The whole Urge debacle is a product of a marketing effort that was in a desperate hurry to play catch-up. It was doomed from the start.
On the surface, a partnership with MTV sounds like it would work, but nobody at MS bothered to do any decent market research. Does anyone out there regard MTV as hip and trendy, especially for music? (We are talking about a channel that had "we don't play music" as its tagline until only recently.)
If MSFT's management team is staying in place, it should diminsh its presence the consumer space or prepare to deal with future disasters like Urge, Zune, and yes, Vista.
These days, they're merely reacting, and cutting corners on the (very) hard work of market research. The brand means next to nothing in the consumer space anyway (unless it's paired with the phrase "compulsory").
Sorry, but I fail to see why anyone would live in CA anymore if they could help it -- let alone try to build a house there (unless of course you're Woz, or anyone else for whom money is hardly an object). The only decent land left for a home is long gone, the potential for quakes, wildfires, mud slides, etc. is more than just a little significant, and the pricing, cost of living, and congestion are simply absurd. "Let's move to California" and "let's work harder to make less" are functionally equivalent statements.
If you really want to build an energy-efficient dream home, take care of your finances first. Start by relocating to.. well, almost anywhere else. (Preferably somewhere with a much, much lower probability of some horrible disaster wiping out what you've worked for.)
I agree that Rove's management of the campaigns was brilliant; he did whatever was necessary to meet (and in some cases exceed) his objectives. This was true not only in 2000 and 2004, but with the mid-term elections in 2002 as well. Of course, during that election cycle he got a little bit of help from Osama bin Laden.
But in 2006, he blew it. The "Republican Revolution" stalled with the disgust over the war's conduct, congressional corruption, and the overall perception that Congress and the White House were ignoring the electorate. (Remember when Rove claimed to have the "real poll numbers"? He didn't.) You could argue that Karl Rove's worst enemy was Tom DeLay.
The big lesson to take away from Rove's tenure is that strategy, spin and yes, hubris will only go so far. In the end, an elected leader has to produce positive results.
An interesting item to note is that politics is not immune from game theory, especially the Prisoner's Dilemma. We all loathe partisan sniping, ideological pissing contests, preoccupation with the small (e.g. the abortion debate, which polarizes many yet really affects very few) for the sake of issues that matter (e.g. health care in this country, which affects nearly everyone). Yet Rove turned these tactics into an art form, complete with data mining to figure out whose buttons when pushed would get the loudest responses. Unfortunately, this causes every other "player" in the "game" to react accordingly. And since every side is perfectly capable of figuring out each of the others' motive, it only takes one idiot (in this case, the Republican establishment with Mr. Rove) to pick the option that, in the end, ruins the competitive landscape for all stakeholders.
IIRC he was busted by Apple management for leaking confidential info here and shown the door. That sucks, but so do comprehensive confidentiality agreements as conditions for employment.
Tell me if I'm wrong about this, I'd certainly like to be.
I beg to differ. I know intelligent people who not only loved it, but can't seem to stop quoting the lines from the movie.
Like Mike Judge's other quasi-famous movie, there are spots that could have been left on the cutting room floor. But I loved the way he used a basic premise (we're all slowly but surely getting dumber) to skewer some of the very large pile of crap known as Modern Life.
Granted, the wife and I were shopping in a Super Target the next day, and we couldn't stop looking at others and muttering lines from the movie under our breath, so maybe my perspective is forever biased.
In the embedded realm (not to mention kernel or driver space stuff for any OS), you won't be using much C++. Granted, I've used both in the embedded world, and I prefer C++ whenever I can get away with it. But that ain't often.
One of the problems with C++ in the embedded market is not the language itself, but the mindset of the developers. Most folks who do low-level stuff are not as concerned with code structure and organization as they are the size and speed of the generated code. (Don't believe that? Try working under a tight schedule.) Many of them abhor C++ for its complexity, and more than a few in my experience also don't have enough experience with C++ to use it effectively anyway.
For example, when I worked on a platform that had to be up 24/7 (this wasn't something you'd buy from Best Buy, 'kay?), some enterprising soul tried his hand at C++ and put the following statement in a constructor:
delete this;
Brrr.
Not much C++ occurred in the organization after that one sneaked in.
Actually, Stac won a nice big patent infringement suit against MS in '94, but afterwards bailed from the compression biz, and became Hifn in 1998. The core business is still compression and encryption, except now Hifn implements it at the chip level. And their HQ is in Silicon Valley, not Carlsbad, where Stac originated. (IIRC the CTO still lives in Carlsbad, even though Hifn has since shuttered the lab there.)
Karma-burning disclosure: I used to work for Hifn until over a year ago. I know folks over there, so, sorry, can't say much else about my stint.
Actually, Anderson's career has been doing pretty well. She's been taking more serious roles ("House of Mirth", "Last King of Scotland", and PBS/BBC's "Bleak House"). Her only drawback is that she's now based in London, not LA, so it's a bit more difficult to land those plum roles in big-budget American films.
Duchovny on the other hand has hit hard times ("House of D", anyone? Brrrr..), even though he does have a new flick coming out soon.
Both of them it seems are trying desperately to avoid getting Shatnerred, but the money for this project is apparently too good to pass up.
Nice to see that Anderson's aboard though. She was always unjustly considered the second banana in the contract negotiations for the first and 2nd movies. (This new production flirted with casting Julianne Moore as Scully, but that effort died after overwhelmingly negative fan reaction. Turns out GA isn't the lesser commodity that the producers hoped, heh heh..)
(Confession: I was an IBMer for a few years in the early 90s, around the time Lou Gerstner took over. The difference between behavior in that era, when the new mindset had yet to percolate to the lower ranks, astonishes me. I still have bad memories of Not Invented Here syndrome, Who Needs Consumer Marketing disease, and the Grow Your Team Solely For Management Esteem epidemic.)
I agree: let's not confuse this move with sheer altruism. IBM is simply smart enough to realize that advancing market trends makes more sense these days than vendor lock-in.
But, having said that, I think it's sweet that they've refused to categorically indemnify anyone who uses their liberated IP. Very slick move indeed.
While I see both parties as uniformly spineless, the GOP was incredibly supine to corporate and other special interests at the expense of the individual. (And in the case of deficit spending, literally at the expense of future individuals.)
The Dems aren't that great (and there are a LOT of things they could have done differently the past 6 months IMO), but they're a damn sight better than the crowd they replaced.
Your concerns are valid, and here's the answer: The average American doesn't give a shit.
For most of my fellow Americans, living in "freedom" means having a decent standard of living with a very narrow focus (creature comforts and more of them!) while being sold an (undeserved) positive image of themselves.
Most Americans don't really care, until their wallets or possessions enter the mix. We're more concerned with rising taxes than we are with the erosion of those freedoms that previous generations fought to protect. We care more about "American Idol" than the American ideal.
This is why when I see one of those stupid magnetic ribbons proclaiming that "freedom isn't free" on a gas-guzzling SUV, and I can't tell if the owner is connected with the military in any way (serving, veteran, family member in the service, etc.).. I steal it. Fuck 'em, they didn't pay a thing.
What I really love is the young-Earther's defense of their position. In the end, you can always boil down their "arguments" to a common set of themes, with the last resort being the argument of choice:
"There is scientific evidence for our position! Look at these facts we cherry-picked! The jury's clearly still out!"
"The scientific community has a grudge against us! Of course they'd never agree!"
"We're entitled to our own truth, you're entitled to yours (even if yours is wrong)!"
"Of course God misled us with bogus "evidence". It's a test of faith!"
The best one: "It's all part of a larger conspiracy of commie-liberal-Nazi-gay-foreign-secular humanist-godless culture warriors who are out to subvert our way of life!!!! Sux0rs!!!"
Fortunately, you can wipe out every proposition above with two small sentences: "Admit it. Maybe you're just incredibly, incredibly stupid."
My point was that there's just not enough value added with a radio for the iPod (for me at least).
How exactly would a conventional radio be "useful" ? Maybe for real-time or breaking news items like traffic updates and sporting events, but I'm having a hard time coming up with anything else.
(If your answer is "for music", especially from commercial stations, you really, really, really need to get out more often.)
To be honest, I can't remember the last time I listened to "the radio".
Especially commercial radio. There's nothing out there that's worth listening to (thank you ClearChannel). And I don't need commercial radio for news -- NPR and the Internet fill that gap very nicely.
(If you like talk radio, well, whatever, that's your business. I always found it an annoying waste of time, regardless of the show.)
I'm very glad the iPod has NO radio at all. Hell, my car radio is tuned 99% of the time to the station supported by the FM transmitter I use with my iPod.
Seriously, my wife and I started out in software development together, and for a time even worked for the same large corporation. Now, basing my observations on a sample size of 1, I can say that while men tend to enjoy the narrowly-focused problem solving that programming requires at times, women simply get bored with it.
More accurately, they get bored with solving problem after problem, with no change in their prospects for advancement. For what it's worth, my wife moved to systems engineering, then product management (after getting her MBA). I wouldn't call her lazy.
But when she was "just a geek in a cube" (as she termed it), she was very tired of coding, of the long hours, of the hellish schedules, of the indifference of her co-workers, and of no chance to contribute more to her company than by whacking out even more code.
In short, most women in the software workforce know that there is no free lunch. They would, however, like to see a better selection of dishes for sale, since they're paying for that lunch with their time.
Liberals in the United States cheered Ahmedinejad (sp?) when he held his little rah-rah last year to "study" whether the Holocaust occurred.
Huh??
I know quite a few liberals, and all of them were appalled by this charade. And I don't know any who approve of that nitwit.
They see him as being as dangerous as Bush, Jerry Falwell, and that ilk -- Muslim or Christian, a nutjob is a nutjob is a nutjob. (They're wrong, actually, since Ahmedinajad's post doesn't have the power of that of Mr. Bush.)
Now, if you want to view this (or anything else for that matter) through the "libs vs. cons" lens, you're free to do so. But I think you're as much of a troll as anyone else who resorts to absolutes and scapegoating for prefabricated explanations.
One of the consequences of diverting corn production to biofuels, and of the subsidies reaped by American farmers, is that the price of corn is skyrocketing in Mexico. And it's driving a lot of starving Mexicans to sneak into the States to eke out a living.
Can't blame them; they're only starving, ferchrissakes. In the meantime, we also have sugar tariffs and subsidies that prohibit a far more efficient crop for use in biofuels.
So, the next time some idiot farmer in Iowa spouts about illegal aliens to a presidential candidate, you may want to remind him that his livelihood is part of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole Urge debacle is a product of a marketing effort that was in a desperate hurry to play catch-up. It was doomed from the start.
On the surface, a partnership with MTV sounds like it would work, but nobody at MS bothered to do any decent market research. Does anyone out there regard MTV as hip and trendy, especially for music? (We are talking about a channel that had "we don't play music" as its tagline until only recently.)
If MSFT's management team is staying in place, it should diminsh its presence the consumer space or prepare to deal with future disasters like Urge, Zune, and yes, Vista.
These days, they're merely reacting, and cutting corners on the (very) hard work of market research. The brand means next to nothing in the consumer space anyway (unless it's paired with the phrase "compulsory").
Yeah, ha ha, the folks sure are backwards.
Hold on a sec, I have to dial a number on my cell phone..
Sorry, but I fail to see why anyone would live in CA anymore if they could help it -- let alone try to build a house there (unless of course you're Woz, or anyone else for whom money is hardly an object). The only decent land left for a home is long gone, the potential for quakes, wildfires, mud slides, etc. is more than just a little significant, and the pricing, cost of living, and congestion are simply absurd. "Let's move to California" and "let's work harder to make less" are functionally equivalent statements.
If you really want to build an energy-efficient dream home, take care of your finances first. Start by relocating to.. well, almost anywhere else. (Preferably somewhere with a much, much lower probability of some horrible disaster wiping out what you've worked for.)
I agree that Rove's management of the campaigns was brilliant; he did whatever was necessary to meet (and in some cases exceed) his objectives. This was true not only in 2000 and 2004, but with the mid-term elections in 2002 as well. Of course, during that election cycle he got a little bit of help from Osama bin Laden.
But in 2006, he blew it. The "Republican Revolution" stalled with the disgust over the war's conduct, congressional corruption, and the overall perception that Congress and the White House were ignoring the electorate. (Remember when Rove claimed to have the "real poll numbers"? He didn't.) You could argue that Karl Rove's worst enemy was Tom DeLay.
The big lesson to take away from Rove's tenure is that strategy, spin and yes, hubris will only go so far. In the end, an elected leader has to produce positive results.
An interesting item to note is that politics is not immune from game theory, especially the Prisoner's Dilemma. We all loathe partisan sniping, ideological pissing contests, preoccupation with the small (e.g. the abortion debate, which polarizes many yet really affects very few) for the sake of issues that matter (e.g. health care in this country, which affects nearly everyone). Yet Rove turned these tactics into an art form, complete with data mining to figure out whose buttons when pushed would get the loudest responses. Unfortunately, this causes every other "player" in the "game" to react accordingly. And since every side is perfectly capable of figuring out each of the others' motive, it only takes one idiot (in this case, the Republican establishment with Mr. Rove) to pick the option that, in the end, ruins the competitive landscape for all stakeholders.
IIRC he was busted by Apple management for leaking confidential info here and shown the door. That sucks, but so do comprehensive confidentiality agreements as conditions for employment.
Tell me if I'm wrong about this, I'd certainly like to be.
I beg to differ. I know intelligent people who not only loved it, but can't seem to stop quoting the lines from the movie.
Like Mike Judge's other quasi-famous movie, there are spots that could have been left on the cutting room floor. But I loved the way he used a basic premise (we're all slowly but surely getting dumber) to skewer some of the very large pile of crap known as Modern Life.
Granted, the wife and I were shopping in a Super Target the next day, and we couldn't stop looking at others and muttering lines from the movie under our breath, so maybe my perspective is forever biased.
In the embedded realm (not to mention kernel or driver space stuff for any OS), you won't be using much C++. Granted, I've used both in the embedded world, and I prefer C++ whenever I can get away with it. But that ain't often.
One of the problems with C++ in the embedded market is not the language itself, but the mindset of the developers. Most folks who do low-level stuff are not as concerned with code structure and organization as they are the size and speed of the generated code. (Don't believe that? Try working under a tight schedule.) Many of them abhor C++ for its complexity, and more than a few in my experience also don't have enough experience with C++ to use it effectively anyway.
For example, when I worked on a platform that had to be up 24/7 (this wasn't something you'd buy from Best Buy, 'kay?), some enterprising soul tried his hand at C++ and put the following statement in a constructor:
Brrr.
Not much C++ occurred in the organization after that one sneaked in.
Actually, Stac won a nice big patent infringement suit against MS in '94, but afterwards bailed from the compression biz, and became Hifn in 1998. The core business is still compression and encryption, except now Hifn implements it at the chip level. And their HQ is in Silicon Valley, not Carlsbad, where Stac originated. (IIRC the CTO still lives in Carlsbad, even though Hifn has since shuttered the lab there.)
Karma-burning disclosure: I used to work for Hifn until over a year ago. I know folks over there, so, sorry, can't say much else about my stint.
I'll be found out for sure now.
Actually, Anderson's career has been doing pretty well. She's been taking more serious roles ("House of Mirth", "Last King of Scotland", and PBS/BBC's "Bleak House"). Her only drawback is that she's now based in London, not LA, so it's a bit more difficult to land those plum roles in big-budget American films.
Duchovny on the other hand has hit hard times ("House of D", anyone? Brrrr..), even though he does have a new flick coming out soon.
Both of them it seems are trying desperately to avoid getting Shatnerred, but the money for this project is apparently too good to pass up.
Nice to see that Anderson's aboard though. She was always unjustly considered the second banana in the contract negotiations for the first and 2nd movies. (This new production flirted with casting Julianne Moore as Scully, but that effort died after overwhelmingly negative fan reaction. Turns out GA isn't the lesser commodity that the producers hoped, heh heh..)
(Confession: I was an IBMer for a few years in the early 90s, around the time Lou Gerstner took over. The difference between behavior in that era, when the new mindset had yet to percolate to the lower ranks, astonishes me. I still have bad memories of Not Invented Here syndrome, Who Needs Consumer Marketing disease, and the Grow Your Team Solely For Management Esteem epidemic.)
I agree: let's not confuse this move with sheer altruism. IBM is simply smart enough to realize that advancing market trends makes more sense these days than vendor lock-in.
But, having said that, I think it's sweet that they've refused to categorically indemnify anyone who uses their liberated IP. Very slick move indeed.
I'm in the minority because I like the Bush administration, but I do have to say that Ashcroft pissed me off when they imprisoned Tommy Chong.
If this is all you have to be angry about with this administration, well.. I take it you don't read much.
God spoke to me.
Let's hope He uses a cuestick next time..
I. G. Metall has organized the new submitters and called a strike. Access to Wikipedia comes to a crashing halt.
You, sir, are a nitwit.
While I see both parties as uniformly spineless, the GOP was incredibly supine to corporate and other special interests at the expense of the individual. (And in the case of deficit spending, literally at the expense of future individuals.)
The Dems aren't that great (and there are a LOT of things they could have done differently the past 6 months IMO), but they're a damn sight better than the crowd they replaced.
Now if only Nancy would grow a pair..
Your concerns are valid, and here's the answer: The average American doesn't give a shit.
For most of my fellow Americans, living in "freedom" means having a decent standard of living with a very narrow focus (creature comforts and more of them!) while being sold an (undeserved) positive image of themselves.
Most Americans don't really care, until their wallets or possessions enter the mix. We're more concerned with rising taxes than we are with the erosion of those freedoms that previous generations fought to protect. We care more about "American Idol" than the American ideal.
This is why when I see one of those stupid magnetic ribbons proclaiming that "freedom isn't free" on a gas-guzzling SUV, and I can't tell if the owner is connected with the military in any way (serving, veteran, family member in the service, etc.).. I steal it. Fuck 'em, they didn't pay a thing.
What I really love is the young-Earther's defense of their position. In the end, you can always boil down their "arguments" to a common set of themes, with the last resort being the argument of choice:
Fortunately, you can wipe out every proposition above with two small sentences: "Admit it. Maybe you're just incredibly, incredibly stupid."
There's no prior art yet, and it's inevitable.
..but I have no life. If anyone wants me, I'm in the basement.
Who's Paris Hilton?
Um, no.
My point was that there's just not enough value added with a radio for the iPod (for me at least).
How exactly would a conventional radio be "useful" ? Maybe for real-time or breaking news items like traffic updates and sporting events, but I'm having a hard time coming up with anything else.
(If your answer is "for music", especially from commercial stations, you really, really, really need to get out more often.)
To be honest, I can't remember the last time I listened to "the radio".
Especially commercial radio. There's nothing out there that's worth listening to (thank you ClearChannel). And I don't need commercial radio for news -- NPR and the Internet fill that gap very nicely.
(If you like talk radio, well, whatever, that's your business. I always found it an annoying waste of time, regardless of the show.)
In fact, the only radio station I listen to these days is on the other side of my current continent. It's as non-commercial as they get, and I get my fix through streaming and podcasts. (I hope it lasts, I hope it lasts...)
I'm very glad the iPod has NO radio at all. Hell, my car radio is tuned 99% of the time to the station supported by the FM transmitter I use with my iPod.
Seriously, my wife and I started out in software development together, and for a time even worked for the same large corporation. Now, basing my observations on a sample size of 1, I can say that while men tend to enjoy the narrowly-focused problem solving that programming requires at times, women simply get bored with it.
More accurately, they get bored with solving problem after problem, with no change in their prospects for advancement. For what it's worth, my wife moved to systems engineering, then product management (after getting her MBA). I wouldn't call her lazy.
But when she was "just a geek in a cube" (as she termed it), she was very tired of coding, of the long hours, of the hellish schedules, of the indifference of her co-workers, and of no chance to contribute more to her company than by whacking out even more code.
In short, most women in the software workforce know that there is no free lunch. They would, however, like to see a better selection of dishes for sale, since they're paying for that lunch with their time.
Liberals in the United States cheered Ahmedinejad (sp?) when he held his little rah-rah last year to "study" whether the Holocaust occurred.
Huh??
I know quite a few liberals, and all of them were appalled by this charade. And I don't know any who approve of that nitwit.
They see him as being as dangerous as Bush, Jerry Falwell, and that ilk -- Muslim or Christian, a nutjob is a nutjob is a nutjob. (They're wrong, actually, since Ahmedinajad's post doesn't have the power of that of Mr. Bush.)
Now, if you want to view this (or anything else for that matter) through the "libs vs. cons" lens, you're free to do so. But I think you're as much of a troll as anyone else who resorts to absolutes and scapegoating for prefabricated explanations.
One of the consequences of diverting corn production to biofuels, and of the subsidies reaped by American farmers, is that the price of corn is skyrocketing in Mexico. And it's driving a lot of starving Mexicans to sneak into the States to eke out a living.
Can't blame them; they're only starving, ferchrissakes. In the meantime, we also have sugar tariffs and subsidies that prohibit a far more efficient crop for use in biofuels.
So, the next time some idiot farmer in Iowa spouts about illegal aliens to a presidential candidate, you may want to remind him that his livelihood is part of the problem.
Well it's a dirty comment, but someone had to post it.