Because most classical music performances are actually concerts, and I doubt classical music requires a lot of post-prod work
The CDs are usually not concerts (music records better in a studio and classical listeners want perfection) and classical music is one of the most heavily post-prodded genres. Engineers typically take sections from multiple performances to produce the final version, sometimes down to a note-by-note level. Plus, mixing is hell...a three-man rock band may have a dozen mics at most. A classical orchestra has dozens of players, hundreds of mics...
I find this interesting in a Microsoft context. Microsoft has consistently tried to gather a bigger share of the Internet pie and consistently failed. First, MSN never got near AOL back in the walled garden days. Then MSN never got near Yahoo in the directory wars. Or near any of the major search engines, much less Google. MSN Home or Communities or whatever never got any kind of traction when blogging sprung to life.
And now, a startup is the #1 site (or even if you question the numbers, pretty obviously in the top five) and there is nothing Microsoft has to show.
Sure, you can say Microsoft makes its money in other places, they're an OS/app company, etc. but they sure spend a lot of money on MSN, trying to get more Internet eyeballs. To me, an outside observer, it just seems that they are eternally reactionary and a couple years behind, despite having practically unlimited resources. What an indictment.
Uh, no. First, the Federal Communications Commission doesn't do flight control. And second, flight control still runs on good ol' IBM mainframe technology.
Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz are suits (Scott was the MBA "business" guy who helped found Sun; Schwartz is a former McKinsey consultant) who have long had a mutual admiration society. This is little more than Jonathan giving Scott one last bit of fawning fellatio on McNealy's way out.
...yesterday morning. Seriously, how long does it take Slashdot to post something? It's not like they have to write the article. Or that the story wasn't submitted multiple times yesterday....
Azul is profiled in the issue of Forbes that's on newsstands now. Unfortunately, I found it rather shallow technically (which isn't surprising for Forbes).
Re:Manned exploration is a stupid vanity project
on
US Plans Lunar Motel
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· Score: 1
What we can do in 2020 that we couldn't do in 1968 is to send good, smart and relatively cheap robots to the moon, and actually have them build something useful.
In the last ten years, we've had quite a few problems sending comparatively simple robots to Mars. What makes you think our batting average would be any better on the moon?
Yes, if you're dealing with middlemen, then what/how much you buy, what they carry, etc. can skew the results.
I work for a Fortune 500 company and we're large enough to buy direct from both HP and IBM. HP is always more expensive. The hilarious thing is that on disk, HP is significantly more expensive than Hitachi, when it's the exact same equipment (HP just rebrands Hitachi, e.g. XP1024 = Hitachi 9980, XP12000 = Hitachi Tagma, etc.). We're talking like 20% more. Likewise, Hitachi tape equipment is more expensive than IBM, STK, or ADIC every time I've priced it.
HP has evolved into a white-box reseller...in enterprise computing, they are just packaging other people's products and marking them up.
Ultrium, yes (perhaps - this is really a broad question). HP, no. There is no point in buying anything HP in storage these days because it's just rebadged equipment (disk, tape, etc.)...with a healthy premium for the HP logo.
The big three in enterprise-class tape library manufacturers are IBM, StorageTek (now part of Sun), and ADIC. Buy from one of them. Don't waste your time with HP.
My personal favorite are IBM's 3581/2/3/4 line. I've worked with all of them and they have some nice features...partitioning, WWN at the drive slot level rather than the drive, virtual I/O ejects, expandability by stacking on frames, highly-available pickers, multiple pickers for high-use environments, etc. Some of the other vendors are catching up, but that's the key...these are all features IBM had in the 3584 five years ago.
He says that it's not practical for Dell (the company) to support numerous distributions due to their incompatibilities, but that he doesn't want alienate large segements of the Linux community by selecting a favorite Linux distro to standardize on...
You should have a good spreadsheet/system for maintenance, software subscriptions, etc. That sort of thing you can project forward. You can also put depreciation on that, since that's a known quantity, and leases. Likewise, known expenses - salaries, benefits, energy bills, etc. Add some factor for growth, raises, etc. Of course in a large environment this could be hundreds of budgets that roll up, or an ERP package, etc.
But cap-ex (new things to buy)? Forget it...my current employer (Fortune 500) does budgeting that's done by August for cap-ex for the following year (i.e., in Aug 2005, we're set for 2006 Capex...16 months in advance!) It never works and we're always doing out-of-budget, though of course conversely there are things that we don't get to do or turn out not to be needed. That sort of budgeting just encourages everyone to add large padding because going under budget is always good, but going over is bad.
Unless you have a good sense of business needs that tie into your IT needs (which is really hard to do in medium or large environments), CapEx is a guess. Or just don't do CapEx budgets...some really big companies don't do them because they're useless. I can predict the next 90 days pretty well...beyond that it's really difficult.
Another trick with IT budgeting is that sometimes projects come along and someone says "oh, I'll pay for that, no problem". Great. But adding that server or that 2TB of disk means I have to add X and Y and Z over here in infrastructure or buy licenses for this or that or you trip over a point where I have to add a new cabinet or a new blade, etc. Yes, yes, utility computing models will save us all, but simply keeping track of all the dependencies is complex.
If I was king, my approach would be to budget out everything that is known (expense, depreciation, etc.), add growth where it's known, and then do CapEx out of a budget cycle or on a very short budget cycle, justified as-needed. Unfortunately, that's really hard to do in a public company where capital spending is something analysts watch.
Interesting, isn't it, that there's a ribbon campaign for every type of cancer except lung cancer. I presume that's because everyone thinks that people with lung cancer deserve it since they smoked.
I'm diabetic. If it would stop animal testing on primates and canines, I'd be happy to stop taking my drugs.
The saddest thing I ever read was a report by an OHSU (Oregon Health & Sciences University) staffer who quit when she saw one chimp try to grab the arm of a researcher who was performing an experiment on a chimp in a neighboring cage that was crying in pain.
What human wouldn't trade his or her life to put an end to that sort of suffering? My comfort or my life would be a small price to pay.
BTW, not all animal testing is for life-saving drugs...it's a shame we make animals suffer for cosmetics.
Exactly. For most things, NPV is complete bullshit. I buy NPVs when you use the risk-free rate, because yes, you could take your money and buy a T-bill with it and that's a valid comparison.
But most companies use internal rates of 12-15%. Let's say they're weighing a $500,000 computer upgrade. Using a 12-15% number employs the fiction that they could take that $500K and invest it in a worthwhile project that would yield 12-15%, so they're computing the tradeoff of that (fictional) project vs. the upgrade to see which yields more over X years.
But that's BS...most companies don't have a limitless capacity to deploy capital, nor do they have a pent-up queue of projects waiting for funding. It makes some sense in a construction/development or finance company, where your capital really is the limiting factor. But for most firms, NPV is too abstract.
Zillions use Oracle Financials...in the late 90s, moving off mainframe apps to Oracle Financials on a Sun E10K was such a popular move that whole companies did nothing but consulting/support for these sorts of environments.
On RentACoder, there are a ton of jobs looking for people to write "100 short articles about auto repair" and junk like that. All of that garbage is going to drive search engine rankings.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems obvious he doesn't have any left.
That was obvious with Return of the Jedi...same plot as the first one, only with cuddly teddy bears.
Indeed, this is sometimes referred to as "data".
I'd hit it.
The CDs are usually not concerts (music records better in a studio and classical listeners want perfection) and classical music is one of the most heavily post-prodded genres. Engineers typically take sections from multiple performances to produce the final version, sometimes down to a note-by-note level. Plus, mixing is hell...a three-man rock band may have a dozen mics at most. A classical orchestra has dozens of players, hundreds of mics...
Not to defend MSFT, but...SQL Server 2005 was "significant".
Post all you want, but he's still not going to sleep with you.
And now, a startup is the #1 site (or even if you question the numbers, pretty obviously in the top five) and there is nothing Microsoft has to show.
Sure, you can say Microsoft makes its money in other places, they're an OS/app company, etc. but they sure spend a lot of money on MSN, trying to get more Internet eyeballs. To me, an outside observer, it just seems that they are eternally reactionary and a couple years behind, despite having practically unlimited resources. What an indictment.
Uh, no. First, the Federal Communications Commission doesn't do flight control. And second, flight control still runs on good ol' IBM mainframe technology.
Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz are suits (Scott was the MBA "business" guy who helped found Sun; Schwartz is a former McKinsey consultant) who have long had a mutual admiration society. This is little more than Jonathan giving Scott one last bit of fawning fellatio on McNealy's way out.
...they would have included a link to the WinterCorp report.
Is it just me or does his chair seem way too low? Looks like he'd have to reach up to work on his keyboards.
...yesterday morning. Seriously, how long does it take Slashdot to post something? It's not like they have to write the article. Or that the story wasn't submitted multiple times yesterday....
Azul is profiled in the issue of Forbes that's on newsstands now. Unfortunately, I found it rather shallow technically (which isn't surprising for Forbes).
In the last ten years, we've had quite a few problems sending comparatively simple robots to Mars. What makes you think our batting average would be any better on the moon?
I work for a Fortune 500 company and we're large enough to buy direct from both HP and IBM. HP is always more expensive. The hilarious thing is that on disk, HP is significantly more expensive than Hitachi, when it's the exact same equipment (HP just rebrands Hitachi, e.g. XP1024 = Hitachi 9980, XP12000 = Hitachi Tagma, etc.). We're talking like 20% more. Likewise, Hitachi tape equipment is more expensive than IBM, STK, or ADIC every time I've priced it.
HP has evolved into a white-box reseller...in enterprise computing, they are just packaging other people's products and marking them up.
The big three in enterprise-class tape library manufacturers are IBM, StorageTek (now part of Sun), and ADIC. Buy from one of them. Don't waste your time with HP.
My personal favorite are IBM's 3581/2/3/4 line. I've worked with all of them and they have some nice features...partitioning, WWN at the drive slot level rather than the drive, virtual I/O ejects, expandability by stacking on frames, highly-available pickers, multiple pickers for high-use environments, etc. Some of the other vendors are catching up, but that's the key...these are all features IBM had in the 3584 five years ago.
"And that", not "but that". Edit much, editors?
You should have a good spreadsheet/system for maintenance, software subscriptions, etc. That sort of thing you can project forward. You can also put depreciation on that, since that's a known quantity, and leases. Likewise, known expenses - salaries, benefits, energy bills, etc. Add some factor for growth, raises, etc. Of course in a large environment this could be hundreds of budgets that roll up, or an ERP package, etc.
But cap-ex (new things to buy)? Forget it...my current employer (Fortune 500) does budgeting that's done by August for cap-ex for the following year (i.e., in Aug 2005, we're set for 2006 Capex...16 months in advance!) It never works and we're always doing out-of-budget, though of course conversely there are things that we don't get to do or turn out not to be needed. That sort of budgeting just encourages everyone to add large padding because going under budget is always good, but going over is bad.
Unless you have a good sense of business needs that tie into your IT needs (which is really hard to do in medium or large environments), CapEx is a guess. Or just don't do CapEx budgets...some really big companies don't do them because they're useless. I can predict the next 90 days pretty well...beyond that it's really difficult.
Another trick with IT budgeting is that sometimes projects come along and someone says "oh, I'll pay for that, no problem". Great. But adding that server or that 2TB of disk means I have to add X and Y and Z over here in infrastructure or buy licenses for this or that or you trip over a point where I have to add a new cabinet or a new blade, etc. Yes, yes, utility computing models will save us all, but simply keeping track of all the dependencies is complex.
If I was king, my approach would be to budget out everything that is known (expense, depreciation, etc.), add growth where it's known, and then do CapEx out of a budget cycle or on a very short budget cycle, justified as-needed. Unfortunately, that's really hard to do in a public company where capital spending is something analysts watch.
Interesting, isn't it, that there's a ribbon campaign for every type of cancer except lung cancer. I presume that's because everyone thinks that people with lung cancer deserve it since they smoked.
The saddest thing I ever read was a report by an OHSU (Oregon Health & Sciences University) staffer who quit when she saw one chimp try to grab the arm of a researcher who was performing an experiment on a chimp in a neighboring cage that was crying in pain.
What human wouldn't trade his or her life to put an end to that sort of suffering? My comfort or my life would be a small price to pay.
BTW, not all animal testing is for life-saving drugs...it's a shame we make animals suffer for cosmetics.
But most companies use internal rates of 12-15%. Let's say they're weighing a $500,000 computer upgrade. Using a 12-15% number employs the fiction that they could take that $500K and invest it in a worthwhile project that would yield 12-15%, so they're computing the tradeoff of that (fictional) project vs. the upgrade to see which yields more over X years.
But that's BS...most companies don't have a limitless capacity to deploy capital, nor do they have a pent-up queue of projects waiting for funding. It makes some sense in a construction/development or finance company, where your capital really is the limiting factor. But for most firms, NPV is too abstract.
Disclaimer: IANACFO.
Zillions use Oracle Financials...in the late 90s, moving off mainframe apps to Oracle Financials on a Sun E10K was such a popular move that whole companies did nothing but consulting/support for these sorts of environments.
On RentACoder, there are a ton of jobs looking for people to write "100 short articles about auto repair" and junk like that. All of that garbage is going to drive search engine rankings.