Re:Won't outsource IT but outsource manufacturing
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Furthermore, I've read that if you took all the fish that are sold at Walmart and used them to fill Yankee Stadium, Steinbrenner would be really pissed.
I work for a large IT company that both outsources things outside its core incompetencies and at the same time does work outsourced to us. One day, a server in our data center blew a power supply, and since it was under warranty, we called the vendor. Turns out that the vendor had outsourced it to another company that had outsourced it to another division of our company.
A few days later, after the work order had filtered through two other companies, a service technician that worked for us came down from two floors up and changed out the power supply.
Abraham Lincoln's Time Machine
Go back and kill John Wilkes Booth before he kills you.
Ted Kennedy Drunk Driving
Can you keep the car out of the lake? It's harder than you think.
Sonny Bono Pro-Slalom
Guide Sonny as he skis downhill. Watch out for the tree!
Dallas, 1963
First person shooter.
Oil Tycoon
Bribe officials in unfriendly nations to get your pipelines built, then protect them from insurgents.
Bill O'Reilly Simulator
Not really a game, rather, a virus that crashes your computer whenever you type something it disagrees with.
Reread my post. Now tell me, at what point did I suggest that either film was accurate or inaccurate? Oh, I didn't. I made nor implied no such assertions one way or the other. Rather, I was remarking on the apparent relative popularity of the two films, and speculating (somewhat hyperbolically) on audience reaction to the latter film, based on the political attitudes of the typical art house patron, with absolutely no commentary on either film's content whatsoever.
Not only that, Citizens United is renting a theater in my hometown to show it for free. I guess that's the only way to get anyone to come if it's free. I wonder if the theater will bill them extra for having the coke syrup and bits of popcorn cleaned off the screen when they're done.
Incidentally, the same theater charged for F9/11 with numerous soldout screenings.
In a statement released in response, the RNC said, "See, with wealthy members like that, the Democrats are clearly out of touch with the average person." then, changing the subject, added, "John Kerry says he would still vote for the Iraq War, knowing what he knows today. You shouldn't vote for him, he supports the President's War in Iraq. Bush, on the other hand, um... crap."
I remember back when that bug was announced. Seems it was at least a couple of years after Windows 95 had been out. I guess they had to work through a lot of other bugs to get Windows 95 to make it long enough for this bug to occur.
One energy tip I've thought about is putting a diode in series with each of my incandecent fixtures with a capacitor across the lamp to bridge the missing half of the cycle. While this won't actually save any energy, as you will be drawing twice the current through half the cycle, it should add a DC bias to the current which won't be measured by the inductive meter, thus you will save money. Make sure all the diodes point the same way so that all your lamps are drawing from the same half of the cycle, otherwise, you might lose the DC bias and end up paying full price for your electricity.
1. Identify something at your company that isn't "sexy." And I'm not talking about the 50 year old receptionist. 3 years ago, right out of college, I took a job with a small software company. They make applications for point-of-sale systems, and about half of the customers are still running old hardware with MS-DOS 6.22 with no plans to upgrade. However, they still wanted new features so there was constant development in this area which no one wanted to do because the Codeview debugger sucks and putting printfs everywhere is tedious.
2. Get good at it. Ideally, you want to find a better way to do things than just do things. So I invested a bunch of time and effort into learning how DOS works at its lowest levels and memorizing the 286-protected mode extender's manual. Then I cooked up some better debugging tools. One thing I did was created an exception routine that would iterate through the frame pointers on the stack and print the address of each called function to a file when the app crashed in the field. It also saved off various variables indicating when in the transaction the crashed occured as well. I then created a script that would automagically match up these hex values to addresses in the map file and give me a human readable call stack. No more unexplainable, unreproduceable offsite crashes. Totally revolutionized how we do things. I was a hero and suddenly I am THE DOS expert. Mostly I now sit in my cube and read Slashdot, pausing occasionally to help the other developers with their DOS problems. Oh, and I write the occasional module to interface to a new device (RS-232, another unsexy area of expertise).
3. Live below your means. As I live in the midwest, housing is cheap to begin with. I shopped around until I found a house that needed some work and had a motivated seller. It was $45K (less than I make a year!), has three bedrooms plus a large finished attic, and is located in a reasonably decent, working class neighborhood. A little paint, a new roof on the garage, and some carpet and its good to go. I've almost got it paid off.
4. Don't get married for a while. For me, this was easy because most of the women I dated up until now have been psychos. Ideally, you want to find a mate that's not horribly materialistic. See that girl with the nice hair and make-up and the designer clothes? Ignore her. She's hugely materialistic and probably a total flake to boot. Instead look for someone that at first glance you wouldn't ordinarily glance at. She's the one wearing the T-shirt and blue jeans and hastily combed hair that likes to stay up all night watching Monty Python. (They do exist, I'm dating her right now. I love you honeybunny.) She may not be as attractive initially but, I've noticed that, if I date an attractive woman with no personality, she quickly becomes less attractive. On the other hand, a relatively unattractive woman with a great personality will become more attractive as you get to know her. (Subjectively attractive that is, they don't let themselves go or anything.)
5. After establishing yourself as the resident expert in something, be sure your boss knows you are living well beneath your means. But don't tell him outright. You don't want to come off as cocky. Instead, drive a shitty car to work as your primary vehicle or casually discuss how you spent the weekend re-roofing the garage. He'll get the idea. Once your house is paid off and you got it fixed up (and it will be soon within a few short years if you do most things yourself and don't spend a ton of money on a new car or other luxuries), you'll be able to quit any time you want and go to work at the local Dairy Mart and your boss will know it. Suddenly, he's kissing YOUR ass. You won't be asked to work 80 hours a week anymore. You might even get to telecommute.
Oh, and as for the THC thing, shave your head and keep a sample of clean urine handy.
Bury it on the moon. If several underground lunar data repositories are set up, then the data will be safe from anything that can happen on Earth. By using multiple repositories, we are protected in case a meteor strikes the moon as well. Maybe the economic impetus that drives future space exploration will be the need to maintain intellectual property in perpetuity rather than mineral resources.
-or-
As Linus suggested, put it on an FTP site and let the world mirror it.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, I've read that if you took all the fish that are sold at Walmart and used them to fill Yankee Stadium, Steinbrenner would be really pissed.
I work for a large IT company that both outsources things outside its core incompetencies and at the same time does work outsourced to us. One day, a server in our data center blew a power supply, and since it was under warranty, we called the vendor. Turns out that the vendor had outsourced it to another company that had outsourced it to another division of our company.
A few days later, after the work order had filtered through two other companies, a service technician that worked for us came down from two floors up and changed out the power supply.
It'll be interesting to see what develops. /ducks
Don't blame me, I voted for
------------------- <==
Abraham Lincoln's Time Machine
Go back and kill John Wilkes Booth before he kills you.
Ted Kennedy Drunk Driving
Can you keep the car out of the lake? It's harder than you think.
Sonny Bono Pro-Slalom
Guide Sonny as he skis downhill. Watch out for the tree!
Dallas, 1963
First person shooter.
Oil Tycoon
Bribe officials in unfriendly nations to get your pipelines built, then protect them from insurgents.
Bill O'Reilly Simulator
Not really a game, rather, a virus that crashes your computer whenever you type something it disagrees with.
I've toyed with making a game based on Bush's service in the National Guard. I'm thinking it's going to be a drinking game.
Because I distinctly saw President Bush take a drink of water while he was speaking.
Not only that, Citizens United is renting a theater in my hometown to show it for free. I guess that's the only way to get anyone to come if it's free. I wonder if the theater will bill them extra for having the coke syrup and bits of popcorn cleaned off the screen when they're done.
Incidentally, the same theater charged for F9/11 with numerous soldout screenings.
Well, it's like they say in the Navy, there is no wrong hole.
In a statement released in response, the RNC said, "See, with wealthy members like that, the Democrats are clearly out of touch with the average person." then, changing the subject, added, "John Kerry says he would still vote for the Iraq War, knowing what he knows today. You shouldn't vote for him, he supports the President's War in Iraq. Bush, on the other hand, um... crap."
Are they using thermal printers or dot matrix? I've noticed that thermally printed receipts tend to fade after a few weeks.
What's your opinion of Ralph Nader?
"Maybe they left off a percent sign?"
Or maybe there's some kind of failover to a backup system (Which they also forgot to reboot)?
I remember back when that bug was announced. Seems it was at least a couple of years after Windows 95 had been out. I guess they had to work through a lot of other bugs to get Windows 95 to make it long enough for this bug to occur.
Well, with the recent explosion of web based applications like Gmail, it was only a matter of time before someone developed the web-based browser.
You won't need to keep a browser installed on your PC anymore. Wherver you are, you can just log on to http://browser.google.com with, um, oh wait...
#define BEGIN {
#define END }
So there.
For less than the cost of a decent bike lock, you can buy a bike that's not worth stealing.
In other words, you can compile GCC with the Intel compiler, but not the other way around.
Seems like there's an "In Soviet Russia" joke in there somewhere.
One energy tip I've thought about is putting a diode in series with each of my incandecent fixtures with a capacitor across the lamp to bridge the missing half of the cycle. While this won't actually save any energy, as you will be drawing twice the current through half the cycle, it should add a DC bias to the current which won't be measured by the inductive meter, thus you will save money. Make sure all the diodes point the same way so that all your lamps are drawing from the same half of the cycle, otherwise, you might lose the DC bias and end up paying full price for your electricity.
Don't change Dicks in the middle of a screw,
Vote for Nixon in '72.
Here's how I dealt with it:
1. Identify something at your company that isn't "sexy." And I'm not talking about the 50 year old receptionist. 3 years ago, right out of college, I took a job with a small software company. They make applications for point-of-sale systems, and about half of the customers are still running old hardware with MS-DOS 6.22 with no plans to upgrade. However, they still wanted new features so there was constant development in this area which no one wanted to do because the Codeview debugger sucks and putting printfs everywhere is tedious.
2. Get good at it. Ideally, you want to find a better way to do things than just do things. So I invested a bunch of time and effort into learning how DOS works at its lowest levels and memorizing the 286-protected mode extender's manual. Then I cooked up some better debugging tools. One thing I did was created an exception routine that would iterate through the frame pointers on the stack and print the address of each called function to a file when the app crashed in the field. It also saved off various variables indicating when in the transaction the crashed occured as well. I then created a script that would automagically match up these hex values to addresses in the map file and give me a human readable call stack. No more unexplainable, unreproduceable offsite crashes. Totally revolutionized how we do things. I was a hero and suddenly I am THE DOS expert. Mostly I now sit in my cube and read Slashdot, pausing occasionally to help the other developers with their DOS problems. Oh, and I write the occasional module to interface to a new device (RS-232, another unsexy area of expertise).
3. Live below your means. As I live in the midwest, housing is cheap to begin with. I shopped around until I found a house that needed some work and had a motivated seller. It was $45K (less than I make a year!), has three bedrooms plus a large finished attic, and is located in a reasonably decent, working class neighborhood. A little paint, a new roof on the garage, and some carpet and its good to go. I've almost got it paid off.
4. Don't get married for a while. For me, this was easy because most of the women I dated up until now have been psychos. Ideally, you want to find a mate that's not horribly materialistic. See that girl with the nice hair and make-up and the designer clothes? Ignore her. She's hugely materialistic and probably a total flake to boot. Instead look for someone that at first glance you wouldn't ordinarily glance at. She's the one wearing the T-shirt and blue jeans and hastily combed hair that likes to stay up all night watching Monty Python. (They do exist, I'm dating her right now. I love you honeybunny.) She may not be as attractive initially but, I've noticed that, if I date an attractive woman with no personality, she quickly becomes less attractive. On the other hand, a relatively unattractive woman with a great personality will become more attractive as you get to know her. (Subjectively attractive that is, they don't let themselves go or anything.)
5. After establishing yourself as the resident expert in something, be sure your boss knows you are living well beneath your means. But don't tell him outright. You don't want to come off as cocky. Instead, drive a shitty car to work as your primary vehicle or casually discuss how you spent the weekend re-roofing the garage. He'll get the idea. Once your house is paid off and you got it fixed up (and it will be soon within a few short years if you do most things yourself and don't spend a ton of money on a new car or other luxuries), you'll be able to quit any time you want and go to work at the local Dairy Mart and your boss will know it. Suddenly, he's kissing YOUR ass. You won't be asked to work 80 hours a week anymore. You might even get to telecommute.
Oh, and as for the THC thing, shave your head and keep a sample of clean urine handy.
So to recap,
Bury it on the moon. If several underground lunar data repositories are set up, then the data will be safe from anything that can happen on Earth. By using multiple repositories, we are protected in case a meteor strikes the moon as well. Maybe the economic impetus that drives future space exploration will be the need to maintain intellectual property in perpetuity rather than mineral resources.
-or-
As Linus suggested, put it on an FTP site and let the world mirror it.
Yeah, but Orson Welles told people that New York was being actively invaded. That's not quite the same thing as picking up a distant radio signal.
"five great machines. First one is crossing the river. I can see it from here, wading... wading the Hudson like a man wading through a brook..."
vs.
"Hey, I think I hear something."