And other than the fact that everyone comes off looking like a charicature of Dr. Evil, the simple truth is that quality does not matter. When people start thinking that this stuff transcends business or even technology then it is doomed to fail. The really remarkable thing is, if the story is accurate, that Apple exists at all today given the acute megalomania of Jobs. The point here is that Palm OS is good, the hardware is solid albeit doesn't 'improve' as fast as some people would want. WinCe or whatever it is called is crap and the hardware is expensive, slow and constantly changing. But it gives the impression of givng the customer what they want. It gives the impression of solid features. Whether it does or not is irrelevant. What WinCe does not do is pretend to be the second coming. I love Palm and have used one or another for many years. It's great for what it does and given what I do with can't think of much they could do to improve it other than incrementally. But I do not accept the premise that it is Brilliant Art that Transcends Technology or Truth.
The simple truth is that Palm &Co. better watch out that they don't become isolated in their own high opinion of themselves while MS and its philosophy of "A C+ was good enough for me at Harvard it's good enough for the shit we make for you.." stumbles across the finish line first.
Seems to me we should value humans as much as we try to avoid cruelty to animals. Or does this free-choice shit override all? Anybody ever work in a company town?
I grew up in NYC where contrary to what most people think they know, most of the people killed by guns are in fact not killed randomly by criminals but instead by someone they know or live with. And most people killed by gun in their own home are killed by their own gun or by one kept in their home by somebody else.
Good or bad these are the facts; in NYC the boogie man theory just doesn't play out.
So I don't expect anyone to read this but has it occured to anyone that inner city schools solved this problem long ago - by putting metal detectors in all the doors. Yes? Can't get into the building with a gun. Doesn't that sort of solve the problem? Oh yeah you could go Charles Whitman on everyone, hole up in the clock tower and fire away but I'm not sure if anything can prevent or predict the proverbial American Lone Crazed Gunman Syndrome.
I must be out of step with the rest of the country. I naively think that if a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun and puncturing someone else's head is the problem then perhaps at least part of the solution is to either keep guns away from people or make it harder to bring guns to where other people are, other unarmed people that is.
Yah know I hear all this "guns make us safe" rhetoric whenever somebody talks about making it harder to own one or at least requiring an owner to demonstrate that they are at least minimally responsible. But I have to wonder how victims of crime are made safer when their assailants have a gun.
Ok enough of that it isn't going to change anyone's mind....
Now on to the other issue the Net. Ok let's say for the sake of argument that all the do-gooders are right, there is a predictable correlation between the Net and violence. Ok let's say that's true. Now, how many people are on the net? About a hundred zillion? Now how many people go Lee Harvey on their class mates? 2 dozen? 3? Sounds like pretty good product reliability to me. Actually sounds like the same kind of argument that Chuck "Moses" Heston uses about guns. No? I mean its got to approach commercial airline kind of stats and I don't see anyone suddenly deciding that air travel is so unacceptably dangerous that minors should not be allowed to ride on planes.
And oh yeah - I forgot. Apparently the thousands of hate groups springing up on the net preaching REAL violence and REAL hatred and REAL action against people and against the government is something to be glossed over. Not real important and even if it was the 1st ammendment should protect them. Well not really because the 1st ammendment is NOT unlimited. If anyone doubts this go all the way back to US v. Debs and read the decision. But what the hey pick an imaginary threat and apply it to a generally voiceless group. Lemme see who used that most effectively... oh yeah it was Hitler and then Milosevic, slap on head, silly me I keep forgetting about those wacky guys.....
There is/was a company many years ago that built PCI expansion bus cabinets. You plug a card into one of your unused PCI slots, run a cable to the expansion bus and voila - get about a dozen new slots. The cabinet looked like a PC or optionally in a much larger box for self contained SCSI devices etc. I can't remember the name of the company but I do remember that this was, at the time a side business to their much more lucrative VME bus expansion business. The VME connecting adapters alone were a few thousand bucks each.
Ok Jim Clark's claim to fame is he was able to turn 2 different multibillion dollar companies into shit in a very short span of time.
Larry Ellison - made Oracle the #1 market share DB and kept it at exactly the same proportion over a ten year period somehow making himself a billionaire even while turning his support and service organizations into complete shit.
LVG - what can you say ex RJR ex Nabisco ex McKinsy antitechnocrat who rode the greatest ecnomic bubble ever to a 'salvaging miracle' at Big Blue. How hard could it be to take a basically sound company apply textbook mgt consulting techniques to it while the rest of the tech world shot up into the stratosphere in value.
Steve Jobs - the shrinking violet permanent temp CEO watched his company go efectively nowhere in ten years. At least it didn't go toes up! (famous quote - 'all you need to make a fortune in this business is a garage and 5 million dollars').
Rick Boucher - oh yeah Congress is at the vangard of thought leadership and getting shit done at warp speed. In 10 years they'll still be debating about the shape of the bargaining table.
This list is basically a bunch of people who were either too shy to really fuck things up or just arrogant enough to fuck them up anyhow. Either way they are experts at being where the shit aint and managing to blame it all on someone else.
About 7% of the population at any given time believes in UFO abductions and Elvis is still alive.
54% of people polled recently by US News and World Report and MSNBC belive in the actual real existance of angels, ghosts & demons. That is, they are really here and excert a real influence on people.
The most banned books from US schools over the whole of the 1990's to present are the Harry Potter series because it is believed they promote Satanism, Devil Worship and general un Christian unacceptable thinking.
Today it was reported on national US news that one of the outcomes being seriously considered by the US Congress in response to the reports that movie companies market to children is that there should be only 2 movie ratings: G and NC-17. That is, there are either cartoon movies with talking animals or everything else that is absolutely forbidden to children even if their parents are present.
In a recent poll by CNN, ~27% of those polled would accept a fascist dictatorship if it meant that crime would be reduced and/or undesireable people (undefined) were removed from the United States.
In a recent poll by USAToday 45% of those polled would support the elimination of the separation of church and state as long as the church was Protestant/Fundamentalist.
In a recent poll by the NY Times 59% of those polled support religious education in public schools.
So it's not really a matter of technology or Luddism. It's a matter of slowly but surely sliding towards a dark dark ignorant world.
All I can say is that my wife who is an attorney does not understand how to save a file to some other directory or a floppy, does not understand how to detach an email attachment, uses the same software for 8 years is not interested in learning anything new and is generally untrainable when I attempt to do so. It could be the teacher I'm not the most patient person in the world but in a nutshell people generally want computers to adapt to how they work and think. They want to be able ignore file systems, most of the window controls and just about anything that isn't a direct analog of how they would work at their desk using paper, pens and folders. They want to be able to automatically archive docs everytime they're opened. They want redlining and version control that's automatic and intelligent enough to understand partial version updates, page insertions and the like. They don't want to convert a scanned TIFF image to some other format. They don't want to retrieve a file by location but instead by function. They want to bundle dissimilar file objects under a single logical work heading, again without any understanding of the file system on their part. That is, they want work folders that logically link different types of objects under the same heading. They want multiple concurrent printer support so that dissimilar work objects can be simultaneously printed w/o having to open all of the applications and with the ability to print color objects on the color printer and B/W objects on the laser printer in-stream. They want automatic archive retreival that is transparent from secondary storage so that objects not in primary storage are automatically brought forward and inserted into the original version control sequence. They want they want they want they want. It can never be easy enough.
No I judge American employers, not employees of any nationality, stripe, citizenship or residency. I couldn't care less who does the work - really. H1B, Americans or mental patients hammering away randomly. The point is, if anyone wants to actually know, and stop taking offense at the facts, is that:
Many 'contractors' abuse or outright break the law. The fact that there is so much pressure to open the floodgates is a good indicator that the difference is much more than 90% and there is no enforcement. And why is that? because employers are making out like bandits and employees are scared of being booted. Remember, there are 10 guys waiting for everyone who is here.
Employers want something for nothing and see this as a way to get it.
Employers have absurdly unrealistic expectations because:
a They don't know what they're doing
b They are trying to compress the work of several people into the hiring of one
c They merely mouth the customers' statement of requirements w/o thinking if it's possible
d Do in fact discriminate against people not fresh out of school.
That's my point. Not that we should bar all or some H1B's - because again I couldn't care less who does the work if it's quality work. No - the point is that the justification that all of the suits parade up to Congress as reasons for expanding H1B are absolutely completely fucking bogus.
Did any of you people work in IT in the NY Metro Area say between 1984 & 1994? Well if you did you were one of the lucky ones because in that time 30,000 IT people lost their jobs or were 're-jobbed' at significantly lower salaries. Why do you think last year's total bill for Y2K was so high? Because all of those COBOL jocks went into Y2K remediation contracting at 3x what their employers felt was equitable to pay them.
Stop taking offence when someone points out that there is no real labor shortage. Because there isn't. There isn't unfulfilled demand for 347,000 tech jobs or whatever today's agreed upon statement is.
No No No.
There is a shortage of people willing to be treated like shit. There is a shortage of people who will stand up for their rights and tell an employer, 'well no really - it really sounds like a shitty offer no matter how many options you give me'. There is a shortage of people who will work under uncertain conditions.
Now sure, all of you can crow about; whining about skills about whatever the fuck you want. More power to you. IF you think that you will always get the best job or the best assignment and command whatever rate you whimsy up just because you feel you have the best skills you are delusional plain and simple. This is a generation of people who have seen nothing but boom times since they learned to jerk off and their response to everything is to pound their chest and scream about how fucking smart they are.
On the one hand you have a bunch of people trying to force the issue and get H1B opened up because they want the opportunity. Great. That's a noble goal and as a second generation child of immigrants I applaud.
On the other hand you have a bunch of people who place themselves at the top of the food chain and dare anyone to knock them off.
Now think about this very very carefully. Isn't that divide and conquer? Do you think employers aren't laughing their asses off looking at a very group of very highly paid people working with a much larger group of low paid people. Where's the risk to the employer? Well I'll tell you it's not with them. It's with you. And you. And you.
of 24 yr olds with 15 yrs experience in a technology 3 yrs old & willing to move 3,000 miles away to work 90hrs/week to earn 67K @ a company with a 50-50 chance of being in business in 6 months! The truth is, is that as soon as they understand you're over 30 they start to cough and mumble about "well this probably isn't a real good fit for you..."
It's not about skills or availability. It's about power and control. It's about exporting your development risk and the hell with the people. It's about bringing a bunch of guys over from India, cramming them 10 to a house, paying them shit and kicking them out when the visa expires because at any payrate they're getting paid better here than there. So what if your code is shit. By then the "contractor" has moved on to another customer who's thrilled to get work done at apparently half the rate of anyone else's bid.
Imagine for a sec that the price of CD's is US$15,000 and the tax on all electronic equipement is 3000% - 'to compensate the artists, you understand'.
Is that world one in which artists are all incredibly wealthy captains of art? Are the record companies merely low margin distributors scraping along on whatever they can skim?
I don't think so.
You see record and media companies specifically push the risk of content development to the artist in the form of "recoup". That is where they advance or loan an amount to the artist to produce his/her own CD, Video, whatever. Think of it like a book advance except the price of typing paper is $40/sheet. All of that "recoup" is advanced against all of the money that eventually comes back to the artist. How much is that you say?
In the recording industry at least, 5% is considered generous, 3% is more average. That's 3% of what the record company gets back from sales less their overhead which includes marketing, distribution, coop advertising, etc. taxes, etc.
Assume for the purposes of this mental experiment that this figure is 25%.
Now retailers buy units recover their costs out of sales. Let's be generous to the retailer and guess that the markup is 50%. So the record company gets 8 bucks a pop.
8.00x0.75x0.03 or.....
18 cents a unit from which the "recoup" is recouped. So lets figure its a monster hit CD and sells 1 million copies. That translates into $180,000 from which the artist now has to give back the production costs of the CD itself as well as the video and a portion of the production costs for a related promo tour.
Let's use round numbers and say that the CD costs 50,000 to develop and the video another 50,000.
That leaves $80,000. Deduct say a quarter of the cost of a promo mini tour; make this about $25,000. That leaves our artist with $55,000.
Do the math. The net profit margin before taxes to the artist is 55,000/16,000,000 is
0.0034375 or roughly 0.34% that is zeropointthreefourpercent.
Are we starting to see the light????????
Record companies are designed to pay nothing to anyone. What is the point here? I'll tell you. Napster is not the problem. The distribution mechanism is not the problem. Changing the distribution mechanism which is really all that Napster is, is not the problem. Cutting the retail cost to effectively ZERO would not materially change the economics to the artist. The problem is how record companies treat artists which is the closest thing to indentured servitude we have.
- Universities and any other contractors must agree not to publish anything the government deems sensitive.
-Researchers may examine only those matters the government wants examined.
-Teams must agree to clear all personnel working on the evaluation with the government.
On a practical level I can understand the first and third requirement. Actually the first follows from the third. If there is a restriction on publication then you have to know who you are restricting. This is fairly standard Federal Gov stuff. One of the downsides to doing research for say, the DOE or the NSA is there is lots of work that could probably win a Nobel or a Fields but it will never be published.
It's the second requirement that is probably the stumbling block. It's just bad science to be restricted in WHAT you MAY evaluate.
Sounds like a lot of rah rah - don't-look-too deeply-into-how-we-invest-your-money kind of pitch. WTF does a VC know about government or governments except that they're bad for unregulated absolute free market capitalism? Another book about the irrelevance of government in the global economy. Don't be too sure that governments and nation-states will just roll over. History hasn't borne that out.
So they make some Freenix apps. Either they're marginal but people buy them anyway and every other vendor collapses. Or they suck and it adds more fuel to the "well Freenix just sucks so come back to the MS fold, you are forgiven" argument.
You buy a phone because you buy cellular service. Going upscale isn't going to get more people into the game. Honestly - the idea of a $200-300-400 phone is just absurd. Compounding this is that most telcos tell you which phones you can use, typically the ones they sell else there is a penalty. If the phone man'f'trs want to sell more phones then they have to work to pressure the telcos in the US to do something about the tangled mess of the industry. There is no national standard or integration such as in Europe. The rates are an order of magnitude higher than in other parts of the world. Service and coverage is spotty at best. You can't integrate billing unless you get land line and mobile from the same telco and even that's hit or miss. The cost of phone insurance for your multihundred dollar phone is in the loan-shark range.
As far as the phone devices themselves are concerned did they even consider that I might not want to replace EVERY accessory if I buy a new phone? The power connectors are different, the headset plugs are different, the batteries are different - and these are from the same man'f'tr.
They will sell more phones when more people can use and afford the service plans.
That's about it. The OS is limited in the amount of RAM it can address so 12MB is the max including ROM. I suppose you could build a 4MB ROM, flash it and add an 8MB RAM for a total of 12MB but that sounds like engineering for the sake of engineering.
Also for those of you who aren't real familiar with the Palm be aware that more storage = less battery.
Even if you monitor what are you monitoring for? Who does this protect? While it may afford the company the excuse that they can go after an employee it does not protect the company from anything per se. Moreover if you have an official policy of monitoring AND ALSO filtering then the company is setting itself up to NEVER send out anything that is in violation of the policy. That is, if you claim you are in compliance then you in fact HAVE TO BE in compliance and you may be exposing the company to even more trouble. In this case the liability is clear regardless of who sends out the offending email. Therefore you again have not actually protected the company from anything unless you the email admin can guarantee the process.
You need to consult an attorney. You may also want to investigate some kind of business insurance to cover litigation and damages that may result.
Like giving guns to mental patients
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Salon on the XBox
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· Score: 2
Just checking - - - is this another online market that MS will claim to conquer then screw up? Uh let's see - Slate, MSN, Travel... Or...
Is this another MS endevour into hardware that they will screw up or ignore once the pretty intern that suggested it to Bill moves on to a real job?
Uh - - I guess that running the same old SW on a closed box that lashes you to whatever endless service pack cycle that MS decides to pry out of its ass will somehow be fucking magic. I can just image the bleeding edge graphics gear MS is so famous for, assuming of course you have a quad-P3 running W2K embedded into the biggest damn ROM you've ever seen underneath a quarter gig or so of RAM.
From the article: "A four-year-old PlayStation still runs the latest Sony game perfectly," observes Keighley. "A four-year-old PC won't even allow you to run 95 percent of the PC games that ship today. If you build a PlayStation game, you know there are upward of 50 million machines ready to run your game. That's not the case with a PC product"
Of course not. The lunatics you want to let out to run the asylum make it that way. On purpose. Sony recognizes that the PS however expensive is simply a reference platform to develop and distribute the SOFTWARE, the CONTENT. It's the SOFTWARE that makes money.
So to conclude....Let's give a huge SW company with questionable QA ability a stranglehold over the hardware and somehow, because they're all so independant and free to do whatever they want even if MS begs and pleads and promises to be good, that through some process call it wishfull thinking, good intentions and the fact that the wizard of OZ was really a nice guy deep down, we'll all have great games on great boxes that always work. Albeit they'll work somewhat worse that PC games today and certainly worse than any game boxes like the PS2 - but hey! So what, vaporous mediocrity sells.
Keeping hundreds of thousands of help desk folks the world over gainfully employed. IF Windows wasn't broke the world economy would collapse. It's kind of like the crime 'problem'. If we could solve it then an entire sector of the economy focused on underclass management would stop.
One guy a devoted open source Linux myrmidon and the other an ex-Apple employee saying Apple is irrelevant???? The next time I want to know which airline is best I'll just ask one of them to critique someone else. Honestly does anyone think Mac is a serious contender to overtake anyone? For the past what, 10 years Apple has tried to hold its own with the claim that they are not somebody else. Along comes a bunch of poorly funded attempts like BeOS that say - "we're like Apple only, not, or better, or something...!" Apple is great for people who like Apple and use it.
Re:The only Notes client is W32 !!! b'leeevit
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IBM Releases SashXB
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· Score: 2
Full console or just a subset of the console via the command line? The admin client IS a Notes client
The only Notes client is W32 !!! b'leeevit
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IBM Releases SashXB
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· Score: 2
There isn't even a Unix Notes client anymore. Hasn't been one since 4.5. There is no Notes client other than W32. Even the server admin console is on W32 regardless of server platform so if you have a Unix cluster hosting Notes you can no longer run the console off, say the control workstation. There have been lots of complaints about a Linux client or any *nix client but that's just the way it is. Lotus/Iris decides these things based on how much money, time, people they have to spend on development. Understand that the reference platform for Notes continues to be NT/2000. Everything else comes from that. "Special" server ports like some flavors of Unix and Linux and S/390 are not handled by Lotus at all but the party line is held by all, and all client direction is centrally controlled. Your better off just running VMWare compared to waiting for the mystical mythical Linux Notes client to arrive - because the king is dead, the ship already sailed to Avalon and it isn't coming back.
Imagine going down to DMV and getting a licencing test. Wadda they do - spool up 2 of these suckers and fly next to you while you:
start
go up
go back
go right
go left
turn left
turn right
rotate 360
pitch forward
pitch back
travel forward while gaining altitude
demonstrate that you can pull the ripcord and bail
land
stop, spool down.
Honestly - who is qualfied to do this and who is going to let you lift off from your driveway, buzz the interstate on your way to work, land, all with no apparent navigation, alert or warning equipment. Will they let you fly it at night or in bad weather? I drive past an airport on my way to work. Can you imagine getting into a pissing contest with an MD-80?
.....it was either the "This England..." speech or "By any means necessary..." Can't tell. Either way, in the context of the music industry it sounds like some coke fueled delusion. Sony will:
1 Control all networking technology
2 Control by legal means all networks throughout the world
3 Anything else it fucking feels like
Only thing missing is something like "God is on our side and we will cleanse the world of these infidels!" Hey Steve why don't you go back to blowing coke off the thighs of supermodels?
Slashdot Mirror
And other than the fact that everyone comes off looking like a charicature of Dr. Evil, the simple truth is that quality does not matter. When people start thinking that this stuff transcends business or even technology then it is doomed to fail. The really remarkable thing is, if the story is accurate, that Apple exists at all today given the acute megalomania of Jobs. The point here is that Palm OS is good, the hardware is solid albeit doesn't 'improve' as fast as some people would want. WinCe or whatever it is called is crap and the hardware is expensive, slow and constantly changing. But it gives the impression of givng the customer what they want. It gives the impression of solid features. Whether it does or not is irrelevant. What WinCe does not do is pretend to be the second coming. I love Palm and have used one or another for many years. It's great for what it does and given what I do with can't think of much they could do to improve it other than incrementally. But I do not accept the premise that it is Brilliant Art that Transcends Technology or Truth.
The simple truth is that Palm &Co. better watch out that they don't become isolated in their own high opinion of themselves while MS and its philosophy of "A C+ was good enough for me at Harvard it's good enough for the shit we make for you.." stumbles across the finish line first.
Seems to me we should value humans as much as we try to avoid cruelty to animals. Or does this free-choice shit override all? Anybody ever work in a company town?
I grew up in NYC where contrary to what most people think they know, most of the people killed by guns are in fact not killed randomly by criminals but instead by someone they know or live with. And most people killed by gun in their own home are killed by their own gun or by one kept in their home by somebody else.
Good or bad these are the facts; in NYC the boogie man theory just doesn't play out.
So I don't expect anyone to read this but has it occured to anyone that inner city schools solved this problem long ago - by putting metal detectors in all the doors. Yes? Can't get into the building with a gun. Doesn't that sort of solve the problem? Oh yeah you could go Charles Whitman on everyone, hole up in the clock tower and fire away but I'm not sure if anything can prevent or predict the proverbial American Lone Crazed Gunman Syndrome.
I must be out of step with the rest of the country. I naively think that if a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun and puncturing someone else's head is the problem then perhaps at least part of the solution is to either keep guns away from people or make it harder to bring guns to where other people are, other unarmed people that is.
Yah know I hear all this "guns make us safe" rhetoric whenever somebody talks about making it harder to own one or at least requiring an owner to demonstrate that they are at least minimally responsible. But I have to wonder how victims of crime are made safer when their assailants have a gun.
Ok enough of that it isn't going to change anyone's mind....
Now on to the other issue the Net. Ok let's say for the sake of argument that all the do-gooders are right, there is a predictable correlation between the Net and violence. Ok let's say that's true. Now, how many people are on the net? About a hundred zillion? Now how many people go Lee Harvey on their class mates? 2 dozen? 3? Sounds like pretty good product reliability to me. Actually sounds like the same kind of argument that Chuck "Moses" Heston uses about guns. No? I mean its got to approach commercial airline kind of stats and I don't see anyone suddenly deciding that air travel is so unacceptably dangerous that minors should not be allowed to ride on planes.
And oh yeah - I forgot. Apparently the thousands of hate groups springing up on the net preaching REAL violence and REAL hatred and REAL action against people and against the government is something to be glossed over. Not real important and even if it was the 1st ammendment should protect them. Well not really because the 1st ammendment is NOT unlimited. If anyone doubts this go all the way back to US v. Debs and read the decision. But what the hey pick an imaginary threat and apply it to a generally voiceless group. Lemme see who used that most effectively... oh yeah it was Hitler and then Milosevic, slap on head, silly me I keep forgetting about those wacky guys.....
There is/was a company many years ago that built PCI expansion bus cabinets. You plug a card into one of your unused PCI slots, run a cable to the expansion bus and voila - get about a dozen new slots. The cabinet looked like a PC or optionally in a much larger box for self contained SCSI devices etc. I can't remember the name of the company but I do remember that this was, at the time a side business to their much more lucrative VME bus expansion business. The VME connecting adapters alone were a few thousand bucks each.
Ok Jim Clark's claim to fame is he was able to turn 2 different multibillion dollar companies into shit in a very short span of time.
Larry Ellison - made Oracle the #1 market share DB and kept it at exactly the same proportion over a ten year period somehow making himself a billionaire even while turning his support and service organizations into complete shit.
LVG - what can you say ex RJR ex Nabisco ex McKinsy antitechnocrat who rode the greatest ecnomic bubble ever to a 'salvaging miracle' at Big Blue. How hard could it be to take a basically sound company apply textbook mgt consulting techniques to it while the rest of the tech world shot up into the stratosphere in value.
Steve Jobs - the shrinking violet permanent temp CEO watched his company go efectively nowhere in ten years. At least it didn't go toes up! (famous quote - 'all you need to make a fortune in this business is a garage and 5 million dollars').
Rick Boucher - oh yeah Congress is at the vangard of thought leadership and getting shit done at warp speed. In 10 years they'll still be debating about the shape of the bargaining table.
This list is basically a bunch of people who were either too shy to really fuck things up or just arrogant enough to fuck them up anyhow. Either way they are experts at being where the shit aint and managing to blame it all on someone else.
About 7% of the population at any given time believes in UFO abductions and Elvis is still alive.
54% of people polled recently by US News and World Report and MSNBC belive in the actual real existance of angels, ghosts & demons. That is, they are really here and excert a real influence on people.
The most banned books from US schools over the whole of the 1990's to present are the Harry Potter series because it is believed they promote Satanism, Devil Worship and general un Christian unacceptable thinking.
Today it was reported on national US news that one of the outcomes being seriously considered by the US Congress in response to the reports that movie companies market to children is that there should be only 2 movie ratings: G and NC-17. That is, there are either cartoon movies with talking animals or everything else that is absolutely forbidden to children even if their parents are present.
In a recent poll by CNN, ~27% of those polled would accept a fascist dictatorship if it meant that crime would be reduced and/or undesireable people (undefined) were removed from the United States.
In a recent poll by USAToday 45% of those polled would support the elimination of the separation of church and state as long as the church was Protestant/Fundamentalist.
In a recent poll by the NY Times 59% of those polled support religious education in public schools.
So it's not really a matter of technology or Luddism. It's a matter of slowly but surely sliding towards a dark dark ignorant world.
I think all you would need is a properly designed headset with a 100 Ohm resistor to prevent the wire from becomming a giant antenna, no?
All I can say is that my wife who is an attorney does not understand how to save a file to some other directory or a floppy, does not understand how to detach an email attachment, uses the same software for 8 years is not interested in learning anything new and is generally untrainable when I attempt to do so. It could be the teacher I'm not the most patient person in the world but in a nutshell people generally want computers to adapt to how they work and think. They want to be able ignore file systems, most of the window controls and just about anything that isn't a direct analog of how they would work at their desk using paper, pens and folders. They want to be able to automatically archive docs everytime they're opened. They want redlining and version control that's automatic and intelligent enough to understand partial version updates, page insertions and the like. They don't want to convert a scanned TIFF image to some other format. They don't want to retrieve a file by location but instead by function. They want to bundle dissimilar file objects under a single logical work heading, again without any understanding of the file system on their part. That is, they want work folders that logically link different types of objects under the same heading. They want multiple concurrent printer support so that dissimilar work objects can be simultaneously printed w/o having to open all of the applications and with the ability to print color objects on the color printer and B/W objects on the laser printer in-stream. They want automatic archive retreival that is transparent from secondary storage so that objects not in primary storage are automatically brought forward and inserted into the original version control sequence. They want they want they want they want. It can never be easy enough.
No I judge American employers, not employees of any nationality, stripe, citizenship or residency. I couldn't care less who does the work - really. H1B, Americans or mental patients hammering away randomly. The point is, if anyone wants to actually know, and stop taking offense at the facts, is that:
Many 'contractors' abuse or outright break the law. The fact that there is so much pressure to open the floodgates is a good indicator that the difference is much more than 90% and there is no enforcement. And why is that? because employers are making out like bandits and employees are scared of being booted. Remember, there are 10 guys waiting for everyone who is here.
Employers want something for nothing and see this as a way to get it.
Employers have absurdly unrealistic expectations because:
a They don't know what they're doing
b They are trying to compress the work of several people into the hiring of one
c They merely mouth the customers' statement of requirements w/o thinking if it's possible
d Do in fact discriminate against people not fresh out of school.
That's my point. Not that we should bar all or some H1B's - because again I couldn't care less who does the work if it's quality work. No - the point is that the justification that all of the suits parade up to Congress as reasons for expanding H1B are absolutely completely fucking bogus.
Did any of you people work in IT in the NY Metro Area say between 1984 & 1994? Well if you did you were one of the lucky ones because in that time 30,000 IT people lost their jobs or were 're-jobbed' at significantly lower salaries. Why do you think last year's total bill for Y2K was so high? Because all of those COBOL jocks went into Y2K remediation contracting at 3x what their employers felt was equitable to pay them.
Stop taking offence when someone points out that there is no real labor shortage. Because there isn't. There isn't unfulfilled demand for 347,000 tech jobs or whatever today's agreed upon statement is.
No No No.
There is a shortage of people willing to be treated like shit. There is a shortage of people who will stand up for their rights and tell an employer, 'well no really - it really sounds like a shitty offer no matter how many options you give me'. There is a shortage of people who will work under uncertain conditions.
Now sure, all of you can crow about; whining about skills about whatever the fuck you want. More power to you. IF you think that you will always get the best job or the best assignment and command whatever rate you whimsy up just because you feel you have the best skills you are delusional plain and simple. This is a generation of people who have seen nothing but boom times since they learned to jerk off and their response to everything is to pound their chest and scream about how fucking smart they are.
On the one hand you have a bunch of people trying to force the issue and get H1B opened up because they want the opportunity. Great. That's a noble goal and as a second generation child of immigrants I applaud.
On the other hand you have a bunch of people who place themselves at the top of the food chain and dare anyone to knock them off.
Now think about this very very carefully. Isn't that divide and conquer? Do you think employers aren't laughing their asses off looking at a very group of very highly paid people working with a much larger group of low paid people. Where's the risk to the employer? Well I'll tell you it's not with them. It's with you. And you. And you.
of 24 yr olds with 15 yrs experience in a technology 3 yrs old & willing to move 3,000 miles away to work 90hrs/week to earn 67K @ a company with a 50-50 chance of being in business in 6 months! The truth is, is that as soon as they understand you're over 30 they start to cough and mumble about "well this probably isn't a real good fit for you..."
It's not about skills or availability. It's about power and control. It's about exporting your development risk and the hell with the people. It's about bringing a bunch of guys over from India, cramming them 10 to a house, paying them shit and kicking them out when the visa expires because at any payrate they're getting paid better here than there. So what if your code is shit. By then the "contractor" has moved on to another customer who's thrilled to get work done at apparently half the rate of anyone else's bid.
Imagine for a sec that the price of CD's is US$15,000 and the tax on all electronic equipement is 3000% - 'to compensate the artists, you understand'.
Is that world one in which artists are all incredibly wealthy captains of art? Are the record companies merely low margin distributors scraping along on whatever they can skim?
I don't think so.
You see record and media companies specifically push the risk of content development to the artist in the form of "recoup". That is where they advance or loan an amount to the artist to produce his/her own CD, Video, whatever. Think of it like a book advance except the price of typing paper is $40/sheet. All of that "recoup" is advanced against all of the money that eventually comes back to the artist. How much is that you say?
In the recording industry at least, 5% is considered generous, 3% is more average. That's 3% of what the record company gets back from sales less their overhead which includes marketing, distribution, coop advertising, etc. taxes, etc.
Assume for the purposes of this mental experiment that this figure is 25%.
Now retailers buy units recover their costs out of sales. Let's be generous to the retailer and guess that the markup is 50%. So the record company gets 8 bucks a pop.
8.00x0.75x0.03 or.....
18 cents a unit from which the "recoup" is recouped. So lets figure its a monster hit CD and sells 1 million copies. That translates into $180,000 from which the artist now has to give back the production costs of the CD itself as well as the video and a portion of the production costs for a related promo tour.
Let's use round numbers and say that the CD costs 50,000 to develop and the video another 50,000.
That leaves $80,000. Deduct say a quarter of the cost of a promo mini tour; make this about $25,000. That leaves our artist with $55,000.
Do the math. The net profit margin before taxes to the artist is 55,000/16,000,000 is
0.0034375 or roughly 0.34% that is zeropointthreefourpercent.
Are we starting to see the light????????
Record companies are designed to pay nothing to anyone. What is the point here? I'll tell you. Napster is not the problem. The distribution mechanism is not the problem. Changing the distribution mechanism which is really all that Napster is, is not the problem. Cutting the retail cost to effectively ZERO would not materially change the economics to the artist. The problem is how record companies treat artists which is the closest thing to indentured servitude we have.
Do the math people. Do the math.
- Universities and any other contractors must agree not to publish anything the government deems sensitive.
-Researchers may examine only those matters the government wants examined.
-Teams must agree to clear all personnel working on the evaluation with the government.
On a practical level I can understand the first and third requirement. Actually the first follows from the third. If there is a restriction on publication then you have to know who you are restricting. This is fairly standard Federal Gov stuff. One of the downsides to doing research for say, the DOE or the NSA is there is lots of work that could probably win a Nobel or a Fields but it will never be published.
It's the second requirement that is probably the stumbling block. It's just bad science to be restricted in WHAT you MAY evaluate.
Sounds like a lot of rah rah - don't-look-too deeply-into-how-we-invest-your-money kind of pitch. WTF does a VC know about government or governments except that they're bad for unregulated absolute free market capitalism? Another book about the irrelevance of government in the global economy. Don't be too sure that governments and nation-states will just roll over. History hasn't borne that out.
So they make some Freenix apps. Either they're marginal but people buy them anyway and every other vendor collapses. Or they suck and it adds more fuel to the "well Freenix just sucks so come back to the MS fold, you are forgiven" argument.
You buy a phone because you buy cellular service. Going upscale isn't going to get more people into the game. Honestly - the idea of a $200-300-400 phone is just absurd. Compounding this is that most telcos tell you which phones you can use, typically the ones they sell else there is a penalty. If the phone man'f'trs want to sell more phones then they have to work to pressure the telcos in the US to do something about the tangled mess of the industry. There is no national standard or integration such as in Europe. The rates are an order of magnitude higher than in other parts of the world. Service and coverage is spotty at best. You can't integrate billing unless you get land line and mobile from the same telco and even that's hit or miss. The cost of phone insurance for your multihundred dollar phone is in the loan-shark range.
As far as the phone devices themselves are concerned did they even consider that I might not want to replace EVERY accessory if I buy a new phone? The power connectors are different, the headset plugs are different, the batteries are different - and these are from the same man'f'tr.
They will sell more phones when more people can use and afford the service plans.
That's about it. The OS is limited in the amount of RAM it can address so 12MB is the max including ROM. I suppose you could build a 4MB ROM, flash it and add an 8MB RAM for a total of 12MB but that sounds like engineering for the sake of engineering.
Also for those of you who aren't real familiar with the Palm be aware that more storage = less battery.
Even if you monitor what are you monitoring for? Who does this protect? While it may afford the company the excuse that they can go after an employee it does not protect the company from anything per se. Moreover if you have an official policy of monitoring AND ALSO filtering then the company is setting itself up to NEVER send out anything that is in violation of the policy. That is, if you claim you are in compliance then you in fact HAVE TO BE in compliance and you may be exposing the company to even more trouble. In this case the liability is clear regardless of who sends out the offending email. Therefore you again have not actually protected the company from anything unless you the email admin can guarantee the process.
You need to consult an attorney. You may also want to investigate some kind of business insurance to cover litigation and damages that may result.
Just checking - - - is this another online market that MS will claim to conquer then screw up? Uh let's see - Slate, MSN, Travel... Or...
Is this another MS endevour into hardware that they will screw up or ignore once the pretty intern that suggested it to Bill moves on to a real job?
Uh - - I guess that running the same old SW on a closed box that lashes you to whatever endless service pack cycle that MS decides to pry out of its ass will somehow be fucking magic. I can just image the bleeding edge graphics gear MS is so famous for, assuming of course you have a quad-P3 running W2K embedded into the biggest damn ROM you've ever seen underneath a quarter gig or so of RAM.
From the article: "A four-year-old PlayStation still runs the latest Sony game perfectly," observes Keighley. "A four-year-old PC won't even allow you to run 95 percent of the PC games that ship today. If you build a PlayStation game, you know there are upward of 50 million machines ready to run your game. That's not the case with a PC product"
Of course not. The lunatics you want to let out to run the asylum make it that way. On purpose. Sony recognizes that the PS however expensive is simply a reference platform to develop and distribute the SOFTWARE, the CONTENT. It's the SOFTWARE that makes money.
So to conclude....Let's give a huge SW company with questionable QA ability a stranglehold over the hardware and somehow, because they're all so independant and free to do whatever they want even if MS begs and pleads and promises to be good, that through some process call it wishfull thinking, good intentions and the fact that the wizard of OZ was really a nice guy deep down, we'll all have great games on great boxes that always work. Albeit they'll work somewhat worse that PC games today and certainly worse than any game boxes like the PS2 - but hey! So what, vaporous mediocrity sells.
Keeping hundreds of thousands of help desk folks the world over gainfully employed. IF Windows wasn't broke the world economy would collapse. It's kind of like the crime 'problem'. If we could solve it then an entire sector of the economy focused on underclass management would stop.
Kinda biased don't ya think?
One guy a devoted open source Linux myrmidon and the other an ex-Apple employee saying Apple is irrelevant???? The next time I want to know which airline is best I'll just ask one of them to critique someone else. Honestly does anyone think Mac is a serious contender to overtake anyone? For the past what, 10 years Apple has tried to hold its own with the claim that they are not somebody else. Along comes a bunch of poorly funded attempts like BeOS that say - "we're like Apple only, not, or better, or something...!" Apple is great for people who like Apple and use it.
Full console or just a subset of the console via the command line? The admin client IS a Notes client
There isn't even a Unix Notes client anymore. Hasn't been one since 4.5. There is no Notes client other than W32. Even the server admin console is on W32 regardless of server platform so if you have a Unix cluster hosting Notes you can no longer run the console off, say the control workstation. There have been lots of complaints about a Linux client or any *nix client but that's just the way it is. Lotus/Iris decides these things based on how much money, time, people they have to spend on development. Understand that the reference platform for Notes continues to be NT/2000. Everything else comes from that. "Special" server ports like some flavors of Unix and Linux and S/390 are not handled by Lotus at all but the party line is held by all, and all client direction is centrally controlled. Your better off just running VMWare compared to waiting for the mystical mythical Linux Notes client to arrive - because the king is dead, the ship already sailed to Avalon and it isn't coming back.
Imagine going down to DMV and getting a licencing test. Wadda they do - spool up 2 of these suckers and fly next to you while you:
start
go up
go back
go right
go left
turn left
turn right
rotate 360
pitch forward
pitch back
travel forward while gaining altitude
demonstrate that you can pull the ripcord and bail
land
stop, spool down.
Honestly - who is qualfied to do this and who is going to let you lift off from your driveway, buzz the interstate on your way to work, land, all with no apparent navigation, alert or warning equipment. Will they let you fly it at night or in bad weather? I drive past an airport on my way to work. Can you imagine getting into a pissing contest with an MD-80?
.....it was either the "This England..." speech or "By any means necessary..." Can't tell. Either way, in the context of the music industry it sounds like some coke fueled delusion. Sony will:
1 Control all networking technology
2 Control by legal means all networks throughout the world
3 Anything else it fucking feels like
Only thing missing is something like "God is on our side and we will cleanse the world of these infidels!" Hey Steve why don't you go back to blowing coke off the thighs of supermodels?