Quote from the above linked article: 'The Corporate Library, an independent research firm, rated Verizon's board as one of the "10 worst" among 1,700 companies in 2003 for excessive pay, a lack of independence among directors and other practices.'
I know you are wondering, how could this happen? Well, I don't know either. But here's a theory:
Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, who will soon quit Verizon and join AT & T, was sitting around wondering, "How could I shoot off my mouth and damage Verizon? That would make my job at AT & T easier."
Okay, maybe not a good theory. What's yours, then?
Both Firefox and Mozilla crashed for me earlier tonight when I was printing postage and labels from the usps.com web site.
It's obvious that both have problems with the plugin interface.
The problem with Open Source software is that there is no one to say, "This bug MUST be fixed, before anything else is done." OO people work on what they want, and the less interesting stuff, like fixing someone else's bugs, doesn't get attention.
The Slashdot rendering bug has not been fixed, for example, and both FF and Moz are crashy, as the parent poster says.
It was the second, a failure in Windows Update. The computer is in our office, and we haven't bought HP stuff for years, since Carly Fiorina began the reign of poor quality products.
The update clearly said it was for some other keyboard, but what it installed was HP.
The parent post is moderated as "Funny", but that's what happened to us.
We installed SP2 on numerous machines. There were a variety of problems.
Re-installing SP2 and rebooting several times often cured the problems.
Sometimes it was necessary to reload the entire Windows SP2 operating
system.
We troubleshot one of the problems and discovered that SP2 expects that a
particular file exists on the target computer, before it has copied that file.
So, if the version that was already on the target computer is not recent
enough, SP2 will crash. We reported this to Microsoft, but there was only a
spacey response, as though confusion reigned. Microsoft did not seem to have
the capacity to respond sensibly.
SP2 has numerous fixes for problems with USB 2.0. USB operated much
better for us after SP2 was installed.
Microsoft gives us the impression that the company has a sloppy
management style supervising coders who are not given enough time to do a good
job. If you don't install SP2, you are not giving Microsoft the opportunity to
fix some of its bugs. Someone once said that the Microsoft motto was "The
whole world is our beta test site." According to that, Windows XP SP2 is just
the first release version of Windows XP. We had many, many time-consuming
problems with the pre-SP1 version; in our opinion, it was not ready for
release; it could be made to work, but it was a time-waster. Maybe it's
foolish to believe that two billionaires could care what happens to the less
rich.
All of our Microsoft OS computers are now using SP2 with all the most
recent critical updates, with no unexplained problems for months.
Be careful with Windows XP updates other than critical updates.
Someone made a mistake and updated a computer here recently with a recommended
hardware driver. The name of the driver on the Windows Update web site is
different from the name of the driver once installed. That computer has never
had an "HP wireless keyboard" attached to it.
It is simply amazing how bad is the management of technically oriented companies.
Or maybe Meetup knows something we don't. Some of the groups will pay the $228/year until they can make other arrangements. So, Meetup will have a sudden influx of money. Maybe they know that Meetup will die, and just want to extract as much money as possible before that happens.
If you have a group, the best thing is to have a web site for your group. Then you aren't dependent on whatever sink-the-company idea someone has this month.
Note also that now organizers must give their mailing addresses to Meetup.com.
More steps commonly taken by proprietary services and manufacturers:
1) Make a privacy policy assuring all the privacy anyone could want.
2) Collect a lot of private information.
3) Change the privacy policy to allow a lack of privacy, because that is more profitable. Include all the people who trusted the old assurances in the new lack-of-privacy policy.
It's the old, "I mean what I say until I decide I don't mean what I say" trick, and it is legal in the United States, apparently. (Many companies have done this. There was a story on Slashdot about it being legal.)
Note that most "groups" have a very small number of "members". Also, the
number of members is vastly inflated because of a trick. You must become a
"member" to get information about where the next meeting will be held. There
may be many, many groups with "members" who decided they had no interest in
the group, and never visited the group online again, or did anything with the
group.
How many people will pay $228 U.S. each year to try an idea of developing a
group? The value of the U.S. dollar is dropping fast because the Bush
administration is rapidly borrowing money, but the dollar
is not worthless.
Would you pay $2,280 over ten years to find other people in your area
with an interest in a special breed of cats, for example? Especially when you
never attract more than 4 people, and some of them are not very interested?
Also, some groups may have fake members entered by organizers
attempting to attract people by making it seem that there is more interest
than there really is. I visited one group that showed photos of two very
beautiful women who said they were enthusiastic about the group. However,
neither of them visited the group again, according to their statistics. A $228
yearly fee makes dishonesty more likely.
A web site for meetings is a good idea, but we need a non-adversarial
method of making that happen.
This always happens with closed-source, proprietary solutions.
Sooner or later the proprietor becomes abusive.
2) Get people to depend on that service. Use poorly designed software.
3) Then begin charging an extremely high fee for that service. $19 per month??? What could they be thinking? For an automatic, low-bandwidth service? There are many groups that have only 2 or 3 members, and have not attracted more, but hope to attract more later.
Brazil: A country that uses proprietary software with hidden file formats is not an independent country. This is particularly true when considering software from the United States. The U.S. government spends a huge amount on spying on other countries. Some of the spying is done to benefit U.S. companies to allow them to compete with foreign companies.
Brazil: Do you want to be a partner of a company that has broken the laws of its own country? If that company has in the past shown little respect for the laws of its own country, would it respect the laws of Brazil?
Brazil: Remember that hidden elements of the U.S. government supported the military coup against democracy in Brazil, without the knowledge of most U.S. citizens.
The GoDaddy web site is always trying to sell something, actually a hundred things. In my opinion, the GoDaddy web site is arranged to intimidate people who aren't really knowledgeable.
I also did not have problems. Some motherboards would work correctly for weeks. Then there would be an unexplained failure of the mirror. HighPoint tech. support said they were not able to understand why the failures were occurring. (Promise told me the same thing.) Highpoint said that the failure was common.
Beware of a company that is so sloppy that it won't go to the Amigo Guest House in Taipei and find a U.S. citizen and native speaker of English to help it with the English on its web site: http://www.highpoint-tech.com/
How many Iraqis has the Argentine government killed? None, right? How many Vietnamese has the Argentine government killed? None, right? The U.S. government killed 2,000,000. Guess how many Vietnamese directly threatened the U.S. at the time? None.
HighPoint RocketRAID cards do not function well when used as the boot device for Windows XP. This was verified by HighPoint technical support. We did not try them under Linux. But read my comment above about timing issues.
Of all the PC RAID card manufacturers, 3Ware has the best reputation. However, you cannot boot from one drive in a 2-drive mirror. If for some reason you don't have a working 3Ware card, you cannot get your data. It is lost.
If you use 3Ware cards, keep one or two spare cards.
I've had major problems with Promise cards under Windows XP. Promise RAID is part software, part hardware. RocketRAIDs have had the same problems. There seems to be basic problems, like Microsoft may not want other RAIDs competing with their Windows 2003 software RAID. Windows seems to have timing problems that confuse RAID cards.
The problem seems to be detecting when the RAID array is broken. This problem has gotten much worse with faster motherboards, because the timing window is shorter. If so, then Linux would be affected, also.
In any case, under Windows, the Promise and RocketRAID cards would often detect a broken mirror or RAID when it was not actually broken.
These problems occur apparently only when booting from the RAID array. When using RAID only for data, there seems to be no problem.
When you talk about the U.S. government, please don't say "your". I have no control whatsoever over the U.S. government, and neither does any other normal citizen. Most of what you don't like is decided and/or done in secret.
Also, Argentina's government is amazingly unable to take care of itself. It is very self-defeating, in my opinion.
Even telephone wires in the major city, Buenos Aires, are a problem. The telephone company is so disfunctional that it cannot install new phones. Citizens must do that themselves!
Slashdot Mirror
Quote from the above linked article: 'The Corporate Library, an independent research firm, rated Verizon's board as one of the "10 worst" among 1,700 companies in 2003 for excessive pay, a lack of independence among directors and other practices.'
Europe uses GSM coding. Verizon is CDMA, I believe, which is one step ahead of soup cans with string between them.
I know you are wondering, how could this happen? Well, I don't know either. But here's a theory:
Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, who will soon quit Verizon and join AT & T, was sitting around wondering, "How could I shoot off my mouth and damage Verizon? That would make my job at AT & T easier."
Okay, maybe not a good theory. What's yours, then?
Except for security updates, I think that the Slashdot rendering bug and the plugin crash bug should be release blockers. And they have not been.
Both Firefox and Mozilla crashed for me earlier tonight when I was printing postage and labels from the usps.com web site.
It's obvious that both have problems with the plugin interface.
The problem with Open Source software is that there is no one to say, "This bug MUST be fixed, before anything else is done." OO people work on what they want, and the less interesting stuff, like fixing someone else's bugs, doesn't get attention.
The Slashdot rendering bug has not been fixed, for example, and both FF and Moz are crashy, as the parent poster says.
It was the second, a failure in Windows Update. The computer is in our office, and we haven't bought HP stuff for years, since Carly Fiorina began the reign of poor quality products.
The update clearly said it was for some other keyboard, but what it installed was HP.
The parent post is moderated as "Funny", but that's what happened to us. We installed SP2 on numerous machines. There were a variety of problems. Re-installing SP2 and rebooting several times often cured the problems. Sometimes it was necessary to reload the entire Windows SP2 operating system.
We troubleshot one of the problems and discovered that SP2 expects that a particular file exists on the target computer, before it has copied that file. So, if the version that was already on the target computer is not recent enough, SP2 will crash. We reported this to Microsoft, but there was only a spacey response, as though confusion reigned. Microsoft did not seem to have the capacity to respond sensibly.
SP2 has numerous fixes for problems with USB 2.0. USB operated much better for us after SP2 was installed.
Microsoft gives us the impression that the company has a sloppy management style supervising coders who are not given enough time to do a good job. If you don't install SP2, you are not giving Microsoft the opportunity to fix some of its bugs. Someone once said that the Microsoft motto was "The whole world is our beta test site." According to that, Windows XP SP2 is just the first release version of Windows XP. We had many, many time-consuming problems with the pre-SP1 version; in our opinion, it was not ready for release; it could be made to work, but it was a time-waster. Maybe it's foolish to believe that two billionaires could care what happens to the less rich.
All of our Microsoft OS computers are now using SP2 with all the most recent critical updates, with no unexplained problems for months.
Be careful with Windows XP updates other than critical updates. Someone made a mistake and updated a computer here recently with a recommended hardware driver. The name of the driver on the Windows Update web site is different from the name of the driver once installed. That computer has never had an "HP wireless keyboard" attached to it.
"How do you handle these 3rd-party security people who make mountains out of every molehill?"
That's not the first step. The first step is for your company to make you VP of risk management.
It is simply amazing how bad is the management of technically oriented companies.
Or maybe Meetup knows something we don't. Some of the groups will pay the $228/year until they can make other arrangements. So, Meetup will have a sudden influx of money. Maybe they know that Meetup will die, and just want to extract as much money as possible before that happens.
If you have a group, the best thing is to have a web site for your group. Then you aren't dependent on whatever sink-the-company idea someone has this month.
Note also that now organizers must give their mailing addresses to Meetup.com.
More steps commonly taken by proprietary services and manufacturers:
1) Make a privacy policy assuring all the privacy anyone could want.
2) Collect a lot of private information.
3) Change the privacy policy to allow a lack of privacy, because that is more profitable. Include all the people who trusted the old assurances in the new lack-of-privacy policy.
It's the old, "I mean what I say until I decide I don't mean what I say" trick, and it is legal in the United States, apparently. (Many companies have done this. There was a story on Slashdot about it being legal.)
Note that most "groups" have a very small number of "members". Also, the number of members is vastly inflated because of a trick. You must become a "member" to get information about where the next meeting will be held. There may be many, many groups with "members" who decided they had no interest in the group, and never visited the group online again, or did anything with the group.
How many people will pay $228 U.S. each year to try an idea of developing a group? The value of the U.S. dollar is dropping fast because the Bush administration is rapidly borrowing money, but the dollar is not worthless.
Would you pay $2,280 over ten years to find other people in your area with an interest in a special breed of cats, for example? Especially when you never attract more than 4 people, and some of them are not very interested?
Also, some groups may have fake members entered by organizers attempting to attract people by making it seem that there is more interest than there really is. I visited one group that showed photos of two very beautiful women who said they were enthusiastic about the group. However, neither of them visited the group again, according to their statistics. A $228 yearly fee makes dishonesty more likely.
A web site for meetings is a good idea, but we need a non-adversarial method of making that happen.
This always happens with closed-source, proprietary solutions. Sooner or later the proprietor becomes abusive.
1) Provide a free service.
2) Get people to depend on that service. Use poorly designed software.
3) Then begin charging an extremely high fee for that service. $19 per month??? What could they be thinking? For an automatic, low-bandwidth service? There are many groups that have only 2 or 3 members, and have not attracted more, but hope to attract more later.
4) Profit? No, go out of business.
Children who have used the Windows Starter Edition will think that Linux is amazingly powerful. Good sales campaign for Linux. Thanks, Microsoft!
They aren't that poor. They need to provide education for their children, and a computer with Internet access provides educational experiences.
Brazil: A country that uses proprietary software with hidden file formats is not an independent country. This is particularly true when considering software from the United States. The U.S. government spends a huge amount on spying on other countries. Some of the spying is done to benefit U.S. companies to allow them to compete with foreign companies.
Brazil: Do you want to be a partner of a company that has broken the laws of its own country? If that company has in the past shown little respect for the laws of its own country, would it respect the laws of Brazil?
Brazil: Remember that hidden elements of the U.S. government supported the military coup against democracy in Brazil, without the knowledge of most U.S. citizens.
The GoDaddy web site is always trying to sell something, actually a hundred things. In my opinion, the GoDaddy web site is arranged to intimidate people who aren't really knowledgeable.
This book by her is more recent than Mapping The Mind. Does that mean Mapping the Mind is obsolete?
Carter, Rita, 1949-
TITLE Exploring consciousness / Rita Carter.
PUBLISHER Berkeley : University of California Press, c2002.
DESCRIPT 320 p. : ill. (chiefly col.) ; 23 cm.
BIBLIOG Includes bibliographical references and index.
I also did not have problems. Some motherboards would work correctly for weeks. Then there would be an unexplained failure of the mirror. HighPoint tech. support said they were not able to understand why the failures were occurring. (Promise told me the same thing.) Highpoint said that the failure was common.
Beware of a company that is so sloppy that it won't go to the Amigo Guest House in Taipei and find a U.S. citizen and native speaker of English to help it with the English on its web site: http://www.highpoint-tech.com/
Could you explain these telephone wires running from building to building in Buenos Aires?
Also, the U.S. government is much worse than you are saying: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.
How many Iraqis has the Argentine government killed? None, right? How many Vietnamese has the Argentine government killed? None, right? The U.S. government killed 2,000,000. Guess how many Vietnamese directly threatened the U.S. at the time? None.
HighPoint RocketRAID cards do not function well when used as the boot device for Windows XP. This was verified by HighPoint technical support. We did not try them under Linux. But read my comment above about timing issues.
Of all the PC RAID card manufacturers, 3Ware has the best reputation. However, you cannot boot from one drive in a 2-drive mirror. If for some reason you don't have a working 3Ware card, you cannot get your data. It is lost.
If you use 3Ware cards, keep one or two spare cards.
I've had major problems with Promise cards under Windows XP. Promise RAID is part software, part hardware. RocketRAIDs have had the same problems. There seems to be basic problems, like Microsoft may not want other RAIDs competing with their Windows 2003 software RAID. Windows seems to have timing problems that confuse RAID cards.
The problem seems to be detecting when the RAID array is broken. This problem has gotten much worse with faster motherboards, because the timing window is shorter. If so, then Linux would be affected, also.
In any case, under Windows, the Promise and RocketRAID cards would often detect a broken mirror or RAID when it was not actually broken.
These problems occur apparently only when booting from the RAID array. When using RAID only for data, there seems to be no problem.
When you talk about the U.S. government, please don't say "your". I have no control whatsoever over the U.S. government, and neither does any other normal citizen. Most of what you don't like is decided and/or done in secret.
Also, Argentina's government is amazingly unable to take care of itself. It is very self-defeating, in my opinion.
Even telephone wires in the major city, Buenos Aires, are a problem. The telephone company is so disfunctional that it cannot install new phones. Citizens must do that themselves!
Ignorant legislators making a poor country poorer.