It's sad that "socialist", "liberal" Canada embraces capitalism and free trade so much more fully than Americans.
[sarcasm]That's right... that's why I can't buy satellite signals from Direct TV complete with HBO[/sarcasm] (both of which outshine any Canadian offering). The Canadian government won't let Canadians buy American TV services directly and there is an outright ban on HBO (they don't want to put pressure on Canadian companies and TV stations to force them to finally offer a good products for a good price).
You see we're all about a competitive market up here. Same reason we're only now starting to see cell phone number portability being implemented at phone companies, and why I have to wait up to 8 months for an MRI even though the one at the local hospital isn't being used more than 8 or 10 hours a day because they can't afford to pay the staff to run it... while not allowing private companies to use the machines who are willing to PAY to for the privilege of giving their customers faster access. BTW, the government frowns and disallows companies from buying their own machines and offering these services. One of the reasons the only health care system in the G8 that we are above is the U.S. health care system... which is on the bottom. Don't brag about shit if it is not all as true as you make it out to be.
That said, I agree that Canada is WAY more capitalistic than almost every American thinks. Just because we have a failing single insurer health care system and believe in paying for safe injection houses instead of water filtration plants (Vancouver's 2 weeks of boil water advisory because a rainstorm screwed up the water system for 2 MILLION people) doesn't mean we don't like capitalism. It just means we don't want to sell American products to Canadians because that would make us uncomfortable when we were America bashing. Meanwhile, we would rather have a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with China who will sell us anything and won't buy a damn thing from us except lumber and oil (if we would sell it... which the liberals here would be OK with because they have no problem with the trade deficit or China's human rights abuses since they are trying so/too hard to be understanding of their values while forgetting our own). Yeah yeah and a few other token things they buy... 60 Billion dollar trade deficit. People here don't want to get on China's bad side because we don't want to lose out on that big potential market. But so far all it has us is 60 billion dollars deeper in debt every year... and that is just from Canada. Time for some equalization. Starting to rant against idiotic notions that trade with China is all good... must stop now.
Could be a Microsoft marketer too. But what the heck...
Anyway, abuse of monopolistic market share does it for me... and it is an intense distaste not a hate. Hate takes too much energy. But distaste is more like what you put up with when you have to, but you'd rather be somewhere else.
The whole Embrace, Extend, Extinguish thing is a good example. The specific example that REALLY bugs me right now is the lack of support for CSS tables in IE. The more I think about the lack of support for CSS tables, the more the distaste thing moves back towards hate. >:-0 And I was pretty relaxed until I wrote this... time for a cup of tea and relax in front of the fire. Anyone want to come to the Microsoft campus with me?;-)
Why do you call me a hater? I just want to keep jobs in North America. I could turn that around and call you a hater because you want to take North American jobs and make their people poor. This is even more terrible as the extreme cold of winters can kill someone living in the streets as you now have their job and they can't pay the rent. You are indeed a horrible person.
Someone once said that 'you can't make the weak strong by making the strong weak'. They either get strong on their own or they don't. You call North Americans the 'have' countries. Where did they start? With the same things you have now. Ox Carts, rudimentary farming etc. Over a few centuries we developed our economy at home. We didn't have the technology to go to other countries and 'exploit' them until relatively recently. So if we could develop 'modern technology' on our own, and have a thriving economy, why can't you? In fact you have a step up on the early North Americans and Europeans. You have electricity and the internal combustion engine, and telephones and computers... Stop moaning that the only way you can get ahead is to take jobs from other people. Get/make your own job, shut up and quit whining about how no-one cares about India. Enough foreign aid has flowed in there and to other countries to choke a horse. If it didn't get to the right places, don't blame us. So stop complaining that no-one is helping you and start helping yourself.
You think those bonuses have anything to do with philanthropy? You think senior executives care about anyone least of all someone living in a mud hut? RTFA. They care about short term profits that fit in their own pockets. I once heard someone say that they believed that senior executives, and especially these modern bonus taking CEOs are mostly if not all, sociopaths. I tend to agree with that.
1 billion poorly lit, poorly framed, grainy images from cameras
Maybe if we assemble these correctly we can see the image of a news scene from a fly's composite eye view... hmmmmm... nope, never mind, they still look like shit.
When I think of photojournalism, I think of the person who can not only take a picture of some news scene, but who can frame it in a way to put a human context on what has/is happening to convey more information than what is just in the picture.
Don't believe me? Go look at the Pulitzer web site and see. You can look at prize winners from 1995 to present on line. The pictures speak for themselves.
News isn't news because it happens. A lot of things happen. For example, the fact a tree falls over in the forest (I don't give a shit if you can hear it or not) is not news *unless* maybe (a purely hypothetical 'maybe' not a Reuters maybe) it was the last tree in existence that contained some microspore that will cure cancer... but the spore can only grow in living trees and now it will be lost forever... or something else that ties it to people somehow. More specifically a good photojournalist will either show how the photo ties the story to you or me, or how it makes you or me feel tied to the story. (Notice the word 'feel'.) Some dweeb taking a picture of the tree on its side with his/her cell phone is not likely to do be able to do that unless they really have some underlying talent already.
Simple, do the same as they do for the IT staff already: Pay them what they are worth in a salary, and if they do a good job, they get to keep working there. Others have some good suggestions too on this. If you don't do something about this though don't expect stupid actions that generate short term profits but long term mediocrity to end.
To put it in slashdot parlance:
1) The senior executives come in, make their short term profit for the company and collect their bonuses,
2) Things go to shit (since their short term plans don't work for the long term... they don't care anyway, their eye is on the bonus) and they get fired,
3) Take a huge severance and... profit!! (well except for the shareholders)
Logic says the same thing is going to happen in every place that is outsourced to. Maybe that is the point to make to the CIOs. Just keep projects where you can control it in the first place, and it will save money in the long run. Lack of control on a project and high personnel turn over can be more expensive and deleterious to a project than keeping things close to home and paying a reasonable salary to begin with.
Granted, having a criminal record for violent crimes is a good indicator of possible erratic/bad behaviour in the future. However, how many work related shootings, and other incidents take place by people without 'records'.
--begin cynicism-- They said that a 500 dollar check would have saved this. Other incidents at other places say this isn't necessarily true. Maybe the 500 dollars (or even a bit more) would have been better spent in giving the guy a better bonus. Who knows, some companies treat good employees like shit, and shit employees like gold. I know writing simple scripts isn't necessarily hard, but he probably was a pretty decent sysadmin to have the skills to be able to take down that many servers at once (no, I don't care how *you* could do it in one line of python or some other B.S.). Maybe the guy who, it sounds like, originally went to the school of hard knocks got sick of office politics and went off.
We don't know the real situation from this article; only that it was the wrong way to go about showing your displeasure and he got nailed by it. Anyway, it was probably a lot better for the other employees that he didn't go off with an AK-47. The company would have probably preferred that over what he did do as it would have cost them less.--end cynicism--
Off-topic. default mod point for an 'Anonymous Coward' is zero... even if it is a good post:-) Most moderators don't like to give mod points to ACs because they would rather reward or punish registered users... otherwise it's like throwing away good mod points.
Why would you make veiled personal attacks on my intelligence when I make the point that new programs should be coded in a way to not only add benefit, but do it efficiently so as to not require a more powerful system? Or another way, programmers should not always rely on better and faster hardware in order to release new code.
Or did I miss something? Are you really running Windows 3.1 still? No no, I get it. You were being clever! Now wasn't that cute of you.
I don't see a big difference in usefulness say from office 2000 to Office 2003 or XP or whatever it is now. And when the new edition for Vista comes out, I doubt that I will see any other difference except that I understand it will have a new GUI which will piss me off since I have to learn how to use something that worked fine the way it was before (if it ain't broke for Christ's sake, don't fix it)... except if I want to use it, I'll have to buy a more powerful machine to do the same thing I am doing now. I am not a neo-Luddite. I know that GUI's offer better general productivity than working on the command line which is why for instance in Linux I like KDE (Gnome is fine for those who like it, I don't personally). Command lines are good when needed and I can write a ksh script with the best of them... the right tool for the job etc. But tell me what Vista does that is so much better than XP that it requires such powerful new hardware in order to give it the same general performance and usability as a 2005 box running XP. I mean if games is your thing then fine, I understand better hardware can give a better experience. Except when the software makers insist on doing everything they can to slow down the new equipment. Maybe just the fact that it say Silent Hunter III would no longer take 5 minutes just to start the game would be enjoyable (on an Athlon 2600... not the fastest but not slow either)!:-) That kind of thing. I don't buy games hardly any more because of this kind of shite.
"With the Vista rollout, it's more and more important to multitask and multicore without a super loud box -- that's the end goal," Huynh said.
Is anyone as tired of software companies eating up the gain in hardware performance as me? And for what? How about someone writing better software, not just new software. I got sick of buying new hardware just to open the same document because the O/S or new Office suite was bloated/full of shit/required way more horsepower just to do the same task. No Vista for me. I'll stay will XP and Linux on my (older) machines. And if MS forces people to go Vista, I'll go Linux or BSD. If I get new hardware, it will be to make these systems faster, not make new software, doing the same job, run the same speed.
The nano-transistor uncertainty principle anyone? They are very fast and power efficient when processing... but when you process you won't know what the answer will be?
So lobbying isn't new. So what. Just because the article lambastes Microsoft for lobbying doesn't mean it is flamebait, nor does it mean that the article is wrong. I could understand your angst if you were complaining that there are no articles on the net attacking other companies' lobbying efforts as being bad (like for instance, when you google for 'haliburton and lobbying'). I could also understand you being angry if perhaps you had previously, in this forum, tried to point our attention to lobbyists from other companies who were trying to create vendor lock-in in public/government sectors and were rebuffed.
Lobbying is shite pure and simple. This story is an example of lobbying and conflict of interest in the technical/computer world. Seeing as how this is a forum on technical and computer related topics, it works here. So maybe you should have titled your post "This post is flamebait"... and I shouldn't have bit. Ahh well... can't help my nature.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever worked in the north-east? This is a pissed off person behaving in a very diplomatic manner.
[sarcasm]That's right... that's why I can't buy satellite signals from Direct TV complete with HBO[/sarcasm] (both of which outshine any Canadian offering). The Canadian government won't let Canadians buy American TV services directly and there is an outright ban on HBO (they don't want to put pressure on Canadian companies and TV stations to force them to finally offer a good products for a good price).
You see we're all about a competitive market up here. Same reason we're only now starting to see cell phone number portability being implemented at phone companies, and why I have to wait up to 8 months for an MRI even though the one at the local hospital isn't being used more than 8 or 10 hours a day because they can't afford to pay the staff to run it... while not allowing private companies to use the machines who are willing to PAY to for the privilege of giving their customers faster access. BTW, the government frowns and disallows companies from buying their own machines and offering these services. One of the reasons the only health care system in the G8 that we are above is the U.S. health care system... which is on the bottom. Don't brag about shit if it is not all as true as you make it out to be.
That said, I agree that Canada is WAY more capitalistic than almost every American thinks. Just because we have a failing single insurer health care system and believe in paying for safe injection houses instead of water filtration plants (Vancouver's 2 weeks of boil water advisory because a rainstorm screwed up the water system for 2 MILLION people) doesn't mean we don't like capitalism. It just means we don't want to sell American products to Canadians because that would make us uncomfortable when we were America bashing. Meanwhile, we would rather have a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with China who will sell us anything and won't buy a damn thing from us except lumber and oil (if we would sell it... which the liberals here would be OK with because they have no problem with the trade deficit or China's human rights abuses since they are trying so/too hard to be understanding of their values while forgetting our own). Yeah yeah and a few other token things they buy... 60 Billion dollar trade deficit. People here don't want to get on China's bad side because we don't want to lose out on that big potential market. But so far all it has us is 60 billion dollars deeper in debt every year... and that is just from Canada. Time for some equalization. Starting to rant against idiotic notions that trade with China is all good... must stop now.
Could be a Microsoft marketer too. But what the heck...
Anyway, abuse of monopolistic market share does it for me... and it is an intense distaste not a hate. Hate takes too much energy. But distaste is more like what you put up with when you have to, but you'd rather be somewhere else.
The whole Embrace, Extend, Extinguish thing is a good example. The specific example that REALLY bugs me right now is the lack of support for CSS tables in IE. The more I think about the lack of support for CSS tables, the more the distaste thing moves back towards hate. > :-0 And I was pretty relaxed until I wrote this... time for a cup of tea and relax in front of the fire. Anyone want to come to the Microsoft campus with me? ;-)
fair enough. :-D
Just don't drop it.
Why do you call me a hater? I just want to keep jobs in North America. I could turn that around and call you a hater because you want to take North American jobs and make their people poor. This is even more terrible as the extreme cold of winters can kill someone living in the streets as you now have their job and they can't pay the rent. You are indeed a horrible person.
Someone once said that 'you can't make the weak strong by making the strong weak'. They either get strong on their own or they don't. You call North Americans the 'have' countries. Where did they start? With the same things you have now. Ox Carts, rudimentary farming etc. Over a few centuries we developed our economy at home. We didn't have the technology to go to other countries and 'exploit' them until relatively recently. So if we could develop 'modern technology' on our own, and have a thriving economy, why can't you? In fact you have a step up on the early North Americans and Europeans. You have electricity and the internal combustion engine, and telephones and computers... Stop moaning that the only way you can get ahead is to take jobs from other people. Get/make your own job, shut up and quit whining about how no-one cares about India. Enough foreign aid has flowed in there and to other countries to choke a horse. If it didn't get to the right places, don't blame us. So stop complaining that no-one is helping you and start helping yourself.
Americans working in America thought they would never be replaced. 'nough said.
Is Nathan Lane or Mathew Broderick involved?
You think those bonuses have anything to do with philanthropy? You think senior executives care about anyone least of all someone living in a mud hut? RTFA. They care about short term profits that fit in their own pockets. I once heard someone say that they believed that senior executives, and especially these modern bonus taking CEOs are mostly if not all, sociopaths. I tend to agree with that.
Maybe if we assemble these correctly we can see the image of a news scene from a fly's composite eye view... hmmmmm... nope, never mind, they still look like shit.
When I think of photojournalism, I think of the person who can not only take a picture of some news scene, but who can frame it in a way to put a human context on what has/is happening to convey more information than what is just in the picture.
Don't believe me? Go look at the Pulitzer web site and see. You can look at prize winners from 1995 to present on line. The pictures speak for themselves.
News isn't news because it happens. A lot of things happen. For example, the fact a tree falls over in the forest (I don't give a shit if you can hear it or not) is not news *unless* maybe (a purely hypothetical 'maybe' not a Reuters maybe) it was the last tree in existence that contained some microspore that will cure cancer... but the spore can only grow in living trees and now it will be lost forever... or something else that ties it to people somehow. More specifically a good photojournalist will either show how the photo ties the story to you or me, or how it makes you or me feel tied to the story. (Notice the word 'feel'.) Some dweeb taking a picture of the tree on its side with his/her cell phone is not likely to do be able to do that unless they really have some underlying talent already.
Simple, do the same as they do for the IT staff already: Pay them what they are worth in a salary, and if they do a good job, they get to keep working there. Others have some good suggestions too on this. If you don't do something about this though don't expect stupid actions that generate short term profits but long term mediocrity to end.
To put it in slashdot parlance:
1) The senior executives come in, make their short term profit for the company and collect their bonuses,2) Things go to shit (since their short term plans don't work for the long term... they don't care anyway, their eye is on the bonus) and they get fired,
3) Take a huge severance and... profit!! (well except for the shareholders)
This will keep happening until companies stop paying huge bonuses to senior executives for short term profits.
Logic says the same thing is going to happen in every place that is outsourced to. Maybe that is the point to make to the CIOs. Just keep projects where you can control it in the first place, and it will save money in the long run. Lack of control on a project and high personnel turn over can be more expensive and deleterious to a project than keeping things close to home and paying a reasonable salary to begin with.
No axe. He physically removed some sort of modules that 'dumbed down' HAL, but didn't kill it (remember they brought him back on-line in 2010).
Where was Dave Bowman? How can they leave out the guy who took down HAL?
That reminds me of that old expression: "It's only a crime if you get caught." :-)
Granted, having a criminal record for violent crimes is a good indicator of possible erratic/bad behaviour in the future. However, how many work related shootings, and other incidents take place by people without 'records'.
--begin cynicism-- They said that a 500 dollar check would have saved this. Other incidents at other places say this isn't necessarily true. Maybe the 500 dollars (or even a bit more) would have been better spent in giving the guy a better bonus. Who knows, some companies treat good employees like shit, and shit employees like gold. I know writing simple scripts isn't necessarily hard, but he probably was a pretty decent sysadmin to have the skills to be able to take down that many servers at once (no, I don't care how *you* could do it in one line of python or some other B.S.). Maybe the guy who, it sounds like, originally went to the school of hard knocks got sick of office politics and went off.
We don't know the real situation from this article; only that it was the wrong way to go about showing your displeasure and he got nailed by it. Anyway, it was probably a lot better for the other employees that he didn't go off with an AK-47. The company would have probably preferred that over what he did do as it would have cost them less.--end cynicism--
Off-topic. default mod point for an 'Anonymous Coward' is zero... even if it is a good post :-) Most moderators don't like to give mod points to ACs because they would rather reward or punish registered users... otherwise it's like throwing away good mod points.
Why would you make veiled personal attacks on my intelligence when I make the point that new programs should be coded in a way to not only add benefit, but do it efficiently so as to not require a more powerful system? Or another way, programmers should not always rely on better and faster hardware in order to release new code.
Or did I miss something? Are you really running Windows 3.1 still? No no, I get it. You were being clever! Now wasn't that cute of you.
I don't see a big difference in usefulness say from office 2000 to Office 2003 or XP or whatever it is now. And when the new edition for Vista comes out, I doubt that I will see any other difference except that I understand it will have a new GUI which will piss me off since I have to learn how to use something that worked fine the way it was before (if it ain't broke for Christ's sake, don't fix it)... except if I want to use it, I'll have to buy a more powerful machine to do the same thing I am doing now. I am not a neo-Luddite. I know that GUI's offer better general productivity than working on the command line which is why for instance in Linux I like KDE (Gnome is fine for those who like it, I don't personally). Command lines are good when needed and I can write a ksh script with the best of them... the right tool for the job etc. But tell me what Vista does that is so much better than XP that it requires such powerful new hardware in order to give it the same general performance and usability as a 2005 box running XP. I mean if games is your thing then fine, I understand better hardware can give a better experience. Except when the software makers insist on doing everything they can to slow down the new equipment. Maybe just the fact that it say Silent Hunter III would no longer take 5 minutes just to start the game would be enjoyable (on an Athlon 2600... not the fastest but not slow either)! :-) That kind of thing. I don't buy games hardly any more because of this kind of shite.
And it is a chief component in the Improbability Drive.
Is anyone as tired of software companies eating up the gain in hardware performance as me? And for what? How about someone writing better software, not just new software. I got sick of buying new hardware just to open the same document because the O/S or new Office suite was bloated/full of shit/required way more horsepower just to do the same task. No Vista for me. I'll stay will XP and Linux on my (older) machines. And if MS forces people to go Vista, I'll go Linux or BSD. If I get new hardware, it will be to make these systems faster, not make new software, doing the same job, run the same speed.
The nano-transistor uncertainty principle anyone? They are very fast and power efficient when processing... but when you process you won't know what the answer will be?
So lobbying isn't new. So what. Just because the article lambastes Microsoft for lobbying doesn't mean it is flamebait, nor does it mean that the article is wrong. I could understand your angst if you were complaining that there are no articles on the net attacking other companies' lobbying efforts as being bad (like for instance, when you google for 'haliburton and lobbying'). I could also understand you being angry if perhaps you had previously, in this forum, tried to point our attention to lobbyists from other companies who were trying to create vendor lock-in in public/government sectors and were rebuffed.
Lobbying is shite pure and simple. This story is an example of lobbying and conflict of interest in the technical/computer world. Seeing as how this is a forum on technical and computer related topics, it works here. So maybe you should have titled your post "This post is flamebait"... and I shouldn't have bit. Ahh well... can't help my nature.
Well Jerry does come up with a lot of good fiction.