Economists like to pretend that they're dealing with a hard science but they are wrong, so very wrong. Economics is certainly a complex field of study but it is also one of the squishiest sciences there is. Economics is psychology with graphs and math. You can talk about supply and demand, this curve and that, but we're ultimately talking about human psychology. You can't use normal logic to figure this stuff out, you have to work with crowd dynamics, herd instinct, quit talking about how people should behave and pay attention to how they really behave.
If you want to understand how everything is going pear-shaped, just look at the Great White club fire. Huge crowd, small venue, and the band's pyrotechnics set the place on fire. Rationally speaking, there's no reason why anyone had to die. There were sufficient doors and sufficient time for a calm and orderly evacuation. And our economists are the ones who would look at that situation and not quite grasp why there was a panic, a human log-jam at the door, and a whole lot of dead bodies. "That wasn't rational behavior! That was irrational exuberance, or maybe irrational shit-the-bed terror. The problem here is that my observations of this event do not fit my models."
That's what we're seeing in this economy, a fire in a club. Everyone is working to maximize their own survival even though it will harm the chances for the group as a whole. Companies are shedding jobs everywhere, getting work is damned near impossible, and we've got a negative feedback loop that nobody seems to be able to break. And nobody wants to take a look at the wall where the writing stands hundreds of feet high -- "we need to reform the way we're doing business and this will change our entire economy as we've come to know it." The thought is too frightening.
It turns out, that, after trashing Bush and Cheney for eight years for not making all of their communications public, the first thing the new Democratic President does is get for himself a means of making private communications based on his word that it will be for personal use only.
This for anyone confused by your argument -- there's obviously no hope of reaching you but I might just be able to reach them.
There is a huge difference between personal privacy and professional privacy. Obama's health was his and his family's business when he was a senator. As President, it's a matter of public interest. Reagan's Alzheimer's after he left office, his business; his Alzheimer's when he was President, that was damn well America's business. It was nothing less than the question of whether he could fulfill his duties as President of the United States. Same reason why we don't have a professional interest in the health of the airline mechanic but we give the pilots annual physicals -- the mechanic keeling over won't kill 150 people.
And when it comes to the president, there's a difference between having an affair with another consenting adult, an action that was incredibly stupid yet broke no laws and Bush's active effort to commit treason against the United States and cover up the planning. Clinton's affair was between him, Hillary, and Chelsea. Bush I and II, Reagan, their crimes were against the American people. Iran-Contra, lying us into the Iraq war, helping to roll back regulations so our economy would overheat and explode like the heart of a rabbit chased by a lawnmower...
Frankly, I don't dispute the right of any President to have secret communications. He needs to be judged by his work product and not be constantly subject to the Congress. It was wrong for Republicans to harrass Clinton during his Presidency and it was wrong for Bush to be harrassed as well. IT's not because, ideally, the President is above the law, but it is because, he (or she!), is not subjugated to the Congress. They are equal branches of government.
Bush and his cronies setup separate RNC emails so that they could conduct illegal politiking from the White House. They tore a strip off Gore's hide for making a fundraising call on public lines from his office, how is it any different doing RNC work on the public's dime? Sure, there should be separate email accounts so that any President can keep party business and state business separate but the White House shouldn't be party headquarters.
Trying to conflate Clinton's sins, which were many, against Bush's sins which were many but also far, far more treasonous is ridiculous. Clinton was impeached for lying about a blowjob. Bush was never impeached for lying us into a fucking war.
Aw "terabyte" was my original handle...and I thought it was clever because it sounded like "terror."
My original handle was going to be my name replaced by asterisks **** ****. It took me ages to figure out why I kept crashing the boards I was tying to join.:(
No, they were back and forward slashes, alternating. That's the beauty of the G\/\/B handle, you can try googling it but you'll never get it right! And I thought the "non-space non-printing character" hidden directory name in DOS was awesome.
Man, I wish that were a joke, but it just isn't. The series producers have admitted that the whole "and they have a plan" thing was added "because it seemed cool."
In fact, if you listen to the episode commentary, quite a bit of things were done "because it seemed cool." Boomer being a Cylon? "Because it seemed cool." The whole thing with the second Sharon and Helo on Caprica? "Because it seemed cool."
The writers have never had a real plan and have been playing the entire thing mostly by ear. And it shows: the "and they have a plan" thing has just vanished. What is that plan? Did they give up on it? Why didn't they finish wiping out the human race? (Problems with Cylons procreating, apparently?) What's the deal with the human/Cylon hybrids (versus the Basestar/humanoid Cylon hybrid)?
The show with manatees isn't Family Guy, it's BSG. It's like they're just bouncing ideas together at random and that's because they are. Why is it that humans and skinjobs are physically indistinguishable and yet Cottle is able to say that the Cylons screwed up the birth canal on the female model? If this is the case, you can find any female skinjob just by giving her a gyno exam.
What I find so frustrating about "making it up as you go" is that proper stories are supposed to build towards something. Yes, real life doesn't have to do that but dramas tend to unless the point being aimed at is existential futility. "Hey, there's no God and no point to anything! Wooohoo!"
Part of the fun of a good mystery is being able to tease out the details as you go and see if you can figure out what's going on before the author reveals it. If the author himself has no idea what's going on and is making it up as he goes then there's just no fun to it. "Um, yeah. So the killer is a character you didn't introduce until the last act and his accomplice was someone who was in the same room with everyone else when the victim was killed in a study locked from the inside. The accomplice, shown in the room with everyone else in the first act, is shown in a third act flashback to have snuck in to the locked room via a secret passage that would have been found in the investigation in the second act."
I never understood why equipment capable of being flash-updated by users does not include the 1.0 drivers as a ROM onboard the device. This way if you completely and utterly bork the flashing, you can reset a jumper, press a recessed button with a paperclip, so SOMETHING that will cause the EPROM to be reflashed from the known good ROM. "Hey, here's baseline firmware again, people. Let's try this again."
The only possible explanation I can think of for not doing this is that the known-good ROM would add another half-cent to the manufacturing process and we know how manufacturers watch their pennies.
We could have slashed half of the workforce, but I'm putting in my life savings, and borrow money to pay for the monthly expenses and salary, trying to ride the storm. We don't even cut any benefits, we even gave everyone a small bonus at the end of year (yeah, in cash, not a Gphone like Google did), and also paid for the annual health checkup (as we have done every year), when every other company has cut all these.
Now, can I get the good publicity now? Can we be called a good corporate? Can we get more clients (eventually) because we are good to our employees? In fact, I'm not even sure that, once the economic slump is over, our employees would even be grateful and stay a bit longer with us.
You have my sympathy and my respect. No good deed goes unpunished and I'm sure you will take some hits from this. However, I would like to optimistically think that the ones who jump ship are the mercenaries and the ones who remain will be all the more loyal for it. I know how hard it is to find good people and how wasteful it seems to cut them in the crisis of the moment because you could well be desperately needing them in six months.
I would be terribly frightened to own my own company in this environment.
Heh... I remember getting calls after I was hit in a post-dot-bomb layoff, asking "Have you seen what people are posting about the company at FC?"
Not knowing what FC was, I enjoyed reading the rants. But then again, I always thought they were stupid, in the end.
Stupid of the people (then looking for work) to post things like that in public, and stupid of the people still working there to even care what was being said.
Only idiots are posting with their real names.:)
I did FC while my dot.com was circling the drain. It was certainly therapeutic. People who dwell on this years later are like people who still haven't gotten over high school but immediately following the traumatic event, it's good to vent and commiserate.
Of course, FC went downhill later after the stormfronters and race trolls took over, but that's another story.
The real reason Vista really failed is the same people who are hyping up 7, the media.
Completely wrong. There are two reasons why Vista failed. The first is that it's a crap product. The media duly took their ad money and their Ferrari laptops and reported their unbiased finding that it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. They squandered their credibility because far and away most people who tried it hated it.
The second reason why Vista failed was us. We tried it. We put it through its paces. We compared it side-by-side with XP. We tried to prepare it for deployment to our myriad customers with their critical applications and legacy hardware, and found that it would not serve. Then we signed on to slashdot and cnet and ZDnet and every other news forum with comments and every time they posted yet another rave review we got up in the comments and told the truth. Never before have I seen such dissonance between news reportage of technology and the public comments available. We told our friends, our family. When we got a call on Saturday from Cousin Joe halfway across the country asking "XP or Vista for my new PC" we told him "Not Vista. If you can't get XP, get a mac." The consensus opinion became so strong that non-technical family members who had never tried it were warning me off of the thing.
I'd say what happened with vista was like a shit firestorm. You get a bunch of fires burning across a city, they can cease to act as individual fires and begin to work as one. The huge mass of rising air creates a chimney effect and fresh air is sucked in from outside, creating a roiling, self-sustaining mass of flaming death. The result is far worse than any of the individual fires and will continue until all fuel is consumed.
Vista is an absolutely crap product, no doubt, and the negative reaction of techies was picked up on and repeated by non-techies. And this is what set the stage for the shit firestorm. The media picked up on it and the negativity has a life of its own that no amount of counter-marketing could possibly defeat.
Conversely, we're watching a sugar firestorm for Obama. I feel sorry for the guy, they're laying it out for him like he's the Second Coming of Christ. It'd be almost impossible not to fall short of these expectations. His sugar firestorm is in direct reaction to the shit firestorm that Bush created for himself by being such a colossal fuckup. Between the wars, the bad economy, and the banal, incurious evil of the Bushies, America would be slavering all over a president who could pronounce "nuclear" properly and in fact we've got what appears to be a great selection with oodles of potential. I just fear that the sugar firestorm will slowly turn into a hype crash. Those of us who grew up on Star Wars and had our hopes up for Phantom Menace, you know well of what I speak.
>Is it as quick as running XP? Well, no, but don't forget that XP is a seven-year-old operating system that required a Pentium II at release.
You see I don't get this comment. Since the operating system 7 years ago had to run on much slower hardware, well, don't expect that now?
WHY F***G NOT! What on earth does an operating system have to do so that it sucks up ever bit of my quad core machine?
Ditto, my friend, ditto. (and I'm loathe to use that word after Rush sullied it.)
I truly don't understand the urge to go and scrap stuff that used to be working and I have no idea how they managed to break so much between XP and Vista when it didn't even advance a version number.
The point of the operating system is to host your apps and be as unobtrusive as possible. DOS wasn't great but did the job. I never liked Windows 3.1. I finally took the windows plunge with 95 because it brought enough new things to the table but unfortunately those things were full of bugs. Win2k was great because it finally brought stability to the OS. XP I did not see as a compelling upgrade and my home desktop remains on 2K. I only have XP on my laptop because the license came with it and uninstalling it to put win2k on would be cutting off my nose to spite my face.
I finally got a mac and am making the acquaintance of OS X for the first time. While I'm despising the unimouse and feel there are a few inexplicable weird decisions made in certain spots, overall I am impressed. There are new ideas here. Well, maybe not new to people who have been on Mac all this time but certainly new to this Windows user. It's the little stuff that impresses the snot out of me. Hmm, what IP address was I assigned? Type "ip address" into finder, it pulls up the exact screen in question. Wow! Indexed, instantaneous searching of every folder on the machine, I don't even have to remember where I put something. That's almost like magic. I haven't setup email on it yet but I bet it probably works like magic there, too. When I compare gmail's search functionality to Outlook I laugh. You can't find anything in Outlook, you have to manually file everything and look for it just like you were printing out everything and sticking it in a filing cabinet. After all these years and all this money, why does Microsoft still suck at it?
My rule of operating system design: 1. People don't buy a stereo to listen to it, they but it to play music. Anyone listening to the stereo rather than the music is probably buying $800 cables to enrich their sound. 2. The operating system exists to facilitate whatever the user is trying to do. Anything that gets in the way of that is a bad idea. 3. The operating system should not expand to fill all available space and resources. There's absolutely no reason why a computer just a few years old should not be able to run the latest OS release. Certainly an elderly computer should be able to run that OS with the bells and whistles turned off and the understanding that demanding apps may not run well or at all but the fucking OS shouldn't be considered a demanding app! 4. If you have nothing new to bring to the table, don't come to the table. Unfortunately, Microsoft's release schedule is dictated by marketing rather than engineering. They're going to release something regardless of whether or not the world needs it. There have been no good advances in Office since Office 2000 and yet we keep seeing releases without compelling features. I've yet to hear of a single new feature in Vista or W7 that makes me think "oooh, I gotta have!" The only reason I'd have to upgrade the OS at this point is that I wouldn't be able to find Win2K drivers for newer kit.
While I do agree with you, I'll take a moment to play Devil's advocate. Small store owners can be dicks just like the big store owners. I do a lot of grocery shopping at hole in the wall ethnic markets and the staff there can be every bit as surly as disaffected slackers in big box stores. The difference (usually) is that good performance goes unrewarded at the big box stores, actually punished at Circuit City since they fired their top salespeople. In a small shop environment, it should be possible for a good salesman to be rewarded for his efforts, therefore you would expect more positive reinforcement and better reps there.
I worked for a computer guy back in '99 as the box stores were rising in prominence. The mom and pop shops couldn't compete with the box stores on price and this guy decided to add PC hardware to his midrange business that was slowly dying off. I told him that trying to make money off of merchandise was ridiculous and that the only way a smaller shop could compete was on service. If we built a proper service department, we might have a shot at surviving. He didn't, I moved on, and from what I've heard of people who have tried running service shops catering to businesses, its a damn rough game to be in these days. Businesses will pay for lawyers and accountants to come in and help as necessary but they seem to think that computer people should be paid the same rates as the janitorial service.
Apple's first big loss to Microsoft was thinking people would pay more for mac quality but the market said Windows wasn't great but good enough. It'll be interesting to see how it goes in the future. The iPods are ridiculously overpriced as mp3 players but those bastards sell like hotcakes. I guess the bit of genius there was equating this to fashion. People will be ruthlessly efficient when it comes to making practical purchases but when it comes to buying impractical things like handbags, shoes, and designer goods, logic and reason go out the fucking window.
Well, I have had experience with the old school way of doing things, Beast Buy, Comp Useless, and Circuit Shitty. The advantage they had over the smaller shops is a huge selection and usually steep discounts on big ticket items. The drawback was usually that you got raped on the peripherals and accessories ($20 printer cables you could buy for $2 anyone?) and their staff was usually pig ignorant and useless. Not only that but you also had to deal with scumfuck corporate tactics on returns, were treated like a thief every time you left the stores with mandatory bag searches, etc. Ultimately I both hated these stores but knew they were the only option when I needed something today and couldn't wait for a delivery. The other problem with buying online, especially electronics, is that returns become a nightmare. If I'm buying a big ticket product, I need a place I can return it to if it's broken and I don't want to eat S&H along with 15% restocking fees.
The newer model seems to be represented by the reborn Comp Useless (purchased and owned by Tiger Direct) and the Apple Stores. In the Comp store by me, they're shucked the generalist crap and are tightly focused on computers and electronics. They carry a full range of parts and you can pick out anything you need to build your computer. The tech desks are at the front of the store and there's no walls, it's just you and them. If the people on the sales floor don't have a clue, you can go up and ask a tech and get an answer. I don't know what they're paid but they don't seem as unqualified as the Geek Squad. So far, I've not yet been disappointed but am still keeping a wary eye on them.
The nice part about the Apple store is how they're heavily staffed with people to answer questions and all the toys are out there for you to play with. The traditional big box stores leave you to find your product on your own. As a geek I can muddle along but I have no idea how Joe NotGeek can find what he needs. Apple also schedules classes, has the genius bar (yes, it is a stupid name) open for people to ask whatever questions they need, and tries to demystify computing as much as possible. I won't say they're entirely successful but they are a huge improvement over what you get at the traditional box stores which is nothing.
What it really comes down to is that some business models can be run along the lines of McDonald's and some simply can't. In the restaurant field there will be people who pay $100 for a fine steak and those who will be satisfied with a crappy burger spanked together by surly wage slaves. McDonald's has been enormously successful and will remain so, even as there's a market segment for higher quality fast food stand-in's like Panera's and Quizno's.
The big box stores were the McDonaldizing of electronics and big ticket consumer products. The funny thing is that I thought they would remain as successful as McDonald's and for the same reason. Oddly enough, it looks like the cost-cutting I took for making them profitable did away with whatever vestige of quality that kept people shopping there. It will be interesting to see if there's more of a trend towards competing on service and knowledgeable staffing. Hell, even McDonald's is trying to take a stab at entering the real food market with Chipolte.
One other factor that might also come into play is America's acceptance of cheaply manufactured disposable junk. In good times, people were content to buy a big screen that might be dead in five years because it could always be chucked for the next great thing. People didn't want reliability and durability in their cars because they were trading up every three years. When income is no longer quite so disposable, will people be willing to pay more for quality with the understanding that it costs less in the long-term?
What really scares me here is that this seems like it's a real article that just had the names replaced. I know there are people like that out there but damn.
If they're going to yutz it up with Keanu, what else can they do wrong? Let's see:
Spike: Keanu Reeves Jet: Samuel L. Jackson (not the cool one from pulp fiction but the lame one from Star Wars and b-movies) Ein: Taco Bell dog Ed: Rosie O'Donnell with CGI and optical effects like from Lord of the Rings to make her appear hobbit-sized Vicious: the comedian Steven Wright with an albino wig, retains deadpan delivery. Fae Valentine: the girl from Lazytown that all the pedos have the hots for Coolie-yo: A brand new CGI character invented just for the movie who brings a fresh blast of hip-hop sass and in-your-face attitude, voiced by Chris Tucker
For every other character in the film, make it be Shia LaBeauf making like Eddie Murphy in the Professor movies, he plays every part. "Nononononononononononononononononononononononono!"
Apple is going to either need someone with a vision and business acuity equal to Jobs, or someone who is able to channel Jobs like Eisner did Disney.;-)
Eisner channeled Disney like Stalin channeled Lenin. (hey, at least it ain't a Hitler reference!) He may have returned the company to profitability but he helped ruin what made Disney special.
Here's a good case in point: Epcot. Originally this was supposed to be a world showcase and a city of tomorrow and a living test lab for future tech. The vision was grandiose and many people had no idea where Walt was going with it. Those who knew where he was going weren't even sure if it was practical. After he died, management had no idea what to do with it. Rather than follow through with his vision, they just turned it into another Orlando theme park. "Hey, it's a people trap built by a mouse. We understand this!"
Dreams and vision have to have a practical side to pay the bills, big ideas ain't supported by pixie dust and wishes alone, but the ruthlessly pragmatic can suck all the life and energy out of something beautiful in the quest for money.
Apple's biggest danger is entering an era of bean counter mediocrity. Live for the quarterly earnings statement, have no vision beyond that point, maximize profit at the expense of doing anything else with the company, play it safe with unambitious ideas, and become what Microsoft is today. (yeah, I know some wags will say "What, insanely profitable? You anti-MS fag" and the like, but I think Microsoft is in serious trouble and when people look back with perspective, the Vista era is when the leaks started to spring. It'll be a long time in sinking but I think we've seen the MS high-water mark.)
The Wiki project represents the best and worst that's in us. I wonder if people will start trying to archive classic shows on there like they do on youtube.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Economists like to pretend that they're dealing with a hard science but they are wrong, so very wrong. Economics is certainly a complex field of study but it is also one of the squishiest sciences there is. Economics is psychology with graphs and math. You can talk about supply and demand, this curve and that, but we're ultimately talking about human psychology. You can't use normal logic to figure this stuff out, you have to work with crowd dynamics, herd instinct, quit talking about how people should behave and pay attention to how they really behave.
If you want to understand how everything is going pear-shaped, just look at the Great White club fire. Huge crowd, small venue, and the band's pyrotechnics set the place on fire. Rationally speaking, there's no reason why anyone had to die. There were sufficient doors and sufficient time for a calm and orderly evacuation. And our economists are the ones who would look at that situation and not quite grasp why there was a panic, a human log-jam at the door, and a whole lot of dead bodies. "That wasn't rational behavior! That was irrational exuberance, or maybe irrational shit-the-bed terror. The problem here is that my observations of this event do not fit my models."
That's what we're seeing in this economy, a fire in a club. Everyone is working to maximize their own survival even though it will harm the chances for the group as a whole. Companies are shedding jobs everywhere, getting work is damned near impossible, and we've got a negative feedback loop that nobody seems to be able to break. And nobody wants to take a look at the wall where the writing stands hundreds of feet high -- "we need to reform the way we're doing business and this will change our entire economy as we've come to know it." The thought is too frightening.
It turns out, that, after trashing Bush and Cheney for eight years for not making all of their communications public, the first thing the new Democratic President does is get for himself a means of making private communications based on his word that it will be for personal use only.
This for anyone confused by your argument -- there's obviously no hope of reaching you but I might just be able to reach them.
There is a huge difference between personal privacy and professional privacy. Obama's health was his and his family's business when he was a senator. As President, it's a matter of public interest. Reagan's Alzheimer's after he left office, his business; his Alzheimer's when he was President, that was damn well America's business. It was nothing less than the question of whether he could fulfill his duties as President of the United States. Same reason why we don't have a professional interest in the health of the airline mechanic but we give the pilots annual physicals -- the mechanic keeling over won't kill 150 people.
And when it comes to the president, there's a difference between having an affair with another consenting adult, an action that was incredibly stupid yet broke no laws and Bush's active effort to commit treason against the United States and cover up the planning. Clinton's affair was between him, Hillary, and Chelsea. Bush I and II, Reagan, their crimes were against the American people. Iran-Contra, lying us into the Iraq war, helping to roll back regulations so our economy would overheat and explode like the heart of a rabbit chased by a lawnmower...
Frankly, I don't dispute the right of any President to have secret communications. He needs to be judged by his work product and not be constantly subject to the Congress. It was wrong for Republicans to harrass Clinton during his Presidency and it was wrong for Bush to be harrassed as well. IT's not because, ideally, the President is above the law, but it is because, he (or she!), is not subjugated to the Congress. They are equal branches of government.
Bush and his cronies setup separate RNC emails so that they could conduct illegal politiking from the White House. They tore a strip off Gore's hide for making a fundraising call on public lines from his office, how is it any different doing RNC work on the public's dime? Sure, there should be separate email accounts so that any President can keep party business and state business separate but the White House shouldn't be party headquarters.
Trying to conflate Clinton's sins, which were many, against Bush's sins which were many but also far, far more treasonous is ridiculous. Clinton was impeached for lying about a blowjob. Bush was never impeached for lying us into a fucking war.
Aw "terabyte" was my original handle...and I thought it was clever because it sounded like "terror."
My original handle was going to be my name replaced by asterisks **** ****. It took me ages to figure out why I kept crashing the boards I was tying to join. :(
That was two V's.
No, they were back and forward slashes, alternating. That's the beauty of the G\/\/B handle, you can try googling it but you'll never get it right! And I thought the "non-space non-printing character" hidden directory name in DOS was awesome.
Cool hacker name = geek culture reference + creative misspellings/capitalizations
Sample names:
Dark JedEYE
FeloniouS MonK
POPP3R SMRF
TERRORByTE
G\/\/B
I predict you will hear of these handles in future busts.
Man, I wish that were a joke, but it just isn't. The series producers have admitted that the whole "and they have a plan" thing was added "because it seemed cool."
In fact, if you listen to the episode commentary, quite a bit of things were done "because it seemed cool." Boomer being a Cylon? "Because it seemed cool." The whole thing with the second Sharon and Helo on Caprica? "Because it seemed cool."
The writers have never had a real plan and have been playing the entire thing mostly by ear. And it shows: the "and they have a plan" thing has just vanished. What is that plan? Did they give up on it? Why didn't they finish wiping out the human race? (Problems with Cylons procreating, apparently?) What's the deal with the human/Cylon hybrids (versus the Basestar/humanoid Cylon hybrid)?
The show with manatees isn't Family Guy, it's BSG. It's like they're just bouncing ideas together at random and that's because they are. Why is it that humans and skinjobs are physically indistinguishable and yet Cottle is able to say that the Cylons screwed up the birth canal on the female model? If this is the case, you can find any female skinjob just by giving her a gyno exam.
What I find so frustrating about "making it up as you go" is that proper stories are supposed to build towards something. Yes, real life doesn't have to do that but dramas tend to unless the point being aimed at is existential futility. "Hey, there's no God and no point to anything! Wooohoo!"
Part of the fun of a good mystery is being able to tease out the details as you go and see if you can figure out what's going on before the author reveals it. If the author himself has no idea what's going on and is making it up as he goes then there's just no fun to it. "Um, yeah. So the killer is a character you didn't introduce until the last act and his accomplice was someone who was in the same room with everyone else when the victim was killed in a study locked from the inside. The accomplice, shown in the room with everyone else in the first act, is shown in a third act flashback to have snuck in to the locked room via a secret passage that would have been found in the investigation in the second act."
I don't think Jobs was actually the one who came up with the iPod, and iWhatever they are (I'm not an Apple fanboy if you can't tell.).
If you're talking about that desk lamp computer monstrosity, I think you mean the iSore.
The authors here are just having a laugh, aren't they?
I work for Seagate. I was there when the fit hit the shan
Aha! Azathoth-worshipping insects from Shaggai are running the company. I knew there must have been a reasonable explanation for all this.
Anybody who uses "brick" as a verb should be bricked - with a brick.
*hefts brick* Well, you did ask for it.
I never understood why equipment capable of being flash-updated by users does not include the 1.0 drivers as a ROM onboard the device. This way if you completely and utterly bork the flashing, you can reset a jumper, press a recessed button with a paperclip, so SOMETHING that will cause the EPROM to be reflashed from the known good ROM. "Hey, here's baseline firmware again, people. Let's try this again."
The only possible explanation I can think of for not doing this is that the known-good ROM would add another half-cent to the manufacturing process and we know how manufacturers watch their pennies.
I can't believe that a First Post that includes references to Frosty Piss got modded informative!
Must be a Bud drinker.
We could have slashed half of the workforce, but I'm putting in my life savings, and borrow money to pay for the monthly expenses and salary, trying to ride the storm. We don't even cut any benefits, we even gave everyone a small bonus at the end of year (yeah, in cash, not a Gphone like Google did), and also paid for the annual health checkup (as we have done every year), when every other company has cut all these.
Now, can I get the good publicity now? Can we be called a good corporate? Can we get more clients (eventually) because we are good to our employees? In fact, I'm not even sure that, once the economic slump is over, our employees would even be grateful and stay a bit longer with us.
You have my sympathy and my respect. No good deed goes unpunished and I'm sure you will take some hits from this. However, I would like to optimistically think that the ones who jump ship are the mercenaries and the ones who remain will be all the more loyal for it. I know how hard it is to find good people and how wasteful it seems to cut them in the crisis of the moment because you could well be desperately needing them in six months.
I would be terribly frightened to own my own company in this environment.
Heh... I remember getting calls after I was hit in a post-dot-bomb layoff, asking "Have you seen what people are posting about the company at FC?"
Not knowing what FC was, I enjoyed reading the rants. But then again, I always thought they were stupid, in the end.
Stupid of the people (then looking for work) to post things like that in public, and stupid of the people still working there to even care what was being said.
Only idiots are posting with their real names. :)
I did FC while my dot.com was circling the drain. It was certainly therapeutic. People who dwell on this years later are like people who still haven't gotten over high school but immediately following the traumatic event, it's good to vent and commiserate.
Of course, FC went downhill later after the stormfronters and race trolls took over, but that's another story.
The real reason Vista really failed is the same people who are hyping up 7, the media.
Completely wrong. There are two reasons why Vista failed. The first is that it's a crap product. The media duly took their ad money and their Ferrari laptops and reported their unbiased finding that it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. They squandered their credibility because far and away most people who tried it hated it.
The second reason why Vista failed was us. We tried it. We put it through its paces. We compared it side-by-side with XP. We tried to prepare it for deployment to our myriad customers with their critical applications and legacy hardware, and found that it would not serve. Then we signed on to slashdot and cnet and ZDnet and every other news forum with comments and every time they posted yet another rave review we got up in the comments and told the truth. Never before have I seen such dissonance between news reportage of technology and the public comments available. We told our friends, our family. When we got a call on Saturday from Cousin Joe halfway across the country asking "XP or Vista for my new PC" we told him "Not Vista. If you can't get XP, get a mac." The consensus opinion became so strong that non-technical family members who had never tried it were warning me off of the thing.
I'd say what happened with vista was like a shit firestorm. You get a bunch of fires burning across a city, they can cease to act as individual fires and begin to work as one. The huge mass of rising air creates a chimney effect and fresh air is sucked in from outside, creating a roiling, self-sustaining mass of flaming death. The result is far worse than any of the individual fires and will continue until all fuel is consumed.
Vista is an absolutely crap product, no doubt, and the negative reaction of techies was picked up on and repeated by non-techies. And this is what set the stage for the shit firestorm. The media picked up on it and the negativity has a life of its own that no amount of counter-marketing could possibly defeat.
Conversely, we're watching a sugar firestorm for Obama. I feel sorry for the guy, they're laying it out for him like he's the Second Coming of Christ. It'd be almost impossible not to fall short of these expectations. His sugar firestorm is in direct reaction to the shit firestorm that Bush created for himself by being such a colossal fuckup. Between the wars, the bad economy, and the banal, incurious evil of the Bushies, America would be slavering all over a president who could pronounce "nuclear" properly and in fact we've got what appears to be a great selection with oodles of potential. I just fear that the sugar firestorm will slowly turn into a hype crash. Those of us who grew up on Star Wars and had our hopes up for Phantom Menace, you know well of what I speak.
Windows 7 is literally putting lipstick on a pig!
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
That's because you're looking at Balmer's neck.
>Is it as quick as running XP? Well, no, but don't forget that XP is a seven-year-old operating system that required a Pentium II at release.
You see I don't get this comment. Since the operating system 7 years ago had to run on much slower hardware, well, don't expect that now?
WHY F***G NOT! What on earth does an operating system have to do so that it sucks up ever bit of my quad core machine?
Ditto, my friend, ditto. (and I'm loathe to use that word after Rush sullied it.)
I truly don't understand the urge to go and scrap stuff that used to be working and I have no idea how they managed to break so much between XP and Vista when it didn't even advance a version number.
The point of the operating system is to host your apps and be as unobtrusive as possible. DOS wasn't great but did the job. I never liked Windows 3.1. I finally took the windows plunge with 95 because it brought enough new things to the table but unfortunately those things were full of bugs. Win2k was great because it finally brought stability to the OS. XP I did not see as a compelling upgrade and my home desktop remains on 2K. I only have XP on my laptop because the license came with it and uninstalling it to put win2k on would be cutting off my nose to spite my face.
I finally got a mac and am making the acquaintance of OS X for the first time. While I'm despising the unimouse and feel there are a few inexplicable weird decisions made in certain spots, overall I am impressed. There are new ideas here. Well, maybe not new to people who have been on Mac all this time but certainly new to this Windows user. It's the little stuff that impresses the snot out of me. Hmm, what IP address was I assigned? Type "ip address" into finder, it pulls up the exact screen in question. Wow! Indexed, instantaneous searching of every folder on the machine, I don't even have to remember where I put something. That's almost like magic. I haven't setup email on it yet but I bet it probably works like magic there, too. When I compare gmail's search functionality to Outlook I laugh. You can't find anything in Outlook, you have to manually file everything and look for it just like you were printing out everything and sticking it in a filing cabinet. After all these years and all this money, why does Microsoft still suck at it?
My rule of operating system design:
1. People don't buy a stereo to listen to it, they but it to play music. Anyone listening to the stereo rather than the music is probably buying $800 cables to enrich their sound.
2. The operating system exists to facilitate whatever the user is trying to do. Anything that gets in the way of that is a bad idea.
3. The operating system should not expand to fill all available space and resources. There's absolutely no reason why a computer just a few years old should not be able to run the latest OS release. Certainly an elderly computer should be able to run that OS with the bells and whistles turned off and the understanding that demanding apps may not run well or at all but the fucking OS shouldn't be considered a demanding app!
4. If you have nothing new to bring to the table, don't come to the table. Unfortunately, Microsoft's release schedule is dictated by marketing rather than engineering. They're going to release something regardless of whether or not the world needs it. There have been no good advances in Office since Office 2000 and yet we keep seeing releases without compelling features. I've yet to hear of a single new feature in Vista or W7 that makes me think "oooh, I gotta have!" The only reason I'd have to upgrade the OS at this point is that I wouldn't be able to find Win2K drivers for newer kit.
While I do agree with you, I'll take a moment to play Devil's advocate. Small store owners can be dicks just like the big store owners. I do a lot of grocery shopping at hole in the wall ethnic markets and the staff there can be every bit as surly as disaffected slackers in big box stores. The difference (usually) is that good performance goes unrewarded at the big box stores, actually punished at Circuit City since they fired their top salespeople. In a small shop environment, it should be possible for a good salesman to be rewarded for his efforts, therefore you would expect more positive reinforcement and better reps there.
I worked for a computer guy back in '99 as the box stores were rising in prominence. The mom and pop shops couldn't compete with the box stores on price and this guy decided to add PC hardware to his midrange business that was slowly dying off. I told him that trying to make money off of merchandise was ridiculous and that the only way a smaller shop could compete was on service. If we built a proper service department, we might have a shot at surviving. He didn't, I moved on, and from what I've heard of people who have tried running service shops catering to businesses, its a damn rough game to be in these days. Businesses will pay for lawyers and accountants to come in and help as necessary but they seem to think that computer people should be paid the same rates as the janitorial service.
Apple's first big loss to Microsoft was thinking people would pay more for mac quality but the market said Windows wasn't great but good enough. It'll be interesting to see how it goes in the future. The iPods are ridiculously overpriced as mp3 players but those bastards sell like hotcakes. I guess the bit of genius there was equating this to fashion. People will be ruthlessly efficient when it comes to making practical purchases but when it comes to buying impractical things like handbags, shoes, and designer goods, logic and reason go out the fucking window.
Well, I have had experience with the old school way of doing things, Beast Buy, Comp Useless, and Circuit Shitty. The advantage they had over the smaller shops is a huge selection and usually steep discounts on big ticket items. The drawback was usually that you got raped on the peripherals and accessories ($20 printer cables you could buy for $2 anyone?) and their staff was usually pig ignorant and useless. Not only that but you also had to deal with scumfuck corporate tactics on returns, were treated like a thief every time you left the stores with mandatory bag searches, etc. Ultimately I both hated these stores but knew they were the only option when I needed something today and couldn't wait for a delivery. The other problem with buying online, especially electronics, is that returns become a nightmare. If I'm buying a big ticket product, I need a place I can return it to if it's broken and I don't want to eat S&H along with 15% restocking fees.
The newer model seems to be represented by the reborn Comp Useless (purchased and owned by Tiger Direct) and the Apple Stores. In the Comp store by me, they're shucked the generalist crap and are tightly focused on computers and electronics. They carry a full range of parts and you can pick out anything you need to build your computer. The tech desks are at the front of the store and there's no walls, it's just you and them. If the people on the sales floor don't have a clue, you can go up and ask a tech and get an answer. I don't know what they're paid but they don't seem as unqualified as the Geek Squad. So far, I've not yet been disappointed but am still keeping a wary eye on them.
The nice part about the Apple store is how they're heavily staffed with people to answer questions and all the toys are out there for you to play with. The traditional big box stores leave you to find your product on your own. As a geek I can muddle along but I have no idea how Joe NotGeek can find what he needs. Apple also schedules classes, has the genius bar (yes, it is a stupid name) open for people to ask whatever questions they need, and tries to demystify computing as much as possible. I won't say they're entirely successful but they are a huge improvement over what you get at the traditional box stores which is nothing.
What it really comes down to is that some business models can be run along the lines of McDonald's and some simply can't. In the restaurant field there will be people who pay $100 for a fine steak and those who will be satisfied with a crappy burger spanked together by surly wage slaves. McDonald's has been enormously successful and will remain so, even as there's a market segment for higher quality fast food stand-in's like Panera's and Quizno's.
The big box stores were the McDonaldizing of electronics and big ticket consumer products. The funny thing is that I thought they would remain as successful as McDonald's and for the same reason. Oddly enough, it looks like the cost-cutting I took for making them profitable did away with whatever vestige of quality that kept people shopping there. It will be interesting to see if there's more of a trend towards competing on service and knowledgeable staffing. Hell, even McDonald's is trying to take a stab at entering the real food market with Chipolte.
One other factor that might also come into play is America's acceptance of cheaply manufactured disposable junk. In good times, people were content to buy a big screen that might be dead in five years because it could always be chucked for the next great thing. People didn't want reliability and durability in their cars because they were trading up every three years. When income is no longer quite so disposable, will people be willing to pay more for quality with the understanding that it costs less in the long-term?
What really scares me here is that this seems like it's a real article that just had the names replaced. I know there are people like that out there but damn.
If they're going to yutz it up with Keanu, what else can they do wrong? Let's see:
Spike: Keanu Reeves
Jet: Samuel L. Jackson (not the cool one from pulp fiction but the lame one from Star Wars and b-movies)
Ein: Taco Bell dog
Ed: Rosie O'Donnell with CGI and optical effects like from Lord of the Rings to make her appear hobbit-sized
Vicious: the comedian Steven Wright with an albino wig, retains deadpan delivery.
Fae Valentine: the girl from Lazytown that all the pedos have the hots for
Coolie-yo: A brand new CGI character invented just for the movie who brings a fresh blast of hip-hop sass and in-your-face attitude, voiced by Chris Tucker
For every other character in the film, make it be Shia LaBeauf making like Eddie Murphy in the Professor movies, he plays every part. "Nononononononononononononononononononononononono!"
Apple is going to either need someone with a vision and business acuity equal to Jobs, or someone who is able to channel Jobs like Eisner did Disney. ;-)
Eisner channeled Disney like Stalin channeled Lenin. (hey, at least it ain't a Hitler reference!) He may have returned the company to profitability but he helped ruin what made Disney special.
Here's a good case in point: Epcot. Originally this was supposed to be a world showcase and a city of tomorrow and a living test lab for future tech. The vision was grandiose and many people had no idea where Walt was going with it. Those who knew where he was going weren't even sure if it was practical. After he died, management had no idea what to do with it. Rather than follow through with his vision, they just turned it into another Orlando theme park. "Hey, it's a people trap built by a mouse. We understand this!"
Dreams and vision have to have a practical side to pay the bills, big ideas ain't supported by pixie dust and wishes alone, but the ruthlessly pragmatic can suck all the life and energy out of something beautiful in the quest for money.
Apple's biggest danger is entering an era of bean counter mediocrity. Live for the quarterly earnings statement, have no vision beyond that point, maximize profit at the expense of doing anything else with the company, play it safe with unambitious ideas, and become what Microsoft is today. (yeah, I know some wags will say "What, insanely profitable? You anti-MS fag" and the like, but I think Microsoft is in serious trouble and when people look back with perspective, the Vista era is when the leaks started to spring. It'll be a long time in sinking but I think we've seen the MS high-water mark.)
This sounds like one of his troll articles.
The Wiki project represents the best and worst that's in us. I wonder if people will start trying to archive classic shows on there like they do on youtube. :)
Last time I was there I had some great meat balls. They really were the dog's bollocks.
And I always thought that was a figure of speech.