I'll second everything in the parent post including the joy of leaving the company last year. I had joined in the late 90's and saw the party slowly end and the crushing grip of earnings expectations squeeze every last penny out of the soul of each employee, especially anyone with talent.
The company has been transformed by Palmisano into a company eating machine. The buying spree started around 2001 and has only increased. After each purchase of a company, any products it has are fed into the IBM sales machine which promises the world to every customer. Development then gets its hands on it and tries to graft every interface imaginable and scale it to hundreds of times anything that had ever been tried. Bandaids are wrapped on the thousands of issues that arise during this process and the product enters a permanent maintenance mode until another company is purchased with a similar product to replace it. Once replaced, it is summarily shat into the dung heap of end-of-life'd IBM crapware.
All "innovation" in IBM is now focused simply on how to make the Frankenstein mess of products the company has acquired over the past decade work with each other in only the simplest ways. No more room for real developers and in fact most good ones have either headed for the doors or are in the process of doing so.
If you want KVM with the manageability of VMWare, then oVirt is what you're looking for. Fee as well, open source and RedHat is investing heavily in it as they base their RedHat Enterprise Virtualization Manager product on it.
Solar panels are close to 40% efficient? As in, I can buy one of those now? Tell that to Sun Power that just released a panel with "World Record Breaking" efficiency of 21.5%.
> Wages in the US have not been on an inevitable downward march,
Adjusted for inflation, this statement is bullshit. Since 1999, household income has *fallen.* That's 14 solid years.
But hey, you go look up these facts yourself. They're googleable.
-- BMO
Umm, I'm not sure where you got your data since you didn't provide a source, but googling produced something different. Inflation adjusted wages have been pretty flat since 2000 at every income level. I actually have graphs to back this up. The bottom shows them going up from 2000 to 2007 and then dropping as would be expected in a recession.
How about the probes we have zipping around all over the solar system? Messenger is collecting tons of information about Mercury. Of course, our information on Mars is growing by leaps and bounds by the month and we have a probe on its way to Pluto due to arrive in a few years.
All done by NASA. The U.S. space program has continued to do great science since Voyager was launched and will continue into the future. Name another country that's even close.
I read through the rules. It's nothing short of slave labor. They pay for only a few submissions and according to the rules every submission whether it wins or not is completely owned by Atari with all rights and copyrights included.
Oh and the "prizes" for the winners are only actually potential prizes. The actual amount paid is based on a percentage of the revenue from the game with the "prize" as the maximum.
I see, it's possible that someone healthy can die from the flu. Therefore I need to be totally worried about it. Let's just ignore the statistical probability. It's possible, therefore I need to spend lots of time thinking about it and preparing.
Half a million? What is that, worldwide? In the U.S. it's more like 30 to 40 thousand and that includes all kinds of people who are extremely vulnerable such as the very old. Among normal healthy adults and children influenza is not nearly the killer it's made out to be in the news.
People need to start living life in reality and stop making so many decisions based on extreme cases found throughout the news.
William Wallace: "Every man dies. Note every man really lives."
Live your damn life to the fullest and don't spend so much time on this shit.
You realize you've just selected yourself out of the gene pool. Not trying to be an ass, but from the sound of it maybe that's a good thing for the human race.
We're talking about the cost to the healthcare system, not some cost to society which is completely subjective anyway.
If it doesn't cost the healthcare system more, then we shouldn't be taxing it extra to pay for it. Simple as that.
If you want to just tax bad things because it's easy to pass those taxes, that's one thing. But just don't do it under the pretext of paying for healthcare.
Actually, while smoking tends to be more expensive it is completely offset by the savings later on by dieing earlier. In fact, there was a study done a little while ago that finally proved what every health care government system hates to hear because it makes it harder to raise taxes for no reason.
Both smoking and obesity don't cost the health care system any more over the long haul.
You're just not getting it. Here's another analogy that will hopefully clarify why they are two completely different things.
Suppose Julian wanted to print out a thousand page book containing the classified material and sell it in Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble doesn't really want to have something like that on their shelves so they decide not to sell it. Then some protesters proceed to block the entrance to the stores, not allowing anyone in or out just because they wouldn't sell Julian's book of CLASSIFIED government documents.
And this sounds right to you? Really? Because at this point you're denying the business the right to choose how they run their business. Julian can sell his book at other places just fine, but just because this one doesn't do it, it's time to raise the pitch forks and light the fires.
Right. Because that's workedsowell. Keep in mind that these refer to apps that made it through the vetting process.
Actually, your examples do in fact prove how well the process is working.
Not one of the apps you describe scammed people out of money or information. They are all examples of developers using other methods to get their apps to the top of the store list to get more people to buy them.
If that's the best you can come up with, then I think that speaks volumes to how good a job Apple is actually doing.
I for one am glad they decided to reinvent the smart phone in general. Before the iphone, we were being lead down a pretty shitty smartphone path by Microsoft, RIM, and even Palm.
I must say, at a certain point it get's old having to constantly fight every battle like this over really benign stuff. You're clearly very into computers, as am I, but for 95% of people out there, they aren't (AND SHOULDN'T) going to spend any time on this. I mean, who cares really? A small hard core group of people will complain and Google will likely change based on them alone.
Gaaah! Do something more important with your lives! You guys make this sound like Google went out and stabbed a bunch of puppies and sent their dead carcasses to your mom's house for mother's day.
This appears to be the only thing you cited that distinguishes the two examples. Nowhere in that article does it state that she attempted to fire the librarian. Is there somewhere else you're getting this information or are you just pulling shit out of your ass to save face?
There's actually a much simpler and more accurate explanation as to why elephants or whales (largest brains on the planet) are not smarter than us. Intelligence is correlated closely with the ratio between the size of the brain and overall size of the animal.
Humans have the highest brain mass to body mass ratio of any animal on the planet.
Everyone always points to the Scandinavian countries as the model socialist system. That's all well and good when you're exporting the 3rd most oil in the WORLD and the money goes directly to the government.
In Norway, fully 25% of GDP comes from oil production. If they didn't have that massive influx of money, especially compared to population size, do you think it would be so easy to have that wonderful socialized government? I think not.
It is simply not a reproduceable situation. In other words, BZZZZZ.... wrong!!!!
As they stated in the article, they had to immunosupress the mice so that they wouldn't reject the human brain tumor that was put in their brain. This suppression allowed the virus to make its way to the cancer cells without being attacked and killed.
To do this in a normal human being, the virus would have to be engineered in such a way that the immune system somehow let's it go.
Now we have a virus that is engineered to avoid a human immune response. Throw in a dose of your mutation where it attacks human brain cells and we could have a SERIOUS problem on our hands. Scary.
Call it Warcraft IV. And make them wait in line for days. You'd have hundreds lined up waiting to get in, although most would be armed with plastic light sabers and nerf guns.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll second everything in the parent post including the joy of leaving the company last year. I had joined in the late 90's and saw the party slowly end and the crushing grip of earnings expectations squeeze every last penny out of the soul of each employee, especially anyone with talent.
The company has been transformed by Palmisano into a company eating machine. The buying spree started around 2001 and has only increased. After each purchase of a company, any products it has are fed into the IBM sales machine which promises the world to every customer. Development then gets its hands on it and tries to graft every interface imaginable and scale it to hundreds of times anything that had ever been tried. Bandaids are wrapped on the thousands of issues that arise during this process and the product enters a permanent maintenance mode until another company is purchased with a similar product to replace it. Once replaced, it is summarily shat into the dung heap of end-of-life'd IBM crapware.
All "innovation" in IBM is now focused simply on how to make the Frankenstein mess of products the company has acquired over the past decade work with each other in only the simplest ways. No more room for real developers and in fact most good ones have either headed for the doors or are in the process of doing so.
If you want KVM with the manageability of VMWare, then oVirt is what you're looking for. Fee as well, open source and RedHat is investing heavily in it as they base their RedHat Enterprise Virtualization Manager product on it.
http://www.ovirt.org/
Solar panels are close to 40% efficient? As in, I can buy one of those now? Tell that to Sun Power that just released a panel with "World Record Breaking" efficiency of 21.5%.
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/03/5312696/sunpower-launches-x-series-family.html
> Wages in the US have not been on an inevitable downward march,
Adjusted for inflation, this statement is bullshit. Since 1999, household income has *fallen.* That's 14 solid years.
But hey, you go look up these facts yourself. They're googleable.
--
BMO
Umm, I'm not sure where you got your data since you didn't provide a source, but googling produced something different. Inflation adjusted wages have been pretty flat since 2000 at every income level. I actually have graphs to back this up. The bottom shows them going up from 2000 to 2007 and then dropping as would be expected in a recession.
http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/household-income.html?household-incomes-mean-real.gif
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_real_median_household_income_1967_-_2011.PNG
So what war did Obama take us into to produce the massive spike in spending in the last four years?
How about the probes we have zipping around all over the solar system? Messenger is collecting tons of information about Mercury. Of course, our information on Mars is growing by leaps and bounds by the month and we have a probe on its way to Pluto due to arrive in a few years.
All done by NASA. The U.S. space program has continued to do great science since Voyager was launched and will continue into the future. Name another country that's even close.
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
Hmm, kind of reminds me of this:
http://www.atari.com/pongdeveloperchallenge
I read through the rules. It's nothing short of slave labor. They pay for only a few submissions and according to the rules every submission whether it wins or not is completely owned by Atari with all rights and copyrights included.
Oh and the "prizes" for the winners are only actually potential prizes. The actual amount paid is based on a percentage of the revenue from the game with the "prize" as the maximum.
What a f| |cking scam.
Agreed, except mine wasn't a strawman argument. Feel free to explain.
I see, it's possible that someone healthy can die from the flu. Therefore I need to be totally worried about it. Let's just ignore the statistical probability. It's possible, therefore I need to spend lots of time thinking about it and preparing.
You're part of the problem, not the solution.
Half a million? What is that, worldwide? In the U.S. it's more like 30 to 40 thousand and that includes all kinds of people who are extremely vulnerable such as the very old. Among normal healthy adults and children influenza is not nearly the killer it's made out to be in the news.
People need to start living life in reality and stop making so many decisions based on extreme cases found throughout the news.
William Wallace: "Every man dies. Note every man really lives."
Live your damn life to the fullest and don't spend so much time on this shit.
You realize you've just selected yourself out of the gene pool. Not trying to be an ass, but from the sound of it maybe that's a good thing for the human race.
We're talking about the cost to the healthcare system, not some cost to society which is completely subjective anyway.
If it doesn't cost the healthcare system more, then we shouldn't be taxing it extra to pay for it. Simple as that.
If you want to just tax bad things because it's easy to pass those taxes, that's one thing. But just don't do it under the pretext of paying for healthcare.
Actually, while smoking tends to be more expensive it is completely offset by the savings later on by dieing earlier. In fact, there was a study done a little while ago that finally proved what every health care government system hates to hear because it makes it harder to raise taxes for no reason.
Both smoking and obesity don't cost the health care system any more over the long haul.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748884.html
You're just not getting it. Here's another analogy that will hopefully clarify why they are two completely different things.
Suppose Julian wanted to print out a thousand page book containing the classified material and sell it in Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble doesn't really want to have something like that on their shelves so they decide not to sell it. Then some protesters proceed to block the entrance to the stores, not allowing anyone in or out just because they wouldn't sell Julian's book of CLASSIFIED government documents.
And this sounds right to you? Really? Because at this point you're denying the business the right to choose how they run their business. Julian can sell his book at other places just fine, but just because this one doesn't do it, it's time to raise the pitch forks and light the fires.
Right. Because that's worked so well. Keep in mind that these refer to apps that made it through the vetting process.
Actually, your examples do in fact prove how well the process is working.
Not one of the apps you describe scammed people out of money or information. They are all examples of developers using other methods to get their apps to the top of the store list to get more people to buy them.
If that's the best you can come up with, then I think that speaks volumes to how good a job Apple is actually doing.
I for one am glad they decided to reinvent the smart phone in general. Before the iphone, we were being lead down a pretty shitty smartphone path by Microsoft, RIM, and even Palm.
I must say, at a certain point it get's old having to constantly fight every battle like this over really benign stuff. You're clearly very into computers, as am I, but for 95% of people out there, they aren't (AND SHOULDN'T) going to spend any time on this. I mean, who cares really? A small hard core group of people will complain and Google will likely change based on them alone.
Gaaah! Do something more important with your lives! You guys make this sound like Google went out and stabbed a bunch of puppies and sent their dead carcasses to your mom's house for mother's day.
It's all plumbing and electrical work.
Send in Joe the Plumber!
No, but attempting to fire the librarian sure is.
This appears to be the only thing you cited that distinguishes the two examples. Nowhere in that article does it state that she attempted to fire the librarian. Is there somewhere else you're getting this information or are you just pulling shit out of your ass to save face?
You're a douche. The previous sentence is true.
There's actually a much simpler and more accurate explanation as to why elephants or whales (largest brains on the planet) are not smarter than us. Intelligence is correlated closely with the ratio between the size of the brain and overall size of the animal.
Humans have the highest brain mass to body mass ratio of any animal on the planet.
Everyone always points to the Scandinavian countries as the model socialist system. That's all well and good when you're exporting the 3rd most oil in the WORLD and the money goes directly to the government.
In Norway, fully 25% of GDP comes from oil production. If they didn't have that massive influx of money, especially compared to population size, do you think it would be so easy to have that wonderful socialized government? I think not.
It is simply not a reproduceable situation. In other words, BZZZZZ.... wrong!!!!
More information here: http://www.norway.org.uk/policy/trade/oil/oil.htm
As they stated in the article, they had to immunosupress the mice so that they wouldn't reject the human brain tumor that was put in their brain. This suppression allowed the virus to make its way to the cancer cells without being attacked and killed.
To do this in a normal human being, the virus would have to be engineered in such a way that the immune system somehow let's it go.
Now we have a virus that is engineered to avoid a human immune response. Throw in a dose of your mutation where it attacks human brain cells and we could have a SERIOUS problem on our hands. Scary.
Call it Warcraft IV. And make them wait in line for days. You'd have hundreds lined up waiting to get in, although most would be armed with plastic light sabers and nerf guns.