The idea of insurance for open source liability strikes me as a very bad idea:
1) It attaches a fee to what was once free. 2) It makes companies carrying insurance more likely to pass deep pockets analysis and be sued. 3) Insurers like to settle. The result is precident. And any precident that says Open Source is tainted is very bad. 4) The mere availability of insurance speeks volumes to the confidence the market has in the product.
This article is not what you expect. How to tell if someone hasn't read the article: ranting about religion being used to justify political positions.
There were two really good points in the article:...do people oppose game violence because they oppose violence, or because they oppose games?
I've always thought people who oppose games just don't like to have fun. They see it as wasteful.
And while I'm not comparing the Bible to a video game, it's worth noting that those games which don't get much attention from pro-censors fit their violence into the overall milieu of the game, just as the Bible fits violence into its context.
This is very interesting - the games cited as examples (Max Payne, etc...) do a very good job of making the violence as part of the story line.
Re:There's spam, then there's the partner in crime
on
Happy Spamiversary!
·
· Score: 1
Also, some 80% of all automobile accidents resulting in FATALITIES occur because at least one driver is using a vehicle made by one of the popular car manufacturers!!!
You forgot:
100% of firearms injuries are caused by guns! -and- 90% of illegal activity is paid for with money!
I'm still laughing at your original post... funny stuff it is.
This is just going to destroy the US research community, which was once the greatest in the world. Goodbye, conferences.
If you are having a "research" conference and the mere fact that you will be logged as having traveled to the conference is a problem, then you have to wonder about what is being researched.
If the purpose of your conference is legit, then this should be not a problem at all.
Moving to IP based phones can have some great benefits to your company. If you do it right you will end up:
- With almost unlimited flexibility for managing call routing - Easy integration with databases for tricks like skills based call routing - Low cost for intra-office communications - Near perfect support for work from home employees - Flexibility to set up spot call centers and so on - Really cool voice mail
Unfortunately, most companies don't use a fraction of the capability of IP phones - a lot of time they end up being used just like the crappy 80's AT&T Merlin they are replacing. Oh yeah - make sure you have a really good SLA on your T's... downtime is SUPER EXPENSIVE when sales and customer service are down.
I believe back in the 50s and 60s both the US and USSR attempted to use radioactive tagging to track people. Sucked to be the subject. A subdermal device would not be useful as it is too small to have enough power for satelite. A variation on an RFID would be interesting, though - you could literally pick people up as they moved through town.
What is going on here is that everyone selling songs for $.99 is LOOSING MONEY and RIAA is GRIPPING BECAUSE THEIR MODEL IS CONTINUING TO FAIL. Problem is:
* Most consumers have an terrible experience when they buy a song on the desktop in the livign room and then can't listen to that song on their laptop on the road. DRM is sucking the life out of selling music online
* Paying a monthly fee on top of $.99 per track is not the same as paying $.99 per track. Bait and switch turns people off. Drop the ads that claim $.99 or drop the membership charge!
* There aren't enough buyers online to sell the kind of volume in music that the online shops have projected!
Interesting observation:
Why can I buy a DVD of a movie from the value pile at wally world for less than the soundtrack to the movie sells for in the music department? The movie cost millions to make. The soundtrack possibly a few hundred thousand... What gives?
Seems that this is a real wast of money. Let's invest our time in effort into:
* Stopping the rat-bastards that traffic humans in semi trailers and occasionally forget to let them out to breathe for an extended periiod.
* Fixing scam-o-tron electronic voting machines.
* Perhaps ticketing the idiot driving with a cheesburger in one hand, somking a cigarette with a cell phone in the other hand who is washing it down with a beer.
My advice to you would be: hire someone who knows the right questions to ask before you move forward. The phrase "you don't know what you don't know" applies. Your spec says:
"we want to do some stuff"
it does not say:
* what the problem is (we have stuff in word isn't a real problem) * who is accessing the information and from where. * how information from the KB is going to be used. * What kind of measurement of KB use is needed (eg. tracking what items are used to weight scoring in searches) * What business systems (i.e. CRM, Accounting, document creation, etc are in place).
There is a ton of off the shelf software that does knowledge management. Not one package I've seen does it the same way. Because this type of software is really a canned set business processes, you need to evaluate what needs to be done from the big picture before you even start looking at packages. Otherwise, you'll get a Rube Goldberg that will not be used by end users.
Re:continuously "working smarter" == ponzi scheme
on
Train Your Own Replacement
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Simple - to switch jobs in those industries requires almost zero personal investment.
Often times several years of OJT is required to switch blue colar jobs. Unplanned job changes SUCK for everyone and just because you went to college doesn't change that. Have some respect for the workin' man.
On the other hand, suppose you just got out of school $40,000 in debt as a programmer, and you lose your job after six months, only to find no other jobs available. Are you going to go back to school for another 4 years to become a lawyer or a doctor?
You are confusing working smarter with improving your education. I can assure you that having more degrees does in no way make you a smarter worker. It does however mean that you are more educated.
Suppose you lose your job at age 35-40. Now what do you do? You can't possibly survive until retirement age.
My God, do you actually think losing your job is a permenant affliction? Ever hear of a career change? Of course, all the automotive people were whining the same whine when IT was booming and their industry had plateaued. Now it's IT while healthcare is booming. Next the healthcare people will complain while some other sector booms.
You probably can't afford to go back to college again since you may have family/house/etc.
Now we are getting to the meat of the problem: how people manage money! The real problem with today's economy is that a lot of people live 90 days from bankruptcy. Most of the time it's because of choices they make to have stuff or to do things earlier in life than they should. Here's how to fix the situation:
Step 1: SELL THE HOUSE. If you are upside down on your house, you are probably loaded with debt. Get it over with and realize that you are bankrupt and see an attorney. Time to start over.
Step 2: Sell the Lexus, SUV and Minivan. Stop making $600-900/mo in car payments. Get a late '90s saturn with low miles or something you can afford now that your life has changed.
Step 3: Adjust your lifestyle to fit your income. Live well below your means, not at your means. Take the kids out of Karate, gymnastics, off-season soccer, softball, baseball, basketball and cancel the $5,000 vacation you take every year. Stop eating out all the time while you are at it.
And if you do go back to college it will probably deplete much of your retirement savings - just postponing your financial problems.
Here's the deal: going to school, getting a high paying job with a good 401 K doesn't work. If your value is based on what you know, then when what you know has little value, what happens to your career? Why go down the same road twice?
It sets you up to retire with $150K in the bank after you pay off all the debt from financing junior's college. $150K will pay for maybe half of the bill when you have major health problems. If you want to prosper, work on developing asset income. Start business. Buy income properties. Write a book, screenplay or some music. Learn to work the stock market. Set up an income that isn't dependent on the good graces of an employer.
However, there has to be an outlet for people who spent a fortune on their career only to find that it has ended.
It's called get a new career - the same outlet that is open to the blue collar people who according to you make "zero personal investment in themselves". You could learn a lot from them: they adapt to the times.
No, I just don't see that it is different. How is offshoring services different than manufacturing cars, t-shirts, or cheap components overseas? How is increasing productivity different than say, the invention of the assembly line (that put a butt-load of businesses out of business), the telephone, etc?
Losing your job sucks - and is certain to be a part of life at least once if you let it.
At the end of the day, when you stop trying to find better ways to do things, you lose because someone else will figure out a better way. It's why you don't ride a jack-ass to work, hunt with a spear, and write with bear claw on a clay tablet. It's also why you HAVE to always be improving yourself.
Most groups don't seem to try to legislate morality on other folks.
What planet do you live on? Every group of every kind tries to legislate it's morality (except the libertarians and anarchists who try to unlegislate their version).
I don't think that radical environmentalist speech should be suppressed.
It always has struck this Christian that it is hypocritical to have freedom of the press and of speech and then to say you can't print porn or talk about certain subjects.
But religious conservative types *do* try to mobilize and dictate what content people want to view
How does this differ from any other group who advocates a particular ideology? Social debate has been an ongoing phenomenon since somewhere around the time man started walking upright.
Being faced with the threat of real competition and the prospect of losing your job is a feeling that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. That said, instead of cowering, wake up and do something about the situation:
* Turn fear into motivation. Instead of cowering and waiting for the pink slip, get motivatied.
* Upgrade your skills - particularly your people and business skills.
* Sieze the opportunity to outsource yourself. Start a company. Make your own outsourcing deal: lower your former employer's costs the way you always talk about at lunch and keep the work local!
* Work on plugging your business unit or self into the revenue generation side of the business. Hint: IT is typically a huge cost center that senior management is rarely satisfied with.
Since when did Slashdot decide that someone who renders DRM useless is a vandal? Especially when it requires the user to have a legitimate right to use the DRM protected data!
What is going on is very simple: we have a new round of businespeople trying to understand the data and software business. I'll shorten the lesson up for them as I lived though the last two rounds of "copy protection":
PROTECTING DIGITAL DATA FROM DUPLICATION IS A FOOL'S PURSUIT. Stating that is is IMPOSSIBLE TO BREAK THIS PROTECTION is very shortsighted and will come home to roost when someone with the ability has a need to de-DRM data.
We went through this whole iteration of stupidity in the mid-80s. Ultimately, copy protection failed. Every couple of months someone would come out with a new and unbreakable copy protection scheme - which is a lot like what is going on in the DRM world now. If you even go look at the newspapers of the day, you'll find articles advocating changing laws to make cracking copy protection extra-double secret illegal.
Fortunately, the business people will figure it out: copy protection, drm and so on is incredibly unprofitable because it does not have value to the buyer. In fact, it reduces the value of the purchased product substantially.
1. NX bit is not an end all in preventing mal code from running. It does limit some exposure.
2. DRM is not guaranteed security as MS is trying to sell to the public. It does guarantee that fixing a hacked system will be sooooo much more difficult. A successful hack could rended someone's local data inaccessable. And we are sure to see version 1.0 type vunerabilities in bios, os and libraries for a while... eeek.
3. MS providing antivirus, firewall and so on will not work out as competition between vendors has fueled a ton of creativity and generated some pretty amazing products. Let's hope this feature is like the backup software included with Win3.11 and 95 rather than IE.
4. None of this really speaks to MS's most important and weakest security-wise product: MS Office.
I think this goes beyond a 80's application delivery platform. With $100 PC's, we can start to seriously look at things like a PC on every students desk in elementary schools-and a PC as an interface to just about every machine in creation
Exactly. The 80s era platform (PC/MAC/Workstation) is too expensive to do anything other than be a general purpose device. IBM is gunning for a platform that can be applied to low computing power devices to high end super computers. Learn the archetecture once, reuse. Add custom functionality as needed. It's not Open Source though - it's a new level of customization that allows engineers to build devices that use a simmilar software environment and leverages that to drive down the costs associated with writing the code that drives advanced or additional functionality. IBM being a driver allows less concern for submarine patents and other IP hijacking a la Rambus, SCO and opportrepreneuers.
I'm sure the other microprocessor manufacturers will be rolling out simmilar plans...
Siebel Analytics (hmmm still a little iffy about this one)
DEVELOPERS LISTEN UP: The trend in OTS software is to add OLAP capabilities and call it analytics. From a technical standpoint, it's whoop-de-doo. From the end user standpoint it's what they want. If you have a VAR channel, they want nothing of it because they will lose revenue writing custom reports.
Like your other reply asked, could you clarify this? I understand the concept of refering to a higher authority, but I cannot fit that with what you said.
Nine out of ten times, referring to higher authority is a shell game designed to allow the salesperson to crafte a better response. More times than not, they actually know the answer to your question but do not like it and are going to try to find an engineer to tell them what they want to hear so they aren't the liar.
Replacing the WinTel monopoly with something truly open architecture is the type of thing that will be necessary to jump-start IT--which in the US is starting to become a declining industry. We need to think about how to produce $50 PC's--and just open sourcing the OS, CPU and memory design is a big step in that direction.
Agreed. IBM is doing something that has needed to be done for a long time - they are quietly delivering the replacement for the 80's era application platforms. Interesting that this time IBM has commoditized the processor and os in a way that would prevent a competitor from hijacking control of the archetecture the way MS and Intel did.
The people who sell you stuff are trained by professionals.
* They are NOT YOUR FREINDS!*
Actually, they are highly trained professionals. They may or may not be your friends. When you encounter a salesperson you can assume:
* They are experts on the verbal and non-verbal language of conducting business transactions. * Every word is crafted carefully to create a precise response from you. * They have a mastery of their product that may or may not be obvious. If they say "I'll have to ask engineering" they already know the answer. * Often they know vastly more about you than you will ever guess. * You can assume that they are as good at what they do as you are at what you do.
The best salespeople don't even come across as selling. They almost come across as a doctor, lawyer or cpa...
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of insurance for open source liability strikes me as a very bad idea:
1) It attaches a fee to what was once free.
2) It makes companies carrying insurance more likely to pass deep pockets analysis and be sued.
3) Insurers like to settle. The result is precident. And any precident that says Open Source is tainted is very bad.
4) The mere availability of insurance speeks volumes to the confidence the market has in the product.
It's too bad that most brains will never use their high-speed short term memory anywhere near capacity.
Now if we could get a distributed client to take advantage of all the idle cycles...
This article is not what you expect. How to tell if someone hasn't read the article: ranting about religion being used to justify political positions.
...do people oppose game violence because they oppose violence, or because they oppose games?
There were two really good points in the article:
I've always thought people who oppose games just don't like to have fun. They see it as wasteful.
And while I'm not comparing the Bible to a video game, it's worth noting that those games which don't get much attention from pro-censors fit their violence into the overall milieu of the game, just as the Bible fits violence into its context.
This is very interesting - the games cited as examples (Max Payne, etc...) do a very good job of making the violence as part of the story line.
Also, some 80% of all automobile accidents resulting in FATALITIES occur because at least one driver is using a vehicle made by one of the popular car manufacturers!!!
You forgot:
100% of firearms injuries are caused by guns!
-and-
90% of illegal activity is paid for with money!
I'm still laughing at your original post... funny stuff it is.
This is just going to destroy the US research community, which was once the greatest in the world. Goodbye, conferences.
If you are having a "research" conference and the mere fact that you will be logged as having traveled to the conference is a problem, then you have to wonder about what is being researched.
If the purpose of your conference is legit, then this should be not a problem at all.
Moving to IP based phones can have some great benefits to your company. If you do it right you will end up:
- With almost unlimited flexibility for managing call routing
- Easy integration with databases for tricks like skills based call routing
- Low cost for intra-office communications
- Near perfect support for work from home employees
- Flexibility to set up spot call centers and so on
- Really cool voice mail
Unfortunately, most companies don't use a fraction of the capability of IP phones - a lot of time they end up being used just like the crappy 80's AT&T Merlin they are replacing. Oh yeah - make sure you have a really good SLA on your T's... downtime is SUPER EXPENSIVE when sales and customer service are down.
I have a cusomer that purchased a case of 200MB ATA hard drives instead of using tape. Incremental and transaction backups are mirrored.
Interesting solution, seems you'd want something more permenant for archival backups though.
I believe back in the 50s and 60s both the US and USSR attempted to use radioactive tagging to track people. Sucked to be the subject. A subdermal device would not be useful as it is too small to have enough power for satelite. A variation on an RFID would be interesting, though - you could literally pick people up as they moved through town.
What is going on here is that everyone selling songs for $.99 is LOOSING MONEY and RIAA is GRIPPING BECAUSE THEIR MODEL IS CONTINUING TO FAIL. Problem is:
* Most consumers have an terrible experience when they buy a song on the desktop in the livign room and then can't listen to that song on their laptop on the road. DRM is sucking the life out of selling music online
* Paying a monthly fee on top of $.99 per track is not the same as paying $.99 per track. Bait and switch turns people off. Drop the ads that claim $.99 or drop the membership charge!
* There aren't enough buyers online to sell the kind of volume in music that the online shops have projected!
Interesting observation:
Why can I buy a DVD of a movie from the value pile at wally world for less than the soundtrack to the movie sells for in the music department? The movie cost millions to make. The soundtrack possibly a few hundred thousand... What gives?
Google is simply the best search tool. Their other products have much more limited appeal:
Google News - is less concise and useful than subscription services or even that sensationalist site that everyone loves to hate.
Froogle - cannot overcome the lack of standards in the ecommerce world to make full ecommerce catalogs searchable.
The idea of "another os layer" is silly. Google is an application. Email is an application. It's not an OS.
Seems that this is a real wast of money. Let's invest our time in effort into:
* Stopping the rat-bastards that traffic humans in semi trailers and occasionally forget to let them out to breathe for an extended periiod.
* Fixing scam-o-tron electronic voting machines.
* Perhaps ticketing the idiot driving with a cheesburger in one hand, somking a cigarette with a cell phone in the other hand who is washing it down with a beer.
My advice to you would be: hire someone who knows the right questions to ask before you move forward. The phrase "you don't know what you don't know" applies. Your spec says:
"we want to do some stuff"
it does not say:
* what the problem is (we have stuff in word isn't a real problem)
* who is accessing the information and from where.
* how information from the KB is going to be used.
* What kind of measurement of KB use is needed (eg. tracking what items are used to weight scoring in searches)
* What business systems (i.e. CRM, Accounting, document creation, etc are in place).
There is a ton of off the shelf software that does knowledge management. Not one package I've seen does it the same way. Because this type of software is really a canned set business processes, you need to evaluate what needs to be done from the big picture before you even start looking at packages. Otherwise, you'll get a Rube Goldberg that will not be used by end users.
Simple - to switch jobs in those industries requires almost zero personal investment.
Often times several years of OJT is required to switch blue colar jobs. Unplanned job changes SUCK for everyone and just because you went to college doesn't change that. Have some respect for the workin' man.
On the other hand, suppose you just got out of school $40,000 in debt as a programmer, and you lose your job after six months, only to find no other jobs available. Are you going to go back to school for another 4 years to become a lawyer or a doctor?
You are confusing working smarter with improving your education. I can assure you that having more degrees does in no way make you a smarter worker. It does however mean that you are more educated.
Suppose you lose your job at age 35-40. Now what do you do? You can't possibly survive until retirement age.
My God, do you actually think losing your job is a permenant affliction? Ever hear of a career change? Of course, all the automotive people were whining the same whine when IT was booming and their industry had plateaued. Now it's IT while healthcare is booming. Next the healthcare people will complain while some other sector booms.
You probably can't afford to go back to college again since you may have family/house/etc.
Now we are getting to the meat of the problem: how people manage money! The real problem with today's economy is that a lot of people live 90 days from bankruptcy. Most of the time it's because of choices they make to have stuff or to do things earlier in life than they should. Here's how to fix the situation:
Step 1: SELL THE HOUSE. If you are upside down on your house, you are probably loaded with debt. Get it over with and realize that you are bankrupt and see an attorney. Time to start over.
Step 2: Sell the Lexus, SUV and Minivan. Stop making $600-900/mo in car payments. Get a late '90s saturn with low miles or something you can afford now that your life has changed.
Step 3: Adjust your lifestyle to fit your income. Live well below your means, not at your means. Take the kids out of Karate, gymnastics, off-season soccer, softball, baseball, basketball and cancel the $5,000 vacation you take every year. Stop eating out all the time while you are at it.
And if you do go back to college it will probably deplete much of your retirement savings - just postponing your financial problems.
Here's the deal: going to school, getting a high paying job with a good 401 K doesn't work. If your value is based on what you know, then when what you know has little value, what happens to your career? Why go down the same road twice?
It sets you up to retire with $150K in the bank after you pay off all the debt from financing junior's college. $150K will pay for maybe half of the bill when you have major health problems. If you want to prosper, work on developing asset income. Start business. Buy income properties. Write a book, screenplay or some music. Learn to work the stock market. Set up an income that isn't dependent on the good graces of an employer.
However, there has to be an outlet for people who spent a fortune on their career only to find that it has ended.
It's called get a new career - the same outlet that is open to the blue collar people who according to you make "zero personal investment in themselves". You could learn a lot from them: they adapt to the times.
this time it's different
No, I just don't see that it is different. How is offshoring services different than manufacturing cars, t-shirts, or cheap components overseas? How is increasing productivity different than say, the invention of the assembly line (that put a butt-load of businesses out of business), the telephone, etc?
Losing your job sucks - and is certain to be a part of life at least once if you let it.
At the end of the day, when you stop trying to find better ways to do things, you lose because someone else will figure out a better way. It's why you don't ride a jack-ass to work, hunt with a spear, and write with bear claw on a clay tablet. It's also why you HAVE to always be improving yourself.
It's not a ponzi scheme. It's evolution.
Sucks doesn't it?
Most groups don't seem to try to legislate morality on other folks.
What planet do you live on? Every group of every kind tries to legislate it's morality (except the libertarians and anarchists who try to unlegislate their version).
I don't think that radical environmentalist speech should be suppressed.
It always has struck this Christian that it is hypocritical to have freedom of the press and of speech and then to say you can't print porn or talk about certain subjects.
But religious conservative types *do* try to mobilize and dictate what content people want to view
How does this differ from any other group who advocates a particular ideology? Social debate has been an ongoing phenomenon since somewhere around the time man started walking upright.
Telling everyone to continue to compete harder and harder and harder is a Ponzi Scheme?
Try working smarter. You can work as hard as you want to - but you will likely end up burnt out and unemployed.
Being faced with the threat of real competition and the prospect of losing your job is a feeling that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. That said, instead of cowering, wake up and do something about the situation:
* Turn fear into motivation. Instead of cowering and waiting for the pink slip, get motivatied.
* Upgrade your skills - particularly your people and business skills.
* Sieze the opportunity to outsource yourself. Start a company. Make your own outsourcing deal: lower your former employer's costs the way you always talk about at lunch and keep the work local!
* Work on plugging your business unit or self into the revenue generation side of the business. Hint: IT is typically a huge cost center that senior management is rarely satisfied with.
Since when did Slashdot decide that someone who renders DRM useless is a vandal? Especially when it requires the user to have a legitimate right to use the DRM protected data!
What is going on is very simple: we have a new round of businespeople trying to understand the data and software business. I'll shorten the lesson up for them as I lived though the last two rounds of "copy protection":
PROTECTING DIGITAL DATA FROM DUPLICATION IS A FOOL'S PURSUIT. Stating that is is IMPOSSIBLE TO BREAK THIS PROTECTION is very shortsighted and will come home to roost when someone with the ability has a need to de-DRM data.
We went through this whole iteration of stupidity in the mid-80s. Ultimately, copy protection failed. Every couple of months someone would come out with a new and unbreakable copy protection scheme - which is a lot like what is going on in the DRM world now. If you even go look at the newspapers of the day, you'll find articles advocating changing laws to make cracking copy protection extra-double secret illegal.
Fortunately, the business people will figure it out: copy protection, drm and so on is incredibly unprofitable because it does not have value to the buyer. In fact, it reduces the value of the purchased product substantially.
Couple of random thoughts:
1. NX bit is not an end all in preventing mal code from running. It does limit some exposure.
2. DRM is not guaranteed security as MS is trying to sell to the public. It does guarantee that fixing a hacked system will be sooooo much more difficult. A successful hack could rended someone's local data inaccessable. And we are sure to see version 1.0 type vunerabilities in bios, os and libraries for a while... eeek.
3. MS providing antivirus, firewall and so on will not work out as competition between vendors has fueled a ton of creativity and generated some pretty amazing products. Let's hope this feature is like the backup software included with Win3.11 and 95 rather than IE.
4. None of this really speaks to MS's most important and weakest security-wise product: MS Office.
I think this goes beyond a 80's application delivery platform. With $100 PC's, we can start to seriously look at things like a PC on every students desk in elementary schools-and a PC as an interface to just about every machine in creation
Exactly. The 80s era platform (PC/MAC/Workstation) is too expensive to do anything other than be a general purpose device. IBM is gunning for a platform that can be applied to low computing power devices to high end super computers. Learn the archetecture once, reuse. Add custom functionality as needed. It's not Open Source though - it's a new level of customization that allows engineers to build devices that use a simmilar software environment and leverages that to drive down the costs associated with writing the code that drives advanced or additional functionality. IBM being a driver allows less concern for submarine patents and other IP hijacking a la Rambus, SCO and opportrepreneuers.
I'm sure the other microprocessor manufacturers will be rolling out simmilar plans...
The next ten years will be very interesting...
Siebel Analytics (hmmm still a little iffy about this one)
DEVELOPERS LISTEN UP: The trend in OTS software is to add OLAP capabilities and call it analytics. From a technical standpoint, it's whoop-de-doo. From the end user standpoint it's what they want. If you have a VAR channel, they want nothing of it because they will lose revenue writing custom reports.
Siebel's product is a case study in this trend.
Like your other reply asked, could you clarify this? I understand the concept of refering to a higher authority, but I cannot fit that with what you said.
Nine out of ten times, referring to higher authority is a shell game designed to allow the salesperson to crafte a better response. More times than not, they actually know the answer to your question but do not like it and are going to try to find an engineer to tell them what they want to hear so they aren't the liar.
Replacing the WinTel monopoly with something truly open architecture is the type of thing that will be necessary to jump-start IT--which in the US is starting to become a declining industry. We need to think about how to produce $50 PC's--and just open sourcing the OS, CPU and memory design is a big step in that direction.
Agreed. IBM is doing something that has needed to be done for a long time - they are quietly delivering the replacement for the 80's era application platforms. Interesting that this time IBM has commoditized the processor and os in a way that would prevent a competitor from hijacking control of the archetecture the way MS and Intel did.
The people who sell you stuff are trained by professionals.
* They are NOT YOUR FREINDS!*
Actually, they are highly trained professionals. They may or may not be your friends. When you encounter a salesperson you can assume:
* They are experts on the verbal and non-verbal language of conducting business transactions.
* Every word is crafted carefully to create a precise response from you.
* They have a mastery of their product that may or may not be obvious. If they say "I'll have to ask engineering" they already know the answer.
* Often they know vastly more about you than you will ever guess.
* You can assume that they are as good at what they do as you are at what you do.
The best salespeople don't even come across as selling. They almost come across as a doctor, lawyer or cpa...