offers goes: I agree with those who have said that the only loyalty in business is that flowing from employee to employer. Regarding the other direction, with few exceptions:
Trust is just a name on a bank.
Considering what you're going to want from us: support (in the form of code, friendliness, help and buying your product), and considering Caldera's past, which I hope you'll agree is has some rough spots at best --
Why should we trust you?
I can't really disagree with anything you've said, but still:
The word I used was disillusioned. I sent them money, I didn't get all the product contracted for, and whoever answered the phone (Margaret?) didn't care too much about it. I was under the illusion that they cared about their fans; I no longer have that illusion, hence dis-illusioned.
I don't dislike them. I'll still be sad when they're gone and I'm glad when they release a new album. I just don't rush out to buy it on the day of release anymore; I wait for a used copy to show up at the the local reseller.
I used to really like TMBG, and I still do but just not as much in a daily-quoting, obsessive kind of way.
John F. had a really great idea back in the 90's to send out ten CD EP's a year (by new artists and old) for $42, and he even threw in a cool extra now and then. BUT: like all mail-order, problems happen, only some of which I can blame on him and the lady who ran the operation with him. One year I didn't get the extra goodie, which was a CD by TMBG, and I let her know that it hadn't arrived. I don't know if she thought I was trying to scam an extra copy out of them or something but they wouldn't send a replacement. I signed up for the next year anyway, but at the end of that year when I tried to re-up no luck even though I left them messages several times. Hello CD-of-the-Month still existed for another few years but I guess they didn't want to sell any more to me -- and by association, I became somewhat disillusioned with TMBG's output.
Still wish I had the rest of the Hello CDs, though.
"A sort of paralyzed acceptance"?
Funny, I haven't seen the RIAA back off a smidgen from its goal of labeling anybody who even uses the *legal* provisions of the Home Recording Act as contemptible thieves and people who share MP3s via P2P as cutthroat pirates. And they do still want to get legislation to help outlaw general-purpose home PCs (with the help of the MPAA, of course.)
Maybe the industry marketers are clucking their tongues and looking numb at conventions but they're still paying Hilary Rosen, Ernest Hollings and Billy Tauzin to push their agenda, and push it hard.
(I re-posted this comment: it's mine, but for some reason it came up as anonymous, and I like to sign what I write)
Am I missing something here? Or are these guys just loopy?
This article and the one from last week seem to be saying the same thing: that since it's politically inconvenient for spectrum to be limited, the authors will just declare physics to be null and void and there will no longer be such a thing as wave interference.
Sure, if you can convince everybody to destroy all their old equipment and replace it with new equipment that uses software scanning you can get more virtual bandwidth out of the same spectrum. But it's not going to be infinite and a few jerks with a few kilowatts of transmit power are going to be able to cause a bunch of problems with this scheme. And considering how much luck there was getting much consensus among shortwave users about trivia such as dropping morse code requirements for licensing, how much cooperation does anyone anticipate on something as blue-sky as this mess?
I realize you're trying to be sarcastic, but:
GWB may be legal, but he wasn't elected. Well, maybe by five votes on their Supreme Court but not by their voters.
September 11th may or may not have happened, but it would have been a lot less likely -- the Clintonistas managed to repel at least a couple of attacks while the Commander-in-Chief was getting blowjobs from that fat intern so there's at least some truth to charges of the Bushites being asleep at the switch.
It wouldn't be soft 'n' pretty but their economy wouldn't be as far in the tank because the U.S. tends to run better when the president and congress are in the hands of different parties and they can't pass paralyzingly costly packages to deplete their budget.
And the slashdotters who aren't getting laid? Too obvious a punch line to point out who they're going to be getting it from.
P.S. Mike Powell IS an appointee of GWB and IS administering virtual Monicas to the Baby Bells and other potential contributors until they bring forth their "donations". Ah, the wonders of the legal bribery of the U.S. electoral system! Don't like the way the current laws are rolling? Convicted of abuse of monopoly? Be a big donor and Get Out Of Jail Free! (or at least be able to say to the judge with a straight face that the penalty would have a negative impact on your business model -- isn't that what a punishment is supposed to do?) The U.S. is adjacent to Mexico in more ways than one these days...
>> I mean, certainly it was covered somewhere. The local paper should have picked up on it.
I worked at newspapers for seven years, and if you really think a newspaper would have cared enough about this story to print it and enrage one of their bigger advertisers, you haven't been around newspaper publishers enough. Beyond that, most of the newspapers around now have cut their staffs sufficiently that unless a story is handed to them pre-written as a press release, already screened for legality and correctness they won't bother with it. Investigative reporting is nearly dead except as a cooperative venture between multiple news organizations and even then it's rather tepid. Does that make this guy's ground-floor view of the reason for the program's cancellation absolutely true? No, but it doesn't make his account of the event automatically internally invalid or even suspect -- and just standing there yelling "liar! liar!" at him does't exactly make your case too strong, either. Although I do respect you more for at least signing your post.
I'm not defending the guy, but your computations may be waaaay off based on an assumption that may or may not be valid. I got hired to teach classes inside some of the Intel campuses and depending on when this happened and where it happened, they used Banyan servers for at least some, if not most, of their e-mail system.
So what difference does that make? If you send the same message to 29,000 people on a Banyan system, you get ONE copy of the message on each server designated as a mail server and a set of pointers to the recipients. The pointers go away as the message gets read and deleted and the message is finally deleted when the last pointer is gone. (It's actually a bit more complicated than that, but that's the general idea.) If Intel was still using Banyan at the time this happened (and it's not unlikely they were, although they didn't make it too public, some divisions were asking Y2K questions and Banyan the company was all but gone by then) and unless Hamidi did it in a way to purposely generate excess diskspace and bandwidth, the totals per message would be much less. Can't get exact without knowing how many servers, distribution lists, and formats of the StreetTalk object names but it's doubtful that any one message got past 6MB distributed on all the servers even if they had all the logs cranked up to maximum verbosity.
Of course, all bets are off if they'd migrated to something less efficient.
>>Look, I'm not trying to elicit sympathy for the telemarketing companies.
Comes to the same thing, though. If you answer at all, realize that you're dealing with a person, but the person has rented their time to a Bad Thing which should not be aided. Keeping the call short is aiding the Bad Thing. Wasting time (if you can afford it yourself) makes the phone selling less profitable, less likely to flourish, and your number much less likely to ever be called again by that company or its minions. So if you have the time and the attitude for it, waste their time. Yes, it'll be much less profitable, but then perhaps they'll move on to some more honest work.
Salesmen are human, but they willingly listen to motivational tapes in their cars. (At least, this behaviour has been apparent in all but one I've known.)
I would argue that they may be longing to devolve to some subspecies earlier than homo sapiens, and that it might explain some of their more mammalian behaviour patterns. Heck, some of the ones I've worked with probably would have marked their territory with urine if the company handbook hadn't had explicit prohibitions against it.
I was actually involved in presales on some hardware for some clustering and which eventually ended up running on UNIX but Microsoft was involved in the early meetings. They sent along the usual contingent of sell-em-anything sales droids but there was an honest engineer with the group who said:
"It's not really accurate to refer to this arrangement of servers as a wolf "pack". A pack is an organized group with a leader working towards a defined goal using a plan with a visible, known structure. These servers just sort of hang out together. It would be more accurate to call them "wolf buddies"."
Microsoft didn't get to put their software on the solution but I did tend to put more credence in what that particular engineer would tell me about the capablities of Microsoft products.
I'm torn.
I'm typing this on a fairly current Athlon that dual-boots Windows and Linux with a DVD player and many cool doodads available to hang off the USB ports, but...
but...
for some strange reason when I was cleaning the basement I came across an old laptop and booted it up to see what was on it. Nearly ten years old: a 386SX with only a meg of RAM, a doublespaced 20 MB hard drive and DOS 5 with WordPerfect 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3, SmartTerm 5, Wolfenstein and Windows 3.1/Quicken 3.
Know what? The little sucker was fast. Booted fast, apps came up quickly, responded quickly. In terms of speed it beat the Athlon running in Windows mode, although not in Linux mode.
I don't necessarily want to go back to the days of 2400 baud modems and BBS's, but that little laptop brought home some of the lecture points in a way I would not have thought possible.
When the car manufacturers wanted to differentiate their vehicles in the U.S. when I was a toddler, they added chrome and fins. Didn't make them run any better, just an attempt to make 'em look snazzier.
So yeah, I like all the cool stuff I've got hanging off my Athlon/DVD computer but if I can actually get my document typed faster using WordPerfect 5.1 instead of Microsoft Office 2000 doesn't that mean that when I boot the Athlon into Windows I'm running something with fins?