I'm in the same boat, almost exactly. I also signed up with Passport just to get their 20% discount. I used it exactly twice, at Mercata (R.I.P.) on a Tivo and a Philips Pronto remote. This was before Passport was revealed to be part of Microsoft's own-the-Internet strategy, though it wasn't too hard even then to see that MS hoped to turn it into something big.
I've never been back, and I certainly don't plan to go back if I can avoid it. I hope the credit card number I used has expired by now. I wonder how many millions more Passport "users" are really just people like us, who couldn't pass up a "free" 20% gift. It's classic Microsoft, using deep pockets to buy a market.
That's the great little gotcha for Passport, once it becomes entrenched as an effective monopoly. MS can begin charging a "nominal annual fee" to maintain our Passport accounts.
This has also been a hot issue where I work. Our legal department recently mandated a draconian policy of automatically deleting ALL e-mail after nine months. We are not allowed to file any electronic correspondance unless we print it out and save the paper.
This may be a good policy when you have something to hide. In the IT world, in my experience (and the experience of most of my peers it seems), old e-mail has helped way more often than it hurts us. If you use e-mail to document conversations, meetings, etc., a lot of disputes get resolved pretty quickly when you pull out an old e-mail and say, "See, here's what you said." or "See, here's what we said we would do."
This doesn't happen if we have to print "important" e-mails. Why? Two reasons. First, you usually don't know a year or two in advance which e-mails are going to be important some day. We may generate a thousand messages plus over the course of a project. Most of them are routine, or are only of passing interest. Every once in a while, however, there will be a design decision (or more likely a design compromise) that one party has conveniently forgotten.
Conversely, if someone can show us that we did, in fact, agree to do something, then we will commit to doing it. Our memories are cloudy too, and we do believe in delivering what we said we would.
The second reason paper filing doesn't work for most of us is that it's extra work. Want to file an e-mail - drag it to a folder. Done. Need to file a paper document - remember to print it, interrupt whatever you're doing to leave your desk, find the right folder (if there's room in the cabinet), file it. If you're on the road, remember to go back later, once you're back in the office, and follow the steps above. This works OK if you're an executive with a secretary dedicated to such tasks. Around here, at least, that perk has become too expensive for all except the most senior management. And, even though paper filing doesn't take much effort for a single document, it is a lot of work for hundreds of e-mails, it requires filing space that is in short supply, and it requires a degree of discipline that most people don't seem to have. Finally, even if you have a good paper filing system, it's much easier to search electronic files quickly.
This is exactly why electronic files are so dangerous in litigation - if you can search them quickly, so can your adversary. By prohibiting them, however, you reduce productivity across the entire company and increase costs. I'm not convinced that the legal eagles balanced the immediate cost benefits against the possible future risk. They only consider the dark side.
On a related note, I know I just read an article (here?) about how electronic documents have a life of their own thanks to widespread forwarding. Your retention policies may be almost meaningless if your correspondants keep everything.
Don't think Xbox 2 - think Ultimate Xbox, Xbox Advanced, or Xbox Plus. Think Xbox meets Moxi, maybe with a side of WebTV thrown in for good measure. The Xbox remains available as a dedicated game machine, but the Ultimate Xbox lets you buy a game machine, PVR, cable tuner, CD/DVD player, media library, and web terminal all in one box.
"Throw away that jumble of wires, put your old-fashioned component entertainment boxes up on eBay, stop writing monthly checks to AOL, cable, DirecTV, and Tivo - with Ultimate Xbox featuring MSN (DMCA/SSSCA-Approved), you plug in just one box, and for only $99.95 per month, you too can have the Ultimate in Digital Entertainment!!!"
My question is, will Sony beat them to it? They don't own an Internet service (as far as I know), but they have everything else, and a lot more consumer electronics experience than Microsoft.
And what might those civil liberties be? The right to safely and securely traffic drugs? No thank you, I'd rather have the wire taps. After all, they aren't tapping YOU. - or are they?
I suspect he was talking about the rights of the 254 people who were arrested, but NOT convicted. Of course I'm sure they were all guilty of something, so let's lock them up anyway, just to be safe.
There's something seriously wrong when we arrest 271 people, but a judge/jury only convicts 17 of them. Would you remain employed if the quality of your work was so poor? This is exactly why you should be so uneasy with the way the USA PATRIOT Act undermines the checks and balances from our justice system.
Cops are paid to find the bad guys. That's their focus, that's what we pay them for, that's what we want them to do. The judiciary and our constitutional rights are are there to hold the reins on the police, to make sure they don't go too far, to make sure we as a society don't sacrifice the rights of the innocent too much in our zeal to get the crooks. You don't have to be dealing drugs to fear living in a police state.
Police are about law enforcement. The judiciary and our rights are about justice. There is an enormous difference between the two.
Why does it seem that governments always come to be dominated by special interests, e.g., big business, religious zealots, etc., at the expense of the people at large? Are statesman inevitably doomed to fade away, to be replaced by politicians and bureaucrats? Is this the best we can do?
We like to believe that the early United States government was "by the people, for the people." Was it really, or is this another myth, another example of rewriting history?
I am not a scholar of history. I am not an expert on the world's governments. Are there any examples of a government that truly remained responsive to its citizenry over the long term? If so, what made them successful? What are we doing wrong?
We've run out of habitable continents. I think it may be time to start looking seriously at colonizing space. It may be the only way to get a representative government, at least for a little while.
What you call the 'elites' in modern society would be better termed 'the ones that provide for every advance in the world and make it a better place'. As long as the elites you sneer at are able to provide a better place to live for the other 99%, then the world will get along just fine.
You misunderstand my point. Success is a good thing. The "elites" I criticize are those successful people who show contempt for the less successful. I fear the possible consequences if their scorn becomes too widespread, too inflammatory. I fear that some of the less successful may take it a little personally when a loudmouth with a few bucks in his pocket says he doesn't give "two flying shits" about people who can't afford a BMW like his.
Many - most - successful people are not so arrogant. They may rightfully feel good about themselves and their success, but they don't view themselves as elite, and they don't view everyone else as sub-human. In short, they are civilized, decent people.
Unfortunately, if the have-nots revolt, they likely will NOT differentiate between the self-proclaimed elites and the rest of the "haves". They will blindly attack anything and anyone associated with power and wealth.
Treat others with respect. You never know when they may show up outside your house with torches and pitchforks.
I couldn't give two flying shits for those with no ambition or self-motivation. If you can't get yourself to spend the time to improve, screw you, those that wish to improve will survive,and you'll starve.
In other words, "Let them eat cake"? Sounds pretty elitist to me.
If too many of the "elite" start thinking like this, we may all get a hard lesson in class warfare. Thanks mostly to the unconstrained greed of the "elite," the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bigger than ever, and it continues to grow. There ratio of haves to have-nots is also decreasing, i.e., the number of "elites" is shrinking while the ranks of the rabble swell. If you rub their noses in your success, show them your scorn, publically declare that you don't give "two flying shits" for them, sooner or later, a bunch of them will mill together and hand you your head.
The masses are a sleeping giant. Most people may not be very ambitious by your standards, but if you push too hard, if you make them angry, they may just get up off their collective butts and decide they've had enough. No matter how superior you may think you are, when you're outnumbered 1000 to 1, you're toast.
Look at the history of the world. How many regimes have been toppled because arrogant rulers thought the peasants were powerless?
Leave room in your brave new world for the well-being of the rest of humanity, or you too may become a lesson for future generations.
Compensation plans of Microsoft product engineers, such as raises and bonuses, will also be tied to how secure their products are.
In related news, Wall Street reacted favorably to a report that Microsoft is slashing payroll expenses by 80%.
Fire and brimstone market prices skyrocketed 72% on the news that hell had indeeed frozen over. Satan declined to comment.
Internet search engine Google reports traffic up 17%, and that the word "security" has become the most popular search term, driven entirely by submissions from the microsoft.com domain.
Wonder if this might also be used as a cyber-warfare mechanism. Ever hear the rumors/myths about the backdoor in printers, computers, whatever, exported to foreign countries? The story goes that the U.S. military can send a special code, a virus of sorts, that activates the backdoor and disables the equipment.
Now imagine building silicon explosives into export equipment. Some fellow sitting back at CIA HQ launches Son of SirCam - within 12 hours, desktops all over Iraq are blowing up.
This could have tremendous potential as the next killer product in consumer electronics. Besides replacing (or perhaps consolidating) your CD/DVD players and your VCR/PVR, it's only a couple of features away from being a standardized gaming platform and even a personal computer. Sure, most of us will still want dedicated PCs. But, if Moxi does a good job on the UI, Joe Six-pack could find that Moxi II is all that he needs to surf, e-mail, and write term papers.
I think it can sell well just as a super-DVR. We have two Tivos already, thinking about a third for another TV in another room. If this box can serve up content to four sets from a central location, it would eliminate our desire for multiple DVRs. It's not that we want to record that many programs; we just watch them in different places.
Further, since the Moxi incorporates the content management that studios lust after, it is likely to be very well received. It's easy to imagine studios providing all sorts of exclusive offerings for the Moxi to undercut interest in vanilla Tivo and Replay systems. Couple that with a new round of lawsuits from studios, and competing technologies may die on the vine. Again, Joe Six-pack won't care, may not even notice, as long as the studios don't get too greedy.
(IMO, the studios' unbridled greed is the only reason they don't already own the digital entainment market. If they would settle for 90% of the potential profit instead of shooting for 120%, most consumers would happily line up behind whatever they - the studios - supported. But I digress.)
The interesting angle will be how many companies launch competing-but-incompatible systems. Again, I could see greedy studios trying to establish their own tech instead of signing up with Moxi. If this new product family gets bogged down in yet another format war, it may become just another footnote on the road to Microsoft's domination of digital entertainment. Or, MS may preempt the whole thing by buying it (again).
This will be interesting to watch no matter how it plays out.
I imagine it's to prevent a conflict of interest. In the professional press, it is often considered a conflict of interest to make observations and recommendations about companies or technologies in which you have some financial stake. That way, we (the public) can be confident in the objectivity of the writer.
I happen to agree with your conclusion that foreign workers are highly talented, but your anecdote is a flawed basis for this conclusion.
Certainly I agree, and I tried to make this clear in my message. I recognized the limits of drawing conclusions about a continent of people based on only four individuals, especially when those four have all moved from that continent. Likely they are a little special, or they'd still be home.
In my opinion, too many U.S. Americans feel smuggly superior to the rest of the world. After all, "them furriner programmers from thems backward countries cain't possibly be as good as us God-fearing, red-blooded 'mericans." Most people I know aren't that blatantly stupid about this, of course. They know there are smart, talented people everywhere. But they sometimes rationalize that the rest of the world just doesn't have the training, or the equipment, or the whatever to really reach "our" levels of expertise.
I offered my little experience only to help point out that this arrogance is foolish, and potentially quite dangerous to our standard of living. At least some of their people compete with the very best of ours. My guess, based on limited data (but a good dose of common sense), is that it's a lot more than "some".
The world is getting smaller every day. There are a lot of former manufacturing workers in the U.S. who never believed their livelihoods could be outsourced either.
Do not underestimate their talent and skills
on
Can China Pull An India?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
We have not used international outsourcing, but I have had employee developers from these countries. I had a client/server development team of up to 26 employees and contractors. This included one person each from India, Pakistan, China, and Malaysia. The balance of the team was mostly good ole' corn-fed Midwesterners, with a couple people from other parts of the U.S.
I won't try to generalize too much based on four individuals. Based on my limited experience, however, I would never underestimate the skills and talent of developers from Asia. Everyone on my team was at least good; several of them were great. These four were all in the top 25%.
In particular, the man from India was an absolute star. I've never met anyone who turned out such high-quality code, well designed and well structured, in so little time. As a plus, his work ethic was outstanding. He was a manager's dream.
Our woman from China was close behind, a solid #2. We handed her an extremely difficult system; she jumped in and devoured it. Similar work ethic, similar high-quality code, extremely valuable to us.
This is NOT a criticism of our American developers. Three or four of them were stars in their own right. As mentioned before, the entire team was good or better. It just happens that these two individuals were from China and India, and they happened to be the best of the best. When I did annual evaluations, those two always got the highest scores on the team.
Maybe I got the only two stars, but I doubt it. Both of them were already in the area, and the Midwest isn't exactly known for being the center of the software universe. I'll bet there are plenty more where they came from.
In short, those countries do have highly talented people. They can produce extremely skilled developers. We must not assume that they can't handle the "creative" work, or we may be asking "Do you want fries with that?" and wondering whatever happened to those good paychecks.
Don't even bother reading the original posts about this article. I did, and like usual here on Slashdot, someone writes in screaming his head off in a panic about his "rights" are being violated and how much of a victim he is.
All Qwest is doing is telling you that they will be sharing meaningless information like wether or not you have Caller ID or (gasp) Touch-Tone Service installed WITH OTHER BRANCHES OF QWEST.
And in another fine Slashdot tradition, having one's facts straight is not required before flaming others for "not reading the article". Here are the facts straight from the Qwest notice:
Account information includes... calling and billing records. For toll calls... includes the number the call comes from, the number it goes to, and how many minutes the call takes.
We expect to share account information with Qwest companies...
We also sometimes disclose account information to third parties [emphasis theirs - kudos] who are not part of the Qwest family of companies when required by law, when it furthers prompt and accurate delivery of your service [cough-bullshit-cough - oops, pardon me], or when it is commercially reasonable to do so. [emphasis mine]
Perhaps this is meaningless information in your book; it certainly isn't in mine. And, strike two, the notice explicitly states that they may share the information with third parties.
Take off your tinfoil hats, kids. The Qwest boogeyman isn't trying to send you evil messages through your television. And, in the future you might be better served to THINK, then react --- Not the other way around.
Good advice, you should try it. I don't know whether Qwest is sharing personal call information with others, but they are claiming the right to do so unless you tell them not to.
I ignored this notice when it came in my bill. Thank you, NYT and Slashdot, for calling it to my attention. I will be on the phone tomorrow. I will also warn my friends and family, maybe drop notes to local media. In my opinion, in spite of my tinfoil hat, this is outrageous. It's way over the line.
One other little Qwest anecdote re. their "quality" service. A couple of years ago, Qwest "upgraded" the service to our little suburb by installing a neighborhood C.O. replacement, a central distribution box of some sort. It immediately broke dial-up connectivity: 56K is now a fond memory. The best I can get is 26.4, many of my neighbors feel lucky to break 19.2. Later, I found that this wonderful upgrade also makes it impossible to provide DSL to our area (or at least that's what Qwest told me when I pushed them about availability).
Deregulation was great for long distance, but local service has gone nowhere but down. It is ironic that we may someday get better service if only our cable provider will offer dialtone. That should tell you how bad Qwest is.
I believe "Office for Linux" has the potential to break the MS desktop OS monopoly, at least on corporate desktops. The lack of MS Office is the single biggest impediment to Linux in business.
Companies don't really care about the desktop OS. To the business, the desktop OS is background noise, like the brand of the light bulbs in the ceiling. You might notice the difference, but it's not the basis for a business decision (an exaggeration, but more true than not). IT wants to manage support costs by using the same OS on every desktop (ideally), but the choice of which OS is based on technical nits and training issues. If you don't have to pay the yearly MS toll, you can buy a lot of training.
On the other hand, your office suite is critical. If your business exchanges information with other businesses -- and virtually all big companies do -- then potential compatibility problems are a real issue. You look unprofessional if you have to tell a partner or client that you can't open their spreadsheet because you can't afford to run "real" Excel.
Office for Linux could really shift the balance. The bad news is that as long as MS-the-OS-company is the same as MS-the-office-suite-company, Office for Linux will be an empty threat. You can bet that it will be crippled in performance, pricing, and/or reliability so that companies can't consider it seriously.
The States' heart is in the right place. They deserve credit for that.
Katz has made the mistake of thinking that his definition of the perfect society is universal, but it isn't, not by a long shot.
True enough; be sure to recognize that your definition is not universal either, not by a long shot. You are apparently offended by "pornography" - whatever that means to you. I've found that nude bodies do not offend me nearly as much as self-righteous people who feel they have the right, even the obligation, to impose their own peculiar moral idiosyncracies on others.
If a web site offends me, I don't visit it. If a TV program offends me, I turn it off. If my children are viewing things that I find objectionable, I execute my parental responsibility by stopping them. If the local religious zealot is preaching his lessons of intolerance and bigotry, I move my children along so their impressionable minds are not tainted by the arrogant presumption that any man can claim that his beliefs alone are the one and only true way to connect man with God.
As I read it, Katz does not advocate denying you your right to associate with like-minded people. As I read it, Katz recognizes the need to filter the juveniles and the extremists that drown out intelligent discussion through the sheer volume of their noise. It seems to me that Katz is merely saying that much of the net's potential to expand our minds is lost because there are so few places where people with differing views can (or at least do) discuss them in an intelligent and reasoned way. He isn't requiring you to participate. He's simply bemoaning the lack of opportunities to do so.
"Judge not, lest ye be judged." It's not just simple human decency, it's the (Christian) law.
Network Associates/McAfee.com Corporation has not contacted the FBI, nor has the FBI contacted NAI/McAfee.com Corp., regarding Magic Lantern.
Note that this doesn't deny that another US agency has contacted Network Associates, nor does it deny that the FBI has contacted them about software named something other than "Magic Lantern" (a bug by any other name would still capture your keystrokes, or something like that). NAI may be telling the truth, strictly speaking. One can only speculate whether they're telling the whole truth.
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I didn't used to be so cynical, but then I learned to read, and to watch the news. The US government has earned our distrust through years of deception and denial. The sad part is that the good, honest, hard-working law enforcement people (which is most of them) are tainted by the abuses of the few.
Not sure why this was modded as flamebait, I think his point is a good one. It is expensive to maintain development and support for multiple platforms. HP's 9000 series - open systems, UNIX-based - is doing well. It's obviously where HP will find most of its future market.
The 3000, on the other hand - closed, proprietary, not the most flexible and capable by today's OS standards - is more and more a niche product. Even if it is still profitable for HP today, it won't be over the long haul. It is not HP's future.
HP has talked about retiring the 3000 line for years. As I understand it, they've kept the line this long only because of their commitment to customer service. There are a lot of companies (like ours) that rely on the 3000. It will be expensive to replace.
People who are critical of companies still using 3000s, IMHO, are a little lacking in real-world business experience. We recognized long ago that the 3000's life was limited. We haven't put any major new applications on them in years. Unfortunately, we have millions of lines of existing code supporting several critical lines of business. We can't replace that at a whim. It will be extremely expensive.
As just one example, the Y2K remediation effort for one large application was about 24,000 man-hours. Note that this application was already almost Y2K compliant, designed in the beginning to track century information. For most programs, most of this time was simply the overhead of checking out the source code, reviewing it for compliance, and checking it back in. There were thousands of programs to check.
I agree that HP deserves credit for continuing the line for so many years past its prime, and for providing good advance notice about retiring it. The future is open systems. HP "done good" by easing the transition.
It's obvious that a music CD is music first and foremost. Any "software" component is incidental. Similarly, a movie DVD is a movie. The presence of other material is secondary to the primary purpose of the DVD. Let us hope that the Australian courts can grasp the obvious.
That said, however: "In Australia a court case with international ramifications . .."
I doubt the ramifications will be all that international, especially in the US. While US courts have shown an eagerness to apply our laws to the rest of the world, I haven't seen much indication that the reverse is true. I don't see US courts giving a hoot about other countries' laws and courts. I'm confident the studios' pockets are deep enough to convince most US courts that the Australians were mistaken.
I see two pieces of the problem. As discussed, the first issue is storage capacity. The second factor is ease of editing. I think #2 is where we will lose more images.
The storage capacity issue is easy to address. A film photographer carries several rolls of film. A digital photographer can carry more or larger memory cards. There's no reason a digital photographer can't take and keep hundreds of pictures if necessary.
I suspect the problem really begins once the photographer gets back to the office. He may have been too busy to do editing in the field, but he might take the time once he gets back. If he doesn't, his editor might. Maybe they have a librarian that manages their archive. The point is, someone in the office will ultimately decide what is kept and what is deleted.
This is the big difference compared to film. In the world of film, it's customary to file the whole roll of negatives. It's a lot easier than picking through each roll and clipping individual frames, plus the film is easier to handle and store if it's kept in strips.
Storage cost with film isn't really a big issue either. Because of the way film is organized and stored, you don't save much storage space by clipping frames. It can even take more space than filing complete strips. By default, unless you decide that every frame on the roll is junk, you will probably keep everything.
In the digital world, the opposite is often true. Someone has to decide which images to archive. The rest are deleted. Of course you can archive all of the image files, but there's little practical reason to do so. Why bother when it's so easy to pick the ones you want?
And, unlike film, storage costs are an issue for digital images. There can be a direct increase in storage costs for keeping everything vs. selecting a few images. If your custom is to store each shoot on a separate CD, then keeping everything isn't an issue. If you're using online storage or consolidating multiple sessions on a single piece of media, then culling your work saves money.
I'm concerned that just giving digital photographers more/bigger memory cards won't help the problem. We really need a commitment to archive all of the images taken. Then we can worry about finding a digital medium that we can still use in 100 years.
Based on my experiences within the corporate world, the big "drawback" here is a lack of accountability if something goes wrong. Management gets a warm fuzzy from knowing that when their purchased XYZ fails, there is a company they can threaten if it isn't fixed NOW!
From a technical standpoint, that's a silly argument. Certainly in my experience (on the average), mature open source products are higher quality, more robust, and better-supported than your typical purchased application. On the other hand, from the perspective of protecting one's employment, open source is risky.
If something goes wrong, Joe CIO may be seeking new employment if his boss hears that the business is down because of open source software. After all, consider the common stereotype of "free software, downloaded off the Internet (the devil's playground), probably written by a bunch of socially malformed teenagers that are really trying to hack our credit card lists." Do you want to defend this to a technically ignorant boss who can't tell the difference between open source and open sore? Joe CIO is a lot more secure saying Blue Chip Computers screwed up, and we've got their Senior Account Executive on the line, promising that they'll fix it Real Soon Now.
In short, as someone else points out, FUD is a major issue with open source.
How did you get those first few jobs, so word of mouth could start to spread?
It's been a while. IIRC, my first clients came through different sources. Some came from personal contacts, e.g., the company my father worked for hired me to do a couple of projects for them. That led to more work from other areas in the same company. I also got an occasional lead from friends & relatives, and friends of friends. Some of it came from being in the right place at the right time.
Some of my first clients came through vendors who worked with me in my day job. I had a good reputation at work and they knew I was looking for side projects. Two cautions with this: first, be completely above board with your employer if you're getting leads from vendors. You don't want want to be accused of a conflict of interest.
Second, it you're taking leads from vendors, be doubly sure to pull out all the stops for any contracts you get, especially early on. There probably aren't that many vendors who can provide leads in your particular specialty. Unless you have a solid track record of happy clients, a vendor will NEVER give you another chance if you burn one of his customers. That's bad for his business.
I've also heard that organizations and activities for business people are a good source of contacts and leads. Examples include the local Chamber of Commerce, business classes, etc. I never really did much of this, it's not my forte. Don't go to sell, just be there, enjoy yourself, tell people what you do, and be friendly and helpful when someone asks a computer question (and they will ask, business people are always looking for someone who can answer computer questions). It's certainly worth a try if other sources are dry.
What do I need to do to make sure my skills still remain sharp, as I'll be spending less time in the bits and bytes?
For what it's worth, I faced the same issue as my career migrated into management. The more I advanced, the less hands-on I could be. That didn't work for me; not only do I enjoy the hands-on work, I've always felt that management is more effective when it has some idea of what it is managing.
My solution is to moonlight as a free-lance consultant. I focus mostly on small, privately-owned companies that need solid expertise, but don't need 40 hours per week and can't afford $200 per hour. I establish a base rate of $150 per hour, just to place myself in the market, then discount it sharply to what the companies can afford. They understand up front that my work is almost exclusively after-hours. In return, they get a big discount.
I mostly rely on word-of-mouth for business. These business owners do talk to each other, and they'll enthusiastically recommend someone who gives good service. I also let local vendors know what I do, not your CompUSAs necessarily, but local branches of business systems (e.g., Sun, IBM). They often have customers who need a hand, but can't afford their big project rate structure. I'm not a threat, since I will not and cannot commit to anything that takes major manpower.
I've been doing this for 15 years or so. It keeps me hands-on. It's also a great source of extra income, pays for the tech "toys" I use in my business. In the process, I had to learn a lot more about running a business - tax and financial issues in particular - which is valuable in my real job.
My only caveat, be realistic about how much time you can spend over the long term. It's fun at first, but the novelty wears off. It gets to be work, especially when the weather's nice or there's a new example of your favorite addiction (games, sports, books, whatever). Your clients depend on you. If you leave them hanging, you can hurt their business.
Slashdot Mirror
2. Will an M1 Abrams fit in an 8'x8'x20' container?
Can't wait, should be a wild show.
I've never been back, and I certainly don't plan to go back if I can avoid it. I hope the credit card number I used has expired by now. I wonder how many millions more Passport "users" are really just people like us, who couldn't pass up a "free" 20% gift. It's classic Microsoft, using deep pockets to buy a market.
That's the great little gotcha for Passport, once it becomes entrenched as an effective monopoly. MS can begin charging a "nominal annual fee" to maintain our Passport accounts.
All your dollars/Euros are belong to us.
This may be a good policy when you have something to hide. In the IT world, in my experience (and the experience of most of my peers it seems), old e-mail has helped way more often than it hurts us. If you use e-mail to document conversations, meetings, etc., a lot of disputes get resolved pretty quickly when you pull out an old e-mail and say, "See, here's what you said." or "See, here's what we said we would do."
This doesn't happen if we have to print "important" e-mails. Why? Two reasons. First, you usually don't know a year or two in advance which e-mails are going to be important some day. We may generate a thousand messages plus over the course of a project. Most of them are routine, or are only of passing interest. Every once in a while, however, there will be a design decision (or more likely a design compromise) that one party has conveniently forgotten.
Conversely, if someone can show us that we did, in fact, agree to do something, then we will commit to doing it. Our memories are cloudy too, and we do believe in delivering what we said we would.
The second reason paper filing doesn't work for most of us is that it's extra work. Want to file an e-mail - drag it to a folder. Done. Need to file a paper document - remember to print it, interrupt whatever you're doing to leave your desk, find the right folder (if there's room in the cabinet), file it. If you're on the road, remember to go back later, once you're back in the office, and follow the steps above. This works OK if you're an executive with a secretary dedicated to such tasks. Around here, at least, that perk has become too expensive for all except the most senior management. And, even though paper filing doesn't take much effort for a single document, it is a lot of work for hundreds of e-mails, it requires filing space that is in short supply, and it requires a degree of discipline that most people don't seem to have. Finally, even if you have a good paper filing system, it's much easier to search electronic files quickly.
This is exactly why electronic files are so dangerous in litigation - if you can search them quickly, so can your adversary. By prohibiting them, however, you reduce productivity across the entire company and increase costs. I'm not convinced that the legal eagles balanced the immediate cost benefits against the possible future risk. They only consider the dark side.
On a related note, I know I just read an article (here?) about how electronic documents have a life of their own thanks to widespread forwarding. Your retention policies may be almost meaningless if your correspondants keep everything.
My question is, will Sony beat them to it? They don't own an Internet service (as far as I know), but they have everything else, and a lot more consumer electronics experience than Microsoft.
I suspect he was talking about the rights of the 254 people who were arrested, but NOT convicted . Of course I'm sure they were all guilty of something, so let's lock them up anyway, just to be safe.
There's something seriously wrong when we arrest 271 people, but a judge/jury only convicts 17 of them. Would you remain employed if the quality of your work was so poor? This is exactly why you should be so uneasy with the way the USA PATRIOT Act undermines the checks and balances from our justice system.
Cops are paid to find the bad guys. That's their focus, that's what we pay them for, that's what we want them to do. The judiciary and our constitutional rights are are there to hold the reins on the police, to make sure they don't go too far, to make sure we as a society don't sacrifice the rights of the innocent too much in our zeal to get the crooks. You don't have to be dealing drugs to fear living in a police state.
Police are about law enforcement. The judiciary and our rights are about justice. There is an enormous difference between the two.
We like to believe that the early United States government was "by the people, for the people." Was it really, or is this another myth, another example of rewriting history?
I am not a scholar of history. I am not an expert on the world's governments. Are there any examples of a government that truly remained responsive to its citizenry over the long term? If so, what made them successful? What are we doing wrong?
We've run out of habitable continents. I think it may be time to start looking seriously at colonizing space. It may be the only way to get a representative government, at least for a little while.
You misunderstand my point. Success is a good thing. The "elites" I criticize are those successful people who show contempt for the less successful. I fear the possible consequences if their scorn becomes too widespread, too inflammatory. I fear that some of the less successful may take it a little personally when a loudmouth with a few bucks in his pocket says he doesn't give "two flying shits" about people who can't afford a BMW like his.
Many - most - successful people are not so arrogant. They may rightfully feel good about themselves and their success, but they don't view themselves as elite, and they don't view everyone else as sub-human. In short, they are civilized, decent people.
Unfortunately, if the have-nots revolt, they likely will NOT differentiate between the self-proclaimed elites and the rest of the "haves". They will blindly attack anything and anyone associated with power and wealth.
Treat others with respect. You never know when they may show up outside your house with torches and pitchforks.
In other words, "Let them eat cake"? Sounds pretty elitist to me.
If too many of the "elite" start thinking like this, we may all get a hard lesson in class warfare. Thanks mostly to the unconstrained greed of the "elite," the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bigger than ever, and it continues to grow. There ratio of haves to have-nots is also decreasing, i.e., the number of "elites" is shrinking while the ranks of the rabble swell. If you rub their noses in your success, show them your scorn, publically declare that you don't give "two flying shits" for them, sooner or later, a bunch of them will mill together and hand you your head.
The masses are a sleeping giant. Most people may not be very ambitious by your standards, but if you push too hard, if you make them angry, they may just get up off their collective butts and decide they've had enough. No matter how superior you may think you are, when you're outnumbered 1000 to 1, you're toast.
Look at the history of the world. How many regimes have been toppled because arrogant rulers thought the peasants were powerless?
Leave room in your brave new world for the well-being of the rest of humanity, or you too may become a lesson for future generations.
In related news, Wall Street reacted favorably to a report that Microsoft is slashing payroll expenses by 80%.
Fire and brimstone market prices skyrocketed 72% on the news that hell had indeeed frozen over. Satan declined to comment.
Internet search engine Google reports traffic up 17%, and that the word "security" has become the most popular search term, driven entirely by submissions from the microsoft.com domain.
Film at 11:00.
Just curious, on a car PC, do you reboot by hitting [Brake], [Accelerator] and the [Glove Compartment Knob] simultaneously?
Is the horn the [Any] key?
Are you comfortable with, "A Fatal Exception has Occurred ..."?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Now imagine building silicon explosives into export equipment. Some fellow sitting back at CIA HQ launches Son of SirCam - within 12 hours, desktops all over Iraq are blowing up.
The ultimate Denial of Service attack.
I think it can sell well just as a super-DVR. We have two Tivos already, thinking about a third for another TV in another room. If this box can serve up content to four sets from a central location, it would eliminate our desire for multiple DVRs. It's not that we want to record that many programs; we just watch them in different places.
Further, since the Moxi incorporates the content management that studios lust after, it is likely to be very well received. It's easy to imagine studios providing all sorts of exclusive offerings for the Moxi to undercut interest in vanilla Tivo and Replay systems. Couple that with a new round of lawsuits from studios, and competing technologies may die on the vine. Again, Joe Six-pack won't care, may not even notice, as long as the studios don't get too greedy.
(IMO, the studios' unbridled greed is the only reason they don't already own the digital entainment market. If they would settle for 90% of the potential profit instead of shooting for 120%, most consumers would happily line up behind whatever they - the studios - supported. But I digress.)
The interesting angle will be how many companies launch competing-but-incompatible systems. Again, I could see greedy studios trying to establish their own tech instead of signing up with Moxi. If this new product family gets bogged down in yet another format war, it may become just another footnote on the road to Microsoft's domination of digital entertainment. Or, MS may preempt the whole thing by buying it (again).
This will be interesting to watch no matter how it plays out.
At least that's the theory.
Certainly I agree, and I tried to make this clear in my message. I recognized the limits of drawing conclusions about a continent of people based on only four individuals, especially when those four have all moved from that continent. Likely they are a little special, or they'd still be home.
In my opinion, too many U.S. Americans feel smuggly superior to the rest of the world. After all, "them furriner programmers from thems backward countries cain't possibly be as good as us God-fearing, red-blooded 'mericans." Most people I know aren't that blatantly stupid about this, of course. They know there are smart, talented people everywhere. But they sometimes rationalize that the rest of the world just doesn't have the training, or the equipment, or the whatever to really reach "our" levels of expertise.
I offered my little experience only to help point out that this arrogance is foolish, and potentially quite dangerous to our standard of living. At least some of their people compete with the very best of ours. My guess, based on limited data (but a good dose of common sense), is that it's a lot more than "some".
The world is getting smaller every day. There are a lot of former manufacturing workers in the U.S. who never believed their livelihoods could be outsourced either.
I won't try to generalize too much based on four individuals. Based on my limited experience, however, I would never underestimate the skills and talent of developers from Asia. Everyone on my team was at least good; several of them were great. These four were all in the top 25%.
In particular, the man from India was an absolute star. I've never met anyone who turned out such high-quality code, well designed and well structured, in so little time. As a plus, his work ethic was outstanding. He was a manager's dream.
Our woman from China was close behind, a solid #2. We handed her an extremely difficult system; she jumped in and devoured it. Similar work ethic, similar high-quality code, extremely valuable to us.
This is NOT a criticism of our American developers. Three or four of them were stars in their own right. As mentioned before, the entire team was good or better. It just happens that these two individuals were from China and India, and they happened to be the best of the best. When I did annual evaluations, those two always got the highest scores on the team.
Maybe I got the only two stars, but I doubt it. Both of them were already in the area, and the Midwest isn't exactly known for being the center of the software universe. I'll bet there are plenty more where they came from.
In short, those countries do have highly talented people. They can produce extremely skilled developers. We must not assume that they can't handle the "creative" work, or we may be asking "Do you want fries with that?" and wondering whatever happened to those good paychecks.
All Qwest is doing is telling you that they will be sharing meaningless information like wether or not you have Caller ID or (gasp) Touch-Tone Service installed WITH OTHER BRANCHES OF QWEST.
And in another fine Slashdot tradition, having one's facts straight is not required before flaming others for "not reading the article". Here are the facts straight from the Qwest notice:
Perhaps this is meaningless information in your book; it certainly isn't in mine. And, strike two, the notice explicitly states that they may share the information with third parties.
Take off your tinfoil hats, kids. The Qwest boogeyman isn't trying to send you evil messages through your television. And, in the future you might be better served to THINK, then react --- Not the other way around.
Good advice, you should try it. I don't know whether Qwest is sharing personal call information with others, but they are claiming the right to do so unless you tell them not to.
I ignored this notice when it came in my bill. Thank you, NYT and Slashdot, for calling it to my attention. I will be on the phone tomorrow. I will also warn my friends and family, maybe drop notes to local media. In my opinion, in spite of my tinfoil hat, this is outrageous. It's way over the line.
One other little Qwest anecdote re. their "quality" service. A couple of years ago, Qwest "upgraded" the service to our little suburb by installing a neighborhood C.O. replacement, a central distribution box of some sort. It immediately broke dial-up connectivity: 56K is now a fond memory. The best I can get is 26.4, many of my neighbors feel lucky to break 19.2. Later, I found that this wonderful upgrade also makes it impossible to provide DSL to our area (or at least that's what Qwest told me when I pushed them about availability).
Deregulation was great for long distance, but local service has gone nowhere but down. It is ironic that we may someday get better service if only our cable provider will offer dialtone. That should tell you how bad Qwest is.
Companies don't really care about the desktop OS. To the business, the desktop OS is background noise, like the brand of the light bulbs in the ceiling. You might notice the difference, but it's not the basis for a business decision (an exaggeration, but more true than not). IT wants to manage support costs by using the same OS on every desktop (ideally), but the choice of which OS is based on technical nits and training issues. If you don't have to pay the yearly MS toll, you can buy a lot of training.
On the other hand, your office suite is critical. If your business exchanges information with other businesses -- and virtually all big companies do -- then potential compatibility problems are a real issue. You look unprofessional if you have to tell a partner or client that you can't open their spreadsheet because you can't afford to run "real" Excel.
Office for Linux could really shift the balance. The bad news is that as long as MS-the-OS-company is the same as MS-the-office-suite-company, Office for Linux will be an empty threat. You can bet that it will be crippled in performance, pricing, and/or reliability so that companies can't consider it seriously.
The States' heart is in the right place. They deserve credit for that.
True enough; be sure to recognize that your definition is not universal either, not by a long shot. You are apparently offended by "pornography" - whatever that means to you. I've found that nude bodies do not offend me nearly as much as self-righteous people who feel they have the right, even the obligation, to impose their own peculiar moral idiosyncracies on others.
If a web site offends me, I don't visit it. If a TV program offends me, I turn it off. If my children are viewing things that I find objectionable, I execute my parental responsibility by stopping them. If the local religious zealot is preaching his lessons of intolerance and bigotry, I move my children along so their impressionable minds are not tainted by the arrogant presumption that any man can claim that his beliefs alone are the one and only true way to connect man with God.
As I read it, Katz does not advocate denying you your right to associate with like-minded people. As I read it, Katz recognizes the need to filter the juveniles and the extremists that drown out intelligent discussion through the sheer volume of their noise. It seems to me that Katz is merely saying that much of the net's potential to expand our minds is lost because there are so few places where people with differing views can (or at least do) discuss them in an intelligent and reasoned way. He isn't requiring you to participate. He's simply bemoaning the lack of opportunities to do so.
"Judge not, lest ye be judged." It's not just simple human decency, it's the (Christian) law.
Note that this doesn't deny that another US agency has contacted Network Associates, nor does it deny that the FBI has contacted them about software named something other than "Magic Lantern" (a bug by any other name would still capture your keystrokes, or something like that). NAI may be telling the truth, strictly speaking. One can only speculate whether they're telling the whole truth.
----
I didn't used to be so cynical, but then I learned to read, and to watch the news. The US government has earned our distrust through years of deception and denial. The sad part is that the good, honest, hard-working law enforcement people (which is most of them) are tainted by the abuses of the few.
The 3000, on the other hand - closed, proprietary, not the most flexible and capable by today's OS standards - is more and more a niche product. Even if it is still profitable for HP today, it won't be over the long haul. It is not HP's future.
HP has talked about retiring the 3000 line for years. As I understand it, they've kept the line this long only because of their commitment to customer service. There are a lot of companies (like ours) that rely on the 3000. It will be expensive to replace.
People who are critical of companies still using 3000s, IMHO, are a little lacking in real-world business experience. We recognized long ago that the 3000's life was limited. We haven't put any major new applications on them in years. Unfortunately, we have millions of lines of existing code supporting several critical lines of business. We can't replace that at a whim. It will be extremely expensive.
As just one example, the Y2K remediation effort for one large application was about 24,000 man-hours. Note that this application was already almost Y2K compliant, designed in the beginning to track century information. For most programs, most of this time was simply the overhead of checking out the source code, reviewing it for compliance, and checking it back in. There were thousands of programs to check.
I agree that HP deserves credit for continuing the line for so many years past its prime, and for providing good advance notice about retiring it. The future is open systems. HP "done good" by easing the transition.
That said, however: ."
"In Australia a court case with international ramifications . .
I doubt the ramifications will be all that international, especially in the US. While US courts have shown an eagerness to apply our laws to the rest of the world, I haven't seen much indication that the reverse is true. I don't see US courts giving a hoot about other countries' laws and courts. I'm confident the studios' pockets are deep enough to convince most US courts that the Australians were mistaken.
The storage capacity issue is easy to address. A film photographer carries several rolls of film. A digital photographer can carry more or larger memory cards. There's no reason a digital photographer can't take and keep hundreds of pictures if necessary.
I suspect the problem really begins once the photographer gets back to the office. He may have been too busy to do editing in the field, but he might take the time once he gets back. If he doesn't, his editor might. Maybe they have a librarian that manages their archive. The point is, someone in the office will ultimately decide what is kept and what is deleted.
This is the big difference compared to film. In the world of film, it's customary to file the whole roll of negatives. It's a lot easier than picking through each roll and clipping individual frames, plus the film is easier to handle and store if it's kept in strips.
Storage cost with film isn't really a big issue either. Because of the way film is organized and stored, you don't save much storage space by clipping frames. It can even take more space than filing complete strips. By default, unless you decide that every frame on the roll is junk, you will probably keep everything.
In the digital world, the opposite is often true. Someone has to decide which images to archive. The rest are deleted. Of course you can archive all of the image files, but there's little practical reason to do so. Why bother when it's so easy to pick the ones you want?
And, unlike film, storage costs are an issue for digital images. There can be a direct increase in storage costs for keeping everything vs. selecting a few images. If your custom is to store each shoot on a separate CD, then keeping everything isn't an issue. If you're using online storage or consolidating multiple sessions on a single piece of media, then culling your work saves money.
I'm concerned that just giving digital photographers more/bigger memory cards won't help the problem. We really need a commitment to archive all of the images taken. Then we can worry about finding a digital medium that we can still use in 100 years.
From a technical standpoint, that's a silly argument. Certainly in my experience (on the average), mature open source products are higher quality, more robust, and better-supported than your typical purchased application. On the other hand, from the perspective of protecting one's employment, open source is risky.
If something goes wrong, Joe CIO may be seeking new employment if his boss hears that the business is down because of open source software. After all, consider the common stereotype of "free software, downloaded off the Internet (the devil's playground), probably written by a bunch of socially malformed teenagers that are really trying to hack our credit card lists." Do you want to defend this to a technically ignorant boss who can't tell the difference between open source and open sore? Joe CIO is a lot more secure saying Blue Chip Computers screwed up, and we've got their Senior Account Executive on the line, promising that they'll fix it Real Soon Now.
In short, as someone else points out, FUD is a major issue with open source.
It's been a while. IIRC, my first clients came through different sources. Some came from personal contacts, e.g., the company my father worked for hired me to do a couple of projects for them. That led to more work from other areas in the same company. I also got an occasional lead from friends & relatives, and friends of friends. Some of it came from being in the right place at the right time.
Some of my first clients came through vendors who worked with me in my day job. I had a good reputation at work and they knew I was looking for side projects. Two cautions with this: first, be completely above board with your employer if you're getting leads from vendors. You don't want want to be accused of a conflict of interest.
Second, it you're taking leads from vendors, be doubly sure to pull out all the stops for any contracts you get, especially early on. There probably aren't that many vendors who can provide leads in your particular specialty. Unless you have a solid track record of happy clients, a vendor will NEVER give you another chance if you burn one of his customers. That's bad for his business.
I've also heard that organizations and activities for business people are a good source of contacts and leads. Examples include the local Chamber of Commerce, business classes, etc. I never really did much of this, it's not my forte. Don't go to sell, just be there, enjoy yourself, tell people what you do, and be friendly and helpful when someone asks a computer question (and they will ask, business people are always looking for someone who can answer computer questions). It's certainly worth a try if other sources are dry.
Hope that's helpful. Good luck to you.
For what it's worth, I faced the same issue as my career migrated into management. The more I advanced, the less hands-on I could be. That didn't work for me; not only do I enjoy the hands-on work, I've always felt that management is more effective when it has some idea of what it is managing.
My solution is to moonlight as a free-lance consultant. I focus mostly on small, privately-owned companies that need solid expertise, but don't need 40 hours per week and can't afford $200 per hour. I establish a base rate of $150 per hour, just to place myself in the market, then discount it sharply to what the companies can afford. They understand up front that my work is almost exclusively after-hours. In return, they get a big discount.
I mostly rely on word-of-mouth for business. These business owners do talk to each other, and they'll enthusiastically recommend someone who gives good service. I also let local vendors know what I do, not your CompUSAs necessarily, but local branches of business systems (e.g., Sun, IBM). They often have customers who need a hand, but can't afford their big project rate structure. I'm not a threat, since I will not and cannot commit to anything that takes major manpower.
I've been doing this for 15 years or so. It keeps me hands-on. It's also a great source of extra income, pays for the tech "toys" I use in my business. In the process, I had to learn a lot more about running a business - tax and financial issues in particular - which is valuable in my real job.
My only caveat, be realistic about how much time you can spend over the long term. It's fun at first, but the novelty wears off. It gets to be work, especially when the weather's nice or there's a new example of your favorite addiction (games, sports, books, whatever). Your clients depend on you. If you leave them hanging, you can hurt their business.