Even from a cost-benefit perspective, outsourcing is a questionable business move. It's the sort of thinking that an idiot MBA (I really should learn to avoid redundancies...) comes up with that often ends up costing the company massively, which doesn't affect the MBA any, as by the time the shit has hit the fan, the MBA has moved on to another victim.
99.99% of MBAs are worthless human beings and couldn't run a business to save their lives.
I'm involved with a private capital firm that's going into the snack cake business. We're closing the purchase of our plant in Boone, Iowa in a couple of weeks. As a later phase of the business, we're looking at purchasing a former Sara Lee plant elsewhere in the state. The plant was massively profitable and productive. Some MBA did an analysis that showed that Sara Lee should build a plant in South Carolina. Lo and behold, Sara Lee built a new plant there, closed the Iowa plant, and the new plant has been an unmitigated disaster. Yet another scam from an MBA.
IME, there are two mistakes a business can make. One is going public (except as a last resort for funding) and the other is bringing MBAs in. I'm setting up my own enterprises shortly; I plan to stay private and will enact a "no MBAs need apply" policy. Obtaining an MBA will be grounds for immediate dismissal of an employee.
What I'd like to see is a MBO program: a masters of business ownership. The first few years of the program would be general business and economic principles and so forth. In lieu of tuition and classes for the final year, the student is required to fund their own startup business, with the school making a loan at a market interest rate.
The business would be run by the student for the year. At the end of the year, a faculty committee of the school would certify the following three things:
The business must not have violated any laws or standards of ethical business (e.g. not dealing drugs or engaging in accounting fraud)
The business must have had positive cash flow for the year
The student found an independent (relative to the student) buyer who purchased the business for an amount sufficient to retire the business's debt and give the student a positive return of capital
Now that's a degree that would actually be useful.
Regarding executive salaries, it's the same basic situation as we see in sports: there's a few who are genuinely worth the money (Jack Welch and Rupert Murdoch being notable) and deliver massive value to shareholders and can actually run a company. However, they set the bar high; other execs see that they're making millions and point out that their company generated profits of n% of GE's and thus the execs should be paid at a certain percentage of Mr. Welch. This is similar to a player who's good for 35 home runs a year arguing that they are worth 1/2 as much as a player who hits 70. And on the executive end, you have the additional problem of the fact that it's mostly executives of other companies that sit on the corporate boards.
Combine this with execs (much like Lord Black of Crossharbour) who are convinced that they still own a private company and you've really got a problem.
When Americans speak of "outsourcing" in this context they mean "out" as in "out of the country".
Any American who thinks that's the definition of outsourcing is an idiot who deserves to live in a cardboard box full of their own filth.
Outsourcing does not in any way shape or form imply anything about offshoring. Outsourcing is simply contracting to others work that you used to do in-house. Now, the place you go to outsource may be to Delhi, but it might as well be Denver, so far as the term "outsourcing" is concerned.
But considering that the only tax-free bonds a citizen of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts can have are bonds issued by the Commonwealth (and thus able to be tracked by the Commonwealth), that could be an input into the program.
What's with the change in panels for GNOME 2.4, for instance?
I used to have a floating panel that was set to only take up as much space as the applet (the workspace switcher) within it took up. I upgraded to GNOME 2.4 and lost floating panels. It's not even like with other GNOME feature removals, where they kept it in the form of a hidden GConf setting that no one really knows a damn thing about (since there's precisely zero documentation as to what keys do what, save for examining the source).
It's still better than KDE, but some of this crap is really annoying.
Some years ago, SomethingAwful one-upped you. Slashdot linked to an article there, and ate up so much bandwidth that the admins redirected all accesses with slashdot referers to goatse.cx.
That's right. In honor of your "thinko" saying something dumb during the next week will be known as "doing a Paco Taco". After that, the phrase will catch on among trolls to mean some sort of depraved sexual act involving CmdrTaco. And whenever you post, people will automatically mod you down because they think your username is obscene.
And even if the case can't be made that convincingly in court, the corporation simply needs to do what every plaintiff's goal is: to make defense so expensive and not worth the time and aggravation that the defendant simply settles and pays up.
Placing attachments on the houses and cars of the company's CEO tends to get their attention, also...
Every one of which claims that those who don't think that it's ethical to have the opt-out bill is out to kill every baby seal and pour toxic waste in the water supply.
There's two major schools of thought: one is that you move the line to 8 or 8.5 (which is the consensus line among those who are moving it).
The other is that you simply lay the excess action off on an online sportsbook or find a bookie elsewhere (Carolina would be ideal) to lay off action with. Basically it's just constitutes betting the Patriots elsewhere.
There's a third option, and this is basically what Vegas and the offshore world (the professionals) are likely to do, and that is adjusting the payout rates to make the Panthers more attractive relative to the Patriots (7-120 for instance, which would mean that Patriots bettors are risking $120 for $100 in desired profit and Panthers bettors are getting $100 profit for every $100 risked).
That game opened at Pittsburgh minus 3 1/2, before moving to minus 4 before moving again to minus 4 1/2. Those movements allowed bettors to get the Steelers at a minus 3 1/2 and, later, the Cowboys at a plus 4 1/2 and win both sides of their bets if the final score landed on 4.
Which it did.
"You could have heard the bookies howl as far away as Los Angeles," Banker recalled. "They compared that day to Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Maine and the stock market crash of 1929 all rolled into one."
I am a professional handicapper and can confirm and elaborate.
Bookmaking in the US is based on -110 odds. Whatever side you want to back against the spread, you're risking $110 if you lose to win $100 if you win (there are discount books offshore/online; Pinnacle out of Curacao generally offers -105). Thus, as long as the betting on both teams breaks down in the 47.5% to 52.5% area, the bookmaker is guaranteed a profit whatever happens. At anything outside that range, the bookmaker is betting on the outcome, as they stand to lose money if the heavily bet side wins.
There's more to it than simple balanced action. The line opened in Vegas and offshore at NE -6.5 and got steamed up to -7. It's highly unlikely though, that any additional action would push it to 7.5 (at least at reputable books [see below]).
The reason is key numbers. You can generate pretty much every realistic number of points scored by an NFL team with a function like s(x,y,z)=3x+7y+z, where x, y, and z are all integers greater than or equal to zero, their sum is less than 8, and z is less than x+y. The realistic score differences are thus differences between s-values for two ordered triples satisfying those constraints. Analysis of this will confirm that 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, and 14 are commonly encountered score differences, with 7 and 3 being especially common.
The result is that bookmakers will require massively unbalanced action to move off of a key number (3, 4, 6, and 7) and to a lesser extent to move onto a key number. At those numbers, bookies are much more willing to gamble, as the balanced action around those numbers is a huge risk.
This risk is called "getting sided" or, even worse, "getting middled".
Imagine that you bet the Patriots -6.5, along with enough of the betting public, to push the line to 7. You buyback Panthers +7 at the same stake level. Let's say you're risking $1100 on both ends. If the Patriots win by 8 or more, Pats -6.5 wins, Cats+7 loses, for a net loss of $100. If the Patriots lose or win by less than 7, the reverse happens. But if the Patriots win by exactly 7 (which is common), your Panthers bet pushes (nothing gained, nothing lost) and the Patriots bet wins. Essentially you've hedged your way into betting at +1000 that the game lands on 7. This is "siding".
It's not difficult to see that the book gets mauled in this situation if everybody's doing it.
Now imagine that Patriots action pushed the line to 7.5. Now, both bets hit if the Patriots win by exactly 7. This is "middling".
You may recall a Monday Night Football game between the Giants and Bucs earlier this year. The line was Tampa -5.5 and steam on Monday pushed it to 6. Late in the game, Giants trailing by 4, they take a safety, giving Tampa two points. Al Michaels (who almost definitely bets on the games; it's not difficult to tell when he has OVER or UNDER) said, "That noise you just heard in Vegas wasn't an earthquake."
Oh, it's already been happening in a number of industries.
Germany's labor costs have been sky-high (largely because it's impossible to lay people off; the response is thus to simply not hire unless the business is sure that the demand for that job will still be present 30 years down the line); thus most German industry has been doing their factory expansions in the UK and in the US (or in the case of VW, Spain and Eastern Europe).
The demand for $TECH_JOB in India will outstrip demand at some point, at which point the prices in India will increase. In addition, a huge influx of massively high-paying jobs (as the article says, programmers over there are making 20 times the normal income) will of necessity lead to inflation in India and thus increased salary requirements. The end result is that the US tech industry's employment will be at the same level as that of India's, somwhere in between where India and the US were status quo ante.
I thought it was just that Canadians cannot be knighted without Parliamentary approval and that the Conrad Black thing was the exception rather than the rule.
Not entirely accurate. Record labels like to hedge their bets. As such, they tend to (especially across an entire company where they'll have different labels for different genres; Warner Bros.' Asylum label (itself a sub-imprint of Elektra) is almost exclusively metal and punk) have a couple of artists from any genre that has, in their eyes, a fighting chance of being popular in the next couple of years; this way, if a competing label comes out with something huge, this label has something to cash in on the boom in that genre ready.
All a consequence, really, of shareholder demands for consistent earnings.
Yeah you don't even have to be invited to join the Stonecutters (they're prohibited from doing so). Just be a male of at least 18 (20 or 21 in some Grand Lodges) and petition your local lodge for the degrees.
Uh... how is that post relevant to today? It's from a year ago, in case you hadn't noticed.
Re:Mandrake really is one of the best.
on
MandrakeSoft Roundup
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Why'd you need to compile DVD playing? Use PLF, where you can find prebuilt RPMS (by many of the same people who contribute to MandrakeLinux) of all the software of questionable status you want.
Clinton easily broke Nixon's record for most corrupt administration (even compensating for length of term).
Bush was essentially picked as a candidate for being the most Clintonian (and hence the most likely to win after Dole got manhandled in 1996).
That assessment was right on the money; Bush is intent on breaking Billy Jefferson Clinton's corruption record (almost a give at this point if Bush wins in November).
Slashdot Mirror
Intel was also a major early investor in Red Hat...
Even from a cost-benefit perspective, outsourcing is a questionable business move. It's the sort of thinking that an idiot MBA (I really should learn to avoid redundancies...) comes up with that often ends up costing the company massively, which doesn't affect the MBA any, as by the time the shit has hit the fan, the MBA has moved on to another victim.
99.99% of MBAs are worthless human beings and couldn't run a business to save their lives.
I'm involved with a private capital firm that's going into the snack cake business. We're closing the purchase of our plant in Boone, Iowa in a couple of weeks. As a later phase of the business, we're looking at purchasing a former Sara Lee plant elsewhere in the state. The plant was massively profitable and productive. Some MBA did an analysis that showed that Sara Lee should build a plant in South Carolina. Lo and behold, Sara Lee built a new plant there, closed the Iowa plant, and the new plant has been an unmitigated disaster. Yet another scam from an MBA.
IME, there are two mistakes a business can make. One is going public (except as a last resort for funding) and the other is bringing MBAs in. I'm setting up my own enterprises shortly; I plan to stay private and will enact a "no MBAs need apply" policy. Obtaining an MBA will be grounds for immediate dismissal of an employee.
What I'd like to see is a MBO program: a masters of business ownership. The first few years of the program would be general business and economic principles and so forth. In lieu of tuition and classes for the final year, the student is required to fund their own startup business, with the school making a loan at a market interest rate.
The business would be run by the student for the year. At the end of the year, a faculty committee of the school would certify the following three things:
Now that's a degree that would actually be useful.
Regarding executive salaries, it's the same basic situation as we see in sports: there's a few who are genuinely worth the money (Jack Welch and Rupert Murdoch being notable) and deliver massive value to shareholders and can actually run a company. However, they set the bar high; other execs see that they're making millions and point out that their company generated profits of n% of GE's and thus the execs should be paid at a certain percentage of Mr. Welch. This is similar to a player who's good for 35 home runs a year arguing that they are worth 1/2 as much as a player who hits 70. And on the executive end, you have the additional problem of the fact that it's mostly executives of other companies that sit on the corporate boards.
Combine this with execs (much like Lord Black of Crossharbour) who are convinced that they still own a private company and you've really got a problem.
Any American who thinks that's the definition of outsourcing is an idiot who deserves to live in a cardboard box full of their own filth.
Outsourcing does not in any way shape or form imply anything about offshoring. Outsourcing is simply contracting to others work that you used to do in-house. Now, the place you go to outsource may be to Delhi, but it might as well be Denver, so far as the term "outsourcing" is concerned.
But considering that the only tax-free bonds a citizen of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts can have are bonds issued by the Commonwealth (and thus able to be tracked by the Commonwealth), that could be an input into the program.
Must proofread...
Insert "daily" after "so forth".
If Slashdot could offer an article of this level of insight and so forth, I'd reckon that they'd double their subscriptions.
What's with the change in panels for GNOME 2.4, for instance?
I used to have a floating panel that was set to only take up as much space as the applet (the workspace switcher) within it took up. I upgraded to GNOME 2.4 and lost floating panels. It's not even like with other GNOME feature removals, where they kept it in the form of a hidden GConf setting that no one really knows a damn thing about (since there's precisely zero documentation as to what keys do what, save for examining the source).
It's still better than KDE, but some of this crap is really annoying.
Some years ago, SomethingAwful one-upped you. Slashdot linked to an article there, and ate up so much bandwidth that the admins redirected all accesses with slashdot referers to goatse.cx.
BTW, /.'d before there were a dozen comments.
Was there a user named TacoSnot or something?
They could be using InnoDB somewhere, which doesn't work with persistent/pooled connections.
Or maybe whoever coded their site is a dolt.
Cooker has generally been about as bleeding edge as Gentoo...
And since, unlike debian, stable releases will be regular (probably two per year), stable will actually be sort of current!
And even if the case can't be made that convincingly in court, the corporation simply needs to do what every plaintiff's goal is: to make defense so expensive and not worth the time and aggravation that the defendant simply settles and pays up.
Placing attachments on the houses and cars of the company's CEO tends to get their attention, also...
Every one of which claims that those who don't think that it's ethical to have the opt-out bill is out to kill every baby seal and pour toxic waste in the water supply.
Some have, some haven't.
There's two major schools of thought: one is that you move the line to 8 or 8.5 (which is the consensus line among those who are moving it).
The other is that you simply lay the excess action off on an online sportsbook or find a bookie elsewhere (Carolina would be ideal) to lay off action with. Basically it's just constitutes betting the Patriots elsewhere.
There's a third option, and this is basically what Vegas and the offshore world (the professionals) are likely to do, and that is adjusting the payout rates to make the Panthers more attractive relative to the Patriots (7-120 for instance, which would mean that Patriots bettors are risking $120 for $100 in desired profit and Panthers bettors are getting $100 profit for every $100 risked).
A Super Bowl has been middled: Super Bowl XIII:
I am a professional handicapper and can confirm and elaborate.
Bookmaking in the US is based on -110 odds. Whatever side you want to back against the spread, you're risking $110 if you lose to win $100 if you win (there are discount books offshore/online; Pinnacle out of Curacao generally offers -105). Thus, as long as the betting on both teams breaks down in the 47.5% to 52.5% area, the bookmaker is guaranteed a profit whatever happens. At anything outside that range, the bookmaker is betting on the outcome, as they stand to lose money if the heavily bet side wins.
There's more to it than simple balanced action. The line opened in Vegas and offshore at NE -6.5 and got steamed up to -7. It's highly unlikely though, that any additional action would push it to 7.5 (at least at reputable books [see below]).
The reason is key numbers. You can generate pretty much every realistic number of points scored by an NFL team with a function like s(x,y,z)=3x+7y+z, where x, y, and z are all integers greater than or equal to zero, their sum is less than 8, and z is less than x+y. The realistic score differences are thus differences between s-values for two ordered triples satisfying those constraints. Analysis of this will confirm that 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, and 14 are commonly encountered score differences, with 7 and 3 being especially common.
The result is that bookmakers will require massively unbalanced action to move off of a key number (3, 4, 6, and 7) and to a lesser extent to move onto a key number. At those numbers, bookies are much more willing to gamble, as the balanced action around those numbers is a huge risk.
This risk is called "getting sided" or, even worse, "getting middled".
Imagine that you bet the Patriots -6.5, along with enough of the betting public, to push the line to 7. You buyback Panthers +7 at the same stake level. Let's say you're risking $1100 on both ends. If the Patriots win by 8 or more, Pats -6.5 wins, Cats+7 loses, for a net loss of $100. If the Patriots lose or win by less than 7, the reverse happens. But if the Patriots win by exactly 7 (which is common), your Panthers bet pushes (nothing gained, nothing lost) and the Patriots bet wins. Essentially you've hedged your way into betting at +1000 that the game lands on 7. This is "siding".
It's not difficult to see that the book gets mauled in this situation if everybody's doing it.
Now imagine that Patriots action pushed the line to 7.5. Now, both bets hit if the Patriots win by exactly 7. This is "middling".
You may recall a Monday Night Football game between the Giants and Bucs earlier this year. The line was Tampa -5.5 and steam on Monday pushed it to 6. Late in the game, Giants trailing by 4, they take a safety, giving Tampa two points. Al Michaels (who almost definitely bets on the games; it's not difficult to tell when he has OVER or UNDER) said, "That noise you just heard in Vegas wasn't an earthquake."
Oh, it's already been happening in a number of industries.
Germany's labor costs have been sky-high (largely because it's impossible to lay people off; the response is thus to simply not hire unless the business is sure that the demand for that job will still be present 30 years down the line); thus most German industry has been doing their factory expansions in the UK and in the US (or in the case of VW, Spain and Eastern Europe).
The demand for $TECH_JOB in India will outstrip demand at some point, at which point the prices in India will increase. In addition, a huge influx of massively high-paying jobs (as the article says, programmers over there are making 20 times the normal income) will of necessity lead to inflation in India and thus increased salary requirements. The end result is that the US tech industry's employment will be at the same level as that of India's, somwhere in between where India and the US were status quo ante.
What's with this hippy 'let no one in the world succeed because I can't compete' attitude?
I thought it was just that Canadians cannot be knighted without Parliamentary approval and that the Conrad Black thing was the exception rather than the rule.
Not entirely accurate. Record labels like to hedge their bets. As such, they tend to (especially across an entire company where they'll have different labels for different genres; Warner Bros.' Asylum label (itself a sub-imprint of Elektra) is almost exclusively metal and punk) have a couple of artists from any genre that has, in their eyes, a fighting chance of being popular in the next couple of years; this way, if a competing label comes out with something huge, this label has something to cash in on the boom in that genre ready.
All a consequence, really, of shareholder demands for consistent earnings.
Yeah you don't even have to be invited to join the Stonecutters (they're prohibited from doing so). Just be a male of at least 18 (20 or 21 in some Grand Lodges) and petition your local lodge for the degrees.
;o)
Uh... how is that post relevant to today? It's from a year ago, in case you hadn't noticed.
Why'd you need to compile DVD playing? Use PLF, where you can find prebuilt RPMS (by many of the same people who contribute to MandrakeLinux) of all the software of questionable status you want.
Clinton easily broke Nixon's record for most corrupt administration (even compensating for length of term).
Bush was essentially picked as a candidate for being the most Clintonian (and hence the most likely to win after Dole got manhandled in 1996).
That assessment was right on the money; Bush is intent on breaking Billy Jefferson Clinton's corruption record (almost a give at this point if Bush wins in November).