Dudes, get "SpamBayes" which uses a bayesian filter to cut out the spam. It is supper way cool and it works (mostly). Downside is that it still ends up on your system but it is marked and you can delete it without ever opening it. I use it to filter out up to thirty spam emails a day, and that includes anything from the democratic party.
Design in America works best when the developers are willing and able to stand up and say when something is a bad or a good idea. No really good design tool is going to fix that. Conseptually, doing a design and then sending it off to India to get coded is going the right way to get a smacked bottom.
The problem is that regardless of the design, coding decisions that affect how the project actually works are the result of weeks and months of haggling between people who couldn't get dates in high school but do know to right a really kick-ass sort routine. Indian developers are not bad coders as it were but they are not vocal about coding issues, and that is what kills a product.
Actually I liked Michael's article. It is my experience that while programmers from India and other countries are every bit as technically capable as American programmers they seem to fall down in the design area. Specifically, other cultures produce programmers who aren't quite as confrontational as Americans. What determines a good design for an American product is it's developers initiative at voicing their opinions of what the product should do.
Design in America is confrontational. It has to be. That's what makes American software products good. When a company takes it's core software and ships it overseas it looses that drive from employees to make the software better.
This is not to say that software developed elsewhere cannot be good but it does mean that software developed in India must use an Indian model for design and development if it is to be successful. For an American product competing on a slight technological advantage this is bad.
HP, as a sidebar, tends to outsource end of life stuff to India.
That's a dumb argument. It's corollary is this: Teacher's should get paid by the number of students that don't end up on the bread line. On the other hand we could say that top 40 stars are really nothing but an aberation manufactured by the recording industry. Is there anybody anywhere who thinks that Britney Spears actually has the talent to warrant the kind of exposure that she gets?
The real truth is that in five or ten years the big recording companies will most likely not resemble at all the companies that we know today. Their business model is doomed because there are too many people with too many computers that don't want to pay a dollar for a song or seventeen for an album.
Outsource management activities. For all most managers know about what is actually happening inside their companies they might as well be in India or China.
The beautiful thing about outsourcing management is that any idiot thinks they can manage and most who manage are as interchangable as vacuum cleaners.
Witness the use of Copellas who went form Compaq to MCI, two companies that essentially produce two completely different product with completely different customers.
Why would any shareholder allow some inexperience yahoo a shot at their company when they wouldn't take their car to their plumber to get it fixed?
This could very well be the single most moronic post I have ever read on Slashdot. Nasa's budget for fiscal year 2004 is recommended to be 15.57 Billion dollars. In real terms that is four months of supply for the war in Iraq. The government is set to spend 2.2 trillion dollars in 2004. This means that Nasa's budget is rougly.7 percent of the total federal budget.
Medicaid, at 529 Billion dollars is roughly thirty-five times the Nasa budget. The department of Justice, which is famously incompetant these days does it for 22 Billion dollars.
For my tax contribution of roughly 10,000 dollars this year a stagering 63 dollars or so went to Nasa. This means that when the space shuttle blew up on reintry I lost something around sixty cents of value.
For my sixty-three dollars this year I expect that Nasa will continue to explore space. Regardless, since sixty-three dollars is roughly the amount of cash I spend on sodas in a month or, worse, loose down the back of my couch in a year, I think I'm getting damn fine value for my money.
Now unless you are Arnold Schwarzenegger and you paid 9 million in taxes, then you might have something to say about where the sixty thousand or so you contributed to the space shuttle program was being used then you should just shut the fsck up.
In a game of Poker the students would probably loose their shirts. RIAA was looking for a patsy to show the other patsy's what could happen to them. The RIAA was the only group in any risk of actually loosing anything.
If you are poor and somebody sues you then you can march into court and fight them to the cows come home. Sure you won't win. That's not the point. Even if the RIAA wins to the tune of millions of dollars per student they will never collect.
On the other hand, the student then now own a stool to stand on and talk to the media. "Look at what these guys did to me." The RIAA on the other hand has a card that says, "Hey, we sued a student who couldn't afford a lawyer and we won. Aren't we great?"
The real RIAA press release would probably read something like: "Now people who steal music know that they are going to end up paying for it."
Realistically then the RIAA now needs to go out and spend money and time suing every eighteen year old in the country.
I disagree. This format sucks. When my boss instituted this he did it like it was our best friend in the whole world. The problem is that everybody is working on something different and nobody actually cares what anybody else is doing.
It's like going to a group psychosis meeting where everybody talks about their own current nerosis and other mental problems. Who gives a shit what some other neurotic braniac is going through.
This guy who wrote the article wrote it like being smart precludes you from being popular. He simply doesn't get it.
Popularity is the result of charisma, or a sort of IQ for people skills. It's a different vector from mechanical or intellectual IQ. You might as well wish you had been born a different sex or that you were left handed when you are right. It seems like you should be able to do it but you can't.
The reason why it doesn't matter as much as an adult is because nerdy people simply don't like to hang out with popular people. Its adulthood, you can get away with that type of behavior.
The idea that people who are good at drawing are good at it because they do it all the time is nonsense. They are good at it because on that particular IQ vector they are smart.
The sooner this guy gets the picture that there are different kinds of smart, the sooner he can go back to writing about something he actually knows about.
I've had the daily meetings. I hate the daily meetings. They are useless and a waste of time. I now spend that time thinking "I should have made it to the meeting." It is a much better use of time.
Our daily meetings go like this: Everybody goes around the table. Each person says what they did yesterday, what they plan on doing today, and are there any impediments.
My scrum statements: "Yesterday I worked on [blah]. Today I am going to work on [blah]. No impediments." Now there is something useful.
The tech companies should just buy the media companies outright and give everything away for free. Treat music the way we treat movies. A release from a major artist would be good for a month or two and as soon as his music became available online his profits would start to decline.
On the other hand, a full third of all CDs I currently own I bought because I downloaded a song from Napster or Kazaa that I liked.
The music industry is going to go broke because the big money is being spent on people who look good, not on people who sound good. It's as simple as that.
I used to upgrade Suse Linux regularly. I don't do that anymore. I have two reasons.
1. None of my good games run on Linux.
2. I spent a lot more money upgrading Linux every six months then I have ever spent upgrading Windows.
This will change in the future due to the fact that Microsoft's Licensing and upgrade schemes mean that my computer is spending a huge amount of time talking to their computer. This drives me nuts. As time progresses this is going to get worse not better.
In addition, some of the desktop apps available for Linux are getting pretty good. While still not production quality I can see that they are on their way there.
I won't use Apple because they have an even larger app problem than Linux has. On the other hand if I was into desktop publishing or maybe if I was a graphical artist. Otherwise Apple is just a toy.
That stupid special from FOX did more to give the US a bad name than anything Ashcroft has ever done. When we went to New Zealand last summer people from all over the coutry asked me about that stupid special.
The problem is that in the US only morons watch that documentary crap. Then FOX ships it all over the world and kind of tells the world that the space program is made up of people who are extremely crooked. They don't ship it with anything resembling a balanced opinion. And then the rest of the world (In this case New Zealand) watches it.
There aught to be a Treason in Television act that puts TV Producers in jail for broadcasting bad fiction and calling it a documentary.
Barring that they aught to give Alan Shepard a medal for smacking the producer of that particular special.
He isn't hitting anything new as far as technology goes. Five years ago there was a company called FastTech that had tools called Graphiq and Cellworks.
Graphiq provided a rudimentary GUI that let you plan program flow with individual modules coded in something called C-- (this is no joke).
CellWorks provided a much better GUI but a different low level language that resembled in only the worst possible ways: Basic.
What we discovered using these tools is that they could indeed be powerful and almost any yahoo could use them. Once you wanted to solve something complicated and the problem immedietly started to look like programming 101.
In other words, complicated things are complicated, and it doesn't matter what the tool is. If you want to solve it you need someone specialized in that tool to solve it.
Larry wrote: But as with any slogan, there are some qustionable assumptions hidden behind the sentiment. We assume that it's obvious which things should be easy or hard, and that the things that are currently easy are the things that ought to be easy. We assume that making the hard things easy will necessarily cause the easy things to become hard. But sometimes it's not obvious what should be easy or hard. Sometimes the wrong things are easy. And sometimes there are ways to make the hard things easier without making the easy things harder.
This paragraph should be taken out and shot.;)
Your price was too low, which meant to the customer that either you weren't paying enough attention to their problem or that you weren't going to give them a novel or complete solution. It's like if you are walking on the street and somebody offers you a Rolex for a hundred dollars. Sure it might be real, odds are its a fake.
Five thousand dollars for any complete solution in any case is still probably too low a bid because almost certainly you aren't accounting for maintenance and phone calls and problems you don't expect. Take whatever your bid is, tripple it and then you should be fine.
As a developer who uses C++ and who realizes that very, very few people who use it actually know it I would like to thank UW for ensuring that I never have to look at a resume from a kid who graduates from there.
Droping C++ from the cariculum ensures that students graduating with degrees from UW will not be suitable for working on anthing that most of my peers would consider interesting.
IT is a value added resource in most companies but, sadly, in most companies it really doesn't directly contribute to the bottom line of profits vs. losses. IT's value is in making the employees lives easier without intruding on the day to day operations of the company. This tends to a be a cyclical trend based on two factors. The first is arrogance and the second is repentance.
The arrogance factor is what drove IT spending a couple of years ago. In essence, it is drawn from the idea that for the vast majority of corporate America IT organizations have tended to view themselves as being "The Reason for all Existance." CIOs, and the organizations they represent, develop an over exagerated opinion of their place in the world. The inevitable happens when the CEO realizes that spending a third of the total corporate budget on new computers still means he has to use Microsoft Office.
The repentance factor happens when after the arrogance factor has disappated and IT spending has flushed itself down the toilet. Computers start breaking and the two guys who program in COLBOL either retired or died. The peasants rise up in arms and the CEO takes notice, realizing that just maybe he needs to up the dollar count before he drives his company out of business.
These two cycles make up the Hebrew Cycle of Corporate Management, or HCCM for short. This is named after the relationship that God's chosen people have developed with God.
In a couple of years, when processes start breaking and computers get older causing more downtime than otherwise necessary the trend will turn around.
I took the Counter-Offer a couple of years ago. It was one of the smartest things I have ever done. It upped my salary to a competitive level and it brought me more authority with my employer.
A Counter-Offer is good but there are a few things to remember. Never play the Counter-Offer card unless you are absolutely willing to leave, now, six months from now, a year from now... The people who make the offer now know that you were willing to leave and if they become unsatisfied with you in the future they will not hesitate to get rid of you.
Offering a Counter-Offer is generally a pretty bad business decision because it means that a company knows they were underpaying you. It also means everybody you work with who knows about the Counter-Offer now knows what the company is willing to do to keep someone. It leaves the company open to blackmail from its employees.
If I were you and I enjoyed my job I would take the Counter-Offer but I might even ask for more. Be prepared to leave if things don't turn out the way you like.
You should check your credit card bill in a month to see if they actually stopped charging you. I had a similar experience with Compuserve and when it was all said and done they continued to bill me for two months.
The thing about these services is that they piss off one person at a time. It's like committing suicide slowly. I know of at least three different people who will never use these services because they were screwed over by them. Those three tell a couple of hundred each, and those couple of hundred also tell a bunch of people.
At first this kind of publicity doesn't hurt you but as the number of pissed off ex-customers grow it can have a real affect on the bottom line. Hence AOL probably doesn't get a lot of repeat customers.
Actually I am a share holder and an employee and I care a great deal about both areas. I like money, I want my investments to make money.
I also like having a job. It is wrong to assume that the shareholders don't care. It is correct to assume that they entrust there savings and investments in people whom we all pray are doing the best job that they know how to do.
Now there are CEOs who will cut jobs just to make there stock look good but you must be aware that long term investors care very little for short term bounces. Nobody that I know is looking forward to the next year or three in the new HP but from an envestment perspective we hope that ten years from now what is HP will really be a good company to have owned stock in.
From a job perspective, it is inconceivable that the people laying off 15,000 people are not going to have really grim dreams for the next little while.
My point is that regardless of whether this merger was a good or a bad idea, the people who thought it up did so because they felt that it was the best possible choice out of series of really bad options. They deserve the right to see if they can make a go of it.
I only hope I don't loose my job or my envestments loose value in the face of this effort.
The heading above is mistating the facts just a little. The new HP doesn't roll out until Tuesday, May 7th. Today is the last day that Compaq is an individual.
For those of you not from Colorado. The Tattered Cover is a bookstore chain out here in Colorado that specializes in all sorts of books over all sorts of subjects. The two stores that I am aware of (there may be more) are at least three, maybe for fours. There are not a used book store and the can be said to be larger than any Barnes and Nobles that I know of.
From a computer books perspective they are neither the best nor the worst but certainly they do carry them.
Re:I'll tell you how to keep us happy
on
Managing Einsteins
·
· Score: 2
I'm forty. I will never be a manager. I hate them. I will spend the rest of my days as a developer and I get a real kick out of it. I'm good at my job. I mean what I say and I say what I think. I think Nerf guns are real cool when they pop the tile on the ceiling right above my desk. Starwars actions figures are okay but I like my frogs and minature pool table better.
Why am I saying this? The writer of the above article is about three ticks away from a full blown heart attack. It is obvious that he has no sense of humor. He doesn't even like people who have a sense of humor.
As a developer you need to do your job and find things to free your mind to think about how to do your job. If this means nurf gun wars then that is what you do. If this means ping pong tables at work then that is what you do. If you are one of those tight assed people that can't stand to see someone populating their cubicle in a way that makes them human than I for one wouldn't want to work with you anyway.
On the other hand free sodas and snacks aren't a motivator. Give me something cool to do from scratch and you can have me for life.
Slashdot Mirror
Dudes, get "SpamBayes" which uses a bayesian filter to cut out the spam. It is supper way cool and it works (mostly). Downside is that it still ends up on your system but it is marked and you can delete it without ever opening it. I use it to filter out up to thirty spam emails a day, and that includes anything from the democratic party.
Design in America works best when the developers are willing and able to stand up and say when something is a bad or a good idea. No really good design tool is going to fix that. Conseptually, doing a design and then sending it off to India to get coded is going the right way to get a smacked bottom.
The problem is that regardless of the design, coding decisions that affect how the project actually works are the result of weeks and months of haggling between people who couldn't get dates in high school but do know to right a really kick-ass sort routine. Indian developers are not bad coders as it were but they are not vocal about coding issues, and that is what kills a product.
Actually I liked Michael's article. It is my experience that while programmers from India and other countries are every bit as technically capable as American programmers they seem to fall down in the design area. Specifically, other cultures produce programmers who aren't quite as confrontational as Americans. What determines a good design for an American product is it's developers initiative at voicing their opinions of what the product should do.
Design in America is confrontational. It has to be. That's what makes American software products good. When a company takes it's core software and ships it overseas it looses that drive from employees to make the software better.
This is not to say that software developed elsewhere cannot be good but it does mean that software developed in India must use an Indian model for design and development if it is to be successful. For an American product competing on a slight technological advantage this is bad.
HP, as a sidebar, tends to outsource end of life stuff to India.
That's a dumb argument. It's corollary is this: Teacher's should get paid by the number of students that don't end up on the bread line. On the other hand we could say that top 40 stars are really nothing but an aberation manufactured by the recording industry. Is there anybody anywhere who thinks that Britney Spears actually has the talent to warrant the kind of exposure that she gets?
The real truth is that in five or ten years the big recording companies will most likely not resemble at all the companies that we know today. Their business model is doomed because there are too many people with too many computers that don't want to pay a dollar for a song or seventeen for an album.
Outsource management activities. For all most managers know about what is actually happening inside their companies they might as well be in India or China.
The beautiful thing about outsourcing management is that any idiot thinks they can manage and most who manage are as interchangable as vacuum cleaners.
Witness the use of Copellas who went form Compaq to MCI, two companies that essentially produce two completely different product with completely different customers.
Why would any shareholder allow some inexperience yahoo a shot at their company when they wouldn't take their car to their plumber to get it fixed?
This could very well be the single most moronic post I have ever read on Slashdot. Nasa's budget for fiscal year 2004 is recommended to be 15.57 Billion dollars. In real terms that is four months of supply for the war in Iraq. The government is set to spend 2.2 trillion dollars in 2004. This means that Nasa's budget is rougly .7 percent of the total federal budget.
Medicaid, at 529 Billion dollars is roughly thirty-five times the Nasa budget. The department of Justice, which is famously incompetant these days does it for 22 Billion dollars.
For my tax contribution of roughly 10,000 dollars this year a stagering 63 dollars or so went to Nasa. This means that when the space shuttle blew up on reintry I lost something around sixty cents of value.
For my sixty-three dollars this year I expect that Nasa will continue to explore space. Regardless, since sixty-three dollars is roughly the amount of cash I spend on sodas in a month or, worse, loose down the back of my couch in a year, I think I'm getting damn fine value for my money.
Now unless you are Arnold Schwarzenegger and you paid 9 million in taxes, then you might have something to say about where the sixty thousand or so you contributed to the space shuttle program was being used then you should just shut the fsck up.
In a game of Poker the students would probably loose their shirts. RIAA was looking for a patsy to show the other patsy's what could happen to them. The RIAA was the only group in any risk of actually loosing anything.
If you are poor and somebody sues you then you can march into court and fight them to the cows come home. Sure you won't win. That's not the point. Even if the RIAA wins to the tune of millions of dollars per student they will never collect.
On the other hand, the student then now own a stool to stand on and talk to the media. "Look at what these guys did to me." The RIAA on the other hand has a card that says, "Hey, we sued a student who couldn't afford a lawyer and we won. Aren't we great?"
The real RIAA press release would probably read something like: "Now people who steal music know that they are going to end up paying for it."
Realistically then the RIAA now needs to go out and spend money and time suing every eighteen year old in the country.
It's like a self inflicted fatal paper cut.
I disagree. This format sucks. When my boss instituted this he did it like it was our best friend in the whole world. The problem is that everybody is working on something different and nobody actually cares what anybody else is doing.
It's like going to a group psychosis meeting where everybody talks about their own current nerosis and other mental problems. Who gives a shit what some other neurotic braniac is going through.
God I hate these meetings.
This guy who wrote the article wrote it like being smart precludes you from being popular. He simply doesn't get it.
Popularity is the result of charisma, or a sort of IQ for people skills. It's a different vector from mechanical or intellectual IQ. You might as well wish you had been born a different sex or that you were left handed when you are right. It seems like you should be able to do it but you can't.
The reason why it doesn't matter as much as an adult is because nerdy people simply don't like to hang out with popular people. Its adulthood, you can get away with that type of behavior.
The idea that people who are good at drawing are good at it because they do it all the time is nonsense. They are good at it because on that particular IQ vector they are smart.
The sooner this guy gets the picture that there are different kinds of smart, the sooner he can go back to writing about something he actually knows about.
I've had the daily meetings. I hate the daily meetings. They are useless and a waste of time. I now spend that time thinking "I should have made it to the meeting." It is a much better use of time.
Our daily meetings go like this: Everybody goes around the table. Each person says what they did yesterday, what they plan on doing today, and are there any impediments.
My scrum statements:
"Yesterday I worked on [blah]. Today I am going to work on [blah]. No impediments." Now there is something useful.
The tech companies should just buy the media companies outright and give everything away for free. Treat music the way we treat movies. A release from a major artist would be good for a month or two and as soon as his music became available online his profits would start to decline.
On the other hand, a full third of all CDs I currently own I bought because I downloaded a song from Napster or Kazaa that I liked.
The music industry is going to go broke because the big money is being spent on people who look good, not on people who sound good. It's as simple as that.
I used to upgrade Suse Linux regularly. I don't do that anymore. I have two reasons.
1. None of my good games run on Linux.
2. I spent a lot more money upgrading Linux every six months then I have ever spent upgrading Windows.
This will change in the future due to the fact that Microsoft's Licensing and upgrade schemes mean that my computer is spending a huge amount of time talking to their computer. This drives me nuts. As time progresses this is going to get worse not better.
In addition, some of the desktop apps available for Linux are getting pretty good. While still not production quality I can see that they are on their way there.
I won't use Apple because they have an even larger app problem than Linux has. On the other hand if I was into desktop publishing or maybe if I was a graphical artist. Otherwise Apple is just a toy.
That stupid special from FOX did more to give the US a bad name than anything Ashcroft has ever done. When we went to New Zealand last summer people from all over the coutry asked me about that stupid special.
The problem is that in the US only morons watch that documentary crap. Then FOX ships it all over the world and kind of tells the world that the space program is made up of people who are extremely crooked. They don't ship it with anything resembling a balanced opinion. And then the rest of the world (In this case New Zealand) watches it.
There aught to be a Treason in Television act that puts TV Producers in jail for broadcasting bad fiction and calling it a documentary.
Barring that they aught to give Alan Shepard a medal for smacking the producer of that particular special.
One word (sort of anyway) DB2. IBM has made a ton of money on databases. It isn't surprising that they would diss a substandard newbee.
He isn't hitting anything new as far as technology goes. Five years ago there was a company called FastTech that had tools called Graphiq and Cellworks.
Graphiq provided a rudimentary GUI that let you plan program flow with individual modules coded in something called C-- (this is no joke).
CellWorks provided a much better GUI but a different low level language that resembled in only the worst possible ways: Basic.
What we discovered using these tools is that they could indeed be powerful and almost any yahoo could use them. Once you wanted to solve something complicated and the problem immedietly started to look like programming 101.
In other words, complicated things are complicated, and it doesn't matter what the tool is. If you want to solve it you need someone specialized in that tool to solve it.
It's as simple as that.
Larry wrote: But as with any slogan, there are some qustionable assumptions hidden behind the sentiment. We assume that it's obvious which things should be easy or hard, and that the things that are currently easy are the things that ought to be easy. We assume that making the hard things easy will necessarily cause the easy things to become hard. But sometimes it's not obvious what should be easy or hard. Sometimes the wrong things are easy. And sometimes there are ways to make the hard things easier without making the easy things harder. ;)
This paragraph should be taken out and shot.
Your price was too low, which meant to the customer that either you weren't paying enough attention to their problem or that you weren't going to give them a novel or complete solution. It's like if you are walking on the street and somebody offers you a Rolex for a hundred dollars. Sure it might be real, odds are its a fake.
Five thousand dollars for any complete solution in any case is still probably too low a bid because almost certainly you aren't accounting for maintenance and phone calls and problems you don't expect. Take whatever your bid is, tripple it and then you should be fine.
As a developer who uses C++ and who realizes that very, very few people who use it actually know it I would like to thank UW for ensuring that I never have to look at a resume from a kid who graduates from there.
Droping C++ from the cariculum ensures that students graduating with degrees from UW will not be suitable for working on anthing that most of my peers would consider interesting.
Bravo UW.
IT is a value added resource in most companies but, sadly, in most companies it really doesn't directly contribute to the bottom line of profits vs. losses. IT's value is in making the employees lives easier without intruding on the day to day operations of the company. This tends to a be a cyclical trend based on two factors. The first is arrogance and the second is repentance.
The arrogance factor is what drove IT spending a couple of years ago. In essence, it is drawn from the idea that for the vast majority of corporate America IT organizations have tended to view themselves as being "The Reason for all Existance." CIOs, and the organizations they represent, develop an over exagerated opinion of their place in the world. The inevitable happens when the CEO realizes that spending a third of the total corporate budget on new computers still means he has to use Microsoft Office.
The repentance factor happens when after the arrogance factor has disappated and IT spending has flushed itself down the toilet. Computers start breaking and the two guys who program in COLBOL either retired or died. The peasants rise up in arms and the CEO takes notice, realizing that just maybe he needs to up the dollar count before he drives his company out of business.
These two cycles make up the Hebrew Cycle of Corporate Management, or HCCM for short. This is named after the relationship that God's chosen people have developed with God.
In a couple of years, when processes start breaking and computers get older causing more downtime than otherwise necessary the trend will turn around.
I took the Counter-Offer a couple of years ago. It was one of the smartest things I have ever done. It upped my salary to a competitive level and it brought me more authority with my employer.
A Counter-Offer is good but there are a few things to remember. Never play the Counter-Offer card unless you are absolutely willing to leave, now, six months from now, a year from now... The people who make the offer now know that you were willing to leave and if they become unsatisfied with you in the future they will not hesitate to get rid of you.
Offering a Counter-Offer is generally a pretty bad business decision because it means that a company knows they were underpaying you. It also means everybody you work with who knows about the Counter-Offer now knows what the company is willing to do to keep someone. It leaves the company open to blackmail from its employees.
If I were you and I enjoyed my job I would take the Counter-Offer but I might even ask for more. Be prepared to leave if things don't turn out the way you like.
You should check your credit card bill in a month to see if they actually stopped charging you. I had a similar experience with Compuserve and when it was all said and done they continued to bill me for two months.
The thing about these services is that they piss off one person at a time. It's like committing suicide slowly. I know of at least three different people who will never use these services because they were screwed over by them. Those three tell a couple of hundred each, and those couple of hundred also tell a bunch of people.
At first this kind of publicity doesn't hurt you but as the number of pissed off ex-customers grow it can have a real affect on the bottom line. Hence AOL probably doesn't get a lot of repeat customers.
Actually I am a share holder and an employee and I care a great deal about both areas. I like money, I want my investments to make money.
I also like having a job. It is wrong to assume that the shareholders don't care. It is correct to assume that they entrust there savings and investments in people whom we all pray are doing the best job that they know how to do.
Now there are CEOs who will cut jobs just to make there stock look good but you must be aware that long term investors care very little for short term bounces. Nobody that I know is looking forward to the next year or three in the new HP but from an envestment perspective we hope that ten years from now what is HP will really be a good company to have owned stock in.
From a job perspective, it is inconceivable that the people laying off 15,000 people are not going to have really grim dreams for the next little while.
My point is that regardless of whether this merger was a good or a bad idea, the people who thought it up did so because they felt that it was the best possible choice out of series of really bad options. They deserve the right to see if they can make a go of it.
I only hope I don't loose my job or my envestments loose value in the face of this effort.
The heading above is mistating the facts just a little. The new HP doesn't roll out until Tuesday, May 7th. Today is the last day that Compaq is an individual.
For those of you not from Colorado. The Tattered Cover is a bookstore chain out here in Colorado that specializes in all sorts of books over all sorts of subjects. The two stores that I am aware of (there may be more) are at least three, maybe for fours. There are not a used book store and the can be said to be larger than any Barnes and Nobles that I know of.
From a computer books perspective they are neither the best nor the worst but certainly they do carry them.
I'm forty. I will never be a manager. I hate them. I will spend the rest of my days as a developer and I get a real kick out of it. I'm good at my job. I mean what I say and I say what I think. I think Nerf guns are real cool when they pop the tile on the ceiling right above my desk. Starwars actions figures are okay but I like my frogs and minature pool table better.
Why am I saying this? The writer of the above article is about three ticks away from a full blown heart attack. It is obvious that he has no sense of humor. He doesn't even like people who have a sense of humor.
As a developer you need to do your job and find things to free your mind to think about how to do your job. If this means nurf gun wars then that is what you do. If this means ping pong tables at work then that is what you do. If you are one of those tight assed people that can't stand to see someone populating their cubicle in a way that makes them human than I for one wouldn't want to work with you anyway.
On the other hand free sodas and snacks aren't a motivator. Give me something cool to do from scratch and you can have me for life.