I think we agree more than I thought we did. He may have in fact inherited this team and not built it. In which case his first priority should be to fix things in house before bringing anyone else aboard. By the way, I'm not suggesting that harassment legislation is necessarily a good thing the way it is implemented. In principle it's good but there are far too many frivolous law suits.
So your solution is to deny a (presumably) qualified lady a job because the current team is a bunch of neanderthal apes that don't appear to have any sense of professionalism? Why, because she might file a lawsuit against the company? I would suggest that the problem here is not the woman looking for a job, it's guys working there already. Look - I enjoy a good bar joke as much as the next guy but there is a time and place for everything. Is it worth it for the company to get sued over some inappropriate comment? I think not. I'm not saying that we all have to be robots at work and not enjoy a laugh once in a while but we just have to keep it clean. I try to think of it like my mom is working there - no swearing, no off color jokes, treat people with respect. That shouldn't be too much to ask.
If I were the manager of your department I would gather everyone together in a room and close the door. I would let the team know that we will be having a new team member joining us on Monday and that it's a female. I would carefully explain the concept of sexual harassment to them and the serious implications that it carries. Then I would remind them that this is not some fucking college frat house, this is a place of work. There will be zero, and I mean zero, tolerance for harassment of any kind - sexual or otherwise. If I find out about it I will have no choice but to report it to HR - otherwise MY ass is on the line for not reporting it. The first offense will get you a written warning. Second offense, your ass is out the door. This isn't baseball, you don't get three strikes in this game. Anyone that doesn't feel that they can abide by those rules are free to tender their resignation effective immediately. This is serious shit - do NOT fuck with me on this. Any questions? Good:-)
Have you ever spoken to these people? I used to work for a big IT company that rhymes with Hell, and they staffed all of their call centers with undertrained, underpaid Indian nationals. One time it took me 5 calls just to get a password changed...and I was on a client site at the time and desperately needed it fixed. Frustration does not even begin to describe how I felt. It's bad enough when you use it for your own internal support but using it for customers paying big bucks for support contracts? Inexcusable. I bet that IBM is working on training monkeys to follow a support script cause, you know, the wages are starting to go up in India and we've got to make our numbers this quarter - damn it!
Didn't know about that. Well, 250GB a month seems like a lot to me. That's still an awful lot of movies. Then again, I don't use Netflix or Amazon Prime to watch all my tv content. I could see it adding pretty quickly if you did. But the catch of course is that they are trying to lock you into their streaming service. Streampix could end up being a honeypot to entice people to get around the bandwidth limit and then...whoops....they take away the unlimited agreement. You know, kind of like what AT&T and Verizon have done.
Yes I am. When I signed an agreement to get my internet connection hooked up there was no mention of bandwidth limits of any kind. Any change to that agreement voids the contract as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure how much broadband is where you are but I'm paying $50/month. That's not exactly low priced in my view, especially if the agreement changes and I'm allowed less bandwidth than before. For the record, I don't stream movies so I doubt that my usage is very high. If it does go to a tiered pricing model I doubt very much I would be effected by it. Water, gas and electricity are finite resources. There is a limit to how much can be produced and, in the case of water, a real shortage in some areas. Network bandwidth is capable of expansion at a far easier rate. I understand that there are infrastructure improvements that need to be made to accommodate that but the telco profits more than cover that.
You do know that Macs are built on UNIX, right? I have installed lots of Linux software on mine and it runs fine. I've also got a Linux VM to mess around with as well as a Windows VM for when I need that too. I'm no fan of the silly round icons either but it's a mistake to think that you can't get real work done on a Mac. I come from a Windows and UNIX background, having used both of them for many years. I use a Mac by choice, not because someone stuck it on my desk and said "deal with it". It's been a great laptop - reliable, fast and secure. Admittedly, Macs have poor support for gaming but I don't play games on it. I work on it. For me the selling point has always been that a Mac is the ONLY platform that you can run OSX, Windows and Linux all at the same time. Well, I've seen that you can build an OSX VM but that has mixed results and not everything works correctly. I can pick and choose the best tools for the task at hand. The only commercial Mac software I have on it is MS Office for Mac, because I need it for work. Everything else either came with it or I'm using an open source alternative.
Then you employ the "half of the jello box" method. Tear it in half. You get one half he gets the other. When you meet, compare them. If they don't match exactly he's not the guy;-)
If the pipe providers have anything to do with it (and they will) you'll start seeing caps on the amount of data you can download per month. One or two of them have already started this. We're seeing it with the cellphone providers doing away with "unlimited" data packages. Streaming an HD movie takes a lot of bandwidth. Until recently the problem was the speed of the home connection. Now you can get very fast home internet connections so speed is no longer an issue. The next issue will be the so called "bandwidth hogs". Those greedy telco pricks will no doubt find a way to put caps on the amount of data you can download with your broadband connection, probably by offering tiered pricing. And if you're someone that likes to download a lot of movies be prepared to take it up the ass when those plans get announced. In the end it will cost more for streaming than getting DVD's by mail, maybe a lot more. At that point a lot of people will go back to the DVD my mail model. Yet another example of technology advances getting stymied by greedy companies looking to squeeze every nickel they can from you.
Try something like Keepass for sites you don't visit very often, or even ones you do. It's a password vault and it works great. Free too. Lastpass is good too. Lots to choose from.
I have worked with a lot of HR types over the years and the vast majority of them are worthless steaming piles. Harassment legislation here in the US gives them an overinflated sense of worth and power. Anyone that has been around for a while knows how to game the system when it comes to interviews with HR types. You just throw around a few buzz words, enough to baffle their feeble pea-sized brains, and it's off to round two. Once you are an employee you can expect nothing useful from them. You'll get the annual benefits signup, which is most likely self service anyway. If you dare ask any questions it will surely be met with a condescending sneer. You'll get a notification that it's time to take the BS harassment seminar that everyone sleeps through. At the end of it all you'll get the exit interview. Now if I thought it would do any good to tell them what I really thought of their company I might open up. But the exit interview only occurs under one of two circumstances - I got pissed off and quit or they fired/laid me off. In neither case am I going to be in a great mood. If I quit it's because the company is messed up. What good is it going to do to tell them it's messed up? I'll just end up looking like a malcontent. If I get laid off I might end up saying something that I'll regret later so better to just bite your tongue and move on. Here's the dirty little secret - the HR drones don't give a shit what you think either way. They'll just laugh about it in the lunch room later that day. Here's the other dirty little secret - even if you did tell the HR drone how to improve their company nobody on the business side will listen to them. They are the hall monitors of the business world. Remember that kid in high school that got stuffed into a gym locker? He's working in HR now.
For me the tipping point with a phone is the point where I can no longer operate the thing with one hand...well thumb actually. On my old iPhone 3GS I could do exactly that. I could wizz around the screen and reach everything using just one hand. With my new Galaxy S2 it's not quite as easy. It still fits in my pocket and for some things a larger screen is nice but it's starting to feel more tablet-y.
It would be great if each of the 200 channels (or whatever it is) were available for 25c each but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. How is it that iTunes can sell the best selling songs of all time along side some tune you have never heard of - both for 99c? One is clearly more popular than the other but they cost the same amount. The tv networks use this model where the "popular shows" (i.e. NCIS, etc.) subsidize the "unpopular shows" (insert favorite fringe tv show here that hardly anyone watches). If you start unbundling things then the cost per show goes up. At the end of the day you spend about the same and get fewer channels. Granted, you'll watch the shows but you'll pay about the same as before. I don't think it's an accident that the pricing model ended up this way;-)
"hey we should give MIT more money, I'm gonna think about that when I vote." - So MIT gets more money. My point exactly. "This is not about money per se, its about marketing" - And why do you think they market anything? To make money. People see Nike stuff on tv...people buy Nike stuff...Nike makes money. "It's a perfectly closed loop and everyone wins." - Well, a lot of people win. All except for the student athlete that doesn't get drafted into the NFL. Sure, they get an education...sort of. They spend more time practicing football and studying playbooks and watching film than learning much in the classroom. Those guys leave university with a piece of paper, not a lot of marketable skills in the job market, and a bum knee.
It is the notion that someone will come along and take what Khan has done and make it a real substitute for traditional in class learning. Khan has taken a very altruistic approach to learning. He believes that it should be free to anyone that wants it. American universities, especially private universities, are most definitely in it to make money. Yes, they want to educate people but make no mistake - they want to bring in as much cash as they can. Look no further than college sports for evidence of that. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it's at odds with Khan's stated approach to education. What the universities really fear is someone coming along that has a profit mindset and improving what Khan has done to the extent that it becomes a compelling alternative to traditional in class education. And if that alternative all of a sudden gets widespread acceptance in the business community as a valid degree on par with the in class degree the universities will be in a world of hurt. That's why they are all jumping into the online realm. They need to have some kind of offering out there just in case. Just as an aside, I have been working in the IT field for a long time and the best programmer I ever worked with had an English degree. The next best had a math degree. The next best didn't have any degree at all - completely self taught. I'm not saying that a CompSci degree is worthless but I have worked with an awful lot of people without one that were every bit as good as people with one. As more people with online degrees get into management I think you'll see the acceptance online degrees continue to grow.
For the Apple buyer packaging is important. They are buying what they feel is a premium product and expect it to be presented that way. I'm generalizing here but I would guess that the Apple customer is more likely to also own designer clothes and accessories that the Google customer. The Google customer is more likely to be a no frills type of person. Less impressed with the packaging and more about what's inside the package and how it works and the technology behind it. Before anyone flames me I'm not saying that one is any better than the other. It's just sort of the engineer view of things (google) vs the architect view of things (apple). Both are important and both are valid they just look at the same thing in a different way.
Based on his track record with government handouts I predict that this $1B will get frittered away. We all know that the teacher unions won't go for anything that is merit related. They always balk at that. So the entire premise is BS. Look - we all agree that we need better teachers and better pay for good teachers but until you get the powerful teacher unions out of the picture it's just not going to happen. Every attempt at real reform has been squashed by the unions. Merit based reward goes against everything they stand for. They want everyone treated equally. Everything is based on seniority (i.e. tenure) rather than skill and dedication and results. Personally, I think one of the reasons that we don't see more engineers go into teaching is the unions. They don't want to belong to one. They don't like the idea of paying dues to protect the jobs of some that ought to be fired. Engineers are trained to gauge the success of things based on actual results, not just showing up. They are used to the idea of getting raises and promotions based on how well they meet their goals. In other words, it's merit based.
From what I've seen, G+ has some interesting features. The circles feature is very elegant. They seem to respect your privacy a bit more and make it easier to get your data OUT of the system. But all of that doesn't mean a hill of beans if everyone I know is using Facebook. It sort of reminds me of the HP Touchpad. Great OS but no apps. So you use it for a while and realize you can't really do anything with it so you either put Android on it or ditch it and get an iPad. That's the feeling I get with G+. It's cool and all but if I don't know anyone there what am I going to do? Follow a bunch of strangers? Now if the momentum changes and people start abandoning Facebook in droves, kind of like what happened with MySpace and Friendster, and moving over to G+ then you've got something. The problem is that the more you use Facebook the more you have invested in it and the less likely you are to go to the trouble of switching to something else.
Yeah, forgot about GeoCities. I lost an entire website when they took it down. Sure, it was free and I should have known better but boy was I pissed when that happened.
I remember when Yahoo first came out. Best search engine, best free email, best chat client, best portal. Then they stagnated. Google and Microsoft swoop in and all of a sudden Yahoo is an afterthought. I've still got a yahoo email account but hardly ever use it. When I did I got much more spam that real mail. Since I switched to gmail I get hardly any spam. With either Bing or Google the search results are better. What happened to Yahoo? Totally left in the dust. Meyer hasn't got a chance to save them and she knows it. It will be a stepping stone to a CEO job at another firm. Meanwhile the Yahoo shareholders take it in the shorts again. Sigh.....
Often the Oracle database is tightly wound with the application front end. For example, Enterprise applications such as PeopleSoft and Oracle Financials use Oracle as the back end database. Other commercial DB's such as SQL Server and DB2 are supported but in my experience rarely used. PostgreSQL is not supported at all on those applications. I had one client that decided it would be a good idea to switch from Oracle to SQL Server in the middle of an application upgrade. Apparently Microsoft was giving them a sweetheart deal so they couldn't resist it. Anyhow, it was a real nightmare. There were a whole series of incompatible commands (describe in Oracle vs. sp_help in SQLServer) that we had to change. Hundreds of reports had to be tested and rewritten in some cases. SQL had to be re-tuned...bunch of stuff. Not something I'd want to go through again anytime soon.
So that's the long and short of it...either the platform is not supported or it's just too difficult to change it.
I think that's part of the problem with news coverage in general. News broadcasts are governed by the Nielsen ratings, which makes it somewhat of a popularity contest. That helps to explain why the vast majority of newscasters (it seems) are hot young blondes. Are they the only people that can learn to read a teleprompter? Or is it more to do with the fact that they are more visually appealing, which arguably helps the ratings? Don't get me wrong - nothing wrong with being visually appealing, unless it bumps off someone less visually appealing but more intelligent and/or better qualified. It might also explain why nearly every news broadcast in America seems to have a political bias one way or the other. Some of them are quite noticeable (Fox news on the right and MSNBC on the left). It seems to me that the BBC is about the only truly unbiased TV news source left now. Which might help to explain why I get most of my news from the internet:-)
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I think we agree more than I thought we did. He may have in fact inherited this team and not built it. In which case his first priority should be to fix things in house before bringing anyone else aboard. By the way, I'm not suggesting that harassment legislation is necessarily a good thing the way it is implemented. In principle it's good but there are far too many frivolous law suits.
So your solution is to deny a (presumably) qualified lady a job because the current team is a bunch of neanderthal apes that don't appear to have any sense of professionalism? Why, because she might file a lawsuit against the company? I would suggest that the problem here is not the woman looking for a job, it's guys working there already. Look - I enjoy a good bar joke as much as the next guy but there is a time and place for everything. Is it worth it for the company to get sued over some inappropriate comment? I think not. I'm not saying that we all have to be robots at work and not enjoy a laugh once in a while but we just have to keep it clean. I try to think of it like my mom is working there - no swearing, no off color jokes, treat people with respect. That shouldn't be too much to ask.
If I were the manager of your department I would gather everyone together in a room and close the door. I would let the team know that we will be having a new team member joining us on Monday and that it's a female. I would carefully explain the concept of sexual harassment to them and the serious implications that it carries. Then I would remind them that this is not some fucking college frat house, this is a place of work. There will be zero, and I mean zero, tolerance for harassment of any kind - sexual or otherwise. If I find out about it I will have no choice but to report it to HR - otherwise MY ass is on the line for not reporting it. The first offense will get you a written warning. Second offense, your ass is out the door. This isn't baseball, you don't get three strikes in this game. Anyone that doesn't feel that they can abide by those rules are free to tender their resignation effective immediately. This is serious shit - do NOT fuck with me on this. Any questions? Good :-)
Have you ever spoken to these people? I used to work for a big IT company that rhymes with Hell, and they staffed all of their call centers with undertrained, underpaid Indian nationals. One time it took me 5 calls just to get a password changed...and I was on a client site at the time and desperately needed it fixed. Frustration does not even begin to describe how I felt. It's bad enough when you use it for your own internal support but using it for customers paying big bucks for support contracts? Inexcusable. I bet that IBM is working on training monkeys to follow a support script cause, you know, the wages are starting to go up in India and we've got to make our numbers this quarter - damn it!
Didn't know about that. Well, 250GB a month seems like a lot to me. That's still an awful lot of movies. Then again, I don't use Netflix or Amazon Prime to watch all my tv content. I could see it adding pretty quickly if you did. But the catch of course is that they are trying to lock you into their streaming service. Streampix could end up being a honeypot to entice people to get around the bandwidth limit and then...whoops....they take away the unlimited agreement. You know, kind of like what AT&T and Verizon have done.
Yes I am. When I signed an agreement to get my internet connection hooked up there was no mention of bandwidth limits of any kind. Any change to that agreement voids the contract as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure how much broadband is where you are but I'm paying $50/month. That's not exactly low priced in my view, especially if the agreement changes and I'm allowed less bandwidth than before. For the record, I don't stream movies so I doubt that my usage is very high. If it does go to a tiered pricing model I doubt very much I would be effected by it. Water, gas and electricity are finite resources. There is a limit to how much can be produced and, in the case of water, a real shortage in some areas. Network bandwidth is capable of expansion at a far easier rate. I understand that there are infrastructure improvements that need to be made to accommodate that but the telco profits more than cover that.
You do know that Macs are built on UNIX, right? I have installed lots of Linux software on mine and it runs fine. I've also got a Linux VM to mess around with as well as a Windows VM for when I need that too. I'm no fan of the silly round icons either but it's a mistake to think that you can't get real work done on a Mac. I come from a Windows and UNIX background, having used both of them for many years. I use a Mac by choice, not because someone stuck it on my desk and said "deal with it". It's been a great laptop - reliable, fast and secure. Admittedly, Macs have poor support for gaming but I don't play games on it. I work on it. For me the selling point has always been that a Mac is the ONLY platform that you can run OSX, Windows and Linux all at the same time. Well, I've seen that you can build an OSX VM but that has mixed results and not everything works correctly. I can pick and choose the best tools for the task at hand. The only commercial Mac software I have on it is MS Office for Mac, because I need it for work. Everything else either came with it or I'm using an open source alternative.
Then you employ the "half of the jello box" method. Tear it in half. You get one half he gets the other. When you meet, compare them. If they don't match exactly he's not the guy ;-)
If the pipe providers have anything to do with it (and they will) you'll start seeing caps on the amount of data you can download per month. One or two of them have already started this. We're seeing it with the cellphone providers doing away with "unlimited" data packages. Streaming an HD movie takes a lot of bandwidth. Until recently the problem was the speed of the home connection. Now you can get very fast home internet connections so speed is no longer an issue. The next issue will be the so called "bandwidth hogs". Those greedy telco pricks will no doubt find a way to put caps on the amount of data you can download with your broadband connection, probably by offering tiered pricing. And if you're someone that likes to download a lot of movies be prepared to take it up the ass when those plans get announced. In the end it will cost more for streaming than getting DVD's by mail, maybe a lot more. At that point a lot of people will go back to the DVD my mail model. Yet another example of technology advances getting stymied by greedy companies looking to squeeze every nickel they can from you.
Try something like Keepass for sites you don't visit very often, or even ones you do. It's a password vault and it works great. Free too. Lastpass is good too. Lots to choose from.
I have worked with a lot of HR types over the years and the vast majority of them are worthless steaming piles. Harassment legislation here in the US gives them an overinflated sense of worth and power. Anyone that has been around for a while knows how to game the system when it comes to interviews with HR types. You just throw around a few buzz words, enough to baffle their feeble pea-sized brains, and it's off to round two. Once you are an employee you can expect nothing useful from them. You'll get the annual benefits signup, which is most likely self service anyway. If you dare ask any questions it will surely be met with a condescending sneer. You'll get a notification that it's time to take the BS harassment seminar that everyone sleeps through. At the end of it all you'll get the exit interview. Now if I thought it would do any good to tell them what I really thought of their company I might open up. But the exit interview only occurs under one of two circumstances - I got pissed off and quit or they fired/laid me off. In neither case am I going to be in a great mood. If I quit it's because the company is messed up. What good is it going to do to tell them it's messed up? I'll just end up looking like a malcontent. If I get laid off I might end up saying something that I'll regret later so better to just bite your tongue and move on. Here's the dirty little secret - the HR drones don't give a shit what you think either way. They'll just laugh about it in the lunch room later that day. Here's the other dirty little secret - even if you did tell the HR drone how to improve their company nobody on the business side will listen to them. They are the hall monitors of the business world. Remember that kid in high school that got stuffed into a gym locker? He's working in HR now.
For me the tipping point with a phone is the point where I can no longer operate the thing with one hand...well thumb actually. On my old iPhone 3GS I could do exactly that. I could wizz around the screen and reach everything using just one hand. With my new Galaxy S2 it's not quite as easy. It still fits in my pocket and for some things a larger screen is nice but it's starting to feel more tablet-y.
It would be great if each of the 200 channels (or whatever it is) were available for 25c each but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. How is it that iTunes can sell the best selling songs of all time along side some tune you have never heard of - both for 99c? One is clearly more popular than the other but they cost the same amount. The tv networks use this model where the "popular shows" (i.e. NCIS, etc.) subsidize the "unpopular shows" (insert favorite fringe tv show here that hardly anyone watches). If you start unbundling things then the cost per show goes up. At the end of the day you spend about the same and get fewer channels. Granted, you'll watch the shows but you'll pay about the same as before. I don't think it's an accident that the pricing model ended up this way ;-)
"hey we should give MIT more money, I'm gonna think about that when I vote." - So MIT gets more money. My point exactly. "This is not about money per se, its about marketing" - And why do you think they market anything? To make money. People see Nike stuff on tv...people buy Nike stuff...Nike makes money. "It's a perfectly closed loop and everyone wins." - Well, a lot of people win. All except for the student athlete that doesn't get drafted into the NFL. Sure, they get an education...sort of. They spend more time practicing football and studying playbooks and watching film than learning much in the classroom. Those guys leave university with a piece of paper, not a lot of marketable skills in the job market, and a bum knee.
It is the notion that someone will come along and take what Khan has done and make it a real substitute for traditional in class learning. Khan has taken a very altruistic approach to learning. He believes that it should be free to anyone that wants it. American universities, especially private universities, are most definitely in it to make money. Yes, they want to educate people but make no mistake - they want to bring in as much cash as they can. Look no further than college sports for evidence of that. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it's at odds with Khan's stated approach to education. What the universities really fear is someone coming along that has a profit mindset and improving what Khan has done to the extent that it becomes a compelling alternative to traditional in class education. And if that alternative all of a sudden gets widespread acceptance in the business community as a valid degree on par with the in class degree the universities will be in a world of hurt. That's why they are all jumping into the online realm. They need to have some kind of offering out there just in case. Just as an aside, I have been working in the IT field for a long time and the best programmer I ever worked with had an English degree. The next best had a math degree. The next best didn't have any degree at all - completely self taught. I'm not saying that a CompSci degree is worthless but I have worked with an awful lot of people without one that were every bit as good as people with one. As more people with online degrees get into management I think you'll see the acceptance online degrees continue to grow.
For the Apple buyer packaging is important. They are buying what they feel is a premium product and expect it to be presented that way. I'm generalizing here but I would guess that the Apple customer is more likely to also own designer clothes and accessories that the Google customer. The Google customer is more likely to be a no frills type of person. Less impressed with the packaging and more about what's inside the package and how it works and the technology behind it. Before anyone flames me I'm not saying that one is any better than the other. It's just sort of the engineer view of things (google) vs the architect view of things (apple). Both are important and both are valid they just look at the same thing in a different way.
Based on his track record with government handouts I predict that this $1B will get frittered away. We all know that the teacher unions won't go for anything that is merit related. They always balk at that. So the entire premise is BS. Look - we all agree that we need better teachers and better pay for good teachers but until you get the powerful teacher unions out of the picture it's just not going to happen. Every attempt at real reform has been squashed by the unions. Merit based reward goes against everything they stand for. They want everyone treated equally. Everything is based on seniority (i.e. tenure) rather than skill and dedication and results. Personally, I think one of the reasons that we don't see more engineers go into teaching is the unions. They don't want to belong to one. They don't like the idea of paying dues to protect the jobs of some that ought to be fired. Engineers are trained to gauge the success of things based on actual results, not just showing up. They are used to the idea of getting raises and promotions based on how well they meet their goals. In other words, it's merit based.
From what I've seen, G+ has some interesting features. The circles feature is very elegant. They seem to respect your privacy a bit more and make it easier to get your data OUT of the system. But all of that doesn't mean a hill of beans if everyone I know is using Facebook. It sort of reminds me of the HP Touchpad. Great OS but no apps. So you use it for a while and realize you can't really do anything with it so you either put Android on it or ditch it and get an iPad. That's the feeling I get with G+. It's cool and all but if I don't know anyone there what am I going to do? Follow a bunch of strangers? Now if the momentum changes and people start abandoning Facebook in droves, kind of like what happened with MySpace and Friendster, and moving over to G+ then you've got something. The problem is that the more you use Facebook the more you have invested in it and the less likely you are to go to the trouble of switching to something else.
Dogpile anyone? :-)
Yeah, forgot about GeoCities. I lost an entire website when they took it down. Sure, it was free and I should have known better but boy was I pissed when that happened.
I remember when Yahoo first came out. Best search engine, best free email, best chat client, best portal. Then they stagnated. Google and Microsoft swoop in and all of a sudden Yahoo is an afterthought. I've still got a yahoo email account but hardly ever use it. When I did I got much more spam that real mail. Since I switched to gmail I get hardly any spam. With either Bing or Google the search results are better. What happened to Yahoo? Totally left in the dust. Meyer hasn't got a chance to save them and she knows it. It will be a stepping stone to a CEO job at another firm. Meanwhile the Yahoo shareholders take it in the shorts again. Sigh.....
Often the Oracle database is tightly wound with the application front end. For example, Enterprise applications such as PeopleSoft and Oracle Financials use Oracle as the back end database. Other commercial DB's such as SQL Server and DB2 are supported but in my experience rarely used. PostgreSQL is not supported at all on those applications. I had one client that decided it would be a good idea to switch from Oracle to SQL Server in the middle of an application upgrade. Apparently Microsoft was giving them a sweetheart deal so they couldn't resist it. Anyhow, it was a real nightmare. There were a whole series of incompatible commands (describe in Oracle vs. sp_help in SQLServer) that we had to change. Hundreds of reports had to be tested and rewritten in some cases. SQL had to be re-tuned...bunch of stuff. Not something I'd want to go through again anytime soon. So that's the long and short of it...either the platform is not supported or it's just too difficult to change it.
Yes I'd forgotten about the Faulklands. Good point. That coverage was a bit, shall we say, one sided :-)
I think that's part of the problem with news coverage in general. News broadcasts are governed by the Nielsen ratings, which makes it somewhat of a popularity contest. That helps to explain why the vast majority of newscasters (it seems) are hot young blondes. Are they the only people that can learn to read a teleprompter? Or is it more to do with the fact that they are more visually appealing, which arguably helps the ratings? Don't get me wrong - nothing wrong with being visually appealing, unless it bumps off someone less visually appealing but more intelligent and/or better qualified. It might also explain why nearly every news broadcast in America seems to have a political bias one way or the other. Some of them are quite noticeable (Fox news on the right and MSNBC on the left). It seems to me that the BBC is about the only truly unbiased TV news source left now. Which might help to explain why I get most of my news from the internet :-)
Good grief...that's a frightening thought.