Dell is staring down hundreds of thousands of users looking for more options that should honestly be very easy to provide.
I can tell you from personal experience, none of those things are 'easy.' Yes, some of them are very easy for you and I. But we're talking about a huge unwieldy corporate machine where every good intention/new idea from the bottom of the org chart is unwelcome and punished.
FYI, for most people at any sufficiently large organization, the customer is at the very bottom of the org chart.
If the CEO drove these changes without endless, mind-numbing discussion and rooms full of people notifying her of the 'dangers' it would be a different story. But that's just not how it works at that level.
Coreboot would be at the very top of my list. From there, the user is free-er to do what they please with the computer. Words cannot describe how important that project is to the future of computing. Please, go help coreboot out.
The car analogy is awful and doesn't apply at all to the situation. This specific weakness (among a host of stupid assumptions) is a pet peeve of mine;
It is true i could sell those seats for a profit on ebay
1. Clearly the author doesn't know the ridiculous intricacies of reselling a Microsoft OS license on ebay. 2. Clearly the author doesn't understand the fundamental limits of the OS installer he would attempt to resell thus rendering it practically worthless.
I'll leave the blatant misuse of the term "profit" to another post.
Since when does something that is technically better mean it's a viable competitor to Apple? History is *full* of technically better failures.
I've come to the inflammatory conclusion regarding the iPhone. The crazy rules of the app store and the phone's 'jail' are a demand accellerant. The intricate craziness of the Apple culture wins out over a vendor developing a relatively open phone OS.
Applied Science Fiction was the first company to successfully market this as a 'dust and scratches' solution.
Same idea, taken to a new level. Now, I hope HP's management is smart enough to get out of the way and bring this to market. It should definitely sell a few more scanners.
recorded by liquid and thermal sensors I can get those already. Common in the shipping industry. detecting extreme environmental exposures How is this different than a thermal sensor? Common in the shipping industry, but not everywhere depending on the environmental element they are testing for. a shock sensor detecting drops or other impacts I can slap one of those inside any old box now. Apple puts it inside a laptop and it's a patent? and a continuity sensor to detect jailbreaking or other tampering Now, this *really* has been done. Permanent adhesives on a holographic label? Anyone? anyone?
Any of you familiar with the way the contract system works in the U.S. should agree. The prime contractor (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc) will take most of the money and farm out the task to a couple of sub-contractors who will farm their tasks out.
This is a perfect example of how the notion of 'small government' is being used against the citizens that clamor for it.
I know that some think this is some kind of critical failure, especially on slashdot. But it isn't.
1. Agents don't know or understand what's on the card(s). They probably fell into the same false belief the scanner operators have just because they don't know any better. 2. There's nothing particularly special on the RFID chip. A parking facility card and a passport generate the same amount of interesting information. A unique ID. Whew! you got me there. There's a particularly obsessive set of slashdotters that watch too much television and come to believe something can be done with this information. The hurdles are so many the odds of winning the lottery are better than doing something useful with the unique ID. 3. If this were a crypto-capable chip and they got the secrets off the chip with a passive scan, they'd still have a unique ID. It would be a minor accomplishment, but no one cares.
Those women were seeking to replicate something they accepted and were attracted to. They were as sick as your Dad. It doesn't make the grandparent post wrong at all.
You have to be someone she can look up to. In this day and age this doesn't have to mean huge amounts of muscle bulk. She might look up to you for your leet skillz, your artistic prowess or your meticulously cultivated good manners, whatever, but if that element is missing, but being all touchy-feely is not a plus, but something that has to be compensated for.
Parent is 100% right. I would only add that it has to go both ways. You need something to look up to in your spouse only the male version is a little different.
Money is the other issue. In most cases, you need to be the primary source. I'm sure there are some enlightened couples out there where the woman makes more and it's okay, but most situations are very tense when the woman makes more money. It's a deathblow to the average marriage.
Remember that you are marrying this person for very powerful emotional reasons. Some of these reasons go back to meeting a need to replicate a dynamic you grew up in. Hopefully, there aren't too many weird/bad things in your childhood to undo.
Whew. The snarky comments about KDE are pretty crazy.
I still have it on my Debian testing/unstable laptop. It's not a very new laptop and KDE4.2 ran very quickly on it. The desktop itself did not have glaring issues. None of the eye candy is enabled by default, so it doesn't look immediately fabulous on Debian. But turn stuff on and there's plenty of prettiness available. There were issues with Korganizer, so it sounds like they cleaned it up quite a bit. For the most part, I don't use konqueror any more since I found bojourfoxy. http://andrew.tj.id.au/projects/bonjourfoxy/
It's clear there is a huge amount of activity going into these releases because whole features have been rewritten since kde4.0. Over time, it looks like most of the common KDE applications have been ported to kde4 too, so there's still solid interest in the desktop.
It looks like they are continuing their efforts to simplify working with KDE as a programmer. So, maybe the bigger KDE4 story that isn't covered as much on slashdot is the programming side?
I'm actually using XFCE4 at the moment for no good reason other than change is good. It's leaner, with enough eye candy for me.
I know Paul Graham's is taken very seriously, but they are words from someone with *many* resources. So many resources that he could afford to wait for the perfect job. What you and the other "Be happy first and work will fit in" seem to have that steers so many people wrong is the luxury of being able to afford waiting for a job that fits into your happiness mantra.
1. There aren't very many of these around. Your anecdote nicely fills that in. Should your friend quit chasing the dream? Nope. But it looks like the method used isn't getting him what he desires. This is the rule, not the exception. So, I hope your friend is happy along the way. If he isn't then doesn't that kind of prove the point that happiness first doesn't work?
2. 'Happiness first' model just doesn't work. Do you think the majority of agriculture workers 'dream' of working in blazing hot summers harvesting produce for next to nothing? How about cleaning crews? Do you think they are 'happy' after a shift cleaning up other people's messes? The uncomfortable truth is there are way more of these honorable but not glorious jobs than the socially respected professions.
Now, does that mean this young woman should sue? Dunno. I'm sure the burden of failure is mostly her fault though. There is a *huge* gap between what the colleges have been promising and the socio-economic reality. Hopefully this starts a national conversation about the over-promising in college marketing.
I would argue that regardless of what you do, it should not make you sick & miserable. But that's different than Paul's thesis.
Huh? In what world does the customer care what email client I use?
What I think you meant was an employer typically rewards conformity over innovation. PHB's are typically strict conformists themselves. NOT using Outlook inspires uncertainty, so you won't be as well rewarded come annual evaluation.
its simpler to have them use the whole Office suite than just part of it.
And the cost of wasted productivity fixing the myriad of rendering bugs are not borne by PHB's either. This is a variation on the Broken Windows parable.
The article only begins to touch the more important point. The nature of document workflow is changing and think ordinary schmoes like this are catching onto the changing and how irrelevant Microsoft has become. They are still relevant for their biggest customers, so it won't happen in my lifetime. But the beginning of a long, slow decline of the relevance of Microsoft is upon us.
First of all, it's been done already. Obviously google couldn't use the standards already in place. The shareholders would formulate the idea the place is some kind of hippie commune.
Telco's patent attorneys should be all over google. The telco's probably tolerate ebay's Skype for now. It's entirely another thing to infringe on their Wireless business. POTS too...
Hardware RAID's are not exactly hopping off the shelf and I think many shops are happy with fiberchannel.
Let's do another reality check: this is enterprise class hardware. Are you telling me you can get SSD RAID/SAN in a COTS package that is cost approximate to whatever is available now? Didn't think so....
Let's face it, in this class of hardware things move much more slowly.
You'd think they'd have fired one up to at least *check* if there's any glaring issues to be pointed out.
No chance of that my friend. Sales is not about making sure the product works right. Sales is getting money for the product.
In this particular case, the vendor is probably sells at low prices compared to others. (Dell, I'm looking at you) How they get those low prices is cutting corners. That means nasty details like this can bite you in the rear.
I've previously worked Dell shops and now work an HP shop. I don't ever want to go back to another Dell shop. Ever.
The general idea is to have the building _not_ collapse on top of you.
As a lifetime resident of Los Angeles that's experienced all of the big quakes back to the 1970's, I've been in stick construction houses for all of the quakes and didn't even experience a broken window. They shake like crazy and it's loud as hell in the big ones, but the stick design is very flexible.
The older homes here 1930's have foundation problems more than anything else in the big ones. They tend to be lathe/plaster walls, but still stick-style construction. I don't know what's different about those. There are *very* few if any of the really old adobe-style houses left. Not because of earthquakes though.
This reminds me of Microsoft's 'commitment' to other document standards.
The likelihood it will ever be sufficiently maintained by Microsoft is 1%. So, they can say "Works with Linux!" when it might work for one version at one point in time of SLES.
I wonder if I could volunteer for programming in an open-source community. There is an infinite supply of worthy projects. The hardest part is not the feature/bug you intend to do work on, it's getting a handle on the coding style of the project. One person's readable code is another person's spaghetti code.
And then there's the social hurdle of contributing code. If the person maintaining the code base may not accept your patches. Don't take this the wrong way. If they are motivated to assist you in becoming a better coder, they'll give you good feedback. If they aren't, and many times they won't be, then don't let that stop you from maintaining a set of patches and perhaps a build of the same code.
Whatever the depth of your motivation enthusiasm, you want to match your time commitment/capabilities to code quality. For some, a little time is needed to do elegant coding. For me right now, lots of time. So, I contribute minor things whenever possible while others more skilled would contribute by solving harder bugs adding bigger features.
If this is a good idea, how do I start? Start today! (gorrilla biscuits anyone?)
I've been discovering that the way it saves.doc files doesn't quite match with how MS Office reads them
Hahaha!!! Microsoft is no better at retaining formatting than OpenOffice. I had one particularly wasteful work day attempting to edit a complex Word doc with embedded images, tables authored on Mac with French as the default language. We were each on different versions of Office too. The language of the document was Fr-english, so I was supposed to clean up the language a little.
I spent Hours spent attempting to keep the document open long enough to get the information out of it before it would crash Word again. Hours!!!!!
Do yourself and them a favor and send them a PDF. They'll think you are a big-shot with your Adobe Acrobat software and everything!!!
All of the file systems are designed for specific tasks/circumstances. I'm too lazy to dig up what's special about each, but they are most useful in specific niches. Not that you _can't_ generalize, but calling ext4 the best of the bunch misses the whole point of the other file systems.
Now that we're past the absurdities in the summary, it may be a useful reminder to many the economic culture in the U.S. still has a strong 'cowboy' mentality.
I would argue it rewards and embraces 'cowboy' coding because it's the cheapest/fastest way to implement a new idea.
Having dealt with Asian cultures in a business environment, the cultures don't reward the 'cowboy mentality.' They can reproduce cheaper/smaller/faster things very, very well. But don't ask them for new ideas. American business is full of new ideas. I just wish we had a less restrictive legal environment to let those new ideas flourish.
Government owning the rights to pollute doesn't mean they stand to benefit the most.
The Investment Banking cohorts JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are the **huge** winners. How? 1. They take a cut of every transaction. The more valuable the credits, the more they earn. So the value of the business is guaranteed to increase every year. 2. They arbitrage the market. There is a spread that develops between an asking and a selling price in any given market. you can place bets on the spread among other neat ways to make money. 3. They game the market. Recent economic history is full of deregulated energy schemes that had huge artificial spreads between demand, supply and price.
It essentially puts extra costs on industry that uses polluting fuels, Right. The idea is to have the worst polluters 'taxed.' That tax defrays the public health costs of pollution. For example, if there were 10,000 less instances of cancer that kills people, there would be meaningful savings in medical expenditures. Now, that is not to say this scheme will not blow up in a mushroom cloud of corruption. Because it is. GS and JPM are behind it 100%. That's a clue that it's bad to the core.
If I followed the logic as laid out in most of the replies, then most regulations with a public health savings angle should be abolished. We should go back to the 1940's and have cars that kill people instead of absorbing impact, cigarettes for everyone and smoked everywhere just to name two.
How about expressing your dissatisfaction by getting involved in the political process instead?
Slashdot Mirror
Dell is staring down hundreds of thousands of users looking for more options that should honestly be very easy to provide.
I can tell you from personal experience, none of those things are 'easy.' Yes, some of them are very easy for you and I. But we're talking about a huge unwieldy corporate machine where every good intention/new idea from the bottom of the org chart is unwelcome and punished.
FYI, for most people at any sufficiently large organization, the customer is at the very bottom of the org chart.
If the CEO drove these changes without endless, mind-numbing discussion and rooms full of people notifying her of the 'dangers' it would be a different story. But that's just not how it works at that level.
Coreboot would be at the very top of my list. From there, the user is free-er to do what they please with the computer. Words cannot describe how important that project is to the future of computing. Please, go help coreboot out.
Kudos to Todd for laying what may be the truth out there.
If Todd's march to the top of the cubicle farm dung heap doesn't end over this one, then Dell gets my next notebook order.
The car analogy is awful and doesn't apply at all to the situation. This specific weakness (among a host of stupid assumptions) is a pet peeve of mine;
It is true i could sell those seats for a profit on ebay
1. Clearly the author doesn't know the ridiculous intricacies of reselling a Microsoft OS license on ebay.
2. Clearly the author doesn't understand the fundamental limits of the OS installer he would attempt to resell thus rendering it practically worthless.
I'll leave the blatant misuse of the term "profit" to another post.
It's inflamatory a million different ways, but AC has the right idea.
Since when does something that is technically better mean it's a viable competitor to Apple? History is *full* of technically better failures.
I've come to the inflammatory conclusion regarding the iPhone. The crazy rules of the app store and the phone's 'jail' are a demand accellerant. The intricate craziness of the Apple culture wins out over a vendor developing a relatively open phone OS.
Applied Science Fiction was the first company to successfully market this as a 'dust and scratches' solution.
Same idea, taken to a new level. Now, I hope HP's management is smart enough to get out of the way and bring this to market. It should definitely sell a few more scanners.
recorded by liquid and thermal sensors
I can get those already. Common in the shipping industry.
detecting extreme environmental exposures
How is this different than a thermal sensor? Common in the shipping industry, but not everywhere depending on the environmental element they are testing for.
a shock sensor detecting drops or other impacts
I can slap one of those inside any old box now. Apple puts it inside a laptop and it's a patent?
and a continuity sensor to detect jailbreaking or other tampering
Now, this *really* has been done. Permanent adhesives on a holographic label? Anyone? anyone?
The summary blathers on about how newspapers should stick it to online media.
Well, bad news. Most of those newspapers have most of their content online. So....????
Any of you familiar with the way the contract system works in the U.S. should agree. The prime contractor (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc) will take most of the money and farm out the task to a couple of sub-contractors who will farm their tasks out.
This is a perfect example of how the notion of 'small government' is being used against the citizens that clamor for it.
I know that some think this is some kind of critical failure, especially on slashdot. But it isn't.
1. Agents don't know or understand what's on the card(s). They probably fell into the same false belief the scanner operators have just because they don't know any better.
2. There's nothing particularly special on the RFID chip. A parking facility card and a passport generate the same amount of interesting information. A unique ID. Whew! you got me there. There's a particularly obsessive set of slashdotters that watch too much television and come to believe something can be done with this information. The hurdles are so many the odds of winning the lottery are better than doing something useful with the unique ID.
3. If this were a crypto-capable chip and they got the secrets off the chip with a passive scan, they'd still have a unique ID. It would be a minor accomplishment, but no one cares.
Move along.
aggressive drinking manipulative
Those women were seeking to replicate something they accepted and were attracted to. They were as sick as your Dad. It doesn't make the grandparent post wrong at all.
Two words for you: seek therapy.
You have to be someone she can look up to. In this day and age this doesn't have to mean huge amounts of muscle bulk. She might look up to you for your leet skillz, your artistic prowess or your meticulously cultivated good manners, whatever, but if that element is missing, but being all touchy-feely is not a plus, but something that has to be compensated for.
Parent is 100% right. I would only add that it has to go both ways. You need something to look up to in your spouse only the male version is a little different.
Money is the other issue. In most cases, you need to be the primary source. I'm sure there are some enlightened couples out there where the woman makes more and it's okay, but most situations are very tense when the woman makes more money. It's a deathblow to the average marriage.
Remember that you are marrying this person for very powerful emotional reasons. Some of these reasons go back to meeting a need to replicate a dynamic you grew up in. Hopefully, there aren't too many weird/bad things in your childhood to undo.
Whew. The snarky comments about KDE are pretty crazy.
I still have it on my Debian testing/unstable laptop. It's not a very new laptop and KDE4.2 ran very quickly on it. The desktop itself did not have glaring issues. None of the eye candy is enabled by default, so it doesn't look immediately fabulous on Debian. But turn stuff on and there's plenty of prettiness available. There were issues with Korganizer, so it sounds like they cleaned it up quite a bit. For the most part, I don't use konqueror any more since I found bojourfoxy. http://andrew.tj.id.au/projects/bonjourfoxy/
It's clear there is a huge amount of activity going into these releases because whole features have been rewritten since kde4.0. Over time, it looks like most of the common KDE applications have been ported to kde4 too, so there's still solid interest in the desktop.
It looks like they are continuing their efforts to simplify working with KDE as a programmer. So, maybe the bigger KDE4 story that isn't covered as much on slashdot is the programming side?
I'm actually using XFCE4 at the moment for no good reason other than change is good. It's leaner, with enough eye candy for me.
I know Paul Graham's is taken very seriously, but they are words from someone with *many* resources. So many resources that he could afford to wait for the perfect job. What you and the other "Be happy first and work will fit in" seem to have that steers so many people wrong is the luxury of being able to afford waiting for a job that fits into your happiness mantra.
1. There aren't very many of these around. Your anecdote nicely fills that in. Should your friend quit chasing the dream? Nope. But it looks like the method used isn't getting him what he desires. This is the rule, not the exception. So, I hope your friend is happy along the way. If he isn't then doesn't that kind of prove the point that happiness first doesn't work?
2. 'Happiness first' model just doesn't work. Do you think the majority of agriculture workers 'dream' of working in blazing hot summers harvesting produce for next to nothing? How about cleaning crews? Do you think they are 'happy' after a shift cleaning up other people's messes? The uncomfortable truth is there are way more of these honorable but not glorious jobs than the socially respected professions.
Now, does that mean this young woman should sue? Dunno. I'm sure the burden of failure is mostly her fault though. There is a *huge* gap between what the colleges have been promising and the socio-economic reality. Hopefully this starts a national conversation about the over-promising in college marketing.
I would argue that regardless of what you do, it should not make you sick & miserable. But that's different than Paul's thesis.
the people that pay us like Outlook
Huh? In what world does the customer care what email client I use?
What I think you meant was an employer typically rewards conformity over innovation. PHB's are typically strict conformists themselves. NOT using Outlook inspires uncertainty, so you won't be as well rewarded come annual evaluation.
its simpler to have them use the whole Office suite than just part of it.
And the cost of wasted productivity fixing the myriad of rendering bugs are not borne by PHB's either. This is a variation on the Broken Windows parable.
The article only begins to touch the more important point. The nature of document workflow is changing and think ordinary schmoes like this are catching onto the changing and how irrelevant Microsoft has become. They are still relevant for their biggest customers, so it won't happen in my lifetime. But the beginning of a long, slow decline of the relevance of Microsoft is upon us.
First of all, it's been done already. Obviously google couldn't use the standards already in place. The shareholders would formulate the idea the place is some kind of hippie commune.
Telco's patent attorneys should be all over google. The telco's probably tolerate ebay's Skype for now. It's entirely another thing to infringe on their Wireless business. POTS too...
Hardware RAID's are not exactly hopping off the shelf and I think many shops are happy with fiberchannel.
Let's do another reality check: this is enterprise class hardware. Are you telling me you can get SSD RAID/SAN in a COTS package that is cost approximate to whatever is available now? Didn't think so....
Let's face it, in this class of hardware things move much more slowly.
You'd think they'd have fired one up to at least *check* if there's any glaring issues to be pointed out.
No chance of that my friend. Sales is not about making sure the product works right. Sales is getting money for the product.
In this particular case, the vendor is probably sells at low prices compared to others. (Dell, I'm looking at you) How they get those low prices is cutting corners. That means nasty details like this can bite you in the rear.
I've previously worked Dell shops and now work an HP shop. I don't ever want to go back to another Dell shop. Ever.
The general idea is to have the building _not_ collapse on top of you.
As a lifetime resident of Los Angeles that's experienced all of the big quakes back to the 1970's, I've been in stick construction houses for all of the quakes and didn't even experience a broken window. They shake like crazy and it's loud as hell in the big ones, but the stick design is very flexible.
The older homes here 1930's have foundation problems more than anything else in the big ones. They tend to be lathe/plaster walls, but still stick-style construction. I don't know what's different about those. There are *very* few if any of the really old adobe-style houses left. Not because of earthquakes though.
This reminds me of Microsoft's 'commitment' to other document standards.
The likelihood it will ever be sufficiently maintained by Microsoft is 1%. So, they can say "Works with Linux!" when it might work for one version at one point in time of SLES.
I wonder if I could volunteer for programming in an open-source community.
There is an infinite supply of worthy projects. The hardest part is not the feature/bug you intend to do work on, it's getting a handle on the coding style of the project. One person's readable code is another person's spaghetti code.
And then there's the social hurdle of contributing code. If the person maintaining the code base may not accept your patches. Don't take this the wrong way. If they are motivated to assist you in becoming a better coder, they'll give you good feedback. If they aren't, and many times they won't be, then don't let that stop you from maintaining a set of patches and perhaps a build of the same code.
Whatever the depth of your motivation enthusiasm, you want to match your time commitment/capabilities to code quality. For some, a little time is needed to do elegant coding. For me right now, lots of time. So, I contribute minor things whenever possible while others more skilled would contribute by solving harder bugs adding bigger features.
If this is a good idea, how do I start?
Start today! (gorrilla biscuits anyone?)
I've been discovering that the way it saves .doc files doesn't quite match with how MS Office reads them
Hahaha!!! Microsoft is no better at retaining formatting than OpenOffice. I had one particularly wasteful work day attempting to edit a complex Word doc with embedded images, tables authored on Mac with French as the default language. We were each on different versions of Office too. The language of the document was Fr-english, so I was supposed to clean up the language a little.
I spent Hours spent attempting to keep the document open long enough to get the information out of it before it would crash Word again. Hours!!!!!
Do yourself and them a favor and send them a PDF. They'll think you are a big-shot with your Adobe Acrobat software and everything!!!
All of the file systems are designed for specific tasks/circumstances. I'm too lazy to dig up what's special about each, but they are most useful in specific niches. Not that you _can't_ generalize, but calling ext4 the best of the bunch misses the whole point of the other file systems.
Now that we're past the absurdities in the summary, it may be a useful reminder to many the economic culture in the U.S. still has a strong 'cowboy' mentality.
I would argue it rewards and embraces 'cowboy' coding because it's the cheapest/fastest way to implement a new idea.
Having dealt with Asian cultures in a business environment, the cultures don't reward the 'cowboy mentality.' They can reproduce cheaper/smaller/faster things very, very well. But don't ask them for new ideas. American business is full of new ideas. I just wish we had a less restrictive legal environment to let those new ideas flourish.
Who exactly is benefitting here?
Government owning the rights to pollute doesn't mean they stand to benefit the most.
The Investment Banking cohorts JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are the **huge** winners. How?
1. They take a cut of every transaction. The more valuable the credits, the more they earn. So the value of the business is guaranteed to increase every year.
2. They arbitrage the market. There is a spread that develops between an asking and a selling price in any given market. you can place bets on the spread among other neat ways to make money.
3. They game the market. Recent economic history is full of deregulated energy schemes that had huge artificial spreads between demand, supply and price.
Rolling Stone has a nice article on Goldman Sachs absolutely worth your time. If you read it, please realize it is exactly that bad. http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=16763183&access_key=key-aq99m8654zlwmm5muht&page=1&version=1&viewMode=
It essentially puts extra costs on industry that uses polluting fuels,
Right. The idea is to have the worst polluters 'taxed.' That tax defrays the public health costs of pollution. For example, if there were 10,000 less instances of cancer that kills people, there would be meaningful savings in medical expenditures. Now, that is not to say this scheme will not blow up in a mushroom cloud of corruption. Because it is. GS and JPM are behind it 100%. That's a clue that it's bad to the core.
If I followed the logic as laid out in most of the replies, then most regulations with a public health savings angle should be abolished. We should go back to the 1940's and have cars that kill people instead of absorbing impact, cigarettes for everyone and smoked everywhere just to name two.
How about expressing your dissatisfaction by getting involved in the political process instead?