I don't believe outsourcing is foolish (of course I work for an outsourcing company). It depends on what the motives are and as you said, because the company does not have the will to control costs themselves. If you have let your company grow too big for it's britches, as an example, for the company we do break/fix outsourcing for (a large 5 letter chip-making company), outsourcing is a great way to save money on things you really shouldn't have been wasting your time doing in the first place. There is a point where there is so much bureaucracy that you have whole divisions dedicated to supporting your own business, and people collecting compensation based on generous stock/comp plans, who should really be making much less than they are. There are divisions here that charge $120 an hour to their own coworkers! For programming! It costs over $1000/month to have a server hosted internally. And that does not include the price of the server! These are all internal chargebacks. If I was a stockholder I would be pissed that they didn't outsource, or at least get rid of half of their IT staff. The larger a company gets, the more it operates and wastes money like our government.
shango
What I found disappointing (maybe I just haven't read enough about serial ATA) is that it only supports two drives. Why only two? I thought serial ATA was supposed to be more like SCSI, with more drives (like 15)?
Shango
Re:Do we want a book?
on
High Score
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There ARE people who sell full cd's of MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) with all the ROM's (IIRC, the.61 version is up to about 8 cd's). If you really have to have them all or are looking for a certain one, usenet almost always has everything. For mame, alt.binaries.emulators.mame. I think someone posted all 8 cd's not long ago.
If anyone is interested in playing any of the games from their adolescence, check out http://www.mame.net for MAME, and http://www.classicgaming.com or http://www.vg-network.com for other emulators.
They have emulators for anything from arcade to Nintendo (original to 64), Apple ][, Amstrad, and Vectrex.
It is truly amazing the amount of people who have spent their time to keep them from dying out.
I would think they would move towards more mind driven typing techniques by harnessing the speech to text technology of something like Dragon Dictate and matching that with the technology from this.
You figure the tech behing Dragon Dictate could learn your thought patterns for words and translate that into words, rather than all these fruity gesture based systems. I want less physical movement not more dammit!
I don't see the point of all these peer to peer networks for downloading albums, unless you have extreme patience. Has anyone bothered with just going to alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.*? There are enough groups that probably have 95% of what anybody would want. I can dump from easynews at 5Mbs, so I can get most cds in under 4 minutes.
I would suspect that usenet is faster getting things than most anyways.
Everything invented now seems to be for the sake of p0rn or entertainment. Just think, these phone probably could be setup to send pics directly to webserver. And you thought you didn't have enough upskirt photos already. You could probably remote control these from a computer and set them up all over the place and take pictures every minute or so.
Seriously though, there are two sides to this. You could be being watched at any point in time and not know it (well, we are right now but I mean up close), or this could be the start of a turning point in moving more countries in the world towards democracy. When you can't hide what you are doing to your people you tend to be a little more scared of doing something bad. What are they going to do, ban cell phones?
Shango
Misuse of terminology - not exciting technology
on
USB On-the-Go Go Go Go
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I fail to see what the effect of this will be. In reality, there is no such thing as a
"peer-to-peer" network. Regardless of what communication device you are using, one of them HAS to ask for SOMETHING. That is the whole basis of communication. Question and answer. This role may be reversed many times during the communication, but it still exists. So you don't need a pc. Wow. A limitation born out of the technology they decided to implement it with.
Maybe someone will come up with the telephone next.
After reading the article, it struck me as funny how things never change. There are tons of PHB's out there buying up any big flashy ad in their free (if you fill out free survey, otherwise pay $XXX a year) industry mags. I am a Windows user (yeah yeah) but at least I am not stupid enough to buy anything first from Microsoft until they come out with one service pack first. Of course, here at unnamed large x86 cpu company (my company contracts here), they have decided to move to Microsoft's tune within 90 days of them releasing a product. So we have people (not just IT people, HR people, finance people) etc... installing the wonderful IT "engineered" version of WinXP. (Don't get me started on how in the world they think they make Microsoft's stuff more stable through their "engineering".) That anyone would buy into Larry's BS is bizarre. But the PHB's are entirely ignorant of the real world and would gladly believe that Windows XP is crashproof and utterly stable if Bill told them so. I hope somebody has their Oracle9i system hacked and then sue's Oracle for false advertising, amongst other things.
--Shango
Their exit of the pda business is due to a natural progression of technology. What we had before pda's were little micro organizers (like from sharp) and other business card size devices that held phone numbers, addresse, etc (I wish they would at least implement one thing I miss from those small things, HAVE THESE DAMN PDA'S DIAL PHONE NUMBERS! All those little tiny ones were able to dial using touch tones way back when). Anyways, before that (and I still have it somewhere) there were those cool Casio Telememo watches which you could put names and phone numbers into.
Err, make a point. I used to have a Palm Pro (I won it at one of our company conventions). It was neat for saving names, addresses, and I could play hours of Hong Kong Mahjong on it. But, it didn't hold enough mail to bother with, couldn't view attachments, and I didn't miss it much when it accidently got ran over when I left it on top of my car (it did make it a half mile to the main intersection though). Most people don't need an "organizer". I remember (most of the time) my appointments, phone numbers I need, etc without one. What I use now (A HP 548 with a Minstrel modem that it sits in like a cradle) is far more functional that my palm was. Granted the palm was a few generations older, but they really haven't changed all that much. I can dump a map from MS Streets into it, look up addresses of yard sales and local auctions. I can surf the web in full color and look up items for price comparison on eBay so I can decide what amount I want to bid on the item. And see a nice color picture. There was software out there to convert my internet connection into voice ala net2phone at one time also. I can add memory using the standard CF slot, or put on a gps, or the little cf camera they have.
Palm may have done them first, but they let themselves go by the wayside when they stayed with their smaller resolution screen and were B/W for so long. People want more functionality and they want color and they want it to work with whatthey already have. People always want more, and most people have outgrown an organizer and moved into a "PocketPC" (TM);-)
I am not bashing Palm users in anyway, but just stating that for some people they will be happy with what the palm provides, and for others they will want more. The CE devices provide more now.
If only Harrison Leong would port Hong Kong Mahjong to WinCE.
A husband of one of my coworkers works for a rival of Kraft foods. They designed a and tried to patent the process/machinery of making peanut butter and jelly into slices (just like sandwich cheese). Their patent I can understand (the work involved to get two dissimilar food products to stick together in a peel and open plastic square in a manufacturing environment is not as easy as it sounds). Anyways, they have been rejected by the patent office over 3 times because there is an "inventor" who basically patented wrapping slices of nut butter and jelly. Not the process, but the idea that it is packaged in plastic (err "flexible package covering". The patent will not issue them a patent because their process is based on "prior art", and nevermind the fact that the patent examiner has stock in PJ Squares. See patent RE37275, reissue of 5855939.
Also see 6,080,436 (patent for err, "refreshing" bread by heating it to 2500-4500 degrees (sounds like making toast) and the almost infamous Smucker patent on a "sealed crustless sandwich" patent number 6,004,596. Patent 6,296,884 (prepackaged s'more kit).
I think I will patent the "method of excreting organically processed food and other sustanance by way of a pouch shaped contractile organ which then compresses the processed food out through a hole at the end of the organ through repetative application of contractions along the length of the organ."
I will then own the patent on the process by which you take a crap. I wonder what I will get paid in?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe outsourcing is foolish (of course I work for an outsourcing company). It depends on what the motives are and as you said, because the company does not have the will to control costs themselves. If you have let your company grow too big for it's britches, as an example, for the company we do break/fix outsourcing for (a large 5 letter chip-making company), outsourcing is a great way to save money on things you really shouldn't have been wasting your time doing in the first place. There is a point where there is so much bureaucracy that you have whole divisions dedicated to supporting your own business, and people collecting compensation based on generous stock/comp plans, who should really be making much less than they are. There are divisions here that charge $120 an hour to their own coworkers! For programming! It costs over $1000/month to have a server hosted internally. And that does not include the price of the server! These are all internal chargebacks. If I was a stockholder I would be pissed that they didn't outsource, or at least get rid of half of their IT staff. The larger a company gets, the more it operates and wastes money like our government. shango
The exact motherboard that supports Serial ATA is the D845PEBT2
The technical documentation is here
What I found disappointing (maybe I just haven't read enough about serial ATA) is that it only supports two drives. Why only two? I thought serial ATA was supposed to be more like SCSI, with more drives (like 15)?
Shango
There ARE people who sell full cd's of MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) with all the ROM's (IIRC, the .61 version is up to about 8 cd's). If you really have to have them all or are looking for a certain one, usenet almost always has everything. For mame, alt.binaries.emulators.mame. I think someone posted all 8 cd's not long ago.
If anyone is interested in playing any of the games from their adolescence, check out http://www.mame.net for MAME, and http://www.classicgaming.com or http://www.vg-network.com for other emulators.
They have emulators for anything from arcade to Nintendo (original to 64), Apple ][, Amstrad, and Vectrex.
It is truly amazing the amount of people who have spent their time to keep them from dying out.
Shango
I would think they would move towards more mind driven typing techniques by harnessing the speech to text technology of something like Dragon Dictate and matching that with the technology from this.
You figure the tech behing Dragon Dictate could learn your thought patterns for words and translate that into words, rather than all these fruity gesture based systems. I want less physical movement not more dammit!
Shango
I don't see the point of all these peer to peer networks for downloading albums, unless you have extreme patience. Has anyone bothered with just going to alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.*? There are enough groups that probably have 95% of what anybody would want. I can dump from easynews at 5Mbs, so I can get most cds in under 4 minutes.
I would suspect that usenet is faster getting things than most anyways.
Shango
Everything invented now seems to be for the sake of p0rn or entertainment. Just think, these phone probably could be setup to send pics directly to webserver. And you thought you didn't have enough upskirt photos already. You could probably remote control these from a computer and set them up all over the place and take pictures every minute or so.
Seriously though, there are two sides to this. You could be being watched at any point in time and not know it (well, we are right now but I mean up close), or this could be the start of a turning point in moving more countries in the world towards democracy. When you can't hide what you are doing to your people you tend to be a little more scared of doing something bad. What are they going to do, ban cell phones?
Shango
I fail to see what the effect of this will be. In reality, there is no such thing as a "peer-to-peer" network. Regardless of what communication device you are using, one of them HAS to ask for SOMETHING. That is the whole basis of communication. Question and answer. This role may be reversed many times during the communication, but it still exists. So you don't need a pc. Wow. A limitation born out of the technology they decided to implement it with.
Maybe someone will come up with the telephone next.
Shango
After reading the article, it struck me as funny how things never change. There are tons of PHB's out there buying up any big flashy ad in their free (if you fill out free survey, otherwise pay $XXX a year) industry mags. I am a Windows user (yeah yeah) but at least I am not stupid enough to buy anything first from Microsoft until they come out with one service pack first. Of course, here at unnamed large x86 cpu company (my company contracts here), they have decided to move to Microsoft's tune within 90 days of them releasing a product. So we have people (not just IT people, HR people, finance people) etc... installing the wonderful IT "engineered" version of WinXP. (Don't get me started on how in the world they think they make Microsoft's stuff more stable through their "engineering".) That anyone would buy into Larry's BS is bizarre. But the PHB's are entirely ignorant of the real world and would gladly believe that Windows XP is crashproof and utterly stable if Bill told them so. I hope somebody has their Oracle9i system hacked and then sue's Oracle for false advertising, amongst other things. --Shango
Their exit of the pda business is due to a natural progression of technology. What we had before pda's were little micro organizers (like from sharp) and other business card size devices that held phone numbers, addresse, etc (I wish they would at least implement one thing I miss from those small things, HAVE THESE DAMN PDA'S DIAL PHONE NUMBERS! All those little tiny ones were able to dial using touch tones way back when). Anyways, before that (and I still have it somewhere) there were those cool Casio Telememo watches which you could put names and phone numbers into.
Err, make a point. I used to have a Palm Pro (I won it at one of our company conventions). It was neat for saving names, addresses, and I could play hours of Hong Kong Mahjong on it. But, it didn't hold enough mail to bother with, couldn't view attachments, and I didn't miss it much when it accidently got ran over when I left it on top of my car (it did make it a half mile to the main intersection though). Most people don't need an "organizer". I remember (most of the time) my appointments, phone numbers I need, etc without one. What I use now (A HP 548 with a Minstrel modem that it sits in like a cradle) is far more functional that my palm was. Granted the palm was a few generations older, but they really haven't changed all that much. I can dump a map from MS Streets into it, look up addresses of yard sales and local auctions. I can surf the web in full color and look up items for price comparison on eBay so I can decide what amount I want to bid on the item. And see a nice color picture. There was software out there to convert my internet connection into voice ala net2phone at one time also. I can add memory using the standard CF slot, or put on a gps, or the little cf camera they have.
Palm may have done them first, but they let themselves go by the wayside when they stayed with their smaller resolution screen and were B/W for so long. People want more functionality and they want color and they want it to work with whatthey already have. People always want more, and most people have outgrown an organizer and moved into a "PocketPC" (TM)
I am not bashing Palm users in anyway, but just stating that for some people they will be happy with what the palm provides, and for others they will want more. The CE devices provide more now.
If only Harrison Leong would port Hong Kong Mahjong to WinCE.
--Shango
A husband of one of my coworkers works for a rival of Kraft foods. They designed a and tried to patent the process/machinery of making peanut butter and jelly into slices (just like sandwich cheese). Their patent I can understand (the work involved to get two dissimilar food products to stick together in a peel and open plastic square in a manufacturing environment is not as easy as it sounds). Anyways, they have been rejected by the patent office over 3 times because there is an "inventor" who basically patented wrapping slices of nut butter and jelly. Not the process, but the idea that it is packaged in plastic (err "flexible package covering". The patent will not issue them a patent because their process is based on "prior art", and nevermind the fact that the patent examiner has stock in PJ Squares. See patent RE37275, reissue of 5855939.
Also see 6,080,436 (patent for err, "refreshing" bread by heating it to 2500-4500 degrees (sounds like making toast) and the almost infamous Smucker patent on a "sealed crustless sandwich" patent number 6,004,596. Patent 6,296,884 (prepackaged s'more kit).
I think I will patent the "method of excreting organically processed food and other sustanance by way of a pouch shaped contractile organ which then compresses the processed food out through a hole at the end of the organ through repetative application of contractions along the length of the organ."
I will then own the patent on the process by which you take a crap. I wonder what I will get paid in?
Shango