And the answer is that they are trying to shut down Internet radio. Consider this: currently, you can connect to the Internet almost anywhere with certain data packages from cell phone carriers. Soon, in major metro areas you'll be able to do the same via municipal WiFi or mesh networking. Some people have been streaming Internet ratio in their cars for years, so fully Internet-enabled car stereos can't be far behind. This is a situation that gives Clear Channel and other large radio companies nightmares: the ability of people to choose from thousands of commercials-free radio stations instead of being stuck with the same selection of ten traditional stations.
I'm actually surprised at the apathy shown towards the Bank of America fiasco of exploiting loopholes in the law to allow them to open accounts and credit cards for illegal aliens!!
Maybe people don't consider this to be a big issue. Usually, to spark a boycott, you need something really unexpected or shocking, which would rally the people into action. A good example of this is Shell, when it tried to sink an oil platform in the North Atlantic, which resulted into massive boycotts all over Europe. Or, more recently, Citgo, which saw a slump in sales after Hugo Chavez had his famous "Bust is Satan" speech at the UN (Citgo is owned by the Venezuelan government).
The Bank of America case is different. What they did was neither shocking nor unexpected. At times when people speak of amnesty for illegals and when there are efforts to grant them driver licenses and scholarships to their children, giving them credit cards doesn't sound far-fetched enough to spark a large protest. (In addition, people are more interested in Smith's decomposing body and Britney's shaved head at the moment.)
They used the SWAT team because, according to a guy in a RIAA jacket who spoke to a FOX reporter on camera after the raid, copyright infringers usually carry drugs and weapons. Video from the raid can be found here.
Those are very good questions. I'd add the following:
* How do you prove that the contents of the "shared" folder were actually shared with third parties? (I have a "shared" folder with music on my PC, to stream to my other PCs and my stereo)
* How do you prove the "shared" folder was not created automatically by the P2P software?
* How do you prove that the user was computer savvy enough to prevent the software from creating the folder?
I'm still waiting for my free samples for reviewing porn movies. Shame on you, porn industry: Microsoft has overtaken you in innovation for the first time.
Verizon has always been a pretty good company for me. In Atlanta, the coverage is excellent and their prices and plans are fantastic.
Same here. When I moved to Atlanta I noticed the heavy Cingular presence here, but decided to stay with Verizon for the time being. It turned out to be a good choice, as my Cingular-challenged friends get spotty coverage even in metro Atlanta. I already know of two big areas without coverage, one in Decatur and the other in Marietta, and one spot along the I-75 inside the Perimeter where Cingular always drops my friends' calls.
When I was recruiting a replacement for me in my previous job as a financial analyst, the obedience aspect was the reason I rejected all Indian candidates. None of them, despite very high qualifications, didn't even make it to the second round, because the job required a high degree of personal initiative. I simply kept running into such a strong culture of obedience, that sometimes I had the feeling I was talking to computers: very fast, very good at what they were doing, but offering zero dissent or showing any desire to do anything on their own. A human garbage-in-garbage-out system.
You can replace "Phoenix" with "Atlanta" and you'll get exactly the same situation. I drive 25 miles to work, and the right-most lane goes around 70mph in a 55mph zone. I'm not a slow driver, so that's not a problem for me. However, I do keep my distance. As a result, I get constantly cut off by others, and it usually takes me a few seconds to regain my distance. If during that time I'm clocked as being too close to the car in front of me, I could easily get ticketed even though I didn't tailgate. (Almost said that I didn't do anything wrong, but I'm not that sure about that. A judge told my friend to drive closer to the car in front of him after a driver tried to cut my friend off and he tapped the driver's back corner, sending him into a spin. According to that judge, it is wrong to give people the opportunity to cut you off.)
A company I worked at previously has been using a legacy e-mail system. We've been under the SEC rules for retaining e-mails already, and when they came to inspect our business we learned that even though it's not stated in the rules, e-mail records must not only be retained, but they must also be readable with modern software. SEC wanted us to deliver the e-mail records in either a formated text file or as an Outlook file. We ended up hiring two interns who spent the next nearly two weeks forwarding all the e-mails to a newly set-up account that used Outlook, and it took so little time only because we were a relatively small company. I really feel sorry for large companies with legacy e-mail systems...
You may be joking (I can't tell for sure; I've seen such phones still being used in cars), but you're not too far from what some of us experience. For ages, I've been using the Nokia 3589i. My contract with Verizon has expired a long time ago, and they've been offering some new, bery compelling contracts, but I'm remaining a month-by-month customer because I don't see a reason to upgrade my phone. All I want is a wireless device I can use to place phone calls, receive them and exchange SMS messages. I don't need anything more, and yet Verizon is trying to push on me phones that are either status symbols or miniature computers, cameras and entertainment centers in one.
What, exactly, is the argument against pen-and-paper voting? It seems to me that everybody wants to migrate to voting machines - electronic or mechanical - but so far nobody has explained to me what's wrong with good old-fashioned "put an X next to your candidate's name" voting.
I work for a company that has several managers who travel almost constantly between our headquarters in the US and our subsidiaries in Europe, China and Brazil. Because of the risk of theft (but also applicable here), they are not allowed to store any corporate data on their computer; it's all on our corporate server and they need to either VPN or FTP (depending on firewall rules) into their directory if they want to get anything. Everything is then saved back there.
For the same reason (in my case primarily travel between the US and Europe) I always keep all my private files on my personal server in the US. This way, all a potential thief or border agent would get is a relatively clean laptop with a few applications and games. All I'd lose would be a few saved game files, which are much more fun to recreate than rewriting a lost spreadsheet.
XROST is simply an on-line gift card shop. You purchase a gift card, and get a card number and pin code in return. You input this information into Allofmp3, and your account is recharged.
Not so long ago, XROST still worked with PayPal. Currently, it works primarily with prepaid cash cards - the type you mention - but also with Click&Buy, which is available in the US. I've got family in Europe, so for me it's easiest to Skype them and ask for one of the cash cards.
Same here. All it did after about fifteen minutes of installing was to give me the link to a IE Troubleshooting page, where I found out that "Something has caused the computer not to trust the Internet Explorer 7 installation package."
It was bound to happen eventually: my computer became smarter than me....
That's where paying through third parties comes in. I've been using XROST for over a year when recharging my Allofmp3 account, and that method has been always working well. Similar system has been working with sports betting sites for a while, and given how easy it is to reroute money I don't think non-US based businesses will have to shut down anytime soon.
Open source is not known for tight self-governance. Many techies tend to leave their work unfinished - instead of polishing it they rely on workarounds - which is why I found that they need to be tightly controlled. In a business with proprietary technology this is relatively easy to do, because the techies don't own any of the technology that's being developed. In open source technology fields, however, the techies may have less incentive to stay put, and they may leave the company easier if they feel constrained. My question is, how do you keep a high employee retention while controlling them enough to deliver adequate results in a realistic time frame?
I used to work for a major US research university in their commercialization department. We were the guys who pitched ideas to venture capitalists, wrote business plans and tried to keep the inventors down to earth. I fully agree with what was said in the article, especially how important is to know your customers, but I'd like to add a few points:
Sales team. The first person you'll ever need is the VP for sales. Then you'll need a good, experienced sales team. No matter how expensive they are, these people will make or break a business. I ended up leaving my job and joining a startup precisely for this reason.
Time frame and financial needs. One thing all startups underestimate is the need for quality assurance. Generally, testing for defects takes more time than assembling a product. Thus, the time to market should be at least tripled and the cost doubled from what you expect.
Intellectual property. True, patent protection is overrated. However, there are thousands of inventors and companies waiting to sue your ass off if you infringe on their patents. More important than filing your patent is to research whether you infringe on others' patents or not, and settle any licensing issues. This will get very costly, and in this case getting good lawyers is worth their weight in gold. We pay roughly $5000 per patent examined, but they decreased the number of patents we thought we would license from 40 to 2.
Company share. Many inventors don't want to relinquish control over the company, and want to maintain a majority stake at any cost. Most investors wouldn't agree with that, with a good reason - a researcher running a company is recipe for disaster. And as the classic saying goes, it's better to have 5% of $100 million than 100% of nothing.
IP ownership. I talked about infringing on others' IP already, but what about the inventor's IP? The inventor must transfer all the rights to the invention to the company. Otherwise, the inventor will exercise undue influence over the business, and sooner or later (rather sooner) this will create conflicts between the inventor and the management.
There are plenty more rules of the game, but this game is too flexible to make any of them universal. The best thing is to give over your technology to a seasoned entrepreneur and just ride along.
Once my users understand how it's meant to be used, it's a universal winner.
Generally speaking, this is a big point of tension between IT staff and the rest of the company. I worked for companies where the users considered PCs to be glorified typewriters, and only after I realized that my job was to dumb down their computers instead of teaching them to appreciate technology, my job became worthwhile. Since then, I learned to think as the average user, and here's why I recommended everybody in my company Yahoo! Beta as their Web mail:
Back button. Such a simple thing, the back button. Too bad that it doesn't work in Gmail as anywhere else. You press it and the screen goes blank, and only then you remember you had to click on the logo instead, to get to your inbox. No big dealm for me (other than I personally find mouse gestures faster), but I've been getting lots of complaints from users who decided to close their browsers and restart them.
Click-and-drag. In Yahoo! Beta, you can click on messages and drag them to their appropriate folders. Not so in Gmail. You wouldn't believe how many of my users still click and drag even spams, one by one, to the trash. In Gmail, they used to leave the messages in their place.
Sorting. Many users don't use the search function to find a particular message. Instead, they sort by sender or message size, and scroll until they find what they are looking for. The new Yahoo! Beta allows to do so much easier than Gmail.
This is where you come in, and explain my users how Gmail works and why should they like it more. It won't work. Many people have more important things to do than to adjust to new interfaces. They have had the same or very similar interface for years, and they see no reason to change. Yahoo! has made an excellent desicion to go after there particular users.
(Full disclosure: I'm not saying Yahoo! Beta is perfect. For my purposes, it still lacks in features. For example, it doesn't remember the colum sorting I set up and always reverts to the default sorting, and it does not allow old-style replies, where the original message has brackets in front of it. I still use Gmail more than Yahoo! Beta, but once these problems are fixed I see no reason to not use it.)
I challenge you to provide an example where a corporation made an ethical choice that wasn't required (or thought to be soon required) that cost more than a trivial amount.
Johnson & Johnson and its Tylenol recall. In fact, J&J has been doing such choices regularly, and they remain among the most profitable (as measured by growing quarterly profits) companies in the US.
At least, the father of little Suzy exists. For all practical purposes, I don't. It has been indicated to me (and I checked it) that I don't exist in any credit-reporting databases. My SS number and name are nowhere to be found.
How was I able to achieve such a feat? Even since I came to the US back in 1995 I always paid in cash or personal check. Some large amounts, such as school tuition, were paid by check; everything else - including rent and car - by cash. For online shopping, I use my debit card. At one point I was stupid enough to apply for a credit card, at which point - having no credit - I've chosen a secured credit card. I haven't gotten it because the bank (Chase) couldn't verify my identity, despite me sending in the copy of my driver license and SS card.
At this point, I've got a good job. As such, I don't consider not being able to get another job to be high enough price for being outside of the credit system.
Fricken' batteries dieing all the time. Who needs it?
Had a vireless mouse, too, and was very unhappy with it because of the batteries. However, I do have devices, which have their own power supplies, and still need to connect to the computer via USB ports. I see no reason why those devices couldn't be wireless. This includes printers, scanners, speakers, and external drives. I started out with two built-in USB ports; recently I had to expand to 12 ports. All I should need are two ports: for my jump drive and my external Bluetooth transmitter.
(Before anyone claims that there are wireless printers/print servers already, let me just say that I consider those to be the biggest scam currently out there. The office wireless HP printer has a $20 network card, but carries a nearly $100 price premium over non-wireless printers.)
I don't know what's more funny: the fact that this comment appears modded as "Insightful", the fact that 30% Funny, 30% Overrated and 20% Troll combine for an "Insightful" rating, or the fact that the three moderation categories don't add to 100%.
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And the answer is that they are trying to shut down Internet radio. Consider this: currently, you can connect to the Internet almost anywhere with certain data packages from cell phone carriers. Soon, in major metro areas you'll be able to do the same via municipal WiFi or mesh networking. Some people have been streaming Internet ratio in their cars for years, so fully Internet-enabled car stereos can't be far behind. This is a situation that gives Clear Channel and other large radio companies nightmares: the ability of people to choose from thousands of commercials-free radio stations instead of being stuck with the same selection of ten traditional stations.
Maybe people don't consider this to be a big issue. Usually, to spark a boycott, you need something really unexpected or shocking, which would rally the people into action. A good example of this is Shell, when it tried to sink an oil platform in the North Atlantic, which resulted into massive boycotts all over Europe. Or, more recently, Citgo, which saw a slump in sales after Hugo Chavez had his famous "Bust is Satan" speech at the UN (Citgo is owned by the Venezuelan government).
The Bank of America case is different. What they did was neither shocking nor unexpected. At times when people speak of amnesty for illegals and when there are efforts to grant them driver licenses and scholarships to their children, giving them credit cards doesn't sound far-fetched enough to spark a large protest. (In addition, people are more interested in Smith's decomposing body and Britney's shaved head at the moment.)
Coffee and a smoke. Then some more coffee.
They used the SWAT team because, according to a guy in a RIAA jacket who spoke to a FOX reporter on camera after the raid, copyright infringers usually carry drugs and weapons. Video from the raid can be found here.
* How do you prove that the contents of the "shared" folder were actually shared with third parties? (I have a "shared" folder with music on my PC, to stream to my other PCs and my stereo)
* How do you prove the "shared" folder was not created automatically by the P2P software?
* How do you prove that the user was computer savvy enough to prevent the software from creating the folder?
I'm still waiting for my free samples for reviewing porn movies. Shame on you, porn industry: Microsoft has overtaken you in innovation for the first time.
Same here. When I moved to Atlanta I noticed the heavy Cingular presence here, but decided to stay with Verizon for the time being. It turned out to be a good choice, as my Cingular-challenged friends get spotty coverage even in metro Atlanta. I already know of two big areas without coverage, one in Decatur and the other in Marietta, and one spot along the I-75 inside the Perimeter where Cingular always drops my friends' calls.
When I was recruiting a replacement for me in my previous job as a financial analyst, the obedience aspect was the reason I rejected all Indian candidates. None of them, despite very high qualifications, didn't even make it to the second round, because the job required a high degree of personal initiative. I simply kept running into such a strong culture of obedience, that sometimes I had the feeling I was talking to computers: very fast, very good at what they were doing, but offering zero dissent or showing any desire to do anything on their own. A human garbage-in-garbage-out system.
You can replace "Phoenix" with "Atlanta" and you'll get exactly the same situation. I drive 25 miles to work, and the right-most lane goes around 70mph in a 55mph zone. I'm not a slow driver, so that's not a problem for me. However, I do keep my distance. As a result, I get constantly cut off by others, and it usually takes me a few seconds to regain my distance. If during that time I'm clocked as being too close to the car in front of me, I could easily get ticketed even though I didn't tailgate. (Almost said that I didn't do anything wrong, but I'm not that sure about that. A judge told my friend to drive closer to the car in front of him after a driver tried to cut my friend off and he tapped the driver's back corner, sending him into a spin. According to that judge, it is wrong to give people the opportunity to cut you off.)
A company I worked at previously has been using a legacy e-mail system. We've been under the SEC rules for retaining e-mails already, and when they came to inspect our business we learned that even though it's not stated in the rules, e-mail records must not only be retained, but they must also be readable with modern software. SEC wanted us to deliver the e-mail records in either a formated text file or as an Outlook file. We ended up hiring two interns who spent the next nearly two weeks forwarding all the e-mails to a newly set-up account that used Outlook, and it took so little time only because we were a relatively small company. I really feel sorry for large companies with legacy e-mail systems...
You may be joking (I can't tell for sure; I've seen such phones still being used in cars), but you're not too far from what some of us experience. For ages, I've been using the Nokia 3589i. My contract with Verizon has expired a long time ago, and they've been offering some new, bery compelling contracts, but I'm remaining a month-by-month customer because I don't see a reason to upgrade my phone. All I want is a wireless device I can use to place phone calls, receive them and exchange SMS messages. I don't need anything more, and yet Verizon is trying to push on me phones that are either status symbols or miniature computers, cameras and entertainment centers in one.
What, exactly, is the argument against pen-and-paper voting? It seems to me that everybody wants to migrate to voting machines - electronic or mechanical - but so far nobody has explained to me what's wrong with good old-fashioned "put an X next to your candidate's name" voting.
For the same reason (in my case primarily travel between the US and Europe) I always keep all my private files on my personal server in the US. This way, all a potential thief or border agent would get is a relatively clean laptop with a few applications and games. All I'd lose would be a few saved game files, which are much more fun to recreate than rewriting a lost spreadsheet.
Not so long ago, XROST still worked with PayPal. Currently, it works primarily with prepaid cash cards - the type you mention - but also with Click&Buy, which is available in the US. I've got family in Europe, so for me it's easiest to Skype them and ask for one of the cash cards.
It was bound to happen eventually: my computer became smarter than me....
That's where paying through third parties comes in. I've been using XROST for over a year when recharging my Allofmp3 account, and that method has been always working well. Similar system has been working with sports betting sites for a while, and given how easy it is to reroute money I don't think non-US based businesses will have to shut down anytime soon.
Open source is not known for tight self-governance. Many techies tend to leave their work unfinished - instead of polishing it they rely on workarounds - which is why I found that they need to be tightly controlled. In a business with proprietary technology this is relatively easy to do, because the techies don't own any of the technology that's being developed. In open source technology fields, however, the techies may have less incentive to stay put, and they may leave the company easier if they feel constrained. My question is, how do you keep a high employee retention while controlling them enough to deliver adequate results in a realistic time frame?
- Sales team. The first person you'll ever need is the VP for sales. Then you'll need a good, experienced sales team. No matter how expensive they are, these people will make or break a business. I ended up leaving my job and joining a startup precisely for this reason.
- Time frame and financial needs. One thing all startups underestimate is the need for quality assurance. Generally, testing for defects takes more time than assembling a product. Thus, the time to market should be at least tripled and the cost doubled from what you expect.
- Intellectual property. True, patent protection is overrated. However, there are thousands of inventors and companies waiting to sue your ass off if you infringe on their patents. More important than filing your patent is to research whether you infringe on others' patents or not, and settle any licensing issues. This will get very costly, and in this case getting good lawyers is worth their weight in gold. We pay roughly $5000 per patent examined, but they decreased the number of patents we thought we would license from 40 to 2.
- Company share. Many inventors don't want to relinquish control over the company, and want to maintain a majority stake at any cost. Most investors wouldn't agree with that, with a good reason - a researcher running a company is recipe for disaster. And as the classic saying goes, it's better to have 5% of $100 million than 100% of nothing.
- IP ownership. I talked about infringing on others' IP already, but what about the inventor's IP? The inventor must transfer all the rights to the invention to the company. Otherwise, the inventor will exercise undue influence over the business, and sooner or later (rather sooner) this will create conflicts between the inventor and the management.
There are plenty more rules of the game, but this game is too flexible to make any of them universal. The best thing is to give over your technology to a seasoned entrepreneur and just ride along.Generally speaking, this is a big point of tension between IT staff and the rest of the company. I worked for companies where the users considered PCs to be glorified typewriters, and only after I realized that my job was to dumb down their computers instead of teaching them to appreciate technology, my job became worthwhile. Since then, I learned to think as the average user, and here's why I recommended everybody in my company Yahoo! Beta as their Web mail:
This is where you come in, and explain my users how Gmail works and why should they like it more. It won't work. Many people have more important things to do than to adjust to new interfaces. They have had the same or very similar interface for years, and they see no reason to change. Yahoo! has made an excellent desicion to go after there particular users.
(Full disclosure: I'm not saying Yahoo! Beta is perfect. For my purposes, it still lacks in features. For example, it doesn't remember the colum sorting I set up and always reverts to the default sorting, and it does not allow old-style replies, where the original message has brackets in front of it. I still use Gmail more than Yahoo! Beta, but once these problems are fixed I see no reason to not use it.)
Impossible. He is the prime example of a nerd who'd never get laid.
Johnson & Johnson and its Tylenol recall. In fact, J&J has been doing such choices regularly, and they remain among the most profitable (as measured by growing quarterly profits) companies in the US.
Auto insurance - Geico, paid in advance. Previously I had car insurance with Prudential. Same deal.
Bank - my bank didn't even have my social security number, as I found out when I was trying to close my account there. It was Bank of America.
At least, the father of little Suzy exists. For all practical purposes, I don't. It has been indicated to me (and I checked it) that I don't exist in any credit-reporting databases. My SS number and name are nowhere to be found.
How was I able to achieve such a feat? Even since I came to the US back in 1995 I always paid in cash or personal check. Some large amounts, such as school tuition, were paid by check; everything else - including rent and car - by cash. For online shopping, I use my debit card. At one point I was stupid enough to apply for a credit card, at which point - having no credit - I've chosen a secured credit card. I haven't gotten it because the bank (Chase) couldn't verify my identity, despite me sending in the copy of my driver license and SS card.
At this point, I've got a good job. As such, I don't consider not being able to get another job to be high enough price for being outside of the credit system.
Had a vireless mouse, too, and was very unhappy with it because of the batteries. However, I do have devices, which have their own power supplies, and still need to connect to the computer via USB ports. I see no reason why those devices couldn't be wireless. This includes printers, scanners, speakers, and external drives. I started out with two built-in USB ports; recently I had to expand to 12 ports. All I should need are two ports: for my jump drive and my external Bluetooth transmitter.
(Before anyone claims that there are wireless printers/print servers already, let me just say that I consider those to be the biggest scam currently out there. The office wireless HP printer has a $20 network card, but carries a nearly $100 price premium over non-wireless printers.)
I don't know what's more funny: the fact that this comment appears modded as "Insightful", the fact that 30% Funny, 30% Overrated and 20% Troll combine for an "Insightful" rating, or the fact that the three moderation categories don't add to 100%.