1) you can't buy CD-quality recordings of the music there.
2) the ratings system is obviously broken
3) Quality has gone into the dustbin since they got bought out by the music conglomerates.
mp3.com was a great idea, and if the original management had not done idiotic things that got them sued, it might actually have reached the point where it presented a challenge to the recording industry. In today's capital-scarce world, though, I hold no hope for such a thing to happen. In particular, not being able to pay for professional quality recordings (sorry, I don't believe mp3 quality to be professional quality) is an obvious drawback to mp3.com that would need to be remedied by anybody who set out to do what mp3.com originally set out to do -- shake up the music world.
The problem with ratings systems is that they get corrupted by fans of the band. If band members have very large families (perhaps they're all rednecks and have family trees that don't branch:-), their family members alone might be enough to get them unfairly pushed to the front of the list. Then there's the 'bot problem. How do we tell that a rating is coming from a human being, and not from a 'bot that is repeatedly disconnecting and then reconnecting in order to get a different IP address at the ISP?
The task of filtering out dreck is not an easy one. While I have found some good unsigned or indie bands at mp3.com, they are by no means usual, and the ratings system at mp3.com is so obviously affected by factors other than quality as to be nigh useless.
Middle-tier state universities (as vs. top-tier universities) typically don't care whether this is your second or fiftieth undergraduate degree. They get funded by the state based on how many bodies they have filling chairs, so most of them will accept you regardless as long as your transcript shows that you had at least a 2.5 GPA at your last university. Though I'll note that in many cases it's just as easy to get into a Master's degree program as it is to get another bachelor's degree at these universities (though you have to take the GRE and have a 3.0 GPA in most cases). For example, at the university I graduated from, many of the folks going for a MS in Computer Science had degrees in a wide variety of subjects. My TA when I was a freshman had an undergraduate degree in general studies!
I have part of the coursework needed to get an MBA under my belt (hey, it was either minoring in math or minoring in business administration, okay?). Behavioral management theory, psychology of organizations, etc., are fine and dandy, but do not substitute for a knowledge of the market that a product fills, and knowledge of what products the customers need, and knowledge of the technology needed to fill those needs.
Managing people is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for success in the computer business. A knowledge of the business is needed too. Someone selling hammers should know who uses hammers, what they use hammers for, and some basics about how hammers are built. Having quite painfully experienced what happens when a man whose sole claim to success is taking a trash hauling company to a successful IPO takes over a technology company, I know what Cringely was trying to say on a quite, err, personal, level.
The anarchists correctly point out that feudalism is the natural consequence of libertarianism (or "anarcho-capitalism", as the anarchists call it). Power ultimately flows from the barrel of a gun, and he with more money can hire more guns. Thus a libertarian "utopia" will invariably degenenerate to a state where the majority of people swear allegience to a liege lord in order to obtain protection from surrounding liege lords -- i.e., feudalism.
The only way to bypass the power of the gun is via consensus. If the majority of the people refuse to participate in a feudal system, a feudal system cannot operate. At one point in time we had a Constitution in this country that provided a mechanism for organizing and obtaining consensus, but over the past two hundred years the mechanisms therein have been corrupted by (tada!) the power of the dollars in the hands of corporate elites to the point where the mechanisms of government are being used to move the United States towards its feudal future.
We are already well on the way to the fate of the Roman Empire.
I've done some work with DVD/RAM media under the UDF filesystem. After about 40 writes, typical DVD/RAM media starts building up a hefty defects list. After about 100 writes, the defects list gets long enough that the media becomes basically unwritable. I am not impressed by the current state of optical disk technology. Given that CD-RW is an early primitive version of what eventually became DVD/RAM, it does not surprise if "around 100" is the correct answer, though I wouldn't re-use a piece of media more than 40 times under any circumstances.
Yes, comparing like properties, a 1500 square foot house in Phoenix, Arizona, is cheaper than an 850 square foot apartment. Rent on an older 850 square foot apartment will set you back around $700 a month. You can buy a 1500 square foot house for around $115,000 in the suburbs, which will set you back around $700 a month.
Real estate prices in the Phoenix area are nowhere near crashing. In fact, so far this year they've gone up 9% over last year.
That's funny. $400 a month won't pay my mortgage. Sure, I could live on $400 a month -- if I were living with mommy, like you are. But I'm not living with mommy.
Average house size: 1100 square feet. 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, no air conditioning (maybe an attic fan if it was in the East, or an evaporative cooler if it was in the West), no dishwasher, no clothes dryer (just a clothes washer -- the clothes dryer was a clothes line in the back yard).
Number of cars: 1
Well guess what, I can easily afford that on one income. Heck, I can even afford what was a *BIG* house in 1959 on one income (I own a 1500 square foot house built in 1959). Heck, my house, unlike most 1950's houses, even had provisions for a *dryer*! Granted, I don't live on the coasts, which are horrendously expensive, but it is quite possible to live as well as in the 1950's on a single income.
BTW, most people in the 1950's did NOT live in rural areas. The 1950's were the first decade in which more Americans lived in cities than in farms, thanks to the aftermath of the Great Depression, WWII, and the mechanization of farms after WWII (which drove many of the ex-farmworkers to the cities).
I suspect that if you got honest employment figures, you would see that probably see that around 20% of able-bodied men between ages 21 and 55 are not currently employed. That's "unemployed" in my opinion (and in 1933 opinion), but that is not "unemployed" today because to be counted as "unemployed" today, you must have applied for a job within the past week, cannot have taken a one-time $40 day job one day last week, etc. The numbers, in short, are being cooked today, and the only reason we don't notice it is because so many wives work (thus cushioning the effects of the husband not being employed) and because the Fed is preventing the bank failures and deflation that wrecked the GNP during 1931-1932.
Regarding $50,000 in student loans, average tuition costs at state colleges are approaching $10,000 a year (they were
$8,655 a year in 2001), with the better state colleges costing more, and average stay at state colleges is approaching 5 years (it's virtually impossible to earn a degree in 4 years unless you kill yourself doing it). $50,000 in student loan debts does not sound out-of-line to me.
Is a college degree worth $50,000? Probably not in today's job marketplace. But I'm sure it seemed a good idea at the time, compared to spending the rest of her life reciting "Do you want fries with that order?".
Going into carpentry trades might make sense up there in Canada. Down here in Arizona, it makes no sense at all. No contractor is going to hire an actual qualified tradesman when he can hire an illegal immigrant off the streetcorner for $40 a day.
The result is that our houses are built crappily and tend to fall apart, but what the hey, they're cheap.
Now, that applies primarily to carpenters, lathers, and stucco appliers. In other trades there is a great demand, for example plumbing, electrical, and HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning). On the other hand, the training to get into those fields is getting more expensive than it once was. You're talking about a six month course of study at a vocational school, or if you're one of the lucky slobs whose Dad was in the union, you can slide into a union apprenticeship. (Hmm, I'll have to ask my mother where my father's old union card went to). Those are definitely NOT fields where you can simply walk in off the street and be hired. If you don't believe me, the full National Electrical Code is over 1,000 8 1/2 by 11" pages long. If you don't have that tome pretty much memorized (at least to the point where you can thumb directly to the table that you need to, say, detirmine the proper depth for a buried type UF feeder to a subpanel in a detached garage that is 120v with a GFI protector), you're not qualified to be an electrician.
I live in the state of Arizona. Our "unemployment insurance" here was $100 a week max, last time I looked (which admittedly was not recently, but I doubt it's gone up since). That would basically give me enough money to eat and pay the light and water bill (to keep the lights on), but nothing for mortgage, car payments, etc... An "extension" of what is basically nothing is worthless.
Granted, I haven't had to use this so-called "unemployment insurance" yet. Last time I was unemployed, I had a job within four days of starting my job search. But that was before the local job market totally crated.
I suggest that before you make blithe statements about "unemployment insurance", that you check to make sure that it exists in places other than where you're posting from. Unemployment insurance that actually replaces a large percentage of one's salary is limited to a few states. In most states, unemployment insurance is capped at an artificially low maximum that is only barely adequate for buying food for a family, and definitely NOT adequate to keep one from tapping savings while unemployed.
Move to a city with lower home prices, then. For example, here in the Phoenix area it is quite possible to get a reasonable home (over 1,000 square feet, 2 or 3 bedroom) for $110,000, which with 5% down works out to well under $700 a month. You're hard pressed to get a 740 square foot apartment for that price here, unless you want to live in a crack infested slum. There was one house that I was looking at that was a really funky early 70's wedge house, that was only $105,900 but quite livable (as long as you liked avacado green counter tops and orange shag carpet:-). The only reason I didn't buy it was because it would have been 45 minutes to work if my next job was in the opposite direction, while my current house is within 30 minutes of pretty much any tech jobs in the Phoenix area.
Mind you, I don't recommend moving to Phoenix. The tech marketplace here sucks right now. I'm just saying that the housing market isn't out of control in ALL big cities, and if you're in one of the few big cities where it IS out of control, you need to widen your horizons.
In my city, mortgage payments on a 1500 square foot house are cheaper than rent payments on an 850 square foot apartment. You're saying that I should have continued to send my money down a rathole for rent?
Most older people have equity in their homes. This counts as wealth. For example, in my neighborhood the old people bought their homes for $12,000 in 1959. These houses are now worth $150,000. So those old people have $150,000 worth of "wealth". Except they don't. If they sell the house, they're homeless. All they have is a roof over their head.
Cashflow-wise, my neighbors are poor. They earned their living in pre-inflation dollars, and their Social Security benefits are measured in pre-inflation dollars. They can barely afford the property taxes on their homes and dog food for their dog. While "wealthy" on paper, the reality is that they live in poverty because you can't eat equity until you sell -- and if they sell, they're on the streets.
Frankly, I haven't had a health insurance policy in the past 10 years that did not pay for prescription drugs, albeit sometimes with a hefty deductible (e.g. basic Blue Cross/Blue Shield had a $1500 deductible before they would start paying 80% of the cost of prescription drugs). Medicare is "just" a health insurance policy. Why should old people have less benefits than I do?
Seriously. That is the biggest reason we are not seeing the massive disruptions of the 1930's. I bet that if you added up all able-bodied men between age 21 and 55, subtracted out the number of them who are employed, and divided by that total, you'd end up with 20% plus who are unemployed. Those are numbers to rival the Great Depression. But the deal is that their wife works. This has cushioned the impact of the New Depression considerably, as has the effects of the FDIC and Federal Reserve Board, which are keeping the money supply intact unlike Herbert Hoover who let it basically vaporize.
Social service agencies here in the Phoenix area report that they are overwhelmed by the demand for their services. They report that they are seeing entire families show up who were formerly middle class, but now are destitute. Even the soup kitchens are now having to turn away people, in a scene right out of the Great Depression. There are a lot of people hurting out there, but due to the way unemployment figures are cooked by our government (it's not a new thing, BTW, I mentioned this several years ago on my web site), we're spared knowing just how bad the situation is.
Lessons from "Been there, done that"
on
The Last Days at 3dfx
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
When I read the 3dfx article, I winced. The story was so familiar. Let me summarize it:
Bunch of cool geeks come up with great idea, and start a company.
They don't have lots of money, so they release a limited compromise version of the product. Even this version is really cool.
To handle all the sales and manufacturing tasks necessary because of the new best-selling gear, the vulture capitalists call in "professional" management, which might be someone who last ran a garbage truck company, or a carpet cleaning company.
The new management has no understanding of the market, so they look at what the biggest company in the market is doing, and say "We want to do that!".
In the meantime, this bunch of cool geeks is working on the great idea that will be the company's next product. There still isn't lots of money or people.
The new management says "Don't do that, we need this other product first!".
The new management strips the engineering team of the cool product. The engineering team pleads for more good people, but the new management says "that'll hurt our margins too much."
The other product flops.
The cool product has gotten obsolete while the other product flops.
Management panics and hires lots of dunderheads.
Meanwhile, management decides they can make more margin in another business, and put all the money from the sales of the first product into that new business.
The new business flops.
The cool product is being worked on by a few die-hard engineers, but is starved of resources. Delivery date gets shoved off further and further in the future.
Company realizes mistake. Hires a bunch of bodies off the street to work on cool product. Unfortunately, the bunch of bodies are dunderheads and make the project even *LATER*.
The first product becomes obsolete.
Sales plummet.
Company dies.
I've seen this happen so many times. The point:
*FOCUS*. Choose your niche. Don't try to be all things to all people. Decide exactly what you're going to do, and do that one thing. Only. Diversification is for the Fortune 500, not for a high-tech startup.
*EXECUTE*.
Hire good people when they're available, not when there's a project for them. A good person can always fit into an existing project.
Throwing bodies via mass hiring at a project dooms it to failure, because most of said bodies will be dunderheads. Most good people are available only for short periods of time. You have to hire them when they're available, not when it's convenient.
Professional management is important, but unless you have a visionary at the top who understands the market, the company will lose its focus, thrash around, and die.
Note that the Fraudmeister people have already stated that if Ogg catches on, they're sure that they have some patent, somewhere, in their patent portfolio that can be used to kill it. So going Ogg doesn't remove the need for lawyers:-(.
One word: Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart did not win the discount retailer wars because of hard-nosed purchasers. Other retailers had purchasers just as hard-nosed. They won for one reason: IT. They know what inventory each store has, and new product hits the shelf as the last product leaves it, with no excess inventory. Wal-Mart views their IT as the corporate jewels, with security on their production floor that rivals that of the NSA. While their IT spending is not extravagant (NOTHING that Wal-Mart does is extravagant), they know that finishing off K-Mart is going to require continued investment and fine-tuning of their system, and they continue to do what it takes to trim those cents off of store inventories.
Companies that do not focus their IT on the bottom line, and spend what it takes to achieve that bottom line, lose. Period. Just ask K-Mart. They spent all their cash on nonsense such as bookstores and home improvement centers rather than on matching Wal-Mart's IT spending, and the result... well, we know the result (Chapter 11 bankruptcy).
I'm confident that savvy companies will continue to spend as much on IT as is necessary to hit the bottom line. As for other companies... (shrug). They'll be road kill soon enough, so I'm not worrying about it.
As far as I know, TurboLinux *HAS* no stock. Their "stock" tanking isn't going to put them out of business. Running out of cash to pay their creditors, on the other hand... well...
I don't think Ventnor's action shows him to be untrustworthy. It shows him to be arrogant and egocentric -- but everybody in the genetics biz already knew that (see the hilarious dig by one of Dr. Ventner's compatriots:
As for the idea that Dr. Venter's body should somehow be preserved along with his genome, Dr. Warren said, "That would be his wish, no doubt, to be prominently displayed in the Smithsonian."
In short, I think this tells us nothing more than we already knew -- that Dr. Ventner has an ego the size of Texas. (And, luckily, the talent to go with it too).
Not only do they have all the SCSI specs for their jukeboxes and optical drives online so driver writers can easily access them, but they pay my salary too:-). Right now all DISC/NSM hardware is supported by the 'mtx' media changer program for Linux (which I maintain, which is distributed with Debian, RedHat, SuSE, and probably other Linux distributions). The only thing that does not currently work is importing media via the import/export slot on the NSM DVD-RAM libraries, which because of the hardware involved needs extra support (the standard way of handling import/export -- send a MOVE_MEDIUM command with a source and destination address of the mail slot to tell the jukebox to stick out its tongue -- doesn't work because the hardware must know which slot you're going to import the disk into before it sticks out its tongue, because it must move that caddy to the mail slot -- the caddies stay inside the box, you get the bare disks spit out at you or you insert bare disks rather than have to mess with caddies yourself). I'm currently working on adding support for those special features (and features such as the disk pack mechanism) to the 'mtx' suite.
-E
The way telephone sales and support works
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Okay, since you never worked for a business, and have no idea how telephone sales and support works, here's how it works:
When you call, say, Best Buy.com's customer service number, you're talking to employees of Best Buy, right?
*WRONG*!!! You're calling employees of a contracted customer service provider. These people are sitting in a tiny cubicle in a call center in Phoenix, Arizona or Gary, Indiana and provide sales and customer service for several different companies. They are provided with scripts and access to the advertising copy and price database for each company they're supporting. If you ask them a question about a price on the advertising copy, guess what they do -- they read it right off the web site right back at you! At least, until somebody notices that hey, we're getting a lot of inquiries about this product, it's time to push this inquiry upstream to actual Best Buy employees.
Now, of course this is shitty customer service. The fact that it is standard industry practice doesn't make it any less shitty. Frankly, I do not buy from Best Buy, and in fact have a one-sentence statement on my web site saying, "Shopping at Worst Buy is the worst thing you can do". But the point is that an employee of a 3rd party contract firm reading mistaken advertising copy back to you does not make the mistaken advertising copy any less mistaken.
And yes, if I'm going by the nearby Krispy Kreme and see them advertising a dozen donuts for 12 cents, I'll go in and ask them about it. If they sell me the donuts for 12 cents, great. If they say, "Whoops! Bad sign!" and hurriedly rush out and change it to say "$1.20", I'd happily pay $1.20 for a dozen Krispy Kremes (of course, the real price is more like $6 for a dozen of those sinful but utterly delicious things, but that's another story:-( ).
-E
They never asked him to leave
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2
They asked him to go back to the manager's office, which he did. Then they called the police.
Slashdot Mirror
2) the ratings system is obviously broken
3) Quality has gone into the dustbin since they got bought out by the music conglomerates.
mp3.com was a great idea, and if the original management had not done idiotic things that got them sued, it might actually have reached the point where it presented a challenge to the recording industry. In today's capital-scarce world, though, I hold no hope for such a thing to happen. In particular, not being able to pay for professional quality recordings (sorry, I don't believe mp3 quality to be professional quality) is an obvious drawback to mp3.com that would need to be remedied by anybody who set out to do what mp3.com originally set out to do -- shake up the music world.
The task of filtering out dreck is not an easy one. While I have found some good unsigned or indie bands at mp3.com, they are by no means usual, and the ratings system at mp3.com is so obviously affected by factors other than quality as to be nigh useless.
Eric Lee Green BadTux
Sounds familiar!
Managing people is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for success in the computer business. A knowledge of the business is needed too. Someone selling hammers should know who uses hammers, what they use hammers for, and some basics about how hammers are built. Having quite painfully experienced what happens when a man whose sole claim to success is taking a trash hauling company to a successful IPO takes over a technology company, I know what Cringely was trying to say on a quite, err, personal, level.
--Eric Lee Green BadTux News'n'Views
The only way to bypass the power of the gun is via consensus. If the majority of the people refuse to participate in a feudal system, a feudal system cannot operate. At one point in time we had a Constitution in this country that provided a mechanism for organizing and obtaining consensus, but over the past two hundred years the mechanisms therein have been corrupted by (tada!) the power of the dollars in the hands of corporate elites to the point where the mechanisms of government are being used to move the United States towards its feudal future.
We are already well on the way to the fate of the Roman Empire.
-- Eric Lee Green BadTux News'n'Views
I've done some work with DVD/RAM media under the UDF filesystem. After about 40 writes, typical DVD/RAM media starts building up a hefty defects list. After about 100 writes, the defects list gets long enough that the media becomes basically unwritable. I am not impressed by the current state of optical disk technology. Given that CD-RW is an early primitive version of what eventually became DVD/RAM, it does not surprise if "around 100" is the correct answer, though I wouldn't re-use a piece of media more than 40 times under any circumstances.
Real estate prices in the Phoenix area are nowhere near crashing. In fact, so far this year they've gone up 9% over last year.
That's funny. $400 a month won't pay my mortgage. Sure, I could live on $400 a month -- if I were living with mommy, like you are. But I'm not living with mommy.
Number of cars: 1
Well guess what, I can easily afford that on one income. Heck, I can even afford what was a *BIG* house in 1959 on one income (I own a 1500 square foot house built in 1959). Heck, my house, unlike most 1950's houses, even had provisions for a *dryer*! Granted, I don't live on the coasts, which are horrendously expensive, but it is quite possible to live as well as in the 1950's on a single income.
BTW, most people in the 1950's did NOT live in rural areas. The 1950's were the first decade in which more Americans lived in cities than in farms, thanks to the aftermath of the Great Depression, WWII, and the mechanization of farms after WWII (which drove many of the ex-farmworkers to the cities).
Regarding $50,000 in student loans, average tuition costs at state colleges are approaching $10,000 a year (they were $8,655 a year in 2001), with the better state colleges costing more, and average stay at state colleges is approaching 5 years (it's virtually impossible to earn a degree in 4 years unless you kill yourself doing it). $50,000 in student loan debts does not sound out-of-line to me.
Is a college degree worth $50,000? Probably not in today's job marketplace. But I'm sure it seemed a good idea at the time, compared to spending the rest of her life reciting "Do you want fries with that order?".
The result is that our houses are built crappily and tend to fall apart, but what the hey, they're cheap.
Now, that applies primarily to carpenters, lathers, and stucco appliers. In other trades there is a great demand, for example plumbing, electrical, and HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning). On the other hand, the training to get into those fields is getting more expensive than it once was. You're talking about a six month course of study at a vocational school, or if you're one of the lucky slobs whose Dad was in the union, you can slide into a union apprenticeship. (Hmm, I'll have to ask my mother where my father's old union card went to). Those are definitely NOT fields where you can simply walk in off the street and be hired. If you don't believe me, the full National Electrical Code is over 1,000 8 1/2 by 11" pages long. If you don't have that tome pretty much memorized (at least to the point where you can thumb directly to the table that you need to, say, detirmine the proper depth for a buried type UF feeder to a subpanel in a detached garage that is 120v with a GFI protector), you're not qualified to be an electrician.
Granted, I haven't had to use this so-called "unemployment insurance" yet. Last time I was unemployed, I had a job within four days of starting my job search. But that was before the local job market totally crated.
I suggest that before you make blithe statements about "unemployment insurance", that you check to make sure that it exists in places other than where you're posting from. Unemployment insurance that actually replaces a large percentage of one's salary is limited to a few states. In most states, unemployment insurance is capped at an artificially low maximum that is only barely adequate for buying food for a family, and definitely NOT adequate to keep one from tapping savings while unemployed.
Mind you, I don't recommend moving to Phoenix. The tech marketplace here sucks right now. I'm just saying that the housing market isn't out of control in ALL big cities, and if you're in one of the few big cities where it IS out of control, you need to widen your horizons.
In my city, mortgage payments on a 1500 square foot house are cheaper than rent payments on an 850 square foot apartment. You're saying that I should have continued to send my money down a rathole for rent?
Cashflow-wise, my neighbors are poor. They earned their living in pre-inflation dollars, and their Social Security benefits are measured in pre-inflation dollars. They can barely afford the property taxes on their homes and dog food for their dog. While "wealthy" on paper, the reality is that they live in poverty because you can't eat equity until you sell -- and if they sell, they're on the streets.
Frankly, I haven't had a health insurance policy in the past 10 years that did not pay for prescription drugs, albeit sometimes with a hefty deductible (e.g. basic Blue Cross/Blue Shield had a $1500 deductible before they would start paying 80% of the cost of prescription drugs). Medicare is "just" a health insurance policy. Why should old people have less benefits than I do?
Social service agencies here in the Phoenix area report that they are overwhelmed by the demand for their services. They report that they are seeing entire families show up who were formerly middle class, but now are destitute. Even the soup kitchens are now having to turn away people, in a scene right out of the Great Depression. There are a lot of people hurting out there, but due to the way unemployment figures are cooked by our government (it's not a new thing, BTW, I mentioned this several years ago on my web site), we're spared knowing just how bad the situation is.
- Bunch of cool geeks come up with great idea, and start a company.
- They don't have lots of money, so they release a limited compromise version of the product. Even this version is really cool.
- To handle all the sales and manufacturing tasks necessary because of the new best-selling gear, the vulture capitalists call in "professional" management, which might be someone who last ran a garbage truck company, or a carpet cleaning company.
- The new management has no understanding of the market, so they look at what the biggest company in the market is doing, and say "We want to do that!".
- In the meantime, this bunch of cool geeks is working on the great idea that will be the company's next product. There still isn't lots of money or people.
- The new management says "Don't do that, we need this other product first!".
- The new management strips the engineering team of the cool product. The engineering team pleads for more good people, but the new management says "that'll hurt our margins too much."
- The other product flops.
- The cool product has gotten obsolete while the other product flops.
- Management panics and hires lots of dunderheads.
- Meanwhile, management decides they can make more margin in another business, and put all the money from the sales of the first product into that new business.
- The new business flops.
- The cool product is being worked on by a few die-hard engineers, but is starved of resources. Delivery date gets shoved off further and further in the future.
- Company realizes mistake. Hires a bunch of bodies off the street to work on cool product. Unfortunately, the bunch of bodies are dunderheads and make the project even *LATER*.
- The first product becomes obsolete.
- Sales plummet.
- Company dies.
I've seen this happen so many times. The point:Note that the Fraudmeister people have already stated that if Ogg catches on, they're sure that they have some patent, somewhere, in their patent portfolio that can be used to kill it. So going Ogg doesn't remove the need for lawyers :-(.
Companies that do not focus their IT on the bottom line, and spend what it takes to achieve that bottom line, lose. Period. Just ask K-Mart. They spent all their cash on nonsense such as bookstores and home improvement centers rather than on matching Wal-Mart's IT spending, and the result... well, we know the result (Chapter 11 bankruptcy).
I'm confident that savvy companies will continue to spend as much on IT as is necessary to hit the bottom line. As for other companies... (shrug). They'll be road kill soon enough, so I'm not worrying about it.
-E
As far as I know, TurboLinux *HAS* no stock. Their "stock" tanking isn't going to put them out of business. Running out of cash to pay their creditors, on the other hand... well...
In short, I think this tells us nothing more than we already knew -- that Dr. Ventner has an ego the size of Texas. (And, luckily, the talent to go with it too).
-E
Not only do they have all the SCSI specs for their jukeboxes and optical drives online so driver writers can easily access them, but they pay my salary too :-). Right now all DISC/NSM hardware is supported by the 'mtx' media changer program for Linux (which I maintain, which is distributed with Debian, RedHat, SuSE, and probably other Linux distributions). The only thing that does not currently work is importing media via the import/export slot on the NSM DVD-RAM libraries, which because of the hardware involved needs extra support (the standard way of handling import/export -- send a MOVE_MEDIUM command with a source and destination address of the mail slot to tell the jukebox to stick out its tongue -- doesn't work because the hardware must know which slot you're going to import the disk into before it sticks out its tongue, because it must move that caddy to the mail slot -- the caddies stay inside the box, you get the bare disks spit out at you or you insert bare disks rather than have to mess with caddies yourself). I'm currently working on adding support for those special features (and features such as the disk pack mechanism) to the 'mtx' suite.
-E
When you call, say, Best Buy.com's customer service number, you're talking to employees of Best Buy, right?
*WRONG*!!! You're calling employees of a contracted customer service provider. These people are sitting in a tiny cubicle in a call center in Phoenix, Arizona or Gary, Indiana and provide sales and customer service for several different companies. They are provided with scripts and access to the advertising copy and price database for each company they're supporting. If you ask them a question about a price on the advertising copy, guess what they do -- they read it right off the web site right back at you! At least, until somebody notices that hey, we're getting a lot of inquiries about this product, it's time to push this inquiry upstream to actual Best Buy employees.
Now, of course this is shitty customer service. The fact that it is standard industry practice doesn't make it any less shitty. Frankly, I do not buy from Best Buy, and in fact have a one-sentence statement on my web site saying, "Shopping at Worst Buy is the worst thing you can do". But the point is that an employee of a 3rd party contract firm reading mistaken advertising copy back to you does not make the mistaken advertising copy any less mistaken.
And yes, if I'm going by the nearby Krispy Kreme and see them advertising a dozen donuts for 12 cents, I'll go in and ask them about it. If they sell me the donuts for 12 cents, great. If they say, "Whoops! Bad sign!" and hurriedly rush out and change it to say "$1.20", I'd happily pay $1.20 for a dozen Krispy Kremes (of course, the real price is more like $6 for a dozen of those sinful but utterly delicious things, but that's another story :-( ).
-E
Read the report.