Monster seems to be the worst offender here, but there's no control or accountability when you're contacted with a job "offer". I get contacted with ridiculous job postings that are clearly not appropriate based on the information I've disclosed in my resume.
Monster seems to feel that a solution to the problem already exists -- you can turn off the ability for others to send you unsolicited offers. But I want people to be able to offer me jobs, provided it's a job that I'd have some chance of being interested in. What really needs to exist is an enhanced set of filters for the unsolicited offers. I should be able to filter people who don't provide a salary range, for example, or don't meet a minimum salary determined by me. I should be able to include in my summary conditions for that contact. Or filter by industry. Or job category. Or any of a dozen other factors that I should be able to control.
Then you need a feedback mechanism to rate the quality of the unsolicited offers -- both on a community level, perhaps like eBay ratings, and back to the job board, perhaps to notify them when someone has falsified information to evade filters.
Of course, the problem with all this is that the job posters pay the bills. Profitable job sites are going to limit the employers as little as possible so long as they can maintain some illusion of job seeker-focus.
Re:Disney will now be the sole owner of Pixar
on
Disney Buys Pixar
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How can that be? What about the piece I own? It's only worth a few thousand but until they tear that stock from my fingers they won't be sole owner.
I'm sure that, since you own stock, you're joking and do understand what will happen. But in case anyone doesn't understand this --
Disney wants to acquire Pixar. Pixar's board (who nominally represent the shareholders) have said they're cool with this. There will be a shareholder vote. Since people in favor of this deal own A LOT of the Pixar stock, the deal will be approved and your Pixar stock will go away. In its place, you will be given Disney stock. You really won't have any say in the matter.
The prefix "Power" isn't necessarily tied to the CPU.
But Jobs did say in the keynote that they changed the name because they wanted their computers to be called Macs and because "power" is over and in the past. They're emphasizing the transition to Intel chips. Expect to see the Power Mac line renamed as well.
Isn't this over by now? The last time I saw a SCO article here, it seemed that even the judge was sick of their nonsense. Is there anyone still taken in by this charade?
Not to mention the enormous spiders and insects on the island.
Which were not imagined by Jackson either. But his film does a great job of re-imagining them.
There were two instances of lost footage from the original King Kong. One was the lost spider pit footage. As in Jackson's version, this scene would have occurred after the crewmen were tossed from the log. The surviving crewmen were attacked and killed by spider and crab like creatures.
It's not certain how much of this scene was filmed, but some pre-production drawings were definitely done. If it was filmed, it's likely that Merian Cooper destroyed the footage since he felt it broke the momentum of the film.
The other footage was the material that was censored in 1938. About 4 1/2 minutes were cut, some of which is replicated in Jackson's film. Kong drops a woman from a building after finding it's not Ann Darrow, pulls off some of Darrow's clothing, grinds a native into the ground with his foot and a little more of the same. This footage was later found in an uncensored print from the UK and restored.
The new 2-disc DVD has the restored 1933 version and includes some pretty cool extras -- apparently, Jackson decided to do a little side project while making Kong. He shot some stop-motion footage to recreate the techniques used to animate Kong, as well as recreating the lost spider pit scene. The extras show this recreation in detail, including Jackson's trip to the hospital to x-ray his original dinosaur puppet from the 1933 film so they can recreate the armature for it. It's worth a look if you're a fan of the original film.
I can not think of a film that has been outrightly banned in the US in the last 30 some years without it being a snuff film or kiddie porn and such.
Can you actually think of a banned snuff film? Everything I've ever seen on the topic says that the FBI has never been able to find a single case of an actual snuff film.
Gee, anyone think the film's producers might have included very adult content knowing the MPAA would have to rate it NC-17 according to their policies and then capitalize on the publicity of "oh noes! censorshipzors!"?
No, I certainly didn't.
I think it's far more likely (and far less conspiratorial) that they show scenes from films from the various ratings. One of the key points of the film seems to be that the ratings board exhibits some bias in its review of films that depict homosexual acts. It's probably going to show a gay sex scene that received NC-17 and a raging raw hetero sex scene that got a R and consider whether there's really much difference between the scenes other than the gender quantity.
This seems like such a non-debate. Everyone here wants to posit some conspiracy, but these seem like no-brainer decisions on the part of all parties. Filmmakers: "We need to include these 4 NC-17 scenes if we're going to explore the fairness of the NC-17 rating." Ratings board: "This movie includes a sex scene from XXX -- we gave that scene a NC-17 rating 4 years ago." Both seem like obvious choices.
This jackass could have simply released the film unrated, and the title would have fit just fine. He submitted a film for approval when it features clips which provoked NC-17 ratings in other movies, so you can't tell me he's surprised it got slapped with an NC-17 of its own.
I didn't see anything in the article that described the content that warranted the NC-17. Have you actually seen the film? Or are you merely speculating on how graphic the content is? Not that speculating would be very hard to do -- given what is said in the article, it sounds like he probably contrasts some of the gay sex scenes that have resulted in NC-17 ratings against hetero sex scenes that have received an R. And that would be pretty relevant material given the topic of this documentary, and would probably not warrant your rabid criticism.
I guess we'll have to wait and see what's actually in the film.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what Directors and Officers liability policies are for?
Yup. Of course, those have limits. They're fine if you get named in some individual suit. Not so helpful in an era of market caps inflated by hot air and assembly-line class action suits.
I probably shouldn't be bitching about it -- I don't have a solution to offer.
But it keeps the pressure on the people who should be coming up with a solution. A well-reasoned critique is valuable and, sadly, hard to find.
At least you acknowledge the problem -- which is more then a lot of other people do.
Your probably right. But I don't think that makes it right. Think most people can get severance packages negotiated at the time they are hired? What makes (most) upper managers any different? The fact that they have pointy hair and MBAs?
No, most people can't do that. But most people don't have the same liability, either. CxO positions are officers of the company. They're on the hook. Look at Scrushy from HealthSouth -- he's been found not guilty (no comment on whether I think he actually did anything wrong) but he still faces enormous civil lawsuits related to his management of the company. Yes, some of these guys are unethical, bad guys -- but that's irrelevant in a society where anyone can sue for almost anything, and where big law firms have networks in place to seek out a representative plaintiff so they can initiate class action lawsuits. (As an aside, I had a friend who was an attorney at a big law firm for awhile. He'd get regular broadcast voicemails soliciting help in finding initial plaintiffs -- "We're seeking an individual who owned XXX stock between Date1 and Date2.")
And under Sarbanes-Oxley, the CEO is signing documentation stating that he knows -- absolutely knows -- that the numbers are accurate. (Yeah, this is a gross oversimplification, and there are also numerous people in the chain who must make similar representations.) I'm not certain how this helped anything -- are we to believe that the CEO really knows what the accounting clerk in the subsidiary in Tuvalu is doing?
With the liability that comes with these jobs, the incentives have to be good for people to take them. You'd be mad not to require a pretty hefty package up front. $1 million a year is great until you're named in a class action suit claiming you're responsible for the last stock market correction that vaporized half a billion dollars of market cap.
This doesn't invalidate your point -- that there are a lot of bastards out there who walk away with enormous gain for themselves while leaving the company in tatters.
With a few "high profile exceptions"? You mean like the airline that threatened to file Chapter 11 until they got massive consessions out of the unions -- then management took millions of dollars in raises for themselves? Or Delta which just filed Chapter 11 and got the bankruptcy court to approve tens of millions of dollars in raises to "retain" management?
Yes. Like those. Two anecdotes would constitute exceptions. And those aren't even what we're discussing -- fat severance packages for terminated senior management.
When people like Fiorina or Scully are fired, their severance packages have been agreed to long before. Even Dick Grasso, whose wacky compensation package caused so much trouble at the NYSE and eventually led to his ouster, was paid under a plan decided by the board before he took the job.
And airlines are strange beasts that operate in a world all their own. Because of some debatable "public interest", these companies are bailed out again and again while bilking the public of millions of dollars. United getting to dump their pension plan on the U.S. taxpayers and shaft their retirees is reprehensible. And you're right -- there isn't much logic in paying fat bonuses to retain the dinosaurs that led an airline into bankruptcy because they couldn't adapt to the changing environment.
But I'll stand by my original statement -- most of the fat payoffs received by top management when they get canned were decided before they took the jobs.
You could make the same argument for senior management but somehow when they f-up the company they get a nice severance package from the board. I guess a few mil is a nice reward for running a company into the ground.
Understand that these people (especially now that we have Sarbanes-Oxley to deal with) have huge liability for everything that goes on. With a few high profile exceptions, these fat severance packages you hear so much about are negotiated before a CxO even starts working -- whether they'll run the company into the ground is anybody's guess at the time these things are decided.
I'm not suggesting that IT people aren't responsible for stuff and don't have some liability associated with their jobs. But when you hit senior management things change.
I know a lot of people are going to immediately hate this idea, but I personally like it. I imagine the net result is that dealerships will be able to offer better deals to people with damaged credit.
The kinds of dealerships using these aren't going to pass along any savings in their repo costs or bad loans. But this is good technology nonetheless. It's also made possible Flexcar, which is a fantastic service. I live in a major city and use them all the time. It's the same deal -- I enter a PIN in the dash to be able to start the car.
I think these systems are pretty old news. The technology has been around for awhile and the lenders aren't pushing the envelope in terms of the law. Nothing to see here. Move along.
It doesn't say that. It says they don't think that it does and if one is found it will be available under RAND licensing.
You're absolutely correct. I completely missed the additional language the first time through. I apologize for my imprecision. And yeah, they could be lying.
I still think putting this out there under a CC license is more good than bad. In the past, I think they would have just incorporated any extensions into their software and then promoted FUD about everyone else's software being broken. So if one accepts the premise that this is a positive move on Microsoft's part, then I think the more interesting question is, why have they done it?
I'm optimistic, and hoping that it's because the ol' monopoly-engine isn't what it used to be.
The *specification* is under the CC licence. So you're talking bollocks:)
That's the first step. The specification needs to be open and published, and freely available. This is the opposite of the MS Word document format, and is not a bad thing.
"As to software implementations, Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification's extensions."
I think this means that it's already patented the implementations it already has. Nice.
IANAL, but I read this as exactly the opposite. I really don't see anything in that sentence to support your reading of it. It doesn't say anything about Microsoft's implementation or affirms a patent. They're saying that MS has no patent that you would be infringing if you created an implementation that conforms to the spec.
To be more picky -- it says "necessarily infringed". Just creating something that interoperable using the spec would be fine. Someone else will have to speak to patents related to Outlook data format, which is the whole point of this. But again, if you just publish your data to interoperate with Outlook, you wouldn't be infringing. As I read it. Could be wrong.:-)
I'm not certain if this is a requirement of the Creative Commons license or not, but there is a disclosure on the Microsoft page at the bottom where it discusses the licensing. It states that the material in the document does not infringe on any MS patents.
Any details will have to be reverse engineered or require immense community pressure to have disclosed.
You mean the sooper sekrit details posted here under a Creative Commons license, which was linked in TFA?
Listen, I'm not prepared to take everything they say at face value, but this is probably a step in the right direction. We have an instance where they've proposed this extension and published it, for anyone to use.
Now, someone more technical than me will have to review what they've published and comment on what, if anything, it screws up.
I wonder how long before it will be that the same places that outlaw talking on a cellphone while driving have to add iPods to that list? I've never been in a situation where I needed to watch tv so bad that I felt I had to carry one around with me everywhere.
I'm not sure I'd consider this a flame, but it seems unreasonable to compare this scenario to the bizarre need to constantly have access to a phone. (Don't get me wrong -- I have a mobile phone. I just turn it off sometimes. But I digress.)
Like a bunch of people, I travel for work. I spend at least 5 hours every week on a plane. That's airtime, excluding time sitting around the airport or going back and forth to the airport. And I know many, many people who take 45-minute train rides to work. Personally, when I'm home I want to do stuff that I can only do when I'm home -- taking some shows with me to kill 5 or 6 hours while I'm traveling is pretty convenient. I kill some dead time and regain some free time at home.
Currently, I do that with my laptop, but an iPod with video would allow me to catch up on some shows in the gate area or during my 40-minute cab ride, not have to juggle my laptop when my meal arrives on the flight, and still watch stuff in the limited space I get on small regional jets. I'm not sold on the new iPod yet -- I'll probably wait another generation and hopefully the screen will get a little bigger.
I can't help but wonder, then, why bother masking the CPU's at all?
Because they aren't selling them to end users? They're going to sell them to someone who will build PC's and sell them as P4's. Of course Chuanghui is completely upfront with whoever they sell to -- that's because they're complicit in the fraud that's going to occur.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else consider this less a measure of live.com's success and more a measure of how unpopular all the other "MSN.com properties" are?
Monster seems to feel that a solution to the problem already exists -- you can turn off the ability for others to send you unsolicited offers. But I want people to be able to offer me jobs, provided it's a job that I'd have some chance of being interested in. What really needs to exist is an enhanced set of filters for the unsolicited offers. I should be able to filter people who don't provide a salary range, for example, or don't meet a minimum salary determined by me. I should be able to include in my summary conditions for that contact. Or filter by industry. Or job category. Or any of a dozen other factors that I should be able to control.
Then you need a feedback mechanism to rate the quality of the unsolicited offers -- both on a community level, perhaps like eBay ratings, and back to the job board, perhaps to notify them when someone has falsified information to evade filters.
Of course, the problem with all this is that the job posters pay the bills. Profitable job sites are going to limit the employers as little as possible so long as they can maintain some illusion of job seeker-focus.
I'm sure that, since you own stock, you're joking and do understand what will happen. But in case anyone doesn't understand this --
Disney wants to acquire Pixar. Pixar's board (who nominally represent the shareholders) have said they're cool with this. There will be a shareholder vote. Since people in favor of this deal own A LOT of the Pixar stock, the deal will be approved and your Pixar stock will go away. In its place, you will be given Disney stock. You really won't have any say in the matter.
But Jobs did say in the keynote that they changed the name because they wanted their computers to be called Macs and because "power" is over and in the past. They're emphasizing the transition to Intel chips. Expect to see the Power Mac line renamed as well.
Isn't this over by now? The last time I saw a SCO article here, it seemed that even the judge was sick of their nonsense. Is there anyone still taken in by this charade?
Which were not imagined by Jackson either. But his film does a great job of re-imagining them.
There were two instances of lost footage from the original King Kong. One was the lost spider pit footage. As in Jackson's version, this scene would have occurred after the crewmen were tossed from the log. The surviving crewmen were attacked and killed by spider and crab like creatures.
It's not certain how much of this scene was filmed, but some pre-production drawings were definitely done. If it was filmed, it's likely that Merian Cooper destroyed the footage since he felt it broke the momentum of the film.
The other footage was the material that was censored in 1938. About 4 1/2 minutes were cut, some of which is replicated in Jackson's film. Kong drops a woman from a building after finding it's not Ann Darrow, pulls off some of Darrow's clothing, grinds a native into the ground with his foot and a little more of the same. This footage was later found in an uncensored print from the UK and restored.
The new 2-disc DVD has the restored 1933 version and includes some pretty cool extras -- apparently, Jackson decided to do a little side project while making Kong. He shot some stop-motion footage to recreate the techniques used to animate Kong, as well as recreating the lost spider pit scene. The extras show this recreation in detail, including Jackson's trip to the hospital to x-ray his original dinosaur puppet from the 1933 film so they can recreate the armature for it. It's worth a look if you're a fan of the original film.
Just 50? You lucky bastard.
It will air on IFC in a year. It premiers at Sundance in a few weeks.
Can you actually think of a banned snuff film? Everything I've ever seen on the topic says that the FBI has never been able to find a single case of an actual snuff film.
No, I certainly didn't.
I think it's far more likely (and far less conspiratorial) that they show scenes from films from the various ratings. One of the key points of the film seems to be that the ratings board exhibits some bias in its review of films that depict homosexual acts. It's probably going to show a gay sex scene that received NC-17 and a raging raw hetero sex scene that got a R and consider whether there's really much difference between the scenes other than the gender quantity.
This seems like such a non-debate. Everyone here wants to posit some conspiracy, but these seem like no-brainer decisions on the part of all parties. Filmmakers: "We need to include these 4 NC-17 scenes if we're going to explore the fairness of the NC-17 rating." Ratings board: "This movie includes a sex scene from XXX -- we gave that scene a NC-17 rating 4 years ago." Both seem like obvious choices.
I didn't see anything in the article that described the content that warranted the NC-17. Have you actually seen the film? Or are you merely speculating on how graphic the content is? Not that speculating would be very hard to do -- given what is said in the article, it sounds like he probably contrasts some of the gay sex scenes that have resulted in NC-17 ratings against hetero sex scenes that have received an R. And that would be pretty relevant material given the topic of this documentary, and would probably not warrant your rabid criticism.
I guess we'll have to wait and see what's actually in the film.
Yup. Of course, those have limits. They're fine if you get named in some individual suit. Not so helpful in an era of market caps inflated by hot air and assembly-line class action suits.
I probably shouldn't be bitching about it -- I don't have a solution to offer.
But it keeps the pressure on the people who should be coming up with a solution. A well-reasoned critique is valuable and, sadly, hard to find.
At least you acknowledge the problem -- which is more then a lot of other people do.
Thanks. I try to be fair.
No, most people can't do that. But most people don't have the same liability, either. CxO positions are officers of the company. They're on the hook. Look at Scrushy from HealthSouth -- he's been found not guilty (no comment on whether I think he actually did anything wrong) but he still faces enormous civil lawsuits related to his management of the company. Yes, some of these guys are unethical, bad guys -- but that's irrelevant in a society where anyone can sue for almost anything, and where big law firms have networks in place to seek out a representative plaintiff so they can initiate class action lawsuits. (As an aside, I had a friend who was an attorney at a big law firm for awhile. He'd get regular broadcast voicemails soliciting help in finding initial plaintiffs -- "We're seeking an individual who owned XXX stock between Date1 and Date2.")
And under Sarbanes-Oxley, the CEO is signing documentation stating that he knows -- absolutely knows -- that the numbers are accurate. (Yeah, this is a gross oversimplification, and there are also numerous people in the chain who must make similar representations.) I'm not certain how this helped anything -- are we to believe that the CEO really knows what the accounting clerk in the subsidiary in Tuvalu is doing?
With the liability that comes with these jobs, the incentives have to be good for people to take them. You'd be mad not to require a pretty hefty package up front. $1 million a year is great until you're named in a class action suit claiming you're responsible for the last stock market correction that vaporized half a billion dollars of market cap.
This doesn't invalidate your point -- that there are a lot of bastards out there who walk away with enormous gain for themselves while leaving the company in tatters.
Yes. Like those. Two anecdotes would constitute exceptions. And those aren't even what we're discussing -- fat severance packages for terminated senior management.
When people like Fiorina or Scully are fired, their severance packages have been agreed to long before. Even Dick Grasso, whose wacky compensation package caused so much trouble at the NYSE and eventually led to his ouster, was paid under a plan decided by the board before he took the job.
And airlines are strange beasts that operate in a world all their own. Because of some debatable "public interest", these companies are bailed out again and again while bilking the public of millions of dollars. United getting to dump their pension plan on the U.S. taxpayers and shaft their retirees is reprehensible. And you're right -- there isn't much logic in paying fat bonuses to retain the dinosaurs that led an airline into bankruptcy because they couldn't adapt to the changing environment.
But I'll stand by my original statement -- most of the fat payoffs received by top management when they get canned were decided before they took the jobs.
Understand that these people (especially now that we have Sarbanes-Oxley to deal with) have huge liability for everything that goes on. With a few high profile exceptions, these fat severance packages you hear so much about are negotiated before a CxO even starts working -- whether they'll run the company into the ground is anybody's guess at the time these things are decided.
I'm not suggesting that IT people aren't responsible for stuff and don't have some liability associated with their jobs. But when you hit senior management things change.
The kinds of dealerships using these aren't going to pass along any savings in their repo costs or bad loans. But this is good technology nonetheless. It's also made possible Flexcar, which is a fantastic service. I live in a major city and use them all the time. It's the same deal -- I enter a PIN in the dash to be able to start the car.
I think these systems are pretty old news. The technology has been around for awhile and the lenders aren't pushing the envelope in terms of the law. Nothing to see here. Move along.
You're absolutely correct. I completely missed the additional language the first time through. I apologize for my imprecision. And yeah, they could be lying.
I still think putting this out there under a CC license is more good than bad. In the past, I think they would have just incorporated any extensions into their software and then promoted FUD about everyone else's software being broken. So if one accepts the premise that this is a positive move on Microsoft's part, then I think the more interesting question is, why have they done it?
I'm optimistic, and hoping that it's because the ol' monopoly-engine isn't what it used to be.
That's the first step. The specification needs to be open and published, and freely available. This is the opposite of the MS Word document format, and is not a bad thing.
"As to software implementations, Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification's extensions." I think this means that it's already patented the implementations it already has. Nice.
IANAL, but I read this as exactly the opposite. I really don't see anything in that sentence to support your reading of it. It doesn't say anything about Microsoft's implementation or affirms a patent. They're saying that MS has no patent that you would be infringing if you created an implementation that conforms to the spec.
To be more picky -- it says "necessarily infringed". Just creating something that interoperable using the spec would be fine. Someone else will have to speak to patents related to Outlook data format, which is the whole point of this. But again, if you just publish your data to interoperate with Outlook, you wouldn't be infringing. As I read it. Could be wrong. :-)
I'm not certain if this is a requirement of the Creative Commons license or not, but there is a disclosure on the Microsoft page at the bottom where it discusses the licensing. It states that the material in the document does not infringe on any MS patents.
You mean the sooper sekrit details posted here under a Creative Commons license, which was linked in TFA?
Listen, I'm not prepared to take everything they say at face value, but this is probably a step in the right direction. We have an instance where they've proposed this extension and published it, for anyone to use.
Now, someone more technical than me will have to review what they've published and comment on what, if anything, it screws up.
Hell, the USB size and file format were even in the summary. I think we'll have to implement the RTFS acronym.
I'm not sure I'd consider this a flame, but it seems unreasonable to compare this scenario to the bizarre need to constantly have access to a phone. (Don't get me wrong -- I have a mobile phone. I just turn it off sometimes. But I digress.)
Like a bunch of people, I travel for work. I spend at least 5 hours every week on a plane. That's airtime, excluding time sitting around the airport or going back and forth to the airport. And I know many, many people who take 45-minute train rides to work. Personally, when I'm home I want to do stuff that I can only do when I'm home -- taking some shows with me to kill 5 or 6 hours while I'm traveling is pretty convenient. I kill some dead time and regain some free time at home.
Currently, I do that with my laptop, but an iPod with video would allow me to catch up on some shows in the gate area or during my 40-minute cab ride, not have to juggle my laptop when my meal arrives on the flight, and still watch stuff in the limited space I get on small regional jets. I'm not sold on the new iPod yet -- I'll probably wait another generation and hopefully the screen will get a little bigger.
Because they aren't selling them to end users? They're going to sell them to someone who will build PC's and sell them as P4's. Of course Chuanghui is completely upfront with whoever they sell to -- that's because they're complicit in the fraud that's going to occur.
Is anything a crime in China? I mean, apart from free speech?
Not according to the link you provided. The Wikipedia entry says otherwise.