critical functions
on
The 3Com Saga
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Dell's critical functions are marketing and logistics. Their marketing gurus and logistics engineers are very much their own. Dell is not a "technology" company per se.
3Com was a true technology company because they designed and fabbed their own chips off the sweat of their 300 engineers. Now they have 900 mercinaries who are not loyal to them in any way, and the patents on their work are no longer assets that they can use to protect their bottm line with.
Accounting conservatism at the expense of innovation is hurting 3Com. Let's hope that they find their courage soon. The are not a financial company or a holding group. 3Com was born in tech, and will die if it strays too far away.
Reap what you sow
on
The 3Com Saga
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you outsource critical functions like R&D and to a lesser extent manufacturing innovation, you will lose your business edge. All your good engineers end up at the parts companies you contract to, and their precious IP will not be yours.
here's the paradox - legalising guns reduces crime for a little while, and then the crime grows back. Banning guns reduces crime for a little while, and then the crime grows back.
Criminals fill a niche in the social eco system. Change the environment and they adapt, either by learning how to easily steal plentiful legal guns or learning how to easily import/make illegal guns. The only solution is to keep altering the environment to keep them in check.
Liberalisation of gun laws followed by harsh crackdowns and buybacks, followed by liberalisation at random intervals. It kinda sucks to be you if you rely on guns as your sole form of self defence and have repeatedly spend a lot of money on a gun only to have it taken away again.
Maybe the solution is get a friend who is a security guard and go drinking with them. When you are really good friends, get them to charge you a nominal $1 to be your "bodyguard" every now and again. Then most jurisdictions around the world will allow your friend to carry a weapon with some nominal licencing fees which will make your friend very happy, and when you go out together you get to feel like a rock star and carry heaps of expensive gear without fear.
and the software engineering documentation subject has "Document the building of your very own team management software" as their semester project
actually, in order to manage all the docs our team used a combination of roundup, mailman and B2 blog to make our own rapidly developed team work space... it was kinda ironic - using a collaborative online project management system to design a collaborative online project management system
in the end, though, the strain of having 7 people work on 1 document through a webbased interface got too much so we ended up using CVS on the school unix servers
Apple0wn3r: Grrr! My Ti-book keeps on pinging apple.com!
UberApple0wn3r: Just set your firewall so that it doesn't let it through. I've blocked all ICMP traffic into and out of my Ti-book.
Apple0wn3r: I have got my firewall blocking it. It's just that it adds hundreds of lines to my firewall logs every minute.
Anonymosity: Well, how about you turn off your firewall blocking and see what happens?
Apple0wn3r: Ok.
17" Ti-Book: HELP ME STEVE JOBS, YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE! My owner keeps on browsing the internet while logged in as an Administrative User!
Scene 2: In a corridor at Apple HQ, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California USA.
Steve Job's Custom Ipod starts speaking into his ear
Steve Job's Custom Ipod: Sorry to interrupt the festivities, Steve, but I think we've got a problem. whisper whisper whisper
Steve Jobs: MY GOD! Quick, send an Extraction Team!
Scene 3: Level 1 ICT.
The Apple Extraction Team kick in the windows. They are dressed in stylish white combat fatigues and covered in this bizarre translucent bodyarmour that is full of electronics - sort of like the cybermen after being made over by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
17" Ti-Book: Yay!
The Apple Extraction Team open fire with these bizarre rifles that look like they're made mostly out of transparent plastic, blowing everybody around the 341 Team table into a fine red mist.
Extraction Team Leader: Scoops up the Ti-book Blueberry, this is Grape. The Tangerines are down. Repeat the Tangerines are down. We have the Strawberry and are Lime for immediate exfiltration.
Blueberry:(V.O.) Roger-Roger.
The Apple Extraction Team activate their rocket belts and whisk the 17" Ti-Book off into the night.
Red misty remains of nounderscores: Well, I guess this means I don't have to do that 332 project.
It was at this point that I woke up and wiped the drool off the SADD draft that I was proofreading and realised that it was all a dream.
Well, I don't know about those city folk and thier armour plated SUVs, but I have my bull bar because I drive where there are real, live bulls.
I am responsible with it, and have never struck anything with it. It's just hedging against the day I meet a large animal with a death wish and enough viscera to drown me if I don't prevent it from coming through my windscreen by making it hit my bonnet and go under the car first.
Having said that, I'm ambivalent as to whether I really need it, since I really haven't hit anything yet (all my colissions are low speed bumps when backing into strange driveways).
The thing against flimsy plastic bumpers is that they actually make things worse for everybody but the auto manufacturer.
OTOH, to get back onto topic, I wonder if once bull bars are banned, metal detectors will be installed in some roads to prevent cars with more than a certain amount of steel in them, or which are visually identified to be having bullbars and trucks over a certain tonnage from entering regions like school zones without getting an automatic ticket issued against their licence plate...
Well, that's just it. Those flimsy painted plastic bumpers we all know and lothe *are* bumper mounted pillows: designed to give way and fail at the slightest knock. The argument of the people who want to take my bull bar goes:
Take a pedestrian. Hit them with a bullbar at 40mph and you get an L shaped pedestrian with no head.
Take same pedestrian. Hit them with a car with a nice round nose and a plastic bumper that takes a pedestrian shaped impression at 40 mph and you get a pedestrian with their spine and pelvis suffering multiple fractures - they'll probably eat throug a straw for the rest of their lives - but they LIVE! Yes that's right, They LIVE. And that's what matters. To the bull bar banners anyway.
Where I live, people are trying to ban large pig iron "bull bars" on the front of vehicles, on the argument that it causes the body of a child to fold at the waist when being hit at 40mph, greatly increasing the speed at which the head of the pedestrian rotates down into the bonnet.
an adult will do the same thing, but with fractured femurs as well.
insurance is like gambling in reverse
on
Road Marker Marks You
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The company bets that you are young and strong and that nothing is ever going to happen to you.
You bet you are going to die tomorrow, and that your babies need some dollars quick.
Once you pass a certain amount of time with the insurance company without anything bad happening to you, they start winning.
Solution: 1) take out insurance 2) OW OW OW OW! 3) profit!
I hope that the trauma unit at my local hospital gets one of these cold blankets to put me into hypothermia to slow down the effects of brain damage after I get so drunk I fall over and hit my head real bad.
Now we come to the crux of the matter. Most so called "education" is actually brainwashing and is a perversion of the kind of personal development and mentoring that used to happen only for the sons of nobles long ago.
Education comes from the root latin "Educare" which means to draw out, or to extract the resource which is already there like drawing water from a well. To school someone on the other hand is to force them into a class of person which has certain known skills, attributes and capabilities and then make them into a cog in the machine.
A truly educated person is hard to control, because they will have the knowledge, opinions and most importantly the fully developed critical mind to make their own decisions.
A truly schooled person will be easy to control, because they've spent years of their life being trained to do as they're told.
Both of these individuals can do what an untrained person cannot - devise new ways of making peace and war.
Think about that, and look at the person sitting next to you. Can you trust them with an education?
Puff the Nuclear Weapon was pointed at Iraq, and waited in his submarine for the signal to attack. Little George Bush Junior, he loved that rascal puff, and all those days, he nightly prayed for the UN to get tough.
oh Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea, protecting all our freedoms to a brand new SUV. Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea, protecting all our freedoms to a brand new SUV.
Now Puff he liked to travel, so he wore travelling clothes While Bush was home and on the phone, from locations undisclosed. Presidents and Princes, they bowed when'ere he came, and Nation States lowered their flags when Puff roared out his name.
oh Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the peace, securing the world's oil supply and the occasional golden fleece. Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the peace, securing the world's oil supply and hte occasional golden fleece.
Plutonium lasts for ever, but not so little boys. ICBMs and M-16s give way to... other toys. And one grey day it happened: The traders broke the Dow. So Puff the Nuclear Weapon's on the open market now.
His warhead packed in plastic, green crates that bore his name. Poor Puff would not intimidate for the Stars and Stripes again. Without his life long friend, poor puff could not be brave, so al-Qaida hid that that weapon in a deep, dark, man-made cave.
oh Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea, but now he's in a backpack some where close to you and me. Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the free, and you can blame it all upon Bush fiscal policy.
Interestingly enough, it's the reverse transcriptases that are used by viruses like HIV to embed themselves in our genome that allowed cDNA technology and therefore Microarray technology to become a reality. We could have made the complimentary DNA strands that the messenger RNA binds to using other methods, but it would have been much harder.
Sorry for interrupting the festivities, but I think we have a problem.
Should private space craft become widely available, it would be theoretically possible to deliver (at the very least) a kinetic energy bomb to any point on the earth, at many times the speed of sound, using nothing more sophisticated than box cutters.
How to fix?
Re:I like the lowtech charme of camphones.
on
Camera Phone Tips
·
· Score: 1
You know, that series of pictures is actually rather artistic and good. freaky.
Puff the Nuclear Weapon was pointed at Iraq, and waited in his submarine for the signal to attack. Little George Bush Junior, he loved that rascal puff, and all those days, he nightly prayed for the UN to get tough.
oh Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea, protecting all our freedoms to a brand new SUV. Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea, protecting all our freedoms to a brand new SUV.
Now Puff he liked to travel, so he wore travelling clothes While Bush was home and on the phone, from locations undisclosed. Presidents and Princes, they bowed when'ere he came, and Nation States lowered their flags when Puff roared out his name.
oh Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the peace, securing the world's oil supply and the occasional golden fleece. Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the peace, securing the world's oil supply and hte occasional golden fleece.
Plutonium lasts for ever, but not so little boys. ICBMs and M-16s give way to... other toys. And one grey day it happened: The traders broke the Dow. So Puff the Nuclear Weapon's on the open market now.
His warhead packed in plastic, green crates that bore his name. Poor Puff would not intimidate for the Stars and Stripes again. Without his life long friend, poor puff could not be brave, so al-Qaida hid that that weapon in a deep, dark, man-made cave.
oh Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea, but now he's in a backpack some where close to you and me. Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the free, and you can blame it all upon Bush fiscal policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Dell's critical functions are marketing and logistics. Their marketing gurus and logistics engineers are very much their own. Dell is not a "technology" company per se.
3Com was a true technology company because they designed and fabbed their own chips off the sweat of their 300 engineers. Now they have 900 mercinaries who are not loyal to them in any way, and the patents on their work are no longer assets that they can use to protect their bottm line with.
Accounting conservatism at the expense of innovation is hurting 3Com. Let's hope that they find their courage soon. The are not a financial company or a holding group. 3Com was born in tech, and will die if it strays too far away.
If you outsource critical functions like R&D and to a lesser extent manufacturing innovation, you will lose your business edge. All your good engineers end up at the parts companies you contract to, and their precious IP will not be yours.
here's the paradox - legalising guns reduces crime for a little while, and then the crime grows back. Banning guns reduces crime for a little while, and then the crime grows back.
Criminals fill a niche in the social eco system. Change the environment and they adapt, either by learning how to easily steal plentiful legal guns or learning how to easily import/make illegal guns. The only solution is to keep altering the environment to keep them in check.
Liberalisation of gun laws followed by harsh crackdowns and buybacks, followed by liberalisation at random intervals. It kinda sucks to be you if you rely on guns as your sole form of self defence and have repeatedly spend a lot of money on a gun only to have it taken away again.
Maybe the solution is get a friend who is a security guard and go drinking with them. When you are really good friends, get them to charge you a nominal $1 to be your "bodyguard" every now and again. Then most jurisdictions around the world will allow your friend to carry a weapon with some nominal licencing fees which will make your friend very happy, and when you go out together you get to feel like a rock star and carry heaps of expensive gear without fear.
Raid [killsbugsdead.com].
I love it. He said it was a software problem, and in the end you were forced to debug your satellite modem.
hmm now if only we could get real world objects to auto raise like windows do in X.
I need a beer. (looks at beer. Beer flies across room into hand).
hmm have to check that out.
my uni uses tutos.
and the software engineering documentation subject has "Document the building of your very own team management software" as their semester project
actually, in order to manage all the docs our team used a combination of roundup, mailman and B2 blog to make our own rapidly developed team work space...
it was kinda ironic - using a collaborative online project management system to design a collaborative online project management system
in the end, though, the strain of having 7 people work on 1 document through a webbased interface got too much so we ended up using CVS on the school unix servers
The first rule of sig club is that we do not talk about sig club!
The first rule of Sig Club is we do not talk about Sig club.
Scene 1: Level 1 ICT.
After a hard day of documentation
Apple0wn3r: Grrr! My Ti-book keeps on pinging apple.com!
UberApple0wn3r: Just set your firewall so that it doesn't let it through. I've blocked all ICMP traffic into and out of my Ti-book.
Apple0wn3r: I have got my firewall blocking it. It's just that it adds hundreds of lines to my firewall logs every minute.
Anonymosity: Well, how about you turn off your firewall blocking and see what happens?
Apple0wn3r: Ok.
17" Ti-Book: HELP ME STEVE JOBS, YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE! My owner keeps on browsing the internet while logged in as an Administrative User!
Scene 2: In a corridor at Apple HQ, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California USA.
Steve Job's Custom Ipod starts speaking into his ear
Steve Job's Custom Ipod: Sorry to interrupt the festivities, Steve, but I think we've got a problem. whisper whisper whisper
Steve Jobs: MY GOD! Quick, send an Extraction Team!
Scene 3: Level 1 ICT.
The Apple Extraction Team kick in the windows. They are dressed in stylish white combat fatigues and covered in this bizarre translucent bodyarmour that is full of electronics - sort of like the cybermen after being made over by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
17" Ti-Book: Yay!
The Apple Extraction Team open fire with these bizarre rifles that look like they're made mostly out of transparent plastic, blowing everybody around the 341 Team table into a fine red mist.
Extraction Team Leader: Scoops up the Ti-book Blueberry, this is Grape. The Tangerines are down. Repeat the Tangerines are down. We have the Strawberry and are Lime for immediate exfiltration.
Blueberry:(V.O.) Roger-Roger.
The Apple Extraction Team activate their rocket belts and whisk the 17" Ti-Book off into the night.
Red misty remains of nounderscores: Well, I guess this means I don't have to do that 332 project.
It was at this point that I woke up and wiped the drool off the SADD draft that I was proofreading and realised that it was all a dream.
Well, I don't know about those city folk and thier armour plated SUVs, but I have my bull bar because I drive where there are real, live bulls.
I am responsible with it, and have never struck anything with it. It's just hedging against the day I meet a large animal with a death wish and enough viscera to drown me if I don't prevent it from coming through my windscreen by making it hit my bonnet and go under the car first.
Having said that, I'm ambivalent as to whether I really need it, since I really haven't hit anything yet (all my colissions are low speed bumps when backing into strange driveways).
The thing against flimsy plastic bumpers is that they actually make things worse for everybody but the auto manufacturer.
OTOH, to get back onto topic, I wonder if once bull bars are banned, metal detectors will be installed in some roads to prevent cars with more than a certain amount of steel in them, or which are visually identified to be having bullbars and trucks over a certain tonnage from entering regions like school zones without getting an automatic ticket issued against their licence plate...
All that cash and they couldn't make a better movie?
Well, that's just it. Those flimsy painted plastic bumpers we all know and lothe *are* bumper mounted pillows: designed to give way and fail at the slightest knock. The argument of the people who want to take my bull bar goes:
Take a pedestrian. Hit them with a bullbar at 40mph and you get an L shaped pedestrian with no head.
Take same pedestrian. Hit them with a car with a nice round nose and a plastic bumper that takes a pedestrian shaped impression at 40 mph and you get a pedestrian with their spine and pelvis suffering multiple fractures - they'll probably eat throug a straw for the rest of their lives - but they LIVE! Yes that's right, They LIVE. And that's what matters. To the bull bar banners anyway.
Where I live, people are trying to ban large pig iron "bull bars" on the front of vehicles, on the argument that it causes the body of a child to fold at the waist when being hit at 40mph, greatly increasing the speed at which the head of the pedestrian rotates down into the bonnet.
an adult will do the same thing, but with fractured femurs as well.
The company bets that you are young and strong and that nothing is ever going to happen to you.
You bet you are going to die tomorrow, and that your babies need some dollars quick.
Once you pass a certain amount of time with the insurance company without anything bad happening to you, they start winning.
Solution:
1) take out insurance
2) OW OW OW OW!
3) profit!
rods from god
I hope that the trauma unit at my local hospital gets one of these cold blankets to put me into hypothermia to slow down the effects of brain damage after I get so drunk I fall over and hit my head real bad.
ask your doctor to sign up for clinical trials on hypothermia as a treatment for brain injury patients by sending your doctor here
And you call yourself a geek. Get a freshman to build you a DC-DC powersupply.
Now we come to the crux of the matter. Most so called "education" is actually brainwashing and is a perversion of the kind of personal development and mentoring that used to happen only for the sons of nobles long ago.
Education comes from the root latin "Educare" which means to draw out, or to extract the resource which is already there like drawing water from a well. To school someone on the other hand is to force them into a class of person which has certain known skills, attributes and capabilities and then make them into a cog in the machine.
A truly educated person is hard to control, because they will have the knowledge, opinions and most importantly the fully developed critical mind to make their own decisions.
A truly schooled person will be easy to control, because they've spent years of their life being trained to do as they're told.
Both of these individuals can do what an untrained person cannot - devise new ways of making peace and war.
Think about that, and look at the person sitting next to you. Can you trust them with an education?
Puff the Nuclear Weapon
Puff the Nuclear Weapon was pointed at Iraq,
and waited in his submarine for the signal to attack.
Little George Bush Junior, he loved that rascal puff,
and all those days, he nightly prayed for the UN to get tough.
oh
Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea,
protecting all our freedoms to
a brand new SUV.
Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea,
protecting all our freedoms to
a brand new SUV.
Now Puff he liked to travel, so he wore travelling clothes
While Bush was home and on the phone, from locations undisclosed.
Presidents and Princes, they bowed when'ere he came,
and Nation States lowered their flags when Puff roared out his name.
oh
Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the peace,
securing the world's oil supply
and the occasional golden fleece.
Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the peace,
securing the world's oil supply
and hte occasional golden fleece.
Plutonium lasts for ever, but not so little boys.
ICBMs and M-16s give way to... other toys.
And one grey day it happened: The traders broke the Dow.
So Puff the Nuclear Weapon's on the open market now.
His warhead packed in plastic, green crates that bore his name.
Poor Puff would not intimidate for the Stars and Stripes again.
Without his life long friend, poor puff could not be brave,
so al-Qaida hid that that weapon in a deep, dark, man-made cave.
oh
Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea,
but now he's in a backpack
some where close to you and me.
Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the free,
and you can blame it all upon
Bush fiscal policy.
lyrics fully GPL.
The really interesting information is a reverse-engineered interpreter. Who cracks the ribosome code will harness the lathe of heaven.
I think you're talking about a DNA Microarray.
It allows you to get the expression profile of the cell. More info here.
Flash tutorial here.
Interestingly enough, it's the reverse transcriptases that are used by viruses like HIV to embed themselves in our genome that allowed cDNA technology and therefore Microarray technology to become a reality. We could have made the complimentary DNA strands that the messenger RNA binds to using other methods, but it would have been much harder.
Sorry for interrupting the festivities, but I think we have a problem.
Should private space craft become widely available, it would be theoretically possible to deliver (at the very least) a kinetic energy bomb to any point on the earth, at many times the speed of sound, using nothing more sophisticated than box cutters.
How to fix?
You know, that series of pictures is actually rather artistic and good. freaky.
rush limbaugh eats everything
...Before the 2004 elections.
Puff the Nuclear Weapon
Puff the Nuclear Weapon was pointed at Iraq,
and waited in his submarine for the signal to attack.
Little George Bush Junior, he loved that rascal puff,
and all those days, he nightly prayed for the UN to get tough.
oh
Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea,
protecting all our freedoms to
a brand new SUV.
Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea,
protecting all our freedoms to
a brand new SUV.
Now Puff he liked to travel, so he wore travelling clothes
While Bush was home and on the phone, from locations undisclosed.
Presidents and Princes, they bowed when'ere he came,
and Nation States lowered their flags when Puff roared out his name.
oh
Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the peace,
securing the world's oil supply
and the occasional golden fleece.
Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the peace,
securing the world's oil supply
and hte occasional golden fleece.
Plutonium lasts for ever, but not so little boys.
ICBMs and M-16s give way to... other toys.
And one grey day it happened: The traders broke the Dow.
So Puff the Nuclear Weapon's on the open market now.
His warhead packed in plastic, green crates that bore his name.
Poor Puff would not intimidate for the Stars and Stripes again.
Without his life long friend, poor puff could not be brave,
so al-Qaida hid that that weapon in a deep, dark, man-made cave.
oh
Puff the Nuclear Weapon lived in the sea,
but now he's in a backpack
some where close to you and me.
Puff the Nuclear Weapon defender of the free,
and you can blame it all upon
Bush fiscal policy.
lyrics fully GPL. And it's satire too.
take it away! lyrics fully GPL'd. And it's satire too.