It's amazing what nearly losing the company will do for attitude. After purchasing NexTel, pissing off all the employees who gave a damn, and having to rebuild the network after deploying insanely low-quality garbage everywhere to make a buck. It'll even get the CEO to lower prices and go on TV begging people to come back. It might even get you to try something completely untested in the real world like WiMax and let your newfound customer friends be the next wave of beta-testers.
My goodness your life is hard. Imagine if you had the time you used to type that up to work on following printed directions how much easier it would have gone!
Even better is when the phone does finally get back on the network and the voice mail waiting indicator doesn't alert until the NEXT voice mail is received, days later. AT&T's back end is truly and royally fucked.
You missed water in the hardline, wind damage to an antenna, failed pre-amplifier module making the site go deaf, power loss to the module or site, loss of disciplined clock source for the GSM or back-end tie trunks causing bit errors, damage to the landline or microwave gear at satellite cell stations off the cluster, mice chewing holes in wiring or hardline, power amplifier failure, local interference sources on frequency or part of a 3rd order or other harmonic mix, crash of the controller,.... Well, you get the idea. Sadly ALL of this stuff pales on AT&T's network to the one thing they could fix -- and is on your general list -- they can't hand off site-to-site to save their ass.
Assuming you're in a covered area, say my typical 27 mile commute down I-25 through Denver one-way, each day... Which is all adequately covered by cell sites (I know where most of them are as an RF geek who looks for such things)... The only reason for dropping a call is that the network can't do a proper hand-off. Top of the hill at I-25 & Thornton Parkway, the cell on the north side of the hill and the one south of it, can't hand off to each other almost ever. Area of Invesco Field on I-25, same problem. Hill between 104th & 120th on I-25 also. Park and sit still on either side of those spots, talk until your battery is dead. Move from one cell to the next, you'll drop almost 80% of the time. Reported numerous times to AT&T customer service via both calls and their iPhone App. Nothing ever done about it. Likely reason why? GSM can't hand-off for shit when the back-end is built wrong or light on inter-site trunks.
Until we get past the idea of a MONTHLY budget, we're all screwed anyway. You need to know where you are for the year, the next five years, the rest of your life.
This thing is just a widget to part fools with their money so they'll THINK they're saving more money, just like most of the "financial" books on the shelves at booksellers.
Living below your means, means NOT buying one of these retarded things, probably. Or more succinctly, "What would you give up to have one of these?"
You don't seem to realize that this turned the process on its head.
If the company had been allowed to fail normally, the original stock would have gone to zero, and the bondholders would have perhaps been made whole (or close) by the sale of assets to new companies who would have been able to rebuild GM's VALUABLE divisions into something useful by now. And the Union would have been badly busted or at least had the crap beaten out of them by the process, etc.
That would have been all the things ALL the people who made the decisions... DESERVED.
Instead the government stepped in, "saved" the company with taxpayer fake money printed at the behest of the Treasury and handed out by the Fed, and twisted the rules of business around such that all the investors got screwed, and the people who made the decisions got to keep running their money-loser.
All at the political behest of the Unions who paid off the people voting for the bailout.
And it's so convoluted they can all make whatever wild claims they like, like "We've paid back our loans ahead of schedule" and people will debate that for years.
It's a great deal, if you can get it. Better even than the typical "Bankruptcy Car Wash" that businesses get, but individuals don't.
Well there's at least a few of us out here who also "get it" that any massive uptake of electric cars leads directly to more coal-fired plants and higher prices for electricity as the big electric companies are already whining about what electrics will do to their grids.
But "Coal-Fired Chevy Volt" does have a nice ring to it, doesn't it? That's the phrase I like to use when talking to greenies about that money-losing dog of a product. It gets their attention, but not any deeper thoughts or willingness to actually discuss it or dig for real numbers and pricing estimates.
Yes, the government bailed them out and screwed the hell out of the bondholders and original ticker owners of the stock. Screwing the stockholders, that's normal risk for any company, but screwing the bondholders... that's a whole new set of fancy fake bankruptcy rules.
So yes, they've "paid back" most of the government loan that kept them afloat after the government allowed them to pay the bondholders at a lower than normal rate for any bankruptcy.
Pretty sleazy business.
And even though I agree that any stock can go to zero and you can lose everything, as of right now, the original shareholders of GM stock are going, "WTF?" since there's a whole new ticker symbol and whole new company called "GM" that other people are invested in, making money on all this "good news" about a car that's producing a loss with every unit, but the original shareholders who stuck it out will get the joy of continuing to hold the now virtually worthless, headed for zero, stock of the previous "GM".
So clearly the moral here is that if the government steps in to bail you out, they get paid first, and your original investors are all screwed, no matter what the contract or the prospectus said. The bondholders paid back most of the loan.
If this is what investors get in the "people who have money to invest must be evil rich people, not people who saved and worked hard" world, why invest? The rules of business change at the whim of the Administration. Right now they're printing money to blow up the bubble, with no products being produced underneath the bubble to support it. Very dangerous game. It'll make the "annual" numbers for stock investors look good... until it falls.
Pump and Dump... December and February. All it will take is one world event to crash this house of cards again. Perhaps people will remain euphoric about the horrible fundamentals for no rational reason though, and it'll hold up into real summer growth. We'll see.
Were we discussing how to get it right, or just doing the usual status-quo of tech... a bunch of concepts that get over-hyped, over-paid-for, and over-blown... and then someone points out the flaws and a newer-better thing is released the next day and the original "deprecated"?
Which is a serious problem with Agile, because all organizations have some number of inexperienced people. A huge hole in the methodology and the way many companies do business is "How do we get people up to speed?"... there's been so little investment of real dollars and time on training that IT/Development is a cluster**** these days.
Because the girl wasn't a power-tripping toddler herself, screwing with the cop once she got a rise out of him? Give us a break. They're both ass-hats.
Because Apple sells what the computer industry has been MARKETING for years, but not delivering. Machines that do certain things their owners want, very well, without hassles.
This is the sales pitch of the industry for decades now. Very few of us buy computers to study their insides. Yes, we geeks like that, and maybe even enjoy designing portions of computers (I say portions since most components inside a modern computer have reached a complexity level that they're pre-packaged into "chips" by highly specialized companies consisting of a whole lot of engineers, marketing, sales, etc.)
What CEO wanted a multi-million dollar server farm with SAN and with needs worse than a baby (powered up 24/7, attendants on-call to its every need, etc) to replace their filing cabinets? They didn't want that. They bought what they thought was technology to lower costs (usually not true, and badly measured in virtually all companies) that made the information in the filing cabinets easy to get to by anyone (and then the Security folks point out that isn't correct, and order up expensive security software -- when having to get past the bosses secretary used to work almost as well as modern "security" software), and they also usually purchased on the idea that information retrieval would be faster -- which often simply isn't needed.
In general, computing "people" who are "into tech" are dying out because companies like Apple and to lesser extents others, are packaging up software and hardware to do TASKS now, not to "be a computer", which is what we wanted of the PC's of the 80s.
Apple is a packaging company, Intel and others make the computer. Apple just puts it in a shiny box and writes software specific to today's consumer desires. They also tend to follow the 80/20 rule and only make that software cover the 80, not the 20.
"Linux is obviously the best choice"... for developers. For end-users, not a chance in hell. Because end-users buy on concepts like "easy-to-use" and "fun", not on "can compile my own kernel". They don't care.
This is exactly what makes the HTC vs iPhone cartoon so damn funny. "I don't care. I don't care. I don't care." Computer folks may never really completely get this concept. Having been both a computer/tech fan, and also working in Customer Support roles for going on close to 20 years, you know what the first thing out of almost every customer's mouth is?
"It isn't doing what I was promised/thought it was supposed to do."
Apple on the other hand with their "oh so evil" closed system, tells you what it's going to do, tells you again when you install it, tells you on their website what it will do, and delivers something that is so much closer to EXACTLY THAT, that they have loyalists now who will go to the ends of the Earth for and with them.
Microsoft although being first and therefore the de facto standard virtually everywhere, has always been at a disadvantage here... they sell and OS without application software, and they fail... an OS can rarely make you happy that it "does something useful for you". Their application software then steps in, not well-integrated with the OS in some respects, and maybe even it shows that it wasn't part of a larger "finished product" since you buy it separately, and it can't deliver as high a percentage of "that does exactly what they said it needed to do, and 80% of us are satisfied" compared to Apple.
It's a marginal thing... Apple may get it right just a few more percent of the time than Microsoft, but people see this. They see the complexity and bloat of things like Office and are not only turned off, but wish there was a way to turn off 20 of the 30 "features" and just get something done. (e.g. "Ribbon" in later versions.)
Power users, love Microsoft, Linux, etc... they want to go beyond the basics that Apple promises the masses. The masses tend to say nay-nay to complexity overall. They also can dig and find complexity under the hood of OSX and iOS if they exert a litt
... is that as soon as anyone starts using the Freedom everyone so highly touts, the community starts bitchin' that successful person needs to give them something.
Either it's truly Free or it's not, folks.
(Thus why most folks who need true Freedom, and have been around the block more than once, just use BSD for their products and systems, and are done with it.)
Carpool lanes are fucked up anyway. We all pay for them, just make them normal lanes and call it good. If there's enough lanes, traffic moves. If not, we all sit together.
I hit the end, and saw that the interviewee was paid by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (Which by the way has to be the BEST name for a Foundation ever, but I digress.)
Look 'em up... they pay for opinions, and aren't even slightly apologetic for it.
Step up to the plate... a big swing... and a miss, intellectually. Since we're talkin' facts here... not paid "research".
I still think a sarcasm font is needed in the modern world... where far too much communication is done with words typed by non-brilliant normal folk who don't like to even type, let alone formulate sentences.
Just curious: What's the litmus test that no one else is "thinking for you"? Aren't we all influenced by everyone and everything we see, along with our biases learned very young from mostly our parents and their associates. Did *they* "think for us" too? (I say, yes... but interested in your opinion.)
There's one speck of good in people who watch any political commentator on any particular "side" of any issue... they're probably thinking about things a whole hell of a lot more important than the folks stuffing their pie-holes on the living room sofa watching [insert sport here, or sit-com, or whatever other entertainment one cares to mention].
Just thoughts. Although they may not truly be my own...:-)
If Obama wanted to do something effective, easy, and popular -- he wouldn't have run for President. He'd have started a business doing it. He (like all politicians) live off of your dime, and your fear that the world wouldn't turn without them.
'Round here, Xcel is forward-thinking enough about electric cars to make sure to buy off the Public Utilities Commission early on in this shift to more people using them, and get a massive change in how their rates are structured in a nice "tiered" system that will bend anyone plugging in a car at night, over and rape them repeatedly for great profit. They're not stupid. And they're hiding it under the banner of "motivation to conserve" today. Now all they have to do is wait for the slow progress on electric car technology to speed up (or buy off some more politicians in the House and Senate to vote for *required* numbers of electric cars produced) and they'll laugh all the way to the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing what nearly losing the company will do for attitude. After purchasing NexTel, pissing off all the employees who gave a damn, and having to rebuild the network after deploying insanely low-quality garbage everywhere to make a buck. It'll even get the CEO to lower prices and go on TV begging people to come back. It might even get you to try something completely untested in the real world like WiMax and let your newfound customer friends be the next wave of beta-testers.
My goodness your life is hard. Imagine if you had the time you used to type that up to work on following printed directions how much easier it would have gone!
Even better is when the phone does finally get back on the network and the voice mail waiting indicator doesn't alert until the NEXT voice mail is received, days later. AT&T's back end is truly and royally fucked.
And who certified that the Infineon chipset was okay to use on their network? Oh yeah. The carrier.
And spit in your sandwich.
You missed water in the hardline, wind damage to an antenna, failed pre-amplifier module making the site go deaf, power loss to the module or site, loss of disciplined clock source for the GSM or back-end tie trunks causing bit errors, damage to the landline or microwave gear at satellite cell stations off the cluster, mice chewing holes in wiring or hardline, power amplifier failure, local interference sources on frequency or part of a 3rd order or other harmonic mix, crash of the controller, .... Well, you get the idea. Sadly ALL of this stuff pales on AT&T's network to the one thing they could fix -- and is on your general list -- they can't hand off site-to-site to save their ass.
Assuming you're in a covered area, say my typical 27 mile commute down I-25 through Denver one-way, each day... Which is all adequately covered by cell sites (I know where most of them are as an RF geek who looks for such things)... The only reason for dropping a call is that the network can't do a proper hand-off. Top of the hill at I-25 & Thornton Parkway, the cell on the north side of the hill and the one south of it, can't hand off to each other almost ever. Area of Invesco Field on I-25, same problem. Hill between 104th & 120th on I-25 also. Park and sit still on either side of those spots, talk until your battery is dead. Move from one cell to the next, you'll drop almost 80% of the time. Reported numerous times to AT&T customer service via both calls and their iPhone App. Nothing ever done about it. Likely reason why? GSM can't hand-off for shit when the back-end is built wrong or light on inter-site trunks.
Not when they install micro-cells or repeaters inside the tunnel. Look up sometime when you're not driving.
Until we get past the idea of a MONTHLY budget, we're all screwed anyway. You need to know where you are for the year, the next five years, the rest of your life.
This thing is just a widget to part fools with their money so they'll THINK they're saving more money, just like most of the "financial" books on the shelves at booksellers.
Living below your means, means NOT buying one of these retarded things, probably. Or more succinctly, "What would you give up to have one of these?"
How's that going to work? The whole county got scammed (and is still) that $300K cardboard contruction boxes (houses) are a good "investment".
You don't seem to realize that this turned the process on its head.
If the company had been allowed to fail normally, the original stock would have gone to zero, and the bondholders would have perhaps been made whole (or close) by the sale of assets to new companies who would have been able to rebuild GM's VALUABLE divisions into something useful by now. And the Union would have been badly busted or at least had the crap beaten out of them by the process, etc.
That would have been all the things ALL the people who made the decisions... DESERVED.
Instead the government stepped in, "saved" the company with taxpayer fake money printed at the behest of the Treasury and handed out by the Fed, and twisted the rules of business around such that all the investors got screwed, and the people who made the decisions got to keep running their money-loser.
All at the political behest of the Unions who paid off the people voting for the bailout.
And it's so convoluted they can all make whatever wild claims they like, like "We've paid back our loans ahead of schedule" and people will debate that for years.
It's a great deal, if you can get it. Better even than the typical "Bankruptcy Car Wash" that businesses get, but individuals don't.
Well there's at least a few of us out here who also "get it" that any massive uptake of electric cars leads directly to more coal-fired plants and higher prices for electricity as the big electric companies are already whining about what electrics will do to their grids.
But "Coal-Fired Chevy Volt" does have a nice ring to it, doesn't it? That's the phrase I like to use when talking to greenies about that money-losing dog of a product. It gets their attention, but not any deeper thoughts or willingness to actually discuss it or dig for real numbers and pricing estimates.
No one ever wants to do the math.
Yes, the government bailed them out and screwed the hell out of the bondholders and original ticker owners of the stock. Screwing the stockholders, that's normal risk for any company, but screwing the bondholders... that's a whole new set of fancy fake bankruptcy rules.
So yes, they've "paid back" most of the government loan that kept them afloat after the government allowed them to pay the bondholders at a lower than normal rate for any bankruptcy.
Pretty sleazy business.
And even though I agree that any stock can go to zero and you can lose everything, as of right now, the original shareholders of GM stock are going, "WTF?" since there's a whole new ticker symbol and whole new company called "GM" that other people are invested in, making money on all this "good news" about a car that's producing a loss with every unit, but the original shareholders who stuck it out will get the joy of continuing to hold the now virtually worthless, headed for zero, stock of the previous "GM".
So clearly the moral here is that if the government steps in to bail you out, they get paid first, and your original investors are all screwed, no matter what the contract or the prospectus said. The bondholders paid back most of the loan.
If this is what investors get in the "people who have money to invest must be evil rich people, not people who saved and worked hard" world, why invest? The rules of business change at the whim of the Administration. Right now they're printing money to blow up the bubble, with no products being produced underneath the bubble to support it. Very dangerous game. It'll make the "annual" numbers for stock investors look good... until it falls.
Pump and Dump... December and February. All it will take is one world event to crash this house of cards again. Perhaps people will remain euphoric about the horrible fundamentals for no rational reason though, and it'll hold up into real summer growth. We'll see.
Thanks Captain Obvious.
Were we discussing how to get it right, or just doing the usual status-quo of tech... a bunch of concepts that get over-hyped, over-paid-for, and over-blown... and then someone points out the flaws and a newer-better thing is released the next day and the original "deprecated"?
Which is a serious problem with Agile, because all organizations have some number of inexperienced people. A huge hole in the methodology and the way many companies do business is "How do we get people up to speed?"... there's been so little investment of real dollars and time on training that IT/Development is a cluster**** these days.
Because the girl wasn't a power-tripping toddler herself, screwing with the cop once she got a rise out of him? Give us a break. They're both ass-hats.
Because Apple sells what the computer industry has been MARKETING for years, but not delivering. Machines that do certain things their owners want, very well, without hassles.
This is the sales pitch of the industry for decades now. Very few of us buy computers to study their insides. Yes, we geeks like that, and maybe even enjoy designing portions of computers (I say portions since most components inside a modern computer have reached a complexity level that they're pre-packaged into "chips" by highly specialized companies consisting of a whole lot of engineers, marketing, sales, etc.)
What CEO wanted a multi-million dollar server farm with SAN and with needs worse than a baby (powered up 24/7, attendants on-call to its every need, etc) to replace their filing cabinets? They didn't want that. They bought what they thought was technology to lower costs (usually not true, and badly measured in virtually all companies) that made the information in the filing cabinets easy to get to by anyone (and then the Security folks point out that isn't correct, and order up expensive security software -- when having to get past the bosses secretary used to work almost as well as modern "security" software), and they also usually purchased on the idea that information retrieval would be faster -- which often simply isn't needed.
In general, computing "people" who are "into tech" are dying out because companies like Apple and to lesser extents others, are packaging up software and hardware to do TASKS now, not to "be a computer", which is what we wanted of the PC's of the 80s.
Apple is a packaging company, Intel and others make the computer. Apple just puts it in a shiny box and writes software specific to today's consumer desires. They also tend to follow the 80/20 rule and only make that software cover the 80, not the 20.
"Linux is obviously the best choice" ... for developers. For end-users, not a chance in hell. Because end-users buy on concepts like "easy-to-use" and "fun", not on "can compile my own kernel". They don't care.
This is exactly what makes the HTC vs iPhone cartoon so damn funny. "I don't care. I don't care. I don't care." Computer folks may never really completely get this concept. Having been both a computer/tech fan, and also working in Customer Support roles for going on close to 20 years, you know what the first thing out of almost every customer's mouth is?
"It isn't doing what I was promised/thought it was supposed to do."
Apple on the other hand with their "oh so evil" closed system, tells you what it's going to do, tells you again when you install it, tells you on their website what it will do, and delivers something that is so much closer to EXACTLY THAT, that they have loyalists now who will go to the ends of the Earth for and with them.
Microsoft although being first and therefore the de facto standard virtually everywhere, has always been at a disadvantage here... they sell and OS without application software, and they fail... an OS can rarely make you happy that it "does something useful for you". Their application software then steps in, not well-integrated with the OS in some respects, and maybe even it shows that it wasn't part of a larger "finished product" since you buy it separately, and it can't deliver as high a percentage of "that does exactly what they said it needed to do, and 80% of us are satisfied" compared to Apple.
It's a marginal thing... Apple may get it right just a few more percent of the time than Microsoft, but people see this. They see the complexity and bloat of things like Office and are not only turned off, but wish there was a way to turn off 20 of the 30 "features" and just get something done. (e.g. "Ribbon" in later versions.)
Power users, love Microsoft, Linux, etc... they want to go beyond the basics that Apple promises the masses. The masses tend to say nay-nay to complexity overall. They also can dig and find complexity under the hood of OSX and iOS if they exert a litt
... is that as soon as anyone starts using the Freedom everyone so highly touts, the community starts bitchin' that successful person needs to give them something.
Either it's truly Free or it's not, folks.
(Thus why most folks who need true Freedom, and have been around the block more than once, just use BSD for their products and systems, and are done with it.)
For every bug you miss, you give back 1/10 of your monthly salary. That ought to make it interesting enough.
Carpool lanes are fucked up anyway. We all pay for them, just make them normal lanes and call it good. If there's enough lanes, traffic moves. If not, we all sit together.
I hit the end, and saw that the interviewee was paid by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (Which by the way has to be the BEST name for a Foundation ever, but I digress.)
Look 'em up... they pay for opinions, and aren't even slightly apologetic for it.
Step up to the plate... a big swing... and a miss, intellectually. Since we're talkin' facts here... not paid "research".
I still think a sarcasm font is needed in the modern world... where far too much communication is done with words typed by non-brilliant normal folk who don't like to even type, let alone formulate sentences.
Just curious: What's the litmus test that no one else is "thinking for you"? Aren't we all influenced by everyone and everything we see, along with our biases learned very young from mostly our parents and their associates. Did *they* "think for us" too? (I say, yes... but interested in your opinion.)
There's one speck of good in people who watch any political commentator on any particular "side" of any issue... they're probably thinking about things a whole hell of a lot more important than the folks stuffing their pie-holes on the living room sofa watching [insert sport here, or sit-com, or whatever other entertainment one cares to mention].
Just thoughts. Although they may not truly be my own... :-)
If Obama wanted to do something effective, easy, and popular -- he wouldn't have run for President. He'd have started a business doing it. He (like all politicians) live off of your dime, and your fear that the world wouldn't turn without them.
'Round here, Xcel is forward-thinking enough about electric cars to make sure to buy off the Public Utilities Commission early on in this shift to more people using them, and get a massive change in how their rates are structured in a nice "tiered" system that will bend anyone plugging in a car at night, over and rape them repeatedly for great profit. They're not stupid. And they're hiding it under the banner of "motivation to conserve" today. Now all they have to do is wait for the slow progress on electric car technology to speed up (or buy off some more politicians in the House and Senate to vote for *required* numbers of electric cars produced) and they'll laugh all the way to the bank.