With the advent of the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) honesty became literally the best policy for not losing gobs of money. That is one of the more naive posts I have yet seen. So you contend that the Federal government was actually trying to achieve ethical business practices with SOX? Quaint, but quite impossible. What they hoped to do was provide laws that they could find companies violating so that they could convict them and impose huge fines, thus generating more money for the Federal Government.
SOX does not cause companies to behave more ethically, it causes them to mindlessly follow new processes and regulations in order to attempt to avoid paying the fines the Federal Government wants to impose. SOX is another excellent example of how NOT to regulate businesses.
On the up side, SOX has generated lots of smaller business opportunities for new companies who can "assist" the big companies in avoiding paying fines by acting as if they are obeying the laws. SOX has created jobs for bean counters, which I think was another of it's primary objectives.
Actually you have it backwards. They did arrive here already, but it was about 70 million years ago, and they got eaten by the dinosaurs, and maybe Fred Flintstone.
I've been telecommuting for about 5 years now. Three years at a major tech company, and currently at a smaller startup. I've found that it completely depends on the manager. At the first company they had a very specific desire to get more people to telecommute because of cost savings for the company. My first couple of managers understood it, and worked very well with it. The last manager I had wasn't comfortable with remote management. Me being in the office would have made no difference at all since he wasn't in the same state I was in to begin with.
At my current company, the CEO was against the idea of a full time work from home employer. He still has misgivings about it, and I know it effects his view of me. However, I have traditionally been the one person that they can call on to get work done on time. I've made a reputation for myself in that regard. As a result, they know that the work from home thing has a big benefit. In fact they ask me to spend more time in the office to mentor other people, but I'm frankly not that interested.
For me, I don't care about career growth. I've been there and done that as a manager for 15 years in the tech industry, I went back to being a heads-down coder, and don't want to go back to management. So if I get passed up for promotions, so much the better.
I typically build my own Desktop systems, so they only have the crap I want on them. Laptops, or course, are another matter, and the Decrapifier will become one of my permanent links from now on!
It's interesting to see how political beliefs effect reporting, for instance the original post says:
The average temperature is still due to rise almost 5 degrees C in the next 100 years, bringing drastic changes in weather patterns. But the article specifically states:
It also predicts that temperatures will rise by up to 4.5 C during the next 100 years "by up to" means at a maximum of 4.5C, maybe less. While "due to rise" would imply that we already know the temperature will rise that much. In fact we do not know how much it will rise, but it COULD/MIGHT/MAY rise as much as 4.5C. Most scientists believe it will be from 1C-2C rise in the next 100 to 150 years.
Too true. One of my former (fortune 500) employers had two habits, one was announcing that they paid according to industry standards, and the other was insisting that during reviews nearly everyone should get a standard rating of 3/5. Nobody should ever get rated well above average.
The message was clear, we only hire highly mediocre candidates.
Then they were shocked that when they offered a voluntary separation package 249 out of 251 IT employees volunteered. The two that didn't volunteer were a single mom and the only guy who had work from home privileges.
They had to change the VSP to take people with the most seniority first.
There was actually one case that I know of where the person who had the second highest seniority in a group bribed the guy in front of him by offering to pay him a portion of the separation package to let the second guy get out of the company!
This is just plain silly. I'd be willing to bet a month of my rather sizable paycheck that many of the people who say "Parents should be made responsible" are the VERY people who screamed all sorts of inane things whenver their own parents tried to spy on anything they did.
I think that what needs to be done is go back to calling children above the age of 12 adults, and treat them as such. If you are old enough to do something that would be considered bad as an adult, you're an adult.
First off, you cannot just 'run Vista with administrative privleges.' That doesn't work around the problem. What you CAN do is turn off UAC, which is done in the most stupid way possible. You turn off the option and then you must (wait for it) REBOOT VISTA. Excuse me? REBOOT? Then why will anyone ever turn UAC back on if they keep having to reboot to use it.
The problem isn't that Microsoft has implemented UAC, it is the horrible way that they did it. You don't enter a password to install new software, you must click on a button that is on a different part of the screen every time it pops up, and it can pop up a lot if you are doing administrative tasks. So most people will simply choose to disable UAC, reboot, and never re-enable it again. That defeats the entire purpose of the feature.
Proper way to do it: When the user needs to perform an administrative task, have them enter a password, then allow ALL administrative tasks performed within the next several minutes without asking. If the time runs out, ask for the password again. This allows people to perform Administrative tasks without constantly having to click on annoying dialog boxes for every step they perform.
For good examples of how to do this properly see Mac OS X or most versions of Linux running a GUI.
Why was this called insightful? Since when do we label all human activity as greedy? Why can't an inventor make money on an invention? Was it greed for the Wright Brothers to expect to make money when they invented the airplane. If a pharmaceutical company creates a new drug that cures cancer, will you call it greed when they charge people to purchase the drug?
I agree that Software patents are too broad, but to say that anyone who wants to make money is greedy is just plain wrong. Does your employer call you greedy when you expect to get paid? Do you call the Federal Government greedy when they take taxes from your paycheck?
So there is no cost for transferring information to electronic media? No cost to delivering Broadband Internet access to every house? No cost to store information?
COOL, what Universe do you live in? And can we all get a visa?
The battle that Microsoft has won is not the desktop, it's the support group. No, I don't mean MS support, I mean your desktop support group. Companies have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a tech support staff to keep all of those computers working. They are not about to swtich to a new OS (or an old one in the case of Linux) and have to retrain their entire support staff.
That's the battle MS has won. And the number of people trained to support Microsoft on the Desktop is growing every day. Linux (or OS X for that matter) will have to make a much much bigger dent before it can overcome that hurdle. And forget about saying that OS X doesn't require tech support. That argument doesn't hold up in a real business. When things break, you don't want the VP of Marketing fixing his own system.
It was little over a century ago that a young college student approached his dean and asked about a career in Physics. The professor told him that there was in fact no more areas remaining to be discovered in Physics. With the Lorentz equations and the laws of Thermodynamics, virtually everything in Physics could be explained. Of course there was a small matter of the Ultra Violet Catastrophe, but that was an anomaly that could probably be resolved in time.
The students name was Max Planck, and he decided to go into Physics after all. Fortunately for the rest of us.
Freedom to let people starve.
Freedom to raze the environment for short-term profit.
Freedom to let people without care when they need it and can't afford it.
Those are the kinds of freedoms that the left want to do away with.
And after dozens of years, they have proven they cannot do it without creating a bigger more corruptible government. We have to face the simple fact that committees are inherently bad, and government is a committee taken to the horrible extreme.
I played EQ from Day one, and as a result, I didn't buy any other games for over a year. It saved me a lot of money, considering that I'd spend $40/month pretty easily on games.
WoW hasn't held me as close as EQ did, but I still buy a lot fewer games. I find that I MUST see a lot of innovation in a new game before I will consider it. I no longer buy every piece of eye-candy that comes out.
Hopefully the rest of the market is getting smarter about buying.
It's a good thing you aren't running an online game company. You're woeful lack of understanding of the economics of such things would drive even the best company out of business.
You are kidding about Halo I hope. There is no way you can compare a game that allows a few people to join up and play (with one of them acting as the host) to a game like WoW in which 3.5 million (that's 3.5 with six zeroes following it) can play. The amount of bandwidth alone is millions of dollars a month. The number of servers (90 last I counted), the computer room, the support staff who has to be there 24/7, the developers fixing bugs, the developers adding content every day, day after day. This is NOTHING like Halo, or other standard console game in any way shape or form. Don't believe me? Next time you encounter a bug in the Console game of Halo, submit a petition to the Game Masters, and wait to see how long it takes for them to get an answer to you;)
GW does it by having YOU host part of the game. The system distributes the game across players computers. When you enter an instance, it goes to your local computer, and the other players just share bandwidth with you. Other than in the town zones, there is no way to get more than 8 or so people in a single zone, because the GW servers aren't hosting anything.
It's an interesting online model, but they haven't provided the amount of content that either EQ or WoW have yet. Maybe in a year or two they will get there, but so far their model is cheap, but it feels cheap as well.
A legendary Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado, E.E. Bartlett (we called him E-squared) told us of how he almost got off of a speeding ticket by proving to the Judge that due to his high speed and the doppler effect, the Red Light appeared to be Green.
He claims he actually had the Judge convinced when he admitted that he had lied about the speed of light being only 100MPH, at that point the Judge threw the book at him.
I had a VP who measured people by how early they came into the office, and how late they were still working. He commented to me about that and I said "Or it could just be they are too disorganized to get the work done in an eight hour day."
A few months later he comes up to me and (I swear) tells me he has decided I was right. So he started a set of programs to get people to balance work/life. He encouraged people to take vacations, take weekends off, and get out of the office by 6PM.
Within a year overall productivity had increased, and morale was noticably better.
No way, the reason for them switching to Intel is now very clear. It's all about the free publicity that comes from being an Intel partner. Apple's Marketing budget was in trouble, and this switch will clearly help with visibility.
Slashdot Mirror
SOX does not cause companies to behave more ethically, it causes them to mindlessly follow new processes and regulations in order to attempt to avoid paying the fines the Federal Government wants to impose. SOX is another excellent example of how NOT to regulate businesses.
On the up side, SOX has generated lots of smaller business opportunities for new companies who can "assist" the big companies in avoiding paying fines by acting as if they are obeying the laws. SOX has created jobs for bean counters, which I think was another of it's primary objectives.
Actually you have it backwards. They did arrive here already, but it was about 70 million years ago, and they got eaten by the dinosaurs, and maybe Fred Flintstone.
Q: What is one spammer behind bars?
A: A good start.
I've been telecommuting for about 5 years now. Three years at a major tech company, and currently at a smaller startup. I've found that it completely depends on the manager. At the first company they had a very specific desire to get more people to telecommute because of cost savings for the company. My first couple of managers understood it, and worked very well with it. The last manager I had wasn't comfortable with remote management. Me being in the office would have made no difference at all since he wasn't in the same state I was in to begin with.
At my current company, the CEO was against the idea of a full time work from home employer. He still has misgivings about it, and I know it effects his view of me. However, I have traditionally been the one person that they can call on to get work done on time. I've made a reputation for myself in that regard. As a result, they know that the work from home thing has a big benefit. In fact they ask me to spend more time in the office to mentor other people, but I'm frankly not that interested.
For me, I don't care about career growth. I've been there and done that as a manager for 15 years in the tech industry, I went back to being a heads-down coder, and don't want to go back to management. So if I get passed up for promotions, so much the better.
Sweet. Thanks for the linkage.
I typically build my own Desktop systems, so they only have the crap I want on them. Laptops, or course, are another matter, and the Decrapifier will become one of my permanent links from now on!
Screw that, then we'd have even more of those East Coast whiners moving down here. No thanks!
Too true. One of my former (fortune 500) employers had two habits, one was announcing that they paid according to industry standards, and the other was insisting that during reviews nearly everyone should get a standard rating of 3/5. Nobody should ever get rated well above average.
The message was clear, we only hire highly mediocre candidates.
Then they were shocked that when they offered a voluntary separation package 249 out of 251 IT employees volunteered. The two that didn't volunteer were a single mom and the only guy who had work from home privileges.
They had to change the VSP to take people with the most seniority first.
There was actually one case that I know of where the person who had the second highest seniority in a group bribed the guy in front of him by offering to pay him a portion of the separation package to let the second guy get out of the company!
Days
This is just plain silly. I'd be willing to bet a month of my rather sizable paycheck that many of the people who say "Parents should be made responsible" are the VERY people who screamed all sorts of inane things whenver their own parents tried to spy on anything they did.
I think that what needs to be done is go back to calling children above the age of 12 adults, and treat them as such. If you are old enough to do something that would be considered bad as an adult, you're an adult.
You didn't see the fine print when Balmer said that, the actual quote was somelike:
Developers (will be locked in to us), Developers (Will pay us royalties and we will own all) Developers
First off, you cannot just 'run Vista with administrative privleges.' That doesn't work around the problem. What you CAN do is turn off UAC, which is done in the most stupid way possible. You turn off the option and then you must (wait for it) REBOOT VISTA. Excuse me? REBOOT? Then why will anyone ever turn UAC back on if they keep having to reboot to use it.
The problem isn't that Microsoft has implemented UAC, it is the horrible way that they did it. You don't enter a password to install new software, you must click on a button that is on a different part of the screen every time it pops up, and it can pop up a lot if you are doing administrative tasks. So most people will simply choose to disable UAC, reboot, and never re-enable it again. That defeats the entire purpose of the feature.
Proper way to do it: When the user needs to perform an administrative task, have them enter a password, then allow ALL administrative tasks performed within the next several minutes without asking. If the time runs out, ask for the password again. This allows people to perform Administrative tasks without constantly having to click on annoying dialog boxes for every step they perform.
For good examples of how to do this properly see Mac OS X or most versions of Linux running a GUI.
Microsoft can't even copy good ideas correctly.
Why was this called insightful? Since when do we label all human activity as greedy? Why can't an inventor make money on an invention? Was it greed for the Wright Brothers to expect to make money when they invented the airplane. If a pharmaceutical company creates a new drug that cures cancer, will you call it greed when they charge people to purchase the drug?
I agree that Software patents are too broad, but to say that anyone who wants to make money is greedy is just plain wrong. Does your employer call you greedy when you expect to get paid? Do you call the Federal Government greedy when they take taxes from your paycheck?
Oh, well yea on that last one.
We have today costless information
So there is no cost for transferring information to electronic media? No cost to delivering Broadband Internet access to every house? No cost to store information?
COOL, what Universe do you live in? And can we all get a visa?
The battle that Microsoft has won is not the desktop, it's the support group. No, I don't mean MS support, I mean your desktop support group. Companies have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a tech support staff to keep all of those computers working. They are not about to swtich to a new OS (or an old one in the case of Linux) and have to retrain their entire support staff.
That's the battle MS has won. And the number of people trained to support Microsoft on the Desktop is growing every day. Linux (or OS X for that matter) will have to make a much much bigger dent before it can overcome that hurdle. And forget about saying that OS X doesn't require tech support. That argument doesn't hold up in a real business. When things break, you don't want the VP of Marketing fixing his own system.
It was little over a century ago that a young college student approached his dean and asked about a career in Physics. The professor told him that there was in fact no more areas remaining to be discovered in Physics. With the Lorentz equations and the laws of Thermodynamics, virtually everything in Physics could be explained. Of course there was a small matter of the Ultra Violet Catastrophe, but that was an anomaly that could probably be resolved in time.
The students name was Max Planck, and he decided to go into Physics after all. Fortunately for the rest of us.
I played EQ from Day one, and as a result, I didn't buy any other games for over a year. It saved me a lot of money, considering that I'd spend $40/month pretty easily on games.
WoW hasn't held me as close as EQ did, but I still buy a lot fewer games. I find that I MUST see a lot of innovation in a new game before I will consider it. I no longer buy every piece of eye-candy that comes out.
Hopefully the rest of the market is getting smarter about buying.
It's a good thing you aren't running an online game company. You're woeful lack of understanding of the economics of such things would drive even the best company out of business.
;)
You are kidding about Halo I hope. There is no way you can compare a game that allows a few people to join up and play (with one of them acting as the host) to a game like WoW in which 3.5 million (that's 3.5 with six zeroes following it) can play. The amount of bandwidth alone is millions of dollars a month. The number of servers (90 last I counted), the computer room, the support staff who has to be there 24/7, the developers fixing bugs, the developers adding content every day, day after day. This is NOTHING like Halo, or other standard console game in any way shape or form. Don't believe me? Next time you encounter a bug in the Console game of Halo, submit a petition to the Game Masters, and wait to see how long it takes for them to get an answer to you
GW does it by having YOU host part of the game. The system distributes the game across players computers. When you enter an instance, it goes to your local computer, and the other players just share bandwidth with you. Other than in the town zones, there is no way to get more than 8 or so people in a single zone, because the GW servers aren't hosting anything.
It's an interesting online model, but they haven't provided the amount of content that either EQ or WoW have yet. Maybe in a year or two they will get there, but so far their model is cheap, but it feels cheap as well.
Only if he used a digital camera to take a picture of the game screen and then imported and uploaded it.
I'm thinking that isn't how he did it.
A legendary Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado, E.E. Bartlett (we called him E-squared) told us of how he almost got off of a speeding ticket by proving to the Judge that due to his high speed and the doppler effect, the Red Light appeared to be Green.
He claims he actually had the Judge convinced when he admitted that he had lied about the speed of light being only 100MPH, at that point the Judge threw the book at him.
True or not, it remains a legend at C.U. Boulder.
I had a VP who measured people by how early they came into the office, and how late they were still working. He commented to me about that and I said "Or it could just be they are too disorganized to get the work done in an eight hour day."
A few months later he comes up to me and (I swear) tells me he has decided I was right. So he started a set of programs to get people to balance work/life. He encouraged people to take vacations, take weekends off, and get out of the office by 6PM.
Within a year overall productivity had increased, and morale was noticably better.
Annectdotal? You be the judge.
Will Apple switch to AMD?
No way, the reason for them switching to Intel is now very clear. It's all about the free publicity that comes from being an Intel partner. Apple's Marketing budget was in trouble, and this switch will clearly help with visibility.
Now my life seems a LOT more exciting...