why would any company try and cripple it's self with the plysical location of being in Silicon Valley? you have to pay 10 times what your competitors do in the midwest and the south do for the building, labor,equipment,supplies,everything.
Exactly! I don't know why all those morons in Silicon Valley didn't see this coming; it's not like it's without historical prescident, right?
For instance, remember back in 1920 when all of those financial companies moved out of Manhattan to the midwest? Having the NASDAQ based in Eau Claire, WI was a great cost-saving move, and I must say that the 100-story Merrill-Lynch building in Rochester, MN is a thing of beauty. In fact, I was in New York last year, and the ghost town that is Manhattan was just sort of creepy -- guess that's what happens when things get too expensive.
Seriously: Business flourishes in a hot-house environment because it draws people. If you want to living the the South, be my guest, but don't fool yourself and believe that there's going to be some sort of outflow to other parts of the country.
People always say that the SV's days are numbered whenever there's a slump; you always hear about how all the jobs are migrating to Virginia or Texas or Wisconsin or wherever, but it's just not so.
Everyone here recognizes that this is where all the tech companies are, that this is where the Next Big Thing will come out of, and this is where everyone will want to be two years from now. It's worked that way a half dozen times in a row, and I don't see any reason to believe that this is about to change.
People have a way of ignoring long term cycles and focusing only on what's right in front of them -- this is why so many seemingly smart people got burned when the bubble popped, why so many people still say the Bay Area housing market is invincible, and why people are yet again prognosticating that the Silicon Valley's days are over.
Well, I wouldn't put my money on it. In fact, I can't think of anyplace else I'd want to be right now -- the low points are actually the big opportunities. Take the long view, then talk to me in a few years.
The American dream is not "make money in America and use it to support a family back in another country where the cost of living is pennies on the dollar". In fact, it has a lot to do with things other than economics, but what the hell, right?
Retail computers are and will continue to be an important market, especially for first-time computer buyers or more casual users. I can't imagine that the retail outlets would ever allow one company to get any sort of real hold on this markets -- why deal with a monopoly on a commodity item?
With the current state of the (US) economy, it's a very smart move for hp & compaq to merge.
I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent
on your police work there, Lou.
Big mergers are tough to pull off in the best of circumstances. At a very nuts-and-bolts level, there's an awful lot of operations work to be done in integrating a company -- standardizing procedures, eliminating redundant staff and offices, etc. This is far from easy to do, and it is an operation that's been bungled more times than I can count by companies that should have known better, and Fiorina doesn't have any solid operations experience.
Then there's the culture clash. I interned with SGI at what used to be a Cray location back in '98, and the culture war was in full swing. Ultimately, it was the refusal of Cray die-hards to integrate (which resulted largely from the treatment of them as second-class citizens by Mountain View) that really caused SGI to puke Cray back out again.
Furthermore, all of this takes the company's attention from the market, which neither HP nor Compaq can afford to do right now. HP's core imaging products are under assault, their workstation business has taken tremendous hits in the last five years and their overall reputation as a company has gone down the tubes (remember when it was a good thing to have an HP printer? I do). Compaq is also reeling after losing substantial market share to companies like Dell; add to this the fact that Best Buy is coming out with an in-house brand, and they've got trouble.
According to an interview I heard on NPR with Fiorina, she's hoping that HP will emerge as an IBM -- a large tech conglomerate with many profit-making business units. The problem is, they're trying to do it with two units (PCs and imaging) that IBM found unprofitable enough to get (mostly) out of.
Now, add to all this the fact that this is hardly the "best of times" -- Fiorina and the other pro-merger folks have managed to alienate roughly half of their investors, including several board members and two guys with framiliar-sounding last names. There's considerable dissent within HP, too; trust me, I had lunch in a bar a block from HP's Cupertino campus last week (the Duke; I like the chicken sandwitches and Newcastle), and a lot of the conversation I overheard was downright angry.
So I think it's a mistake. There's not a lot of historical prescedence for this sort of merger working well, you're combining two ailing companies and expecting to see a healthy one emerge, and there are going to be too many internal distractions, anyhow.
If I held HP stock, I'd wait for the dust to settle a little and sell it (at this point, even if the merger doesn't go through). If you want to be in PCs, buy Dell. If you want to own shares in IBM, buy IBM.
Interesting; I'm taking my version ofthe story from p. 194-195 of Linus's book "Just for Fun". It could well be glossing things over, though.
Re:Gotta represent (er, maintain)
on
More Marcelo Tosatti
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Hmm... has to be somewhat ironic that the backlash to the apex of capitalism (MS) has created a socialist system (the open source and free software movements) that is being guided by a monarchy, as you've put it.
Hm, I'm not sure it's fair to present open source (or, more accurately, RMS's free software movement) as being a reaction to MS's complete success in the capitalist system. If you look back, I think you'll see that RMS concieved the copyleft because a number of projects he was working on suddenly went commercial, leaving his out of the loop and separated from the hard work he'd been putting in.
And Linux isn't the only OSS system, just the most successful. But yeah, it is a benevolent dictatorship, and yeah, that is somewhat ironic, but maybe that's the way it ultimately needs to be...
Does it strike anyone else as strange that the Linux kernel is still run by a small monarchy?
Seriously: Linus is the king, and he's surrounded by a small contingency of advisors who filter what gets through to him. I'm not suggesting that these people aren't all very deserving, but it seems odd that nobody else is cranking out any sort of alternative. MS or Sun can't be considered serious competitors (not on the same page), and all the BSD's seem to have been pushed to the fringe. This leaves other Linux kernels, and there are none.
I suspect this is because you just can't compete with Linus -- after all, he is the man. Still, it seems to me that this leads to a lack of internal competition in a very important area of overall systems development, which can't be a Good Thing (tm); consider how much KDE and GNOME have benefitted from having each other to race against. The kernel, on the other hand, exists mainly on the preferences of a small number of people.
Of course, Linus historically has shown great insticts; he's only been really wrong once that I can remember. This might sound like a call for fragmentation, but I still can't help but think that being open is good, but being open and competing against someone else is even better.
This sort of thing is a sure-fire symptom of inept management.
Ideally, employees should be gauged on performance items: do they do the work they're given, does their work reflect a high level of quality, does the employee both fill their job description and give that extra 10% (participating in meetings, giving a shit about the product, etc) you expect from employees, etc.
Things like monitoring web access are on the other end of that. This is more on the level of companies that rate their employees by how many hours a week they spend at their desk or who eats lunch in the office. These things are quantifiable, but in the end are a lot less meaningful (for example, at my last job there were people who'd spend 14 hours a day at work, but who couldn't make a deadline to save their souls).
But hey, it's tough find good managers. And even when you find them, they tend to be expensive. It's much cheaper to hire people with degrees in business from state colleges and experience bossing their dog around. I'm looking at you, Nadir.
ISP's can't be liable for things like piracy because they make no attempt to control the customer's internet access, but only provide a conduit for that access.
Couldn't this apply to other companies that provide access?
As an employer, why on earth would I want to get into the whole filtering game when it could conceivably bite me in the ass?
Besides that, can you imagine sitting at your desk for ten hours a day with no decent distractions? It seems like a great way to kill morale without providing any sort of advantage to the employer.
Well, in fairness, there's a good reason why you can't just leave a developer to go on a six month project.
This is why the iterative development method is useful -- you set a certain number of things you want to see done by such-and-such a date (best done with the interaction of the developer), then if it's not done the developer better have a good reason.
This approach works on most development projects (with the possible exception of very new projects with no existing product) and only when at least the lower level managers understand the development of the project and can participate in setting the goals.
Oh, and here's the big secret: then you build on an extra 15 days for every six months of the project and don't tell anyone involved with the development. That way, you look like a hero if it gets done in time and don't lose your job if its not. Don't tell anyone.
Hey, that's a time-honored management staple -- I think JWZ once described Marc Andreesen as the guy who'd wave his hand in meetings and say "these aren't the droids you're looking for" (for the record, this was portrayed as a good thing).
If the governments going to bail out every failing business and their employees then we may as well stop working!
I think you misread: the Canadian system allows the employees to go after the management, not for them to be reimbursed by the government. This prevents debacles like Enron where the top dogs walk away with millions by fucking the rank-and-file.
It's not like this is without prescedence; the whole civil law system is based on making people pay for doing crummy things to other people. If I steal your car and wreck it, you can sue me to force me to buy you a new one. You seem to be saying that it's my fault the car got stolen in the first place.
I believe in the existing US system, the employees who are owed money get first crack at what's left in a bankruptcy. Canada just takes it a logical step further; here we have to have the SEC investigate and freeze excessive bonuses and pay, like they're going with the Enron execs. Sure, it's not the bullet in the head they deserve, but at least it's something.
Look at most start-ups and you see two types - the very young and the very rich.
How very 1999 of you. Personally, working at startups, I've seen a lot of a third group: the formerly rich-on-paper who work so much their kids don't recognize them at the holiday parties.
Startups tend to be a breeding place for workaholics. I'm all for spending as much time as I need to at work, but I've watched people literally destroy their families by working 90 hour weeks, then get laid off and have two weeks pay to show for it rather than the untold riches they'd been hoping for.
Cautionary tale, I suppose. I still like working for startups and I'd do it again, but you've got to remember to control the workplace environment rather than letting it control you.
Ugh, what was I thinking last night? I haven't mixed alcohol and computing since that time in college when I changed my root password and couldn't remember it the next morning.
Paste everything in a long movie (Score:1)
by Semi_War on Saturday March 09, @05:22AM (#3134485)
Take a look at that comment. See how they said exactly what you said, only about a half hour earlier? This mean that you should have your formulated your own unique thoughts rather than echoing another/.er.
Of course, I'm f*cking loaded, so time is progressing at odd speeds for me, but I still think you're just "Me Too!"ing your way across the board.
Yeah, but doing Dance #4 should keep a lot of the Natelie Portman trolls occuppied for weeks to come. You can't tell me that's a bad thing.
Besides, it's more the flash animation that the dialog that keeps the whole thing interesting. The image of the Queen Amidala character ODing is art in itself, at least as much as the stuff hanging on the walls in museams. Besides, the fact that it uses a lot of Pulp Fiction is a great example of the value of Constitutionally-protected parody, ain't it?
And my UID is still lower than yours. Damn, I'm loaded.
Man, it's a good think I'm sitting here alone, drunk on a Saturday morning at 2:17 AM PST, 'cause I got a good look at the thing before it got Slashdotted.
Er, okay, that sounds even more loserly than general, doesn't it?
Anyhow, very good stuff. I mean, it was a little lame at times (yeah, Pulp Fiction seeded with Star Wars terminology!), but I'm definately sending it to my non-geek friends when the/. effect wears off. Then again, I'm pretty loaded, so this is opinion is obviously open to revision sometime tomorrow morning around 11.
Crap, I'm getting modded down for this, aren't I? Oh yeah, well my UID is lower than yours, smart guy.
What says that technologically advanced cockroaches couldn't develope on a heavily radiated moon of a large planet?
Well. Time to increase funding to nuclear weapon reseach, then. Or at least doing some basic research into the feasibility of remotely deloying really big roach motels.
...but it is a likely case that a one could cause the destruction of the human race unless we populate another planet as well to ensure the survival of the species.
This is actually an exaggeration from hollywood -- the meteors left in our solar system are not large enough to cause a global extinction of a race as tenacious as humans.
I wouldn't so much list a second haven from extinction as a driving factor in pushing to colonize Mars. Instead, I think that our very basic instinct to push outwards is what will drive us there -- whenever people think they can expand into an area, they go for it. We find the resources we need, we adapt to the environment, and (when necessary) we beat down the locals (even when the locals are us).
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! I don't know why all those morons in Silicon Valley didn't see this coming; it's not like it's without historical prescident, right?
For instance, remember back in 1920 when all of those financial companies moved out of Manhattan to the midwest? Having the NASDAQ based in Eau Claire, WI was a great cost-saving move, and I must say that the 100-story Merrill-Lynch building in Rochester, MN is a thing of beauty. In fact, I was in New York last year, and the ghost town that is Manhattan was just sort of creepy -- guess that's what happens when things get too expensive.
Seriously: Business flourishes in a hot-house environment because it draws people. If you want to living the the South, be my guest, but don't fool yourself and believe that there's going to be some sort of outflow to other parts of the country.
Everyone here recognizes that this is where all the tech companies are, that this is where the Next Big Thing will come out of, and this is where everyone will want to be two years from now. It's worked that way a half dozen times in a row, and I don't see any reason to believe that this is about to change.
People have a way of ignoring long term cycles and focusing only on what's right in front of them -- this is why so many seemingly smart people got burned when the bubble popped, why so many people still say the Bay Area housing market is invincible, and why people are yet again prognosticating that the Silicon Valley's days are over.
Well, I wouldn't put my money on it. In fact, I can't think of anyplace else I'd want to be right now -- the low points are actually the big opportunities. Take the long view, then talk to me in a few years.
The American dream is not "make money in America and use it to support a family back in another country where the cost of living is pennies on the dollar". In fact, it has a lot to do with things other than economics, but what the hell, right?
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/feb200 2/nf2002021_9293.htm
Retail computers are and will continue to be an important market, especially for first-time computer buyers or more casual users. I can't imagine that the retail outlets would ever allow one company to get any sort of real hold on this markets -- why deal with a monopoly on a commodity item?
I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou.
Big mergers are tough to pull off in the best of circumstances. At a very nuts-and-bolts level, there's an awful lot of operations work to be done in integrating a company -- standardizing procedures, eliminating redundant staff and offices, etc. This is far from easy to do, and it is an operation that's been bungled more times than I can count by companies that should have known better, and Fiorina doesn't have any solid operations experience.
Then there's the culture clash. I interned with SGI at what used to be a Cray location back in '98, and the culture war was in full swing. Ultimately, it was the refusal of Cray die-hards to integrate (which resulted largely from the treatment of them as second-class citizens by Mountain View) that really caused SGI to puke Cray back out again.
Furthermore, all of this takes the company's attention from the market, which neither HP nor Compaq can afford to do right now. HP's core imaging products are under assault, their workstation business has taken tremendous hits in the last five years and their overall reputation as a company has gone down the tubes (remember when it was a good thing to have an HP printer? I do). Compaq is also reeling after losing substantial market share to companies like Dell; add to this the fact that Best Buy is coming out with an in-house brand, and they've got trouble.
According to an interview I heard on NPR with Fiorina, she's hoping that HP will emerge as an IBM -- a large tech conglomerate with many profit-making business units. The problem is, they're trying to do it with two units (PCs and imaging) that IBM found unprofitable enough to get (mostly) out of.
Now, add to all this the fact that this is hardly the "best of times" -- Fiorina and the other pro-merger folks have managed to alienate roughly half of their investors, including several board members and two guys with framiliar-sounding last names. There's considerable dissent within HP, too; trust me, I had lunch in a bar a block from HP's Cupertino campus last week (the Duke; I like the chicken sandwitches and Newcastle), and a lot of the conversation I overheard was downright angry.
So I think it's a mistake. There's not a lot of historical prescedence for this sort of merger working well, you're combining two ailing companies and expecting to see a healthy one emerge, and there are going to be too many internal distractions, anyhow.
If I held HP stock, I'd wait for the dust to settle a little and sell it (at this point, even if the merger doesn't go through). If you want to be in PCs, buy Dell. If you want to own shares in IBM, buy IBM.
Interesting; I'm taking my version ofthe story from p. 194-195 of Linus's book "Just for Fun". It could well be glossing things over, though.
Hm, I'm not sure it's fair to present open source (or, more accurately, RMS's free software movement) as being a reaction to MS's complete success in the capitalist system. If you look back, I think you'll see that RMS concieved the copyleft because a number of projects he was working on suddenly went commercial, leaving his out of the loop and separated from the hard work he'd been putting in.
And Linux isn't the only OSS system, just the most successful. But yeah, it is a benevolent dictatorship, and yeah, that is somewhat ironic, but maybe that's the way it ultimately needs to be...
Seriously: Linus is the king, and he's surrounded by a small contingency of advisors who filter what gets through to him. I'm not suggesting that these people aren't all very deserving, but it seems odd that nobody else is cranking out any sort of alternative. MS or Sun can't be considered serious competitors (not on the same page), and all the BSD's seem to have been pushed to the fringe. This leaves other Linux kernels, and there are none.
I suspect this is because you just can't compete with Linus -- after all, he is the man. Still, it seems to me that this leads to a lack of internal competition in a very important area of overall systems development, which can't be a Good Thing (tm); consider how much KDE and GNOME have benefitted from having each other to race against. The kernel, on the other hand, exists mainly on the preferences of a small number of people.
Of course, Linus historically has shown great insticts; he's only been really wrong once that I can remember. This might sound like a call for fragmentation, but I still can't help but think that being open is good, but being open and competing against someone else is even better.
Ideally, employees should be gauged on performance items: do they do the work they're given, does their work reflect a high level of quality, does the employee both fill their job description and give that extra 10% (participating in meetings, giving a shit about the product, etc) you expect from employees, etc.
Things like monitoring web access are on the other end of that. This is more on the level of companies that rate their employees by how many hours a week they spend at their desk or who eats lunch in the office. These things are quantifiable, but in the end are a lot less meaningful (for example, at my last job there were people who'd spend 14 hours a day at work, but who couldn't make a deadline to save their souls).
But hey, it's tough find good managers. And even when you find them, they tend to be expensive. It's much cheaper to hire people with degrees in business from state colleges and experience bossing their dog around. I'm looking at you, Nadir.
ISP's can't be liable for things like piracy because they make no attempt to control the customer's internet access, but only provide a conduit for that access. Couldn't this apply to other companies that provide access? As an employer, why on earth would I want to get into the whole filtering game when it could conceivably bite me in the ass?
Besides that, can you imagine sitting at your desk for ten hours a day with no decent distractions? It seems like a great way to kill morale without providing any sort of advantage to the employer.
This is why the iterative development method is useful -- you set a certain number of things you want to see done by such-and-such a date (best done with the interaction of the developer), then if it's not done the developer better have a good reason.
This approach works on most development projects (with the possible exception of very new projects with no existing product) and only when at least the lower level managers understand the development of the project and can participate in setting the goals.
Oh, and here's the big secret: then you build on an extra 15 days for every six months of the project and don't tell anyone involved with the development. That way, you look like a hero if it gets done in time and don't lose your job if its not. Don't tell anyone.
Hot damn, I knew this thing would pay off someday! Airport security, here I come!
In a word: Scale.
Hey, that's a time-honored management staple -- I think JWZ once described Marc Andreesen as the guy who'd wave his hand in meetings and say "these aren't the droids you're looking for" (for the record, this was portrayed as a good thing).
I think you misread: the Canadian system allows the employees to go after the management, not for them to be reimbursed by the government. This prevents debacles like Enron where the top dogs walk away with millions by fucking the rank-and-file.
It's not like this is without prescedence; the whole civil law system is based on making people pay for doing crummy things to other people. If I steal your car and wreck it, you can sue me to force me to buy you a new one. You seem to be saying that it's my fault the car got stolen in the first place.
I believe in the existing US system, the employees who are owed money get first crack at what's left in a bankruptcy. Canada just takes it a logical step further; here we have to have the SEC investigate and freeze excessive bonuses and pay, like they're going with the Enron execs. Sure, it's not the bullet in the head they deserve, but at least it's something.
How very 1999 of you. Personally, working at startups, I've seen a lot of a third group: the formerly rich-on-paper who work so much their kids don't recognize them at the holiday parties.
Startups tend to be a breeding place for workaholics. I'm all for spending as much time as I need to at work, but I've watched people literally destroy their families by working 90 hour weeks, then get laid off and have two weeks pay to show for it rather than the untold riches they'd been hoping for.
Cautionary tale, I suppose. I still like working for startups and I'd do it again, but you've got to remember to control the workplace environment rather than letting it control you.
Ugh, what was I thinking last night? I haven't mixed alcohol and computing since that time in college when I changed my root password and couldn't remember it the next morning.
Paste everything in a long movie (Score:1) by Semi_War on Saturday March 09, @05:22AM (#3134485)
Take a look at that comment. See how they said exactly what you said, only about a half hour earlier? This mean that you should have your formulated your own unique thoughts rather than echoing another /.er.
Of course, I'm f*cking loaded, so time is progressing at odd speeds for me, but I still think you're just "Me Too!"ing your way across the board.
And my UID is still lower than yours.
Besides, it's more the flash animation that the dialog that keeps the whole thing interesting. The image of the Queen Amidala character ODing is art in itself, at least as much as the stuff hanging on the walls in museams. Besides, the fact that it uses a lot of Pulp Fiction is a great example of the value of Constitutionally-protected parody, ain't it?
And my UID is still lower than yours. Damn, I'm loaded.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. And my UID is still lower than yours.
Suggestion: Try watching it fuckin' plastered. Makes dealing easier, plus you get to drink a bunch of Caffrey's.
Er, okay, that sounds even more loserly than general, doesn't it?
Anyhow, very good stuff. I mean, it was a little lame at times (yeah, Pulp Fiction seeded with Star Wars terminology!), but I'm definately sending it to my non-geek friends when the /. effect wears off. Then again, I'm pretty loaded, so this is opinion is obviously open to revision sometime tomorrow morning around 11.
Crap, I'm getting modded down for this, aren't I? Oh yeah, well my UID is lower than yours, smart guy.
Well. Time to increase funding to nuclear weapon reseach, then. Or at least doing some basic research into the feasibility of remotely deloying really big roach motels.
This is actually an exaggeration from hollywood -- the meteors left in our solar system are not large enough to cause a global extinction of a race as tenacious as humans.
I wouldn't so much list a second haven from extinction as a driving factor in pushing to colonize Mars. Instead, I think that our very basic instinct to push outwards is what will drive us there -- whenever people think they can expand into an area, they go for it. We find the resources we need, we adapt to the environment, and (when necessary) we beat down the locals (even when the locals are us).