I wonder if running the same sheet of paper, printed as a blank page, thru 10-20 printers if it would garble this registration info to the point of uselessness?
What are the chances of 2 Texas oilmen (financially supported by many more oilmen) giving us a coherent national energy policy which frees us from dependency on oil and the Middle East?
Question for Kerry supporters:
What are the chances that 2 trial lawyers (who's biggest contributors are the trial lawyers associations) giving us the litigation reforms so crucial to getting escalating health care and pharm costs under control for the long term viability of our economy?
Expensing options is designed to do exactly one thing...eliminate them. They are the scapegoat for the excesses of the late 90's.
Its a crazy idea...expense an unknown amount that might never happen. When do you take it back? How weird are those balance sheets and bottom lines going to look in the future when times get bad, employees leave (or are laid off) and the bottom line gets a positive boost from the reversal of expenses for options?
We need business people to be actively concerned about a companies numbers 2-3 years down the road. One of the major problems with US companies is the incredible focus on the current quarter's numbers (and, of course, now Sarbanes Oxley is making that substantially worse.)
A better approach would be to make optioned stock be issued as restricted shares, with only 20%/year being unrestricted (and sellable and taxable.)
How far afield is an exec going to go screwing with results if he/she has to keep them up for many years for their stock to be worth something. Think about it after a couple of years of vesting options, they have a lot of money riding on the business doing well FOR 4 MORE YEARS.
Unfortunately, the government wants us to forget that the Congress and the White House of 1996-2000 couldn't (wouldn't?) enforce the existing laws/SEC regs that were on the books and this is how they distract us from that fact.
Based on their attention to detail, I prescribe the same disposition for this article as I do for resumes I receive with typo's.....the round file. (Or in this case the bit bucket.)
Here's one example from the numerous ones available on the page....
While some may argue that Linux only impact the business software sector
Anyone who would post something this poorly written to their website and have a press release about it is obviously clueless.
Oh yeah, the continued shredding of the Bill of Rights. How long will it be before the DOJ censors this site too. Its clearly a threat to national security.
OTOH, perhaps we could start a pool to guess when it is finally completely gone.
I'll never forget, he said "There was no way to know that the backups were failing without looking at the log file." This statement was made 17 months after the backups stopped working....
It will take years for these standards to settle d
on
Buzzword du Jour: DRM
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If history is any guide, the corporate positioning, coupled with the slowness of standards bodies will make this a mess for at least 2-3 years.
Not only that, but H1s are supposed to make wages comparable to US workers. Even worse are L1 visas.
They are still an employee of the company in their home country, paid a slary as if they were in the home country (plus get room & board), but They Are Actually Here in the US and it is legal.
However, when someone starts to seriously dump the stock (possibly as they figure out what's really going to happen) the price will tumble, fast and far.
When this time initially arrives, more than likely, you'll see SCO start buying back some of their stock (they've got $60 million in cash) to keep the price supported for a while (possibly while the execs slowly unload their shares.)
I don't know. I would guess that developing a fearsome enough weapon, with such severe impact that it induced peace worldwide could get you a peace prize. Something that had the opposite effect of viagra on a massive scale might do it.
You can take some of that stuff on board now, but in early days of government mass hysteria after 9/11 you definitely could not. I personally saw nail clippers being confiscated at Hartsfield. Even today, they don't want you to have a file on your nail clippers and they can confiscate that part (break it off) of the clippers or have you check them.
"I'm unaware of any company that would shortchange the customer in their speed to get the software to market," said Jonathan Thompson, vice president of the Washington-based trade group, which has more than 650 members.
Just out of curiosity, I hit google and searched for Jonathan Thompson software washington. I wanted to start an email dialog with him. The first link returned was it (you gotta love google?) It is the SIAA. This is the best part....
In the middle of this page it says:
As a result of aggressive sniffer and collection programs, SIIA is no longer able to list the email addresses of its employees. We apologize for this inconvenience. However, you may contact the individual directly to receive their address. Apparently they don't want people telling them how ridiculous they sound.
Not just SMP, the entire vm subsystem (at least in 2.4) is very primitive. If you go thru fs/buffers.c, you can see not only how clunky the logic is, but there are an alarming number of comments about things that are broken. A lot of work has gone on in this area for 2.6 (2.5) and I hope we see significant improvement. If not, BSD has done this stuff very well for years, just copy it.
"Which of course, is a technical, not a marketing function. By the way, you forgot highly profitable in your list.
No, they don't create technology, they don't innovate with technology, they don't perfect technology. They use technology. You can't say that every company that uses technology is a 'technology company'.
As you say, they are highly profitable. Couple that fact with the quality (or lack thereof) of their products and it is very clear that they are a very, very good marketing organization. They have a clear vision of their marketing goals and they get there in spite of their lack of technological innovation.
I don't begrudge them their profits. (see my original post.)
My original post rebutted the position that the trial (in which they were in fact convicted) caused people to distrust technology. That's ridiculous.
I know that most users today take it for granted that they are going to routinely lose work/data as a result of their computing systems screwing up. Sadly, it doesn't really suprise or upset them (very) much anymore. That is a recent development in the world of computing and Windows and MS are pretty much the cause of that. I know that 12 or 15 years ago if I had told my users that this is how their computers were going to help them on a daily basis, they'd have had a fit.
"Well, it depends on what you mean by a "truly new idea". I suspect that no matter what example I might give for a new idea from MS, you would claim that it wasn't truely new. "
Correct.
"So if the standard for truly new is very tough, I would say that Netscape's browser and Sun's Java are not truly new ideas since browser's had already been invented and Java's syntax was lifted from C."
Correct again.
'new' things are things that haven't existed before. (The first folks to do email, handwriting recognition, virtual memory, hard drives, etc..)
Sun may have had something new when the did nfs, but there's nothing conceptually new in java.
Bit of MS history: they bought dos, they hired the guy that wrote VMS to do it again in NT, they didn't invent word processing, email, spreadsheets, databases, etc.... The only thing they've ever done that comes close to new is/was Bob. Remember that? Perhaps that's why they gave up on 'new'.
If you aren't doing something that's new, then you are in the majority. However, if you aren't doing something new, you should be doing it better. Unfortunately (for us) Microsoft's interpretation of doing it better is a marketing definition, not a technical definition.
"Gee, I wonder what all those programmers at MS do all day."
My guess is working hard to create mediocre, unreliable implementations of other people's ideas.
While, from a business point of view, I don't really have a problem with MS's practices (after all competition is competition; out play your opponent) I think you miss a larger point. MS is pretty much single handedly responsible for the 'loss of public confidence in the technology sector'.
Most of the public are clueless about technology. They pay scant attention to this lawsuit, the ravings of maniacs like Scott McNealy, etc.. What they do pay attention to is what the read and hear about virus's, worms, etc.. and what they feel when they use their machines and consistently lose work.
MS has never brought a truly new idea to the market. It is not their mission. They are not a technology company; they are a marketing company. As a result Microsoft, through their unstable, unreliable and insecure products have universally lowered peoples expectations of software. Most people expect software to be crap now and that accomplishment can be laid at Bill Gates doorstep.
I've been using Evolution since Aug 2001 and it hasn't cost me anything. Best I can tell, the only cost is if you want the (shudder) exchange connector.
Sun makes big honkin servers. They don't want java on the client. They have deliberately made java a piece of UI crap on the pc. There's no way they would have inadvertantly made the jre such a hunk of junk (performance-wise) if they intended it to be successful.
Their whole model is that server side is where it is at. They don't want you to need much CPU on the client end. They will send you something minimal (such as html or xml/xslt) and do all the 'real' work on the server where they (and most rational people) think it belongs.
Don't kid yourself, the abysmal performance of java ui on the PC (and swing in general) is no Accident.
I've been using Evolution since last August during the beta. I run version 1.08 under RH 7.2 without any problems at all. The last crash I had with it was several months ago (in an earlier version) when some thoughtful soul sent a message to the evolution list saying "this message crashes evolution."
I don't use it with Exchange, but I do use it with POP/SMTP and encryption to read mail from 4 different accounts.
The filters meet my needs, but there are a few things I'd like to see. I can't see how to set the priority of an email or to get delivery notification, but otherwise, its pretty good.
I worked on a project with a company in California back in the mid-80s that took advantage of an non-intrusive optical coupler that they had patented. The coupler placed a microbend in the fiber and cound extract or insert light from the fiber. In the extract mode, it was almost impossible to measure the attenuation change in the light and detect the coupling. Of course, doing this underwater is a bit tricky.
I had always assumed that the government made covert use of this technology. Who knows?
Slashdot Mirror
I bought mini w/512 and wifi, $653. Got it last Friday and love it.
Went to the apple site and went thru the order process again out of curiosity. Same price.
I feel better.
I wonder if running the same sheet of paper, printed as a blank page, thru 10-20 printers if it would garble this registration info to the point of uselessness?
Question for Bush supporters:
What are the chances of 2 Texas oilmen (financially supported by many more oilmen) giving us a coherent national energy policy which frees us from dependency on oil and the Middle East?
Question for Kerry supporters:
What are the chances that 2 trial lawyers (who's biggest contributors are the trial lawyers associations) giving us the litigation reforms so crucial to getting escalating health care and pharm costs under control for the long term viability of our economy?
Expensing options is designed to do exactly one thing...eliminate them. They are the scapegoat for the excesses of the late 90's.
Its a crazy idea...expense an unknown amount that might never happen. When do you take it back? How weird are those balance sheets and bottom lines going to look in the future when times get bad, employees leave (or are laid off) and the bottom line gets a positive boost from the reversal of expenses for options?
We need business people to be actively concerned about a companies numbers 2-3 years down the road. One of the major problems with US companies is the incredible focus on the current quarter's numbers (and, of course, now Sarbanes Oxley is making that substantially worse.)
A better approach would be to make optioned stock be issued as restricted shares, with only 20%/year being unrestricted (and sellable and taxable.)
How far afield is an exec going to go screwing with results if he/she has to keep them up for many years for their stock to be worth something. Think about it after a couple of years of vesting options, they have a lot of money riding on the business doing well FOR 4 MORE YEARS.
Unfortunately, the government wants us to forget that the Congress and the White House of 1996-2000 couldn't (wouldn't?) enforce the existing laws/SEC regs that were on the books and this is how they distract us from that fact.
Based on their attention to detail, I prescribe the same disposition for this article as I do for resumes I receive with typo's.....the round file. (Or in this case the bit bucket.)
Here's one example from the numerous ones available on the page....
While some may argue that Linux only impact the business software sector
Anyone who would post something this poorly written to their website and have a press release about it is obviously clueless.
Oh yeah, the continued shredding of the Bill of Rights. How long will it be before the DOJ censors this site too. Its clearly a threat to national security.
OTOH, perhaps we could start a pool to guess when it is finally completely gone.
Give MS a frickin' break....MS said there is going to be something like 40 *million* lines of code...
Just out of curiosity, I counted the lines of code (both c & assembler, all processors) of the 2.6.4 kernel. It is less than 5.5 million.
40 million lines of code. There's all the reason I ever need to not use it.
With 40 million lines of code, you never fix bugs, the best you can hope for is to relocate them to a really obscure place.
I'll never forget, he said "There was no way to know that the backups were failing without looking at the log file." This statement was made 17 months after the backups stopped working....
If history is any guide, the corporate positioning, coupled with the slowness of standards bodies will make this a mess for at least 2-3 years.
Not only that, but H1s are supposed to make wages comparable to US workers. Even worse are L1 visas.
They are still an employee of the company in their home country, paid a slary as if they were in the home country (plus get room & board), but They Are Actually Here in the US and it is legal.
Talk about an un-level playing field.
The statement was "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore."
How about the Prez of HP? Can that job be outsourced too? Might be far more cost effective.
Its true that low-volume helps the price stay up.
However, when someone starts to seriously dump the stock (possibly as they figure out what's really going to happen) the price will tumble, fast and far.
When this time initially arrives, more than likely, you'll see SCO start buying back some of their stock (they've got $60 million in cash) to keep the price supported for a while (possibly while the execs slowly unload their shares.)
I don't know. I would guess that developing a fearsome enough weapon, with such severe impact that it induced peace worldwide could get you a peace prize. Something that had the opposite effect of viagra on a massive scale might do it.
You can take some of that stuff on board now, but in early days of government mass hysteria after 9/11 you definitely could not. I personally saw nail clippers being confiscated at Hartsfield. Even today, they don't want you to have a file on your nail clippers and they can confiscate that part (break it off) of the clippers or have you check them.
I found this quote from the story amazing...
"I'm unaware of any company that would shortchange the customer in their speed to get the software to market," said Jonathan Thompson, vice president of the Washington-based trade group, which has more than 650 members.
Just out of curiosity, I hit google and searched for Jonathan Thompson software washington. I wanted to start an email dialog with him. The first link returned was it (you gotta love google?) It is the SIAA. This is the best part....
In the middle of this page it says:
As a result of aggressive sniffer and collection programs, SIIA is no longer able to list the email addresses of its employees. We apologize for this inconvenience. However, you may contact the individual directly to receive their address.
Apparently they don't want people telling them how ridiculous they sound.
Not just SMP, the entire vm subsystem (at least in 2.4) is very primitive. If you go thru fs/buffers.c, you can see not only how clunky the logic is, but there are an alarming number of comments about things that are broken. A lot of work has gone on in this area for 2.6 (2.5) and I hope we see significant improvement. If not, BSD has done this stuff very well for years, just copy it.
I agree. Flash is like a pervasive virus. If I could find a way to disable it in Galeon for good, it would be gone.
"Which of course, is a technical, not a marketing function. By the way, you forgot highly profitable in your list.
No, they don't create technology, they don't innovate with technology, they don't perfect technology. They use technology. You can't say that every company that uses technology is a 'technology company'.
As you say, they are highly profitable. Couple that fact with the quality (or lack thereof) of their products and it is very clear that they are a very, very good marketing organization. They have a clear vision of their marketing goals and they get there in spite of their lack of technological innovation.
I don't begrudge them their profits. (see my original post.)
My original post rebutted the position that the trial (in which they were in fact convicted) caused people to distrust technology. That's ridiculous.
I know that most users today take it for granted that they are going to routinely lose work/data as a result of their computing systems screwing up. Sadly, it doesn't really suprise or upset them (very) much anymore. That is a recent development in the world of computing and Windows and MS are pretty much the cause of that. I know that 12 or 15 years ago if I had told my users that this is how their computers were going to help them on a daily basis, they'd have had a fit.
"Well, it depends on what you mean by a "truly new idea". I suspect that no matter what example I might give for a new idea from MS, you would claim that it wasn't truely new. "
Correct.
"So if the standard for truly new is very tough, I would say that Netscape's browser and Sun's Java are not truly new ideas since browser's had already been invented and Java's syntax was lifted from C."
Correct again.
'new' things are things that haven't existed before. (The first folks to do email, handwriting recognition, virtual memory, hard drives, etc..)
Sun may have had something new when the did nfs, but there's nothing conceptually new in java.
Bit of MS history: they bought dos, they hired the guy that wrote VMS to do it again in NT, they didn't invent word processing, email, spreadsheets, databases, etc.... The only thing they've ever done that comes close to new is/was Bob. Remember that? Perhaps that's why they gave up on 'new'.
If you aren't doing something that's new, then you are in the majority. However, if you aren't doing something new, you should be doing it better. Unfortunately (for us) Microsoft's interpretation of doing it better is a marketing definition, not a technical definition.
"Gee, I wonder what all those programmers at MS do all day."
My guess is working hard to create mediocre, unreliable implementations of other people's ideas.
While, from a business point of view, I don't really have a problem with MS's practices (after all competition is competition; out play your opponent) I think you miss a larger point. MS is pretty much single handedly responsible for the 'loss of public confidence in the technology sector'.
Most of the public are clueless about technology. They pay scant attention to this lawsuit, the ravings of maniacs like Scott McNealy, etc.. What they do pay attention to is what the read and hear about virus's, worms, etc.. and what they feel when they use their machines and consistently lose work.
MS has never brought a truly new idea to the market. It is not their mission. They are not a technology company; they are a marketing company. As a result Microsoft, through their unstable, unreliable and insecure products have universally lowered peoples expectations of software. Most people expect software to be crap now and that accomplishment can be laid at Bill Gates doorstep.
Let's see 2002 - 40 = 1962.
Wow, All this time I thought Multics was in the late 60's and the first Unix came in November of 71.
Guess journalism and math don't mix.
I've been using Evolution since Aug 2001 and it hasn't cost me anything. Best I can tell, the only cost is if you want the (shudder) exchange connector.
Sun makes big honkin servers. They don't want java on the client. They have deliberately made java a piece of UI crap on the pc. There's no way they would have inadvertantly made the jre such a hunk of junk (performance-wise) if they intended it to be successful.
Their whole model is that server side is where it is at. They don't want you to need much CPU on the client end. They will send you something minimal (such as html or xml/xslt) and do all the 'real' work on the server where they (and most rational people) think it belongs.
Don't kid yourself, the abysmal performance of java ui on the PC (and swing in general) is no Accident.
Sun doesn't make their $ selling pc's.
I've been using Evolution since last August during the beta. I run version 1.08 under RH 7.2 without any problems at all. The last crash I had with it was several months ago (in an earlier version) when some thoughtful soul sent a message to the evolution list saying "this message crashes evolution."
I don't use it with Exchange, but I do use it with POP/SMTP and encryption to read mail from 4 different accounts.
The filters meet my needs, but there are a few things I'd like to see. I can't see how to set the priority of an email or to get delivery notification, but otherwise, its pretty good.
I worked on a project with a company in California back in the mid-80s that took advantage of an non-intrusive optical coupler that they had patented. The coupler placed a microbend in the fiber and cound extract or insert light from the fiber. In the extract mode, it was almost impossible to measure the attenuation change in the light and detect the coupling. Of course, doing this underwater is a bit tricky.
I had always assumed that the government made covert use of this technology. Who knows?