Microsoft is a company that played the Business game very well in the past. They do not have a reputation for technical excellence or innovation. But you already know this. I strongly suspect many people at Microsoft believe their success is due to technical excellence.
Most companies that are wildly successfull rot out from the inside. They think they are great even while they are in decline internally. I am sure Microsoft is rotting out from the inside. Google has a few years before they start to rot from the inside.
I work for neither company. I do work for a company that was very very successful in the past but is now in decline. I would go with the younger company if everything else is equal.
Jail should be a last resort. It makes no use of the person or their time, and does nothing to "rehabilitate" anyone.
Those enron executives still have vast knowledge on a variety of subjects, useful skills, and other things. It would have been significantly better use of their time to, say, have them go on speaking circuits at business ethics meetings, or universities, and send the vast majority of money they get from these events to the victims of their actions.
I'm not trying to argue the severity of their crimes relative to others. I'm saying using jail for anything but violent criminals is an absolute waste of resources.
I agree.
Jail should just be for poor people and people of color.
Afluent and powerfull people who break the law, cost us money, and steal our personal information are not a threat to us. Because these people "still have vast knowledge on a variety of subjects, useful skills," it would be better to keep these people in circulation so they can continue to use their skills to commit crimes against us!
Regarding the false email tips, Fried and Kerstetter reported:
A later e-mail from that same address included an attachment believed to have contained marketing information about a new HP product. That attachment, government investigators told Kawamoto, is believed to have had the ability to track the e-mail, notify the sender if it was opened, and tell the sender if the e-mail was forwarded and to which IP address it had been forwarded. Sending Kawamoto an attachment like that would not have been illegal, government investigators said, noting that the technology used was not believed to have been a keylogger loaded onto the computer.
I could not get Windows Me to run more than 3 hours without crashing. I finally put Windows 2000 on that box. Then it could run for weeks without crashing.
This has become the media storm of the moment. There are more important things going on that are not getting much coverage. But our news media has been broken since at least O. J. Simpson.
I think much of the lockin is psychological. People feel they have invested a lot of time learning to use Windows and Office etc. They feel they would be throwing that away. They feel invested in Windows.
I know this is irrational. They would find learning to use alternative products a lot easier than they think. But they would still go through a period of time where things are a little bit unfamiliar. This is a bit uncomfortable.
This is a nice academic exercise. If I have an RF spectrum analyser or other very sophisticated equipement then I could do this. The crude RF reciever in my $40 wireless router is just marginally able to recieve and decode the signal. It will never have the capabilities of a rack of expensive RF test equipement. I do not think this capability will end up in any low cost equipement in the next few years.
Even though he is a bean-counter I like Otellini a lot better than Barrett. Barrett always talked down the the employees. Also Barrett led Intel into a series of disasters large and small. Barrett gave us the Itanic and the Prescott as examples of big disasters.
The corporate culture is also a disaster. Meetings upon meetings. The ratio of talking about doing stuff to doing stuff at Intel is beyond belief. There are proceedures for creating proceedures. Intel has the farthest thing I have ever seen from a results oriented culture.
The only stuff that is really good is designed in Israel or based on stuff designed in Israel. Let us hope the forces of bureaucratic darkness in Santa Clara do not descend upon Israel and fuck it up.
Microsoft really does not have much to show for it's 6.6 Billion. I think they need to think outside the box. Here are some ideas.
They should give up on "innovation". They just waste money when they try to invent. If they just do bug fixes and security fixes, all the OEMs will still load Windows and Office on all their computers for the next 10 - 20 years. Windows is the path of least resistance and that is good enough to keep the destop. Microsoft should think like the Dell of days past. Dell knew not to spend much on technology development.
Microsoft should consider open sourcing Windows!! Maybe a "community" could do the development for them. These open source communities seem to create very solid and well partitioned code with fewer coders and many fewer managers. They do a better job with Office. Maybe they do not need to open source Office!
Shoddy lazy journalism? No. That would have been uncritically reprinting your original story.
They just "matched" it. That's the industry term. As a stringer for many years (a "stringer" is a type of freelance journalist) I was called by editors many, many times to "match" stories.
You've worked in journalism for, what, a week now? Welcome to the industry. You may want to check with some people in your organisation who've been around the block a few times before firing off embarrassing (to you) letters to the Post Ombudsman.
You help me understand why the mainstream press is in such bad shape these days. Shoddy Lazy Journalism is accepted as standard industry practice.
I suspect they will save more on support than on Licensing. Keeping Windows boxes running at a company or at a school is very expensive. The constant patching, the Anti-malware battles and the fact that Windows installs spontainously degrade over time make the support expensive. While it is possible to not give Windows users administrator [root] privilege, this is not very practicle.
Fighting malware is not a full time job on a Linux box. Also the linux installs tend to behave the same way day after day. Linux is designed to be very usable without the users having root privilege. This makes the system a lot more stable.
The article says the equation to describe how interest in a news story drops off over time is not as is expected. But there are no equations in the story. They do not have an equation for the old model or for the new model for how interest in a story drops off!
The founders of Google are starting to act like Carly Fiorina. This may be the beggining of the decline of Google. Perhaps Google raised too much money in their stock offerings. All this money may be something Google will not recover from.
From what I've read of him, Ken had several flaws:
He was far more interested in the trappings of power (luxury homes, expensive jets, etc.) than running a multi-billion-dollar company. So he let his underlings do it for him.
He had a great aversion to interpersonal conflicts, so he rarely ever told anyone "no". It was common knowledge among the top execs that Ken was a pushover - just threaten to quit, and you could have whatever you wanted.
Because of #1 and #2, he wouldn't or couldn't control the executives under him, who ran wild as a result.
I tend to suspect that the oh-so-clever accounting techniques and special purpose entities Andrew Fastow cooked up to keep Enron's debts off their books was far more complicated than Ken could understand. (They're certainly too much for my little brain.) But instead of asking tough questions, Ken just shrugged and signed off on them.
If Ken Lay was as described above, then he was a fraud. He fraudulenty presented himself as executive material.
Re:Ubuntu Hacks... thanks for the review!
on
Ubuntu Hacks
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· Score: 1
I will have to get a copy of the book. I met one of the authors when he was working on the book in a coffee shop in Gilroy CA. I am glad the book turned out well.
She seems to have had a change of heart. She tries to back peddle on her record a bit. But you have to give her credit for seeing that the RIAA is on a bad course.
I am going to go out on a limb and be ethnocentric --- maybe I should call it temporalcentric.
Placing one's drug of choice into the air inside so that others have no choice but to breath it in is weird. I think smoking in a building in the presence of non-smokers is weird and Dvorak is weird.
I would assume the IT department erases the hard drive and installs a fresh version of Windows on it anyway. If they were somewhat concerned about security they would at least do that much on all the PCs they bought. Then it would not matter if they came from the government of China.
If they actually wanted computer security, they would use alternatives. Apples? freeBSD? Linux? -- anything but Windows!
Things sent with "High Priority" are almost always sent by an admin and are almost always about some silly bureaucratic thing. Why anyone things corporate goobledegook is important is beyond my understanding. Some exampels:
-Everyone needs to take silly class to infuse us with some sort of "corporate culture".
-It could be abot quarterly meeting where they tell us how well the company is doing. These meeting are so filled with spin as to be uniformative.
The following things are sent with normal importance:
-Customer X is having failures with our product and will stop buying if we do not fix it.
-If we change Y in the manufacturing process we can easily improve yields by x% and save a few million dollars per year.
A modest proposal. Let e-mail readers vote on if the "important" emails are important. If they are not important, the first several readers can "mod them down".
Slashdot Mirror
Good thing we don't base our lives around things said in the Constitution in the 1700s, eh?
That is too close to the truth to be funny!
Microsoft is a company that played the Business game very well in the past. They do not have a reputation for technical excellence or innovation. But you already know this. I strongly suspect many people at Microsoft believe their success is due to technical excellence.
Most companies that are wildly successfull rot out from the inside. They think they are great even while they are in decline internally. I am sure Microsoft is rotting out from the inside. Google has a few years before they start to rot from the inside.
I work for neither company. I do work for a company that was very very successful in the past but is now in decline. I would go with the younger company if everything else is equal.
Jail should be a last resort. It makes no use of the person or their time, and does nothing to "rehabilitate" anyone.
Those enron executives still have vast knowledge on a variety of subjects, useful skills, and other things. It would have been significantly better use of their time to, say, have them go on speaking circuits at business ethics meetings, or universities, and send the vast majority of money they get from these events to the victims of their actions.
I'm not trying to argue the severity of their crimes relative to others. I'm saying using jail for anything but violent criminals is an absolute waste of resources.
I agree.
Jail should just be for poor people and people of color.
Afluent and powerfull people who break the law, cost us money, and steal our personal information are not a threat to us. Because these people "still have vast knowledge on a variety of subjects, useful skills," it would be better to keep these people in circulation so they can continue to use their skills to commit crimes against us!
The press has reported this:
Regarding the false email tips, Fried and Kerstetter reported:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/wp-mobile.php?p=3640&m
I've never seen even Windows Me crash daily.
With all due respect -- You are full of shit!!
I could not get Windows Me to run more than 3 hours without crashing. I finally put Windows 2000 on that box. Then it could run for weeks without crashing.
why the f*** is this front page news
This has become the media storm of the moment. There are more important things going on that are not getting much coverage. But our news media has been broken since at least O. J. Simpson.
I think much of the lockin is psychological. People feel they have invested a lot of time learning to use Windows and Office etc. They feel they would be throwing that away. They feel invested in Windows.
I know this is irrational. They would find learning to use alternative products a lot easier than they think. But they would still go through a period of time where things are a little bit unfamiliar. This is a bit uncomfortable.
This is a nice academic exercise. If I have an RF spectrum analyser or other very sophisticated equipement then I could do this. The crude RF reciever in my $40 wireless router is just marginally able to recieve and decode the signal. It will never have the capabilities of a rack of expensive RF test equipement. I do not think this capability will end up in any low cost equipement in the next few years.
Even though he is a bean-counter I like Otellini a lot better than Barrett. Barrett always talked down the the employees. Also Barrett led Intel into a series of disasters large and small. Barrett gave us the Itanic and the Prescott as examples of big disasters.
The corporate culture is also a disaster. Meetings upon meetings. The ratio of talking about doing stuff to doing stuff at Intel is beyond belief. There are proceedures for creating proceedures. Intel has the farthest thing I have ever seen from a results oriented culture.
The only stuff that is really good is designed in Israel or based on stuff designed in Israel. Let us hope the forces of bureaucratic darkness in Santa Clara do not descend upon Israel and fuck it up.
Microsoft really does not have much to show for it's 6.6 Billion. I think they need to think outside the box. Here are some ideas.
They should give up on "innovation". They just waste money when they try to invent. If they just do bug fixes and security fixes, all the OEMs will still load Windows and Office on all their computers for the next 10 - 20 years. Windows is the path of least resistance and that is good enough to keep the destop. Microsoft should think like the Dell of days past. Dell knew not to spend much on technology development.
Microsoft should consider open sourcing Windows!! Maybe a "community" could do the development for them. These open source communities seem to create very solid and well partitioned code with fewer coders and many fewer managers. They do a better job with Office. Maybe they do not need to open source Office!
They just "matched" it. That's the industry term. As a stringer for many years (a "stringer" is a type of freelance journalist) I was called by editors many, many times to "match" stories.
You've worked in journalism for, what, a week now? Welcome to the industry. You may want to check with some people in your organisation who've been around the block a few times before firing off embarrassing (to you) letters to the Post Ombudsman.
You help me understand why the mainstream press is in such bad shape these days. Shoddy Lazy Journalism is accepted as standard industry practice.
I suspect they will save more on support than on Licensing. Keeping Windows boxes running at a company or at a school is very expensive. The constant patching, the Anti-malware battles and the fact that Windows installs spontainously degrade over time make the support expensive. While it is possible to not give Windows users administrator [root] privilege, this is not very practicle.
Fighting malware is not a full time job on a Linux box. Also the linux installs tend to behave the same way day after day. Linux is designed to be very usable without the users having root privilege. This makes the system a lot more stable.
I did not know Microsoft had a security expert!
He seems to be the world's best reverse engineer!
They have to push the fear buttons before the fall election. It will make the difference between winning and losing.
The article says the equation to describe how interest in a news story drops off over time is not as is expected. But there are no equations in the story. They do not have an equation for the old model or for the new model for how interest in a story drops off!
This is just lame reporting of science news.
The founders of Google are starting to act like Carly Fiorina. This may be the beggining of the decline of Google. Perhaps Google raised too much money in their stock offerings. All this money may be something Google will not recover from.
From what I've read of him, Ken had several flaws:
If Ken Lay was as described above, then he was a fraud. He fraudulenty presented himself as executive material.
I will have to get a copy of the book. I met one of the authors when he was working on the book in a coffee shop in Gilroy CA. I am glad the book turned out well.
At the bottom of the article was this text:
Tom Harris is mechanical engineer and Ottawa Director of High Park Group, a public affairs and public policy company.
The author is a paid fudster!!
She seems to have had a change of heart. She tries to back peddle on her record a bit. But you have to give her credit for seeing that the RIAA is on a bad course.
I am going to go out on a limb and be ethnocentric --- maybe I should call it temporalcentric.
Placing one's drug of choice into the air inside so that others have no choice but to breath it in is weird. I think smoking in a building in the presence of non-smokers is weird and Dvorak is weird.
I would assume the IT department erases the hard drive and installs a fresh version of Windows on it anyway. If they were somewhat concerned about security they would at least do that much on all the PCs they bought. Then it would not matter if they came from the government of China.
If they actually wanted computer security, they would use alternatives. Apples? freeBSD? Linux? -- anything but Windows!
I really see very little difference between the US media and old-school Soviet Propaganda.
I see a big difference. In Soviet Russia they stopped swallowing the "truthiness" of their media.
Things sent with "High Priority" are almost always sent by an admin and are almost always about some silly bureaucratic thing. Why anyone things corporate goobledegook is important is beyond my understanding. Some exampels:
-Everyone needs to take silly class to infuse us with some sort of "corporate culture".
-It could be abot quarterly meeting where they tell us how well the company is doing. These meeting are so filled with spin as to be uniformative.
The following things are sent with normal importance:
-Customer X is having failures with our product and will stop buying if we do not fix it.
-If we change Y in the manufacturing process we can easily improve yields by x% and save a few million dollars per year.
A modest proposal. Let e-mail readers vote on if the "important" emails are important. If they are not important, the first several readers can "mod them down".