Missed that. Apologies. The attitude isn't necessary. (I doubt you really mean the "thanks" in your second sentence.)
And as far as Fortune 500 companies failing... it happens. But that doesn't even matter. You don't need it to fail to make your shares worthless.
Just a stock price drop more than your employee discount... if you get a (generous) 15% discount through your ESPP, a 15% drop in stock price on any company is pretty common, statistically. You then get stuck having to hold them until the company does better, or you leave which also again, statistically is an average of seven years, these days.
And $11B in cash... is typical right now, but without growth, the stock prices of all these companies holding all this cash will suffer. The Street doesn't care much about cash...
Anyway, sounds like you know the ropes. I misread your original message, but there's no need for the 'tude.;-)
"The only shares I own"... are of my own company? That's the worst possible situation if your company runs aground... no diversification. I'm not a huge fan of "sector diversification" but I dump my own company shares and invest in things AWAY from my chosen line of work as soon as I possibly can.
Most ESPP shares are bought at a (usually significant) discount anyway, so after taxes for the transaction, you're still (usually) making money.
Employee ownership of company stock is "all the eggs in one basket" if you're not buying other investments at the same time.
Word to the wise: "Stuff happens"... and it happens fast. Companies come and go. Something happens to your company, you're out of a job, and their stock price probably tanks simultaneously, and you're "stuffed" as my Brit friends say...
Since Ubuntu is really a Debian derivative itself...
And since not a single one is RedHat/Fedora based...
It says something very interesting about the ability to easily roll your own distro off of Debian's choices (over a decade ago) in their packaging system, vs. RPM.
And I remember oh so clearly how.spec files and RPM were going to "change the packaging world" over that "clunky dpkg stuff you use on Debian" from oh-so many friends who bought into the (paid) marketing hype from RedHat... back in the day.
Not trying to start a distro war, just thought it was interesting that RH/Fedora distros are so almost non-existent in this particular list. Respin makes rolling a custom CD of CentOS/RHEL super duper easy these days, too...
Ah, I see you've never looked at the cookies on most executive's machines, then... especially at small companies.
As for the speech, spoken like a true-blue security guy. Somehow I'm glad you think it's important, but the shady deals and horsecrap that Sales is constantly up to in most organizations large enough to even have IT security people, since smaller firms simply can't afford to pay people to work on only IT Security all day... those deals and silliness put your job and the company at FAR more real-world risk than some idiot in Operations surfing porn on the late-shift.
Morals and ethics matter, is all you're saying at the end of the day. And HR departments are way too scared to fire people over ethics issues these days. "Oh (s)he just has a different set of cultural values, we have to put him on a work-improvement program first before we can fire him/her."
Unless you work in Banking or Finance... then it's the traders that put you at risk. Things they do every day could mean you are laid off tomorrow. A sexual harassment lawsuit is literally nothing compared to that.
One of the funniest things (or saddest) that I've seen over 20+ years in this industry is "security" people not even able to see the REAL risks to the company, compared to the chump change "someone saw porn on a computer at the office" lawsuit.
By the way, if you architect it right -- and I say this, 'cause I've seen it done when execs wanted it -- you CAN build a network where the items that MUST run for continuity of the business, will continue to run, even if some moron gets a laptop infection and spreads it to other machines. I've seen plenty of companies run WIDE OPEN Internet access, and do just fine. Maybe a single virus outbreak in a five year period. All contained to the production laptop/desktop network, kept from spreading beyond a single site, and no company data breaches... and all critical company systems ran just fine during the "desktop" outage.
Your company's "lockdown" is more a cultural thing than a technical necessity. Seen both models. Seen the open one work, just fine... when the network and firewalls/ACL's/access are built RIGHT.
In this economy, any company that can't afford to install a basically free webserver -- probably isn't going to be around very much longer anyway. They're all behind the eightball.
If you have money to absolutely blow, there are some Aviation headsets that have built in Bluetooth. The Lightspeed Zulu comes to mind.
But it's complete overkill for what you're attempting to accomplish. A dual-ear Jabra GN series would work fine in all but the most noisy environments.
It's funny... when it's poor folks, everyone says they can "wear what they want" and hollers and screams that they're just "being themselves"...
Put a millionaire on stage in a pair of jeans, and the world freaks out that he's "not properly dressed".
WTF? Who cares what he's wearing. Or if he's shaving. Or whatever.
Aren't we over this by now? (And yeah, I know the answer is no, but I still want folks to actually take a second and THINK about it.)
It's not like you can look at your future mate and tell if they're a financial winner from the shoes they have on... in modern society... but we're still wired that way, so we buy shit that NO ONE needs... in our "Consumer" economy.
I read about a brilliant naval engineer who gave it up finally, and bought identical sets of the same clothes to put in his closet... Short and Long sleeve blue oxford/collared shirts, navy blue pants and shorts (like dress shorts), black socks, and black loafers, and a couple of identical black belts.
He kept one pair of shoes for Sunday church, as he was a churchgoer, the next most worn out set for daily wear, and an almost worn out pair of loafers for mowing the lawn. He kept enough shirts/pants/shorts to get him through a few weeks of travel.
When he was recognized for one of the U.S. highest Intelligence awards for his work during the Cold War, he had to borrow a navy blue jacket and tie.
Eccentric, yup. Predictable on budget, yup. No worries ever again in your whole LIFE about "what should I wear?" or farting around looking in the closet, yup. Just dressy enough and also non-dressy enough for just about any situation, yup to that too.
Most of the world would look at him and say, "How boring!" But the guy built things no one else on the planet has ever built, and cared just enough to pick sane items to make up his wardrobe that if you worked with him regularly, you'd know he "always had the same clothes on", but if you'd never met him, you thought he looked downright normal. And then never worried about clothes ever again.
His self-worth came from within, knowing what he'd done in his life. Clothes were just a "uniform" so he wasn't running around nekkid.
This is why China's government tries to control the information their people see on a daily basis. If the Chinese workers knew what we pay for the things they produce, they would also want it.
In a way, we're benefiting from China keeping the truth from their own people. Yes, there's billions more Chinese than us, but in the extreme long-term end-game, that means their vast natural resources may not keep up with ours. (Just a very wide-angle/big-picture view.)
They have to feed/house all of those folks. They already have controls on reproduction that the rest of the world finds "immoral". Now they took on our businesses contracts to make gadgets, and their workers marvel at these things they're building and shipping to us.
There's a backlash from that sooner or later for them, and a price jump that both stifles some of our unbridled "love affair" with cheap electronic crap, and also makes it profitable to make some of the items here again someday... or... perhaps, with Globalization, in the next poor country willing to say, "We'll learn how to make those things, if you'll fund the infrastructure."
The economic waves in the overall ocean can be slow and enormous, or small and powerful. And everyone's slapping the water trying to make the ocean do what they want it to, as if their hands or even a paddle is enough to make a significant change in the wave height.
Ahh, in this (wanting people to hold investments for the long-term), we definitely agree.
Ironically, the lack of competition inside most retirement plans means that pool of money is very stable. Can't take it out without penalty and only have a limited few mutual fund options inside the plan. I think that's the "base" pool that invests for the long-term.
The "noisy pool" is the day-traders, the trading companies themselves, etc. One could say the middle-men got too good at their jobs. It's difficult to buy stock directly from the company that issued it... virtually impossible. (Some companies have programs for super-small investors, but the rest of the stock is held by a brokerage firm, and isn't liquid without their offer to sell.)
Shareholders really do need to get control of the silliness and games played by most of the Boards of Directors, though. Not sure how that best happens.
The "craphole" isn't so bad, they just won't spend money on labs or servers for our group. Other departments seem to be doing just fine with piles of hardware.
Basically we make money, someone else spends it. Normal way of the world.
2. See "SLA" section in number 1. If none, losing the leased lines is probably retarded. At least your boss will get a refund check the month after he fires you for choosing "alternatives".
3. Obviously the writer has never seen the opposite, never settling down with any particular system because it's replaced every year with the "next big thing" some CEO read about in a trade rag while drunk in 1st Class doing the globetrotter thing. Or the middle-ground death by attrition where a system is touted as the "best possible solution" tons of meetings to "customize" it for every department's whim, and when it's released it's so complex it slows down productivity, while no one's measuring.*
4. Just makes me laugh my ass off. If the boss were willing to spend $1500 on a single computer, we'd already be doing this with virtualization. We're not stupid. We're using seven or eight year old cast-off desktops from the IT department just to even HAVE a lab. You're hilarious.
6. Bwahahaha... we MAKE apps. Really big important apps for things we do for a living. Well more than 50% of the company doesn't know how OURS work. You think we can figure out how a vendor's app works? Golden.
(Better tactic, start with the damn thing completely firewalled and open enough just to get it working. Note any possible security issues from vendor even though you've already been told by the boss this thing's purchased and you have no choice in the matter, like... "We need TELNET turned on for this thing to work?! WTF is wrong with you people?!" Sigh, and continue to load said app that the boss says has to be loaded, note that boss is on the Board of Directors of the company that produces that software, and their CEO on yours. Realize you're out of your league, and try to figure out how to make good backups so when the thing gets the smackdown by a 14 year old in their basement, you can at least put it back online rapidly a few times in a row, overnight, while you finally have enough ammo to tell the boss the thing's insecure and the other vendor needs to fix it. Hopefully by then one or the other CEO will have been replaced, and no more golf games to discuss who will buy each-other's crap software this year.)
7. Did you read number 4? We're running everything on some old 20 MB SCSI disks and Ultra 5's from eBay. Seriously.
8. Again, number 4. We hit "over-virtualized" the day we loaded the virtual server. Who are you kidding?
9. ROFLMAO... you assume that we have a SAN or data that's backed up?! Oh, you're rich, my friend. Rich.
10. Backups. Again with the backups.
This might get modded "Funny" if folks think it's sad enough. Or they might realize it's true...
*"In order to open a ticket you must click the serial number field, type a 20 digit serial number, if it's not found the number will be deleted from your screen, so make sure you type it into Notepad first, after that, type the customer's last name, wait 15 seconds for all customers by that last name worldwide to pop up (can't select company name first), re-query using customers last and first name (not an option on the main screen), find one of six instances of the same customer (other people got lazy and just typed them in), pick the most accurate one, now back to the main screen to type in the company name, pick one of the ten of those, or if you like, one of their divisions that was put in with the full business name, all with different account numbers, now click "check entitlement" and see if they have a service contract."
See any possible problems with that? Okay now do it in 1 minute or less so the guy on the phone doesn't get pissed that you're putting him through the gauntlet (because you talk to him regularly, and already know his personal information), and stay nice and friendly and chit chat while you're doing it. Yes, I just described the REAL system I work with daily. It cost $2 million to deploy. Based on Siebel, which was a nice system when it was a desktop app, but is a god-awful web interface that "saves deployment time and money". Awesome ain't it?
Such fun reading this BS from writers who've never done any of it anyplace with a real budget. BOFH is closer to reality.
Was it this thread or another where I mentioned that very few stocks trade outside of a relatively narrow range of the company's price to earnings ratio?
Your scenario, while technically correct, leaves out that the humans involved in your transaction are the same humans involved in a stock transaction. The buyer must FEEL like he made $2, and the seller must make the $2 profit, and the worker makes their wages...
This is all the same in the stock market, even if you (probably correctly) point out that it's made up out of thin air. Companies typically ONLY skyrocket if their projected EARNINGS are higher than average in their "sector", and fall mainly on the same news in the opposite direction. There's "jaggedness" on the trend line in the form of the things you're worried about, like news that "bumps" the price up or down, but the overall average comes back to a specific multiple of earnings.
If it didn't the market would be FAR too risky for even the largest risk-takers.
Forgive me if I don't fall in line with your "doomsday" scenario, but at its root, the entire monetary system is a sham based on nothing but perceived value, and if the majority of the world is convinced that money is worth less today than it was yesterday -- it is. Same thing with a stock. There's no difference.
You seem to treat money as if it has INTRINSIC value, when it doesn't. Only durable goods do. Trading money for a product is just as risky as handing over a pile of stock for a product.
So what you're really saying indirectly is that economies themselves are absurd, and based on nothing. And I'm 100% with you there.
The problem is, for those sitting around hand-wringing about it, is that while you're sitting there concerned, someone else has figured out how to make a buck on it. And your status in our society dropped by a small amount if you didn't make that same amount in the same time-period.
So... you can either learn to play the game, or be upset that others have and you're on the sidelines, but there's really no stopping the freight train.
Replace "futures" with "Money" and you've just described the entire system, right? Money is the real fiction. Trading of it in "futures" or whatever really doesn't matter -- the value of money goes up and down on whatever the news-du-jour of the day is.
I generally agree with all of your points. My point in other threads (not this one) has been that the entire system is just a riddle/puzzle/game, and "bankers" and "traders" and their companies are not necessarily "evil" for playing... it's just the natural (as in "behavioral economics" natural) behavior of humans.
Trying to find other humans who are supposedly "morally superior" who can regulate such things efficiently and correctly, is pretty much a fallacy too.
Thus, we can slap all the laws and fines and whatever we want on BP or any other corporation, even putting them clean out of business in the process if we all so desire. The problem will be that as long as we're a petroleum-based society, there will always be gamesmen playing with the numbers. For many of these folks, they're just playing a game they were taught by society at-large via MBA schooling.
I've sat with oil company traders. Futures vs. real doesn't really apply, because they're all traded like they're real. And there's a reason... if you buy too many futures for the tank farm you have, you're going to have your asses handed to you by your trading competitors when they start to fill up and your competition knows you have nowhere to put it.
So, futures, real... doesn't matter. It's all traded like it's real. The place where they don't is if they have information that Company X needs oil due to a problem at a pumping station, etc... and Company Y has it... and you as Company Z can effectively trade against both sides. That's one of the ONLY times I saw traders on the desk making any kinds of calculated risk of having too much oil around to deal with.
And of course, oil like any other industry (computer bugs, whatever) has things that change from day to day.... at the morning conference calls the refinery might say XYZ device barfed, and a replacement will take a week, lowering need for crude and production by X number of bbls per day.... totally throwing all the careful month-long (or longer) hedging that a trader did to provide them with the stuff for the next one to six months... out of whack.
Saying there's a difference in futures vs. real is like saying there's money to be made in futures on the weather. You'd get your ass handed to you, not on the trading desk where your numbers might look great, but in the back-room meetings when the refinery called and said they had to stop all the pumps because the tanks are full.
(Add in twists like common-carrier pipelines where if you don't take what you bought, someone else is going to take it out of the pipeline for you and charge you for the "service", etc... and it gets even more complex.)
Oh for fuck's sake... ever hear of Contango or even the words "high inventory levels"? Grow up. The U.S. refineries are fully-supplied with crude. The temporary shutdown of the Alaska pipeline for a contained spill last week was more problematic for the logistics folks than this... because none of this oil had ever made it to market nor was there a daily pumping rate to meet from this well.
Loved the comments, sorry didn't get back to you sooner.
One area where this breaks is that the ownership of the stock in most companies is often majority-held by insiders. They're required to file paperwork when they trade, etc... but most of the other shareholders don't pay attention, other than seeing if the insiders are dumping all their stock.
In fact, this is often where the *real* salary of the execs comes from. I know of a company where the CEO sells somewhere between $3-$5 million worth of shares in his company per quarter, like clockwork. No triggers to tell anyone there's anything good/bad going on, and he's sucking $5 million in capital out of the company every time he does it. No one on the Board says "boo", because they gave it to him... of course.
Good times, bad times, $5 million a quarter.
So... while I like the ideas and the sentiment of working to make it more like investing in the company, there's still an issue with how *much* of the stock is held by investors, and how much by insiders... an interesting problem to ponder.
Cooking and nutrition... I have a theory going that all the processed food and high-fructose corn syrup is part of the CAUSE of the "Dumbing Down of America"... people shovel really nasty things into their pie-holes and there's no fuel for brain cells.
Not that I don't have a bit of an addiction to the American fast-food cheeseburger myself... but it's not all that I eat... wow.
Slashdot Mirror
Missed that. Apologies. The attitude isn't necessary. (I doubt you really mean the "thanks" in your second sentence.)
And as far as Fortune 500 companies failing... it happens. But that doesn't even matter. You don't need it to fail to make your shares worthless.
Just a stock price drop more than your employee discount... if you get a (generous) 15% discount through your ESPP, a 15% drop in stock price on any company is pretty common, statistically. You then get stuck having to hold them until the company does better, or you leave which also again, statistically is an average of seven years, these days.
And $11B in cash... is typical right now, but without growth, the stock prices of all these companies holding all this cash will suffer. The Street doesn't care much about cash...
Anyway, sounds like you know the ropes. I misread your original message, but there's no need for the 'tude. ;-)
"The only shares I own" ... are of my own company? That's the worst possible situation if your company runs aground... no diversification. I'm not a huge fan of "sector diversification" but I dump my own company shares and invest in things AWAY from my chosen line of work as soon as I possibly can.
Most ESPP shares are bought at a (usually significant) discount anyway, so after taxes for the transaction, you're still (usually) making money.
Employee ownership of company stock is "all the eggs in one basket" if you're not buying other investments at the same time.
Word to the wise: "Stuff happens"... and it happens fast. Companies come and go. Something happens to your company, you're out of a job, and their stock price probably tanks simultaneously, and you're "stuffed" as my Brit friends say...
What's really interesting about your list is ...
Since Ubuntu is really a Debian derivative itself...
And since not a single one is RedHat/Fedora based...
It says something very interesting about the ability to easily roll your own distro off of Debian's choices (over a decade ago) in their packaging system, vs. RPM.
And I remember oh so clearly how .spec files and RPM were going to "change the packaging world" over that "clunky dpkg stuff you use on Debian" from oh-so many friends who bought into the (paid) marketing hype from RedHat... back in the day.
Not trying to start a distro war, just thought it was interesting that RH/Fedora distros are so almost non-existent in this particular list. Respin makes rolling a custom CD of CentOS/RHEL super duper easy these days, too...
Very interesting.
Sounds quite a bit like the Soviet Union in the 70's and 80's, doesn't it?
Bottom line: Qualcomm is making a fuckload of money changing standards every 5 minutes. :-)
As if the NSA doesn't already have such a system? ;-)
Okay, you add sex as a field in the table. Whoop dee do. Got a better example?
$20 says the whole thing's mired in what's "public" and what's "family private" data... behind the scenes.
Are you supposed to know what sex someone is by looking at their grave marker if you didn't know them?
Welcome to Google being just as "evil" as Apple.
Capture the hot air blowing out of Congress in Washington D.C. -- both mouth and ass hot air.
Ah, I see you've never looked at the cookies on most executive's machines, then... especially at small companies.
As for the speech, spoken like a true-blue security guy. Somehow I'm glad you think it's important, but the shady deals and horsecrap that Sales is constantly up to in most organizations large enough to even have IT security people, since smaller firms simply can't afford to pay people to work on only IT Security all day... those deals and silliness put your job and the company at FAR more real-world risk than some idiot in Operations surfing porn on the late-shift.
Morals and ethics matter, is all you're saying at the end of the day. And HR departments are way too scared to fire people over ethics issues these days. "Oh (s)he just has a different set of cultural values, we have to put him on a work-improvement program first before we can fire him/her."
Unless you work in Banking or Finance... then it's the traders that put you at risk. Things they do every day could mean you are laid off tomorrow. A sexual harassment lawsuit is literally nothing compared to that.
One of the funniest things (or saddest) that I've seen over 20+ years in this industry is "security" people not even able to see the REAL risks to the company, compared to the chump change "someone saw porn on a computer at the office" lawsuit.
By the way, if you architect it right -- and I say this, 'cause I've seen it done when execs wanted it -- you CAN build a network where the items that MUST run for continuity of the business, will continue to run, even if some moron gets a laptop infection and spreads it to other machines. I've seen plenty of companies run WIDE OPEN Internet access, and do just fine. Maybe a single virus outbreak in a five year period. All contained to the production laptop/desktop network, kept from spreading beyond a single site, and no company data breaches... and all critical company systems ran just fine during the "desktop" outage.
Your company's "lockdown" is more a cultural thing than a technical necessity. Seen both models. Seen the open one work, just fine... when the network and firewalls/ACL's/access are built RIGHT.
In this economy, any company that can't afford to install a basically free webserver -- probably isn't going to be around very much longer anyway. They're all behind the eightball.
Been using the GN Netcom headsets (both wired and wireless) in the workplace now for over 10 years. Great quality. Jabra recently bought them.
http://www.jabra.com/NA-US/headsetsolutions/Pages/JabraGN9100.aspx?tab=variants#UID=9
If you have money to absolutely blow, there are some Aviation headsets that have built in Bluetooth. The Lightspeed Zulu comes to mind.
But it's complete overkill for what you're attempting to accomplish. A dual-ear Jabra GN series would work fine in all but the most noisy environments.
It's funny... when it's poor folks, everyone says they can "wear what they want" and hollers and screams that they're just "being themselves"...
Put a millionaire on stage in a pair of jeans, and the world freaks out that he's "not properly dressed".
WTF? Who cares what he's wearing. Or if he's shaving. Or whatever.
Aren't we over this by now? (And yeah, I know the answer is no, but I still want folks to actually take a second and THINK about it.)
It's not like you can look at your future mate and tell if they're a financial winner from the shoes they have on... in modern society... but we're still wired that way, so we buy shit that NO ONE needs... in our "Consumer" economy.
I read about a brilliant naval engineer who gave it up finally, and bought identical sets of the same clothes to put in his closet... Short and Long sleeve blue oxford/collared shirts, navy blue pants and shorts (like dress shorts), black socks, and black loafers, and a couple of identical black belts.
He kept one pair of shoes for Sunday church, as he was a churchgoer, the next most worn out set for daily wear, and an almost worn out pair of loafers for mowing the lawn. He kept enough shirts/pants/shorts to get him through a few weeks of travel.
When he was recognized for one of the U.S. highest Intelligence awards for his work during the Cold War, he had to borrow a navy blue jacket and tie.
Eccentric, yup. Predictable on budget, yup. No worries ever again in your whole LIFE about "what should I wear?" or farting around looking in the closet, yup. Just dressy enough and also non-dressy enough for just about any situation, yup to that too.
Most of the world would look at him and say, "How boring!" But the guy built things no one else on the planet has ever built, and cared just enough to pick sane items to make up his wardrobe that if you worked with him regularly, you'd know he "always had the same clothes on", but if you'd never met him, you thought he looked downright normal. And then never worried about clothes ever again.
His self-worth came from within, knowing what he'd done in his life. Clothes were just a "uniform" so he wasn't running around nekkid.
... for an eventual return to U.S. manufacturing.
The pendulum continues to swing, as it ever has.
This is why China's government tries to control the information their people see on a daily basis. If the Chinese workers knew what we pay for the things they produce, they would also want it.
In a way, we're benefiting from China keeping the truth from their own people. Yes, there's billions more Chinese than us, but in the extreme long-term end-game, that means their vast natural resources may not keep up with ours. (Just a very wide-angle/big-picture view.)
They have to feed/house all of those folks. They already have controls on reproduction that the rest of the world finds "immoral". Now they took on our businesses contracts to make gadgets, and their workers marvel at these things they're building and shipping to us.
There's a backlash from that sooner or later for them, and a price jump that both stifles some of our unbridled "love affair" with cheap electronic crap, and also makes it profitable to make some of the items here again someday... or... perhaps, with Globalization, in the next poor country willing to say, "We'll learn how to make those things, if you'll fund the infrastructure."
The economic waves in the overall ocean can be slow and enormous, or small and powerful. And everyone's slapping the water trying to make the ocean do what they want it to, as if their hands or even a paddle is enough to make a significant change in the wave height.
Ahh, in this (wanting people to hold investments for the long-term), we definitely agree.
Ironically, the lack of competition inside most retirement plans means that pool of money is very stable. Can't take it out without penalty and only have a limited few mutual fund options inside the plan. I think that's the "base" pool that invests for the long-term.
The "noisy pool" is the day-traders, the trading companies themselves, etc. One could say the middle-men got too good at their jobs. It's difficult to buy stock directly from the company that issued it... virtually impossible. (Some companies have programs for super-small investors, but the rest of the stock is held by a brokerage firm, and isn't liquid without their offer to sell.)
Shareholders really do need to get control of the silliness and games played by most of the Boards of Directors, though. Not sure how that best happens.
Luckily, I'm paid by the hour! :-) Any negative productivity only hurts until the overtime kicks in. LOL!
Never said it was BS. Just funny.
The "craphole" isn't so bad, they just won't spend money on labs or servers for our group. Other departments seem to be doing just fine with piles of hardware.
Basically we make money, someone else spends it. Normal way of the world.
Rebuttals to TFA's points:
2. See "SLA" section in number 1. If none, losing the leased lines is probably retarded. At least your boss will get a refund check the month after he fires you for choosing "alternatives".
3. Obviously the writer has never seen the opposite, never settling down with any particular system because it's replaced every year with the "next big thing" some CEO read about in a trade rag while drunk in 1st Class doing the globetrotter thing. Or the middle-ground death by attrition where a system is touted as the "best possible solution" tons of meetings to "customize" it for every department's whim, and when it's released it's so complex it slows down productivity, while no one's measuring.*
4. Just makes me laugh my ass off. If the boss were willing to spend $1500 on a single computer, we'd already be doing this with virtualization. We're not stupid. We're using seven or eight year old cast-off desktops from the IT department just to even HAVE a lab. You're hilarious.
6. Bwahahaha... we MAKE apps. Really big important apps for things we do for a living. Well more than 50% of the company doesn't know how OURS work. You think we can figure out how a vendor's app works? Golden.
(Better tactic, start with the damn thing completely firewalled and open enough just to get it working. Note any possible security issues from vendor even though you've already been told by the boss this thing's purchased and you have no choice in the matter, like... "We need TELNET turned on for this thing to work?! WTF is wrong with you people?!" Sigh, and continue to load said app that the boss says has to be loaded, note that boss is on the Board of Directors of the company that produces that software, and their CEO on yours. Realize you're out of your league, and try to figure out how to make good backups so when the thing gets the smackdown by a 14 year old in their basement, you can at least put it back online rapidly a few times in a row, overnight, while you finally have enough ammo to tell the boss the thing's insecure and the other vendor needs to fix it. Hopefully by then one or the other CEO will have been replaced, and no more golf games to discuss who will buy each-other's crap software this year.)
7. Did you read number 4? We're running everything on some old 20 MB SCSI disks and Ultra 5's from eBay. Seriously.
8. Again, number 4. We hit "over-virtualized" the day we loaded the virtual server. Who are you kidding?
9. ROFLMAO... you assume that we have a SAN or data that's backed up?! Oh, you're rich, my friend. Rich.
10. Backups. Again with the backups.
This might get modded "Funny" if folks think it's sad enough. Or they might realize it's true...
*"In order to open a ticket you must click the serial number field, type a 20 digit serial number, if it's not found the number will be deleted from your screen, so make sure you type it into Notepad first, after that, type the customer's last name, wait 15 seconds for all customers by that last name worldwide to pop up (can't select company name first), re-query using customers last and first name (not an option on the main screen), find one of six instances of the same customer (other people got lazy and just typed them in), pick the most accurate one, now back to the main screen to type in the company name, pick one of the ten of those, or if you like, one of their divisions that was put in with the full business name, all with different account numbers, now click "check entitlement" and see if they have a service contract."
See any possible problems with that? Okay now do it in 1 minute or less so the guy on the phone doesn't get pissed that you're putting him through the gauntlet (because you talk to him regularly, and already know his personal information), and stay nice and friendly and chit chat while you're doing it. Yes, I just described the REAL system I work with daily. It cost $2 million to deploy. Based on Siebel, which was a nice system when it was a desktop app, but is a god-awful web interface that "saves deployment time and money". Awesome ain't it?
Such fun reading this BS from writers who've never done any of it anyplace with a real budget. BOFH is closer to reality.
Was it this thread or another where I mentioned that very few stocks trade outside of a relatively narrow range of the company's price to earnings ratio?
Your scenario, while technically correct, leaves out that the humans involved in your transaction are the same humans involved in a stock transaction. The buyer must FEEL like he made $2, and the seller must make the $2 profit, and the worker makes their wages...
This is all the same in the stock market, even if you (probably correctly) point out that it's made up out of thin air. Companies typically ONLY skyrocket if their projected EARNINGS are higher than average in their "sector", and fall mainly on the same news in the opposite direction. There's "jaggedness" on the trend line in the form of the things you're worried about, like news that "bumps" the price up or down, but the overall average comes back to a specific multiple of earnings.
If it didn't the market would be FAR too risky for even the largest risk-takers.
Forgive me if I don't fall in line with your "doomsday" scenario, but at its root, the entire monetary system is a sham based on nothing but perceived value, and if the majority of the world is convinced that money is worth less today than it was yesterday -- it is. Same thing with a stock. There's no difference.
You seem to treat money as if it has INTRINSIC value, when it doesn't. Only durable goods do. Trading money for a product is just as risky as handing over a pile of stock for a product.
So what you're really saying indirectly is that economies themselves are absurd, and based on nothing. And I'm 100% with you there.
The problem is, for those sitting around hand-wringing about it, is that while you're sitting there concerned, someone else has figured out how to make a buck on it. And your status in our society dropped by a small amount if you didn't make that same amount in the same time-period.
So... you can either learn to play the game, or be upset that others have and you're on the sidelines, but there's really no stopping the freight train.
Replace "futures" with "Money" and you've just described the entire system, right? Money is the real fiction. Trading of it in "futures" or whatever really doesn't matter -- the value of money goes up and down on whatever the news-du-jour of the day is.
I generally agree with all of your points. My point in other threads (not this one) has been that the entire system is just a riddle/puzzle/game, and "bankers" and "traders" and their companies are not necessarily "evil" for playing... it's just the natural (as in "behavioral economics" natural) behavior of humans.
Trying to find other humans who are supposedly "morally superior" who can regulate such things efficiently and correctly, is pretty much a fallacy too.
Thus, we can slap all the laws and fines and whatever we want on BP or any other corporation, even putting them clean out of business in the process if we all so desire. The problem will be that as long as we're a petroleum-based society, there will always be gamesmen playing with the numbers. For many of these folks, they're just playing a game they were taught by society at-large via MBA schooling.
I've sat with oil company traders. Futures vs. real doesn't really apply, because they're all traded like they're real. And there's a reason... if you buy too many futures for the tank farm you have, you're going to have your asses handed to you by your trading competitors when they start to fill up and your competition knows you have nowhere to put it.
So, futures, real... doesn't matter. It's all traded like it's real. The place where they don't is if they have information that Company X needs oil due to a problem at a pumping station, etc... and Company Y has it... and you as Company Z can effectively trade against both sides. That's one of the ONLY times I saw traders on the desk making any kinds of calculated risk of having too much oil around to deal with.
And of course, oil like any other industry (computer bugs, whatever) has things that change from day to day.... at the morning conference calls the refinery might say XYZ device barfed, and a replacement will take a week, lowering need for crude and production by X number of bbls per day.... totally throwing all the careful month-long (or longer) hedging that a trader did to provide them with the stuff for the next one to six months... out of whack.
Saying there's a difference in futures vs. real is like saying there's money to be made in futures on the weather. You'd get your ass handed to you, not on the trading desk where your numbers might look great, but in the back-room meetings when the refinery called and said they had to stop all the pumps because the tanks are full.
(Add in twists like common-carrier pipelines where if you don't take what you bought, someone else is going to take it out of the pipeline for you and charge you for the "service", etc... and it gets even more complex.)
Feel free to share which stellar government you live under so we can use it as an example there, sport.
Oh for fuck's sake... ever hear of Contango or even the words "high inventory levels"? Grow up. The U.S. refineries are fully-supplied with crude. The temporary shutdown of the Alaska pipeline for a contained spill last week was more problematic for the logistics folks than this... because none of this oil had ever made it to market nor was there a daily pumping rate to meet from this well.
Says the man typing on a keyboard made from petroleum products...
Loved the comments, sorry didn't get back to you sooner.
One area where this breaks is that the ownership of the stock in most companies is often majority-held by insiders. They're required to file paperwork when they trade, etc... but most of the other shareholders don't pay attention, other than seeing if the insiders are dumping all their stock.
In fact, this is often where the *real* salary of the execs comes from. I know of a company where the CEO sells somewhere between $3-$5 million worth of shares in his company per quarter, like clockwork. No triggers to tell anyone there's anything good/bad going on, and he's sucking $5 million in capital out of the company every time he does it. No one on the Board says "boo", because they gave it to him... of course.
Good times, bad times, $5 million a quarter.
So... while I like the ideas and the sentiment of working to make it more like investing in the company, there's still an issue with how *much* of the stock is held by investors, and how much by insiders... an interesting problem to ponder.
Cooking and nutrition... I have a theory going that all the processed food and high-fructose corn syrup is part of the CAUSE of the "Dumbing Down of America"... people shovel really nasty things into their pie-holes and there's no fuel for brain cells.
Not that I don't have a bit of an addiction to the American fast-food cheeseburger myself... but it's not all that I eat... wow.