The claim that there are "no bosses" is complete rubbish. There has to be a few people in charge who make decisions and act as the final authority when a group of people cannot agree about something. Otherwise, nothing would ever get done due to the fact that people are horribly imperfect.
Should we hire this person? What if the "group consensus" is that they don't like him because of his race? Who's going to tell them thats illegal? Do we need to buy some new servers? What should we buy? How much should we charge for this latest game?
Somebody has to make those decisions. And a few million more. They might not actually have a job title with "boss" or "manager" in it, but they are still bosses and managers.
And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!
Unless you buy a small one. The 750GB 7200 RPM hard drive in my laptop cost a little over $100, while an SSD of only 512GB is around $350. Close to $1000 for higher capacities.
When shopping for a hard drive I've found that you really have to look closely at the specs. If you can find them. Even for desktop hard drives, there are still a lot of 5400 and 5900 rpm drives out there.
There is nothing wrong with Office 2003. It's a utility. There are few features in the newer versions that make doing your job faster, more accurate, or cheaper.
Not where I am contracting as it is a big headache!
One of the VPs read something about the cloud and Office 365 and decided to layoff the Exchange support team and outsource it to Microsoft with outlook.com. Problem is about 500+ users in 4 continents still used Outlook 2003 when the switch went thru.
No email or calandar functions for these users! They need a browser and about 200 called the India help desk at the same time for instructions. +5 hour wait time.
FYI outlook 2003 does not support mapi. Very bad things happened and I am working overtime trying to fix it with angry hostile users with +120 tickets a week as it is with only 2 other guys trying to manage the minimalist insourced I.T.
Staying behind may look cheap and reasonable but tickets and support are skyrocketing and management is all sooo clueless on why is support costs and tickets going up! This software worked fine for 10 years! The social media integration, clouds, and soon HTML 5 versions of SAP, Kronos, Google Docs, Salesforce.com are going to hit those stuck on IE 7 next.
So it is a hassle so lets plug our ears and whine I CANT HEAR YOU. Shit will hit the fine later but in a surge like at this company that decided to go cheap with the accounting department running through 3 different outsources to do I.T. Office 2003 is surely not a utility when we went to the cloud.
Sadly, you have completely missed the point. Switching to Office 365 and "the cloud" got you nothing but trouble. And it's not the fault of your "outdated" Office 2003. Once again, someone who is in a position of power, and who doesn't belong there due to their total clulessness, made a gigantic bonehead decision.
All in all, $100 *is cheap* - till next year, at least..
That's the problem.
If my copy of Office 2003 had been sold as a subscription only for $100 a year, I would have paid $1000 so far. And along the way I would probably been forced to "upgrade" to the completely unusable newer versions.
You aren't going to be able to sell business on something, even if the price is lower, if it isn't going to give them anything they aren't already getting
Which is exactly why most businesses aren't running Linux and Open Office on all their desktops. It's also why there are still millions of people using Windows XP and Office 2003. Contrary to Microsoft's PR department, newer versions of Windows and Office don't give users any benefits that even come close to outweighing the enormous cost of changing.
I watched some HD Youtube videos of Crysis 3 at max settings. Sure, the graphics are great from an engineering perspective, but artistically? All they seem to have done is made it look as realistic as possible. Where's the imagination?
Also, the article linked mentions the composer deserves an award. Sorry, but all I heard were "music effects" rather than any sort of soundtrack. Maybe I was watching the wrong videos...?
That's the problem. Creating super high resolution graphics is strictly a technical issue. With a little knowledge, anyone can do it. Actually coming up with a compelling/interesting story line requires a lot of creativity, and that is a talent few people have. It's the same reason why movies have a gazillion dollars worth of special effects but the movie sucks.
The thing is, they could probably stand to make a lot of money if they weren't quite so predatory. I think that for the most part, the people who bought the groupons were quite happy. However, the businesses who offered the groupons often got shafted. I'm sure they could easily change the way they they deal with businesses to make sure they have a much better experience. For instance, most of the time they push for no limits on the number of coupons sold. Instead, there should always be a limit, because most businesses aren't set up to handle the amount of business that Groupon could send to them. Groupon would still make money off the deal, and would probably even have some repeat business.
Even if Groupon were less "predatory" it's still a bad deal for businesses. Businesses are losing money on every sale that uses a Groupon based on the hope that it will generate repeat business. But a couple of years experience with Groupon has shown that it just doesn't happen.
People go in, get their good deal, and then move on to the next deal. That's not theory or opinion, those are the words of the many business owners who lost a lot of money dealing with Groupon.
I'm not sure that's really what happened. I'll bet it's more like Google looked at their books, said "WTF???" and let Groupon "back away" from the deal to save face.
That's a very real possibility. Another possibility is that Andrew Mason really did turn down Google's offer because he knew it would kill his scam. Google isn't just going to walk in and hand them a check for $6 Billion. There's a lot of "due diligence".
Groupon was cooking the books, losing money but showing profitability. Mason was probably worried that if word got out that Google killed the deal because of what they found, Groupon would be tainted and that could put a serious damper on their IPO.
Don't cry for Andrew Mason, the fired CEO. Thanks to Groupon's IPO he leaves a pretty wealthy guy. Which is what this was really all about all along.
Every conservative on the court supports unreviewable police power and opposes civil liberties: is anyone surprised?
No one is surprised, and that's the worst part. Despite 40+ years of conservatives claiming to be great lovers and defenders of the constitution, their track record has been exactly the opposite.
They're either the same companies (Time-Warner cable), or they're in cahoots (Verizon with their NFL deals, Comcast with their sports networks).
I'm surprised that it has taken so long for someone to mention this. This is not a case of ISPs "going along" or "being on the side of" the RIAA/MPAA. The 6 major ISPs who are pulling this crap ARE the RIAA/MPAA. Every one of them owns or is owned by movie studios, TV networks, record companies, etc.
For new spiffy pages, new spiffy URLs. Yes folks, you can have a DIFFERENT URL for new content. Funny how Mayer spent so much time in the biz and doesn't know that.
She's an executive. She doesn't need to know those things. She has people who take care of that.
based on the idea the Mayer might turn that company around.
Best joke of the week.
But seriously, Yahoo is too far gone. They've been under incompetent leadership for so long that nobody can turn them around now. They're already dead. They just haven't realized it yet.
I have a feeling (and it's only a guess admittedly) that this is Mayer trying to stamp her manner of working onto the company. Being present and having a hand in as many different projects as possible is a pretty good way to become a top executive in a company.
You're absolutely right. This is very common, not just at the CEO level but at all levels of management. Whenever someone takes over a particular position they immediately begin making all sorts of changes and the reason is simple. If everything works out then they can take all the credit and say "I was responsible for that".
Unfortunately, this mindset frequently results in making lots of changes just for the sake of change. Things aren't better, they're just different. It also frequently results in making lots of changes that actually make things worse.
Last time I looked, remote workers seemed to be the wave of the future.
Companies that use a lot of "telecommuting" have done it for one reason and one reason only -- they think it will save them money. Fewer offices means less furniture and equipment, utilities, etc.
What's his net worth? I found something quoting $200 million, which would be well short of the cost of even an unmanned Mars mission. He'll have to get other investors.
Lots of other investors.
And why would you invest billions for an unmanned mission, which has already been done several times? This sounds an awful lot like someone with a big ego and some money to waste.
I'll be the first to admit that the entire patent system is a horrible mess that is now doing more harm than good. But this story is about something entirely different.
Out of 250 claimed "inventions", which include such nonsense as a "self-weighing briefcase", he invented one item, 20 years ago, which took off and sold fairly well, but has now been replaced by newer technology. Apparently he seems to think that he should be able to live forever on the royalties from that single 20 year old patent.
Horrible.... I remember when Star Wars was amazing... It's been dying a slow death the last 15 years
Or maybe you grew older and had more to compare it against. The kiddies with simple palettes and little experience seem to like episodes 1-3, much as we did when we were children during episode 4 and teenagers during episode 5. YMMV.
That;s the problem with memories.
You remember the original trilogy as being amazing and fantastic. And they were -- by 1977 standards. 35 years later, not so much. What you are actually remembering is not the movie itself but the feeling of amazement you felt when you first saw it.
Google's search engine, as well as Microsoft's (Bing), both ignore the Do Not Track header . . . . . Yahoo Search also ignored Do Not Track requests . . . . . . this has been done in order to preserve their advertising revenue.
Or, we could all stick with a previous version of Office, and Microsoft can go screw. I'm still using Office 2000. Works fine on Windows 7.
This is the correct answer.
I am still using Office 2003 because (a) It works just fine and does what I need. Newer versions contain absolutely nothing of benefit to me. (b) No "activation" or other bullshit required, which means I can easily transfer it to another computer when needed. (c) It doesn't have the god awful ribbon that was introduced with Office 2007 and rendered the program unusable.
Many years ago, before the world wide web existed, I went to some online system, maybe Compuserve, I don't remember, and I noticed that they had a bunch of forums for Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. Being a big sci-fi fan fan I thought "this sounds pretty cool." Wrong. It took me all of about 5 minutes to discover that having serious discussions about fictional characters and events is boring, pointless and just plain stupid.
Why did [some character] do [something] instead of doing [something else]? Why? Because it was in the script. That's why.
Are people really so dense they can't figure out that every movie and television show contains giant holes in the story line that don't make sense because telling the story that the writer wants to tell is the number one priority.
Every year or so Microsoft and the BSA roll out an updated report on the financial cost of software piracy. They make a similar argument, that someone who uses a pirated copy of MS Office would have otherwise bought an MS Office license. So they estimate the loss to the economy as # pirated copies * retail price of MS Office.
So it is interesting, and a bit of poetic justice, to apply that same logic to show the value of open source in the economy.
No, it just means that the open source people are now using the same bullshit lies as Microsoft and the BSA to greatly over-inflate the "value" of their software.
Slashdot Mirror
Cancel the service, you can live without cable-TV.
Agreed.
If you're using sickbeard and/or couchpotato to download TV shows from Usenet, what do you need Cox for?
Who are these people stupid enough to buy Office 2013?
Who authorized all the recent "layoffs" ?
Exactly.
The claim that there are "no bosses" is complete rubbish. There has to be a few people in charge who make decisions and act as the final authority when a group of people cannot agree about something. Otherwise, nothing would ever get done due to the fact that people are horribly imperfect.
Should we hire this person? What if the "group consensus" is that they don't like him because of his race? Who's going to tell them thats illegal?
Do we need to buy some new servers? What should we buy? How much should we charge for this latest game?
Somebody has to make those decisions. And a few million more. They might not actually have a job title with "boss" or "manager" in it, but they are still bosses and managers.
And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!
You misspelled Commodore.
Unless you buy a small one. The 750GB 7200 RPM hard drive in my laptop cost a little over $100, while an SSD of only 512GB is around $350. Close to $1000 for higher capacities.
When shopping for a hard drive I've found that you really have to look closely at the specs. If you can find them. Even for desktop hard drives, there are still a lot of 5400 and 5900 rpm drives out there.
There is nothing wrong with Office 2003. It's a utility. There are few features in the newer versions that make doing your job faster, more accurate, or cheaper.
Not where I am contracting as it is a big headache!
One of the VPs read something about the cloud and Office 365 and decided to layoff the Exchange support team and outsource it to Microsoft with outlook.com. Problem is about 500+ users in 4 continents still used Outlook 2003 when the switch went thru.
No email or calandar functions for these users! They need a browser and about 200 called the India help desk at the same time for instructions. +5 hour wait time.
FYI outlook 2003 does not support mapi. Very bad things happened and I am working overtime trying to fix it with angry hostile users with +120 tickets a week as it is with only 2 other guys trying to manage the minimalist insourced I.T.
Staying behind may look cheap and reasonable but tickets and support are skyrocketing and management is all sooo clueless on why is support costs and tickets going up! This software worked fine for 10 years! The social media integration, clouds, and soon HTML 5 versions of SAP, Kronos, Google Docs, Salesforce.com are going to hit those stuck on IE 7 next.
So it is a hassle so lets plug our ears and whine I CANT HEAR YOU. Shit will hit the fine later but in a surge like at this company that decided to go cheap with the accounting department running through 3 different outsources to do I.T. Office 2003 is surely not a utility when we went to the cloud.
Sadly, you have completely missed the point. Switching to Office 365 and "the cloud" got you nothing but trouble. And it's not the fault of your "outdated" Office 2003. Once again, someone who is in a position of power, and who doesn't belong there due to their total clulessness, made a gigantic bonehead decision.
All in all, $100 *is cheap* - till next year, at least..
That's the problem.
If my copy of Office 2003 had been sold as a subscription only for $100 a year, I would have paid $1000 so far. And along the way I would probably been forced to "upgrade" to the completely unusable newer versions.
You aren't going to be able to sell business on something, even if the price is lower, if it isn't going to give them anything they aren't already getting
Which is exactly why most businesses aren't running Linux and Open Office on all their desktops. It's also why there are still millions of people using Windows XP and Office 2003. Contrary to Microsoft's PR department, newer versions of Windows and Office don't give users any benefits that even come close to outweighing the enormous cost of changing.
I watched some HD Youtube videos of Crysis 3 at max settings. Sure, the graphics are great from an engineering perspective, but artistically? All they seem to have done is made it look as realistic as possible. Where's the imagination?
Also, the article linked mentions the composer deserves an award. Sorry, but all I heard were "music effects" rather than any sort of soundtrack. Maybe I was watching the wrong videos...?
That's the problem. Creating super high resolution graphics is strictly a technical issue. With a little knowledge, anyone can do it. Actually coming up with a compelling/interesting story line requires a lot of creativity, and that is a talent few people have. It's the same reason why movies have a gazillion dollars worth of special effects but the movie sucks.
The thing is, they could probably stand to make a lot of money if they weren't quite so predatory. I think that for the most part, the people who bought the groupons were quite happy. However, the businesses who offered the groupons often got shafted. I'm sure they could easily change the way they they deal with businesses to make sure they have a much better experience. For instance, most of the time they push for no limits on the number of coupons sold. Instead, there should always be a limit, because most businesses aren't set up to handle the amount of business that Groupon could send to them. Groupon would still make money off the deal, and would probably even have some repeat business.
Even if Groupon were less "predatory" it's still a bad deal for businesses. Businesses are losing money on every sale that uses a Groupon based on the hope that it will generate repeat business. But a couple of years experience with Groupon has shown that it just doesn't happen.
People go in, get their good deal, and then move on to the next deal. That's not theory or opinion, those are the words of the many business owners who lost a lot of money dealing with Groupon.
I'm not sure that's really what happened. I'll bet it's more like Google looked at their books, said "WTF???" and let Groupon "back away" from the deal to save face.
That's a very real possibility. Another possibility is that Andrew Mason really did turn down Google's offer because he knew it would kill his scam. Google isn't just going to walk in and hand them a check for $6 Billion. There's a lot of "due diligence".
Groupon was cooking the books, losing money but showing profitability. Mason was probably worried that if word got out that Google killed the deal because of what they found, Groupon would be tainted and that could put a serious damper on their IPO.
Don't cry for Andrew Mason, the fired CEO. Thanks to Groupon's IPO he leaves a pretty wealthy guy. Which is what this was really all about all along.
Every conservative on the court supports unreviewable police power and opposes civil liberties: is anyone surprised?
No one is surprised, and that's the worst part. Despite 40+ years of conservatives claiming to be great lovers and defenders of the constitution, their track record has been exactly the opposite.
They're either the same companies (Time-Warner cable), or they're in cahoots (Verizon with their NFL deals, Comcast with their sports networks).
I'm surprised that it has taken so long for someone to mention this. This is not a case of ISPs "going along" or "being on the side of" the RIAA/MPAA. The 6 major ISPs who are pulling this crap ARE the RIAA/MPAA. Every one of them owns or is owned by movie studios, TV networks, record companies, etc.
For new spiffy pages, new spiffy URLs. Yes folks, you can have a DIFFERENT URL for new content. Funny how Mayer spent so much time in the biz and doesn't know that.
She's an executive. She doesn't need to know those things. She has people who take care of that.
based on the idea the Mayer might turn that company around.
Best joke of the week.
But seriously, Yahoo is too far gone. They've been under incompetent leadership for so long that nobody can turn them around now. They're already dead. They just haven't realized it yet.
Jason Fried argues that less productivity happens at the office.
Jason Fried
That's his opinion. And he's wrong.
I get lots of work done at work. It's the only place that i work. If you aren't getting work done at work, then you're doing it wrong.
I have a feeling (and it's only a guess admittedly) that this is Mayer trying to stamp her manner of working onto the company. Being present and having a hand in as many different projects as possible is a pretty good way to become a top executive in a company.
You're absolutely right. This is very common, not just at the CEO level but at all levels of management. Whenever someone takes over a particular position they immediately begin making all sorts of changes and the reason is simple. If everything works out then they can take all the credit and say "I was responsible for that".
Unfortunately, this mindset frequently results in making lots of changes just for the sake of change. Things aren't better, they're just different. It also frequently results in making lots of changes that actually make things worse.
Last time I looked, remote workers seemed to be the wave of the future.
Companies that use a lot of "telecommuting" have done it for one reason and one reason only -- they think it will save them money. Fewer offices means less furniture and equipment, utilities, etc.
What's his net worth? I found something quoting $200 million, which would be well short of the cost of even an unmanned Mars mission. He'll have to get other investors.
Lots of other investors.
And why would you invest billions for an unmanned mission, which has already been done several times? This sounds an awful lot like someone with a big ego and some money to waste.
He really needs to read this before spending any money.
I'll be the first to admit that the entire patent system is a horrible mess that is now doing more harm than good. But this story is about something entirely different.
Out of 250 claimed "inventions", which include such nonsense as a "self-weighing briefcase", he invented one item, 20 years ago, which took off and sold fairly well, but has now been replaced by newer technology. Apparently he seems to think that he should be able to live forever on the royalties from that single 20 year old patent.
Horrible.... I remember when Star Wars was amazing... It's been dying a slow death the last 15 years
Or maybe you grew older and had more to compare it against. The kiddies with simple palettes and little experience seem to like episodes 1-3, much as we did when we were children during episode 4 and teenagers during episode 5. YMMV.
That;s the problem with memories.
You remember the original trilogy as being amazing and fantastic. And they were -- by 1977 standards. 35 years later, not so much. What you are actually remembering is not the movie itself but the feeling of amazement you felt when you first saw it.
Google's search engine, as well as Microsoft's (Bing), both ignore the Do Not Track header . . . . . Yahoo Search also ignored Do Not Track requests . . . . . . this has been done in order to preserve their advertising revenue.
File this under: Well, DUH!!!
Or, we could all stick with a previous version of Office, and Microsoft can go screw. I'm still using Office 2000. Works fine on Windows 7.
This is the correct answer.
I am still using Office 2003 because (a) It works just fine and does what I need. Newer versions contain absolutely nothing of benefit to me. (b) No "activation" or other bullshit required, which means I can easily transfer it to another computer when needed. (c) It doesn't have the god awful ribbon that was introduced with Office 2007 and rendered the program unusable.
Many years ago, before the world wide web existed, I went to some online system, maybe Compuserve, I don't remember, and I noticed that they had a bunch of forums for Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. Being a big sci-fi fan fan I thought "this sounds pretty cool." Wrong. It took me all of about 5 minutes to discover that having serious discussions about fictional characters and events is boring, pointless and just plain stupid.
Why did [some character] do [something] instead of doing [something else]?
Why? Because it was in the script. That's why.
Are people really so dense they can't figure out that every movie and television show contains giant holes in the story line that don't make sense because telling the story that the writer wants to tell is the number one priority.
Every year or so Microsoft and the BSA roll out an updated report on the financial cost of software piracy. They make a similar argument, that someone who uses a pirated copy of MS Office would have otherwise bought an MS Office license. So they estimate the loss to the economy as # pirated copies * retail price of MS Office.
So it is interesting, and a bit of poetic justice, to apply that same logic to show the value of open source in the economy.
No, it just means that the open source people are now using the same bullshit lies as Microsoft and the BSA to greatly over-inflate the "value" of their software.