I can imagine it. When I was born, my parents named me after my dad's best friend, Richard, who had just died in Vietnam. So I understand that, and it's why I will never change my name.
On the other hand, to have named a child "Richard Burton" in 1967 was pretty flippin' cruel. You have no idea how vapid and unclever allegedly intelligent people can be until you have a name like this. Each time I hear "how's Liz?", it's usually accompanied by a look of "gosh, I must be the smartest person on the planet, to be the first to think of that comment." Yeah. This has not made me a tolerant person; I keep reminding my parents of this when they tell me not to think of people as idiotic and irreflective morons.
Investors aren't happy, because Microsoft's performance in the market has been pretty flat, relative to the market. They see Apple getting the iPod and iTunes Music Store rolling and wonder why MS didn't do that. They see MS doing things like the XBox which, while a decent product, isn't really their core business while the core business is floundering. They see no real innovation from a techonology company, and there is an understanding, possibly only instinctive, that technology companies need to innovate.
I don't think the PHBs are happy, either. Many of them signed up for MS' licensing scheme, and are now wondering why they have been paying money each year just to run the same software they'd already bought three or four years ago. They see rising support costs and wonder why. They keep hearing "Lower costs! Lower costs!" from their so-called superiors and see MS eating up a sizeable, growing chunk of their budget.
I can't say that the IT people are necessarily happy, either. They see Linux gaining traction and, if they keep themselves connected (the writing's on the wall), hear/see all these things in that new Apple OS and wonder why MS, a company with much greater resources, can't do the same thing. (What could Rendezvous, Apple's implementation of zeroconf, mean to a thinly-stretched MCSE staff?) They see free software like Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, Eclipse, Java, etc, working well and wonder why they should have to pay for all those MS licenses. And security is a whole other ball of wax.
I can't say that developers are happy, either, because while MS has promised a lot, people doing new things find themselves either reinventing the wheel or working around MS' lagging features.
I don't think that MS' advocates like Paul Thurott are all that happy, either. They made whatever reputation and career they have by touting MS and its products, but does OS X's rapid improvement and rich features while Longhorn/Vista stagnates then regresses make them look so wise? And if that hurts their reputations, what about their careers?
Do you think OEMs are happy that Vista won't be ready until AFTER the holiday shopping season?
Do you think that users are happy with spyware, viruses, etc? That their year-old system will require major upgrade to run Vista? That Vista offers a confusing, expensive (relative to OS X) array of Vista options?
Do you think that Microsoft's employees are happy? Can you imagine what it must be like to have been a developer, or tester, or architect, or development manager, or project manager in Redmond these last three years? Do you think middle managers are happy with a chair-throwing ape (and I apologize to all apes) forcing upper management to bark down their snorkel to get their overworked and dissatisfied staffs to meet impossible deadlines?
Somehow, I don't think "happy" is the proper description of the Windows community right now.
I think that they would make better progress if they followed Apple's model; be a little less ambitious about world domination, just incrementally improve the product. Don't try to conquer the world with a single release because
While I agree with what you say, it might not be in the nature of Microsoft to work this way. They got where they were (world domination) in part by conquering the world with single releases. It's in their DNA, as the buzzword had it six months ago. From the outside looking in, I would guess that they would need a real culture change to do that, and organizations as successful as Microsoft don't undergo complete culture changes unless they become unsuccessful and face severe outside pressure. Heck, Ford, Caterpiller, GM haven't done it in 30+ years of competition from overseas. Chrysler only did it because they damn near went out of business in the process, and even with that, they are now owned by a foreign company.
Globalization isn't necessarily a bad thing but I would like to see the results of an economic simulation where an entire coutry, like say the US, wraps itself in isolationist economic and trade policies, and see what happens.
Easily done. To find the results, read about what happened when Commodore Perry sailed into Japan. Japan had gotten very backwards over time, relative to Europe, althought the Japanese had previously shown great aptitude with adapting European technology beforehand. Isolation breeds stagnation.
A lot of that is Value Added Tax, in which case the government is the one screwing you. Also, it may well be that, given all the various factors that go into the cost of running a business, costs in the UK may be higher.
Actually, I think "kill the baby" was in reference to the MS settlement with Apple, where they wanted Apple to stop developing QuickTime. Fortunately, Apple (probably Jobs) said "No", likely in more syllables.
Aside from military use (which to some might be a vice as well), isn't it interesting how much of our innovation nowadays is centered around profiting from people's vices (gambling, sex/porn, etc)
Considering that a lot of naval technology of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries was stimulated by things like warfare, tobacco, sugar/rum, tea, coffee, and the slave trade, is this really surprising?
Yes, Indiana seems to be moving to a more tech-oriented economy, and not just in computing. Governor Daniels is trying to get Indy back to being the center of the auto racing industry (and if you want to talk about a high-tech business...), and we seem to be leading the push in the growth industry of ethanol. I don't think we're going to leave manufacturing behind; that would be foolish, and it does provide a lot of good paying jobs for some smart people who didn't necessarily go to college. Recently Honda announced that it would build a big plant in Greensburg and that Toyota would add about 1000 jobs to its Lafayette plant. And while the Michigan governor was blasting Delphi and GM, the Indiana government was telling them "Look, we know this whole thing sucks, but your cheapest and most profitable facilities are in this state, so why not move more of your operations here?"
Now, if we could just get the Colts to play in the playoffs like in their regular season games...
Corporations have long been treating consumers like sheep. It's a small wonder that they haven't started publishing fake newspapers yet.
Like Gannett?
This is nothing new. H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain wrote about this sort of stuff happening in their respective newspaper days, more than a century ago, and somehow I don't think that these were unusual occurrences.
Who is running the schooling system in the USA? Naturally it's the NeoCons - "keep them dumb and pregnant".
No, it's the Teacher's Union. In most states in the US, the Teacher's Union is, by far, the biggest contributor to state elections. If you cheese them off, you've pretty much lost the money battle and thus the war.
One little-regarded fact is that the Pilgrims got to North America after the Jamestown colony started. The Pilgrims were such a pain in the gluteus that even the Dutch, the Dutch mind you, kicked them out. At the people of time Jamestown were leading a near subsistence living; the markets for cotton and tobacco would become important later. And here came a ship of fools whose beliefs were basically intolerant communists and religious radicals, bringing nothing to help the colony economically, and would expect to be fed. Oddly enough, when the Jamestown colonists heard this, they bribed the Mayflower captain to dump them off where all the cod fishing was going on up north.
(For the record, I am descended from some of those Jamestown colonists.)
And let's not forget the grand European tradition of sending their religious loons to North America; the results of this should be obvious.
Unfortunately, the monarch species has field a suit with the Federal Trade Commission, claiming that the merger creates a monopoly on frangiapana pollination, which they are attempting to leverage into a hostile milkweed pod takeover.
Soon it'll make more sense to outsource from expensive american cities to inexpensive smaller cities, larger towns, or downright rural locations within the United States. Arkansas costs half as much to live in than Hawaii.
It's happening now. I live in Indianapolis, and there are already three companies here who are getting on that trend. One thing they point out is that prices for land and housing are 1/2 to 1/3 of what they are in, say, Chicago, and that while wages here aren't THAT much lower, they are lower. The labor laws are also pretty much the same as elsewhere in the US, plus there are nice little junkets like Colts games, the Indy 500, etc. Indy isn't the only place seeing this, either.
Of course, over time, as wages adjust,... but hey, that's just how the world is.
Yeah. Poor Paul Allen was fucked over so badly, he cries and cries every time he flies across the country on his private jet with his very own NBA team.
I'd cry, too, if I owned an NBA team with guard play like that.
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And name Fiona Apple as a godparent.
On the other hand, to have named a child "Richard Burton" in 1967 was pretty flippin' cruel. You have no idea how vapid and unclever allegedly intelligent people can be until you have a name like this. Each time I hear "how's Liz?", it's usually accompanied by a look of "gosh, I must be the smartest person on the planet, to be the first to think of that comment." Yeah. This has not made me a tolerant person; I keep reminding my parents of this when they tell me not to think of people as idiotic and irreflective morons.
(Bush baaaad! Education goooood!)
Sincerely,
Standard Gannet Newspaper Editorial Team
I'm not so sure about this.
Investors aren't happy, because Microsoft's performance in the market has been pretty flat, relative to the market. They see Apple getting the iPod and iTunes Music Store rolling and wonder why MS didn't do that. They see MS doing things like the XBox which, while a decent product, isn't really their core business while the core business is floundering. They see no real innovation from a techonology company, and there is an understanding, possibly only instinctive, that technology companies need to innovate.
I don't think the PHBs are happy, either. Many of them signed up for MS' licensing scheme, and are now wondering why they have been paying money each year just to run the same software they'd already bought three or four years ago. They see rising support costs and wonder why. They keep hearing "Lower costs! Lower costs!" from their so-called superiors and see MS eating up a sizeable, growing chunk of their budget.
I can't say that the IT people are necessarily happy, either. They see Linux gaining traction and, if they keep themselves connected (the writing's on the wall), hear/see all these things in that new Apple OS and wonder why MS, a company with much greater resources, can't do the same thing. (What could Rendezvous, Apple's implementation of zeroconf, mean to a thinly-stretched MCSE staff?) They see free software like Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, Eclipse, Java, etc, working well and wonder why they should have to pay for all those MS licenses. And security is a whole other ball of wax.
I can't say that developers are happy, either, because while MS has promised a lot, people doing new things find themselves either reinventing the wheel or working around MS' lagging features.
I don't think that MS' advocates like Paul Thurott are all that happy, either. They made whatever reputation and career they have by touting MS and its products, but does OS X's rapid improvement and rich features while Longhorn/Vista stagnates then regresses make them look so wise? And if that hurts their reputations, what about their careers?
Do you think OEMs are happy that Vista won't be ready until AFTER the holiday shopping season?
Do you think that users are happy with spyware, viruses, etc? That their year-old system will require major upgrade to run Vista? That Vista offers a confusing, expensive (relative to OS X) array of Vista options?
Do you think that Microsoft's employees are happy? Can you imagine what it must be like to have been a developer, or tester, or architect, or development manager, or project manager in Redmond these last three years? Do you think middle managers are happy with a chair-throwing ape (and I apologize to all apes) forcing upper management to bark down their snorkel to get their overworked and dissatisfied staffs to meet impossible deadlines?
Somehow, I don't think "happy" is the proper description of the Windows community right now.
While I agree with what you say, it might not be in the nature of Microsoft to work this way. They got where they were (world domination) in part by conquering the world with single releases. It's in their DNA, as the buzzword had it six months ago. From the outside looking in, I would guess that they would need a real culture change to do that, and organizations as successful as Microsoft don't undergo complete culture changes unless they become unsuccessful and face severe outside pressure. Heck, Ford, Caterpiller, GM haven't done it in 30+ years of competition from overseas. Chrysler only did it because they damn near went out of business in the process, and even with that, they are now owned by a foreign company.
Well, it's udderly obvious that your boss certainly has a steak in your technology knowledge.
Easily done. To find the results, read about what happened when Commodore Perry sailed into Japan. Japan had gotten very backwards over time, relative to Europe, althought the Japanese had previously shown great aptitude with adapting European technology beforehand. Isolation breeds stagnation.
I was about to say "any journalist", but then I wondered if, by "adult", you intended some connotation that would exclude them.
How this is America's fault is beyond me.
Oh, so that's the way Ballmer paved his path to CEO.
Seriously, Office for the Mac is much more consistent, whereas Office for MS is reminiscent of Brownian Motion.
SQL Server. Or Perl syntax (and I say that as a professional Perl programmer).
Considering that a lot of naval technology of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries was stimulated by things like warfare, tobacco, sugar/rum, tea, coffee, and the slave trade, is this really surprising?
Sounds like most of America, actually. Then again, when you are spending person A's money on person B, these things happen.
Now, if we could just get the Colts to play in the playoffs like in their regular season games ...
Like Gannett?
This is nothing new. H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain wrote about this sort of stuff happening in their respective newspaper days, more than a century ago, and somehow I don't think that these were unusual occurrences.
No, it's the Teacher's Union. In most states in the US, the Teacher's Union is, by far, the biggest contributor to state elections. If you cheese them off, you've pretty much lost the money battle and thus the war.
Yeah, but when you mathematically eliminate southern California and Arkansas, the differences are way, way below the statistical error.
One little-regarded fact is that the Pilgrims got to North America after the Jamestown colony started. The Pilgrims were such a pain in the gluteus that even the Dutch, the Dutch mind you, kicked them out. At the people of time Jamestown were leading a near subsistence living; the markets for cotton and tobacco would become important later. And here came a ship of fools whose beliefs were basically intolerant communists and religious radicals, bringing nothing to help the colony economically, and would expect to be fed. Oddly enough, when the Jamestown colonists heard this, they bribed the Mayflower captain to dump them off where all the cod fishing was going on up north.
(For the record, I am descended from some of those Jamestown colonists.)
And let's not forget the grand European tradition of sending their religious loons to North America; the results of this should be obvious.
What's the difference between a BMW and a porcupine?
The porcupine has pricks on the outside.
Thank you! I'm here all week! Tip your waitress! Help her back up!
It's happening now. I live in Indianapolis, and there are already three companies here who are getting on that trend. One thing they point out is that prices for land and housing are 1/2 to 1/3 of what they are in, say, Chicago, and that while wages here aren't THAT much lower, they are lower. The labor laws are also pretty much the same as elsewhere in the US, plus there are nice little junkets like Colts games, the Indy 500, etc. Indy isn't the only place seeing this, either.
Of course, over time, as wages adjust, ... but hey, that's just how the world is.
Yeah, like West Virginia or Arkansas.
I'd cry, too, if I owned an NBA team with guard play like that.