I just find the whole "activation" process to be completely wrong-headed. To me, it's the same thing with DRM. It's like they're putting all their effort into making sure that it's not worth the trouble to pirate their IP, but if it's not worth pirating, then it sure as hell isn't worth buying.
I'm not a fan of activation/DRM in the first place, and it's particularly bad when it keeps re-checking and re-authenticating, so that even if it was working today it might stop working tomorrow. I would agree, though, that activation and DRM can be tolerable when done properly. I've bought music from iTunes and games from Steam, and never really had a problem with the restrictions.
However, I just think there's no place for this in operating systems. If my steam account breaks and I can't play Half Life for a couple days, Valve knows there isn't going to be much harm done. Even if you have Adobe's software break due to activation problems, it's unlikely that there will be any damages more than some lost productivity. However, there is no way to gauge what the consequences are going to be if you suddenly and unexpectedly disable someone's operating system. Microsoft doesn't know how you use your computer, can't predict the importance of your need of a functioning computer on any given day, and has no idea what trouble it will cause to deny you access to your own applications and data.
Whether you're talking about the OS that runs a life-support system or one that runs my grandmother's home PC, it simply shouldn't be built to break. They shouldn't be built to be disabled or stop function when you really need them to work. And more to the point, I don't want Microsoft deciding under which circumstances it's ok for my computer to break-- by itself, on purpose.
I actually think Vista disabling itself on my grandmother's home PC is a particularly bad situation. Her data might not be "mission critical", but it's still important to her. And she doesn't have a tech-support team that can help her get her data off if she can't get Windows running again. Generally, unless she had someone like me to figure it out, she'd probably end up buying a new PC and losing her data because she can't figure out what the hell is going on.
I can't decide whether or not I agree with you. On the one hand, I have no difficulty imagining how computers could hinder education rather than help. People have a tendency to think that our education problem with somehow magically be solved if you just throw computers at the problem, when in fact the most important thing children can get is personal attention from parents and teachers.
On the other hand, our society (and economy) are becoming increasingly dependent on computers. Children who grow up without computers lack experience, which then puts them at a disadvantage later in life. Also, I think the Internet is an amazing tool for communication and discovery, and an Internet-connected child might have far more opportunities to broaden their minds than would otherwise be possible.
Our aversion to vocational training comes from a bunch of elitist snobs who are in denial about being elitist snobs. If you listen to them, they'll claim the idea that "not everyone should go to college" is elitist, exclusionary, and bigoted. Inherent in those claims are the belief that you *must* go to college in order to be a decent human being, and that anyone who opposes a 100% enrollment in college only does so in order to keep everyone else "down".
It's a foreign idea to these people to consider that a mechanic or carpenter might still be a decent person, still be a smart person, and even still be a happy person. To them, being a carpenter or mechanic is "dirty work", and considered unfit for any human to undertake. They have no problem reaping the benefits of that work being done, but they believe it's an insult to tell someone that they should consider anything other than white-collar work.
I don't know exactly what the deal is, but I don't see why they wouldn't allow it in Alabama. Scaling production up would allow the laptops to be cheaper. And besides, Alabama is almost like a 3rd world country.
Seriously, though, if the purpose is to build a laptop for children who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford a computer, there are enough poor kids in Alabama (or elsewhere in the US) for whom this project makes sense. Having some kind of access to computing is great for education, and I don't see why kids should be deprived of that simply because they live in the US.
Only then will any type of "activation" be acceptable.
No, not even then in my book. I use my computer for relatively important purposes, and the real purpose of the OS is to stay up and running and allow me to access my data and applications. That's priority number 1, and in fact most of what I care about.
Therefore, in my opinion, When I see an OS vendor who spends their time trying to figure out how to make their OS not-work and how to make it disallow access to my programs and applications, I must assume that they don't understand the first thing about what they're doing.
I know that explanation might sound too clever by half, but I am dead serious. When Microsoft should have been spending their time figuring out how to keep my system running at all times, they were instead engineering a kill switch. It's like if a shoemaker was trying to engineer a shoe so that it could easily be made uncomfortable or made to fall apart.
So my message to Microsoft: as long as you're spending your resources trying to figure out how to make my computer less useful and less reliable, I will not buy your OS anymore. Spend your immense resources on making an operating system that does what operating systems are supposed to do, and I may reconsider.
Yeah, I hate huge bureaucratic companies that take monopolistic stances, overprice their services, and give crappy customer service. Hopefully Comcast will die and we can all switch to a good company like... Verizon?
Seriously, this all seems pretty slanted. The submission reads more like Verizon astroturfing than a legitimate post. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of FIOS and hope it comes to my area soon and is cheap. However, I'm not a huge fan of Verizon and don't see how they're much better than Comcast. In the end, I'd rather have the choice between Comcast and Verizon than to have one go out of business and to be completely stuck with either, without any choice whatsoever.
apple mp3 players are at places 1,2,4,5,6,7,8. the zune is number 9. (apple continues at places 11, 12, 13, 18
Well, and ignoring what shows up at number 1, that Apple shows up in all those places shows that the iPod *line* is dominating the market. It's not too astoundingly great for Microsoft that they can hit the top spot, considering that the iPod line is being split into every color of every size of every model. Combine all those models' sales and ask, "Who is selling the most MP3 players?" and I'm pretty sure you'll find that Apple is blowing everyone else out of the water.
Well even ignoring patent issues, FAT is not good enough. AFAIK (maybe I'm wrong?) there's no journaling, no file permission scheme to speak of, and even long filenames, case sensitivity, and support for volumes over 4GB are kind of hacked-on.
Ideally, I'd like to see a single filesystem that can be used for the system volume for any OS. But I think it should be practical for every OS to support at least one decent (not FAT) filesystem in common for read/write.
Re:When's the next one come out?
on
Futurama Returns!
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, I read elsewhere that the movie was created in the first place to be easily edited down into 4 episodes (but they tried not to be too obvious) because it will actually air on Comedy Central as the first 4 episodes in a new season. They'll have enough new episodes to fill out the rest of the season, and if its viewership is good, it could be picked up as a normal show again (by Comedy Central this time).
I actually don't particularly have a problem with people trying to make money from art, and I don't care too much whether the primary motivation is the money or the "art for art's sake". As an audience member, all I really care about is whether or not I like it.
But what I specifically don't agree with is when people are trying to use my government (yes, "my government", or if you prefer "our government", but the point is that the government is properly owned/run by the people) to prop up a failing poorly-run businesses while those same businesses attack the citizens my government is supposed to be protecting.
Or to put it another way, the purpose of my/our government is to protect me/us. The goal of my government should not be to ensure profitable business for Sony/Universal/EMI/Warner in spite of their own mismanagement and outdated business model. I don't mind these companies trying to make a buck, so long as they're doing it through legal means and trying to satisfy a real market. However, they absolutely should not be bringing copyright infringement suites against P2P people or engaging in anti-competitive practices. Given their behavior over the past few years, they should be investigated for things like price-fixing and racketeering.
That's my only beef. So if these companies insist on abusing their own customers, then it doesn't hurt my feelings to see them suffer and go out of business because of it.
That was largely my point. Advocates of the record industry tend to want to scare us by implying that, if their industry implodes, we won't have music anymore. But in fact, these two things are pretty separate. So if the record industry falls apart, I'm not sure I care very much.
What about adding "dys" as a prefix to pepsi and using the resulting word to mean "stomach ache". I'm sure the makers of Pepsi don't want the product associated with stomach aches.
Why doesn't a company like Apple take on all those other pieces and start their own Record company to solicit artists.
Well I believe Apple is specifically barred from doing that after a trademark settlement with Apple Corps. The fact that they even have a music store has been the subject of a lot of legal wrangling. I think it's settled again, but I don't know if they've ever released the terms of the settlement, so I don't know if they're allowed yet to act as a record label.
Fronted the money for recording in expensive studios
Invested the money for actually cutting and distributing records
Marketing/advertising
As digital distribution grows, they're growing increasingly irrelevant in terms of distribution. They aren't irrelevant yet, but they're getting there. Similarly, consumer technology becoming powerful enough to produce professional albums without the expensive recording studio. The need for a huge company's backing in order to fund recording is disappearing.
It's getting to be that the role of record companies is to try to market crap. They're not particularly expert at finding talent, producing albums, or distributing media anymore. They're good at taking generic and sometimes awful music and convincing millions of teenagers that it's the best thing ever. And if you talk to people working within these companies, you'll find out that many of them view their job as that: they're marketing/branding companies.
Whenever people talk about the "collapse" of the record industry, I always want to ask, "Do you honestly think people will stop making music?"
I wouldn't be surprised if things changed, but things are constantly changing. Ultimately though, people won't stop writing music, playing music, or performing music. The tendency of the human race to make music didn't start with the record industry, and in fact didn't start with musicians being able to get rich off of their talent. The fact is, Homo sapiens are a musical species. You'd have a hard time getting us to stop making music if you tried. If all the governments of the world made music illegal, people would still do it.
They need to do a better job of recruitment. On any given night I can find better bands playing at local clubs then I hear on the radio
But what I find really strange about the whole thing is that, when I go back to my hometown and listen to the radio, all the stations are playing 90% old stuff. I don't listen to the radio anymore (I don't drive), but I remember being in high school and when I turned to the lock rock stations, there was a lot of new music on. They'd play older stuff too, inter-splicing some classic rock songs, but the majority of the songs were from the prior 5 years. Now I go back and listen to the same radio stations, and 10 years later, most of the songs that they're playing are the same songs they played 10-15 years ago. Every once in a while you hear a new song, but mostly not.
Is that a typo or joke? I don't get it. If it will really take that long, wouldn't it make sense to set some intermediate goals first? Like whatever they're making HTML 5, call it HTML 8, and set a roadmap for the intervening years?
Yeah, sometimes I'll just walk around, try to grab people. Sometimes it's just good to walk around to see what people are actually doing with their time anyway. The only problem that I have with that is that I don't always want to put people on the spot or interrupt what they're doing. So when I say "a meeting", i really just mean "multiple people in the same room talking about something." It could be 10 people, or is could be me and one other person who I'm talking to at his/her desk. To me, if it's scheduled and/or focussed on a specific topic, it's a meeting.
And part of the reason to schedule is specifically to avoid wasting man-hours. Sometimes I know that person has some down time, where they're either surfing the web or talking to me, and sometimes I'm happy to let them surf the web and sometimes I'd rather they talk to me. So I'll schedule it for when they have down-time or ask them to schedule it for when they have down-time, so that I can talk to them without keeping them from their work. But that's just the ideal. Sometimes you have to pull people away from their work for 15 minutes will waste less of their time than having them work on the wrong thing for 3 hours.
I know why people hate meetings, and I understand why there's the image of the PHB. I used to have this boss that would call me into useless meetings all day and show retarded Powerpoint movies. He was the cliché. But I also have come to realize that good communication is vital to getting projects done, and as a manager you have to try to make sure that communication is happening. Sometimes that means calling people into meetings, sitting them down, and making them talk.
Jeeze, I wish you people would read a little better before responding. I use Outlook. I use meeting invites all the time. I even block off hours of time when I expect that I will be busy. However, still, an empty block in my calendar doesn't actually give an indication of whether I can handle a meeting during that time. I don't expect everyone to call me to ask if they can have a meeting. But I do think the system sometimes gets used in a way that I don't consider to be very polite. IMO, if you don't really know me well enough to have any idea how I spend my day, and if you're sending me an invite to an event that I don't already know is coming, I would prefer to get some kind of phonecall first. Don't just send me an invite and then assume that I'm going to show up, even if I don't respond.
And yes, I've had that happen. The problem that I'm talking about is that people use e-mail and meeting invites instead of real communication, and if people really are that busy, a lot can get lost in the shuffle.
I understand that some organizations are micro-manager and meeting crazy.
I don't really micromanage, and I do delegate quite a lot. Jeeze, I wouldn't be able to get anything done if I didn't delegate. I've just had to work with people who are meeting-phobic and won't sit down and talk to each other, even when they really need to. For example, right now I have three managers who are constantly going back and forth every day on IM and e-mail, they sit just down the hall from each other, but when a problem pops up, they often won't just sit down and talk to each other about it because they "don't like meetings".
Ok, so they don't like meetings and don't think they're important, so then they when a problem comes up, they both set their teams working on solving the same problem. Often they're either duplicating effort or they're interfering with each other. Every now and then, they're even sending conflicting information to clients. So I have to call a meeting and say, "Hey guys, what the hell is going on?" They'll insist for the first 5 minutes of the meeting that they have it covered and don't need a meeting, but once they get talking, suddenly you hear a lot of "Oh, I didn't know you were doing that!" Or else, "Oh, that's a great idea, and we could be doing this too!"
Sometimes you really just have to get the right people into the same room for 15 minutes. I've known a bunch of people who don't like meetings and think they're just a tool for the PHB, and so they don't have them enough. I agree that there's such a thing as meeting that are too long, that are unfocussed, that are unproductive, and that have too many people in them, but I don't agree that the unhelpfulness of poorly-run meetings is an indicator that meetings should be kept to a minimum.
And like I said before, maybe I wouldn't have to have as many meetings myself if I had better employees who would just communicate productively on their own, but right after reading me say that is when you should be saying, "yeah, good luck with that". Better and more likely, I'll probably be getting some kind of assistant to make things easier on myself.
Slashdot Mirror
I just find the whole "activation" process to be completely wrong-headed. To me, it's the same thing with DRM. It's like they're putting all their effort into making sure that it's not worth the trouble to pirate their IP, but if it's not worth pirating, then it sure as hell isn't worth buying.
I'm not a fan of activation/DRM in the first place, and it's particularly bad when it keeps re-checking and re-authenticating, so that even if it was working today it might stop working tomorrow. I would agree, though, that activation and DRM can be tolerable when done properly. I've bought music from iTunes and games from Steam, and never really had a problem with the restrictions.
However, I just think there's no place for this in operating systems. If my steam account breaks and I can't play Half Life for a couple days, Valve knows there isn't going to be much harm done. Even if you have Adobe's software break due to activation problems, it's unlikely that there will be any damages more than some lost productivity. However, there is no way to gauge what the consequences are going to be if you suddenly and unexpectedly disable someone's operating system. Microsoft doesn't know how you use your computer, can't predict the importance of your need of a functioning computer on any given day, and has no idea what trouble it will cause to deny you access to your own applications and data.
Whether you're talking about the OS that runs a life-support system or one that runs my grandmother's home PC, it simply shouldn't be built to break. They shouldn't be built to be disabled or stop function when you really need them to work. And more to the point, I don't want Microsoft deciding under which circumstances it's ok for my computer to break-- by itself, on purpose.
I actually think Vista disabling itself on my grandmother's home PC is a particularly bad situation. Her data might not be "mission critical", but it's still important to her. And she doesn't have a tech-support team that can help her get her data off if she can't get Windows running again. Generally, unless she had someone like me to figure it out, she'd probably end up buying a new PC and losing her data because she can't figure out what the hell is going on.
It was a joke. Don't take it so seriously.
I can't decide whether or not I agree with you. On the one hand, I have no difficulty imagining how computers could hinder education rather than help. People have a tendency to think that our education problem with somehow magically be solved if you just throw computers at the problem, when in fact the most important thing children can get is personal attention from parents and teachers.
On the other hand, our society (and economy) are becoming increasingly dependent on computers. Children who grow up without computers lack experience, which then puts them at a disadvantage later in life. Also, I think the Internet is an amazing tool for communication and discovery, and an Internet-connected child might have far more opportunities to broaden their minds than would otherwise be possible.
Our aversion to vocational training comes from a bunch of elitist snobs who are in denial about being elitist snobs. If you listen to them, they'll claim the idea that "not everyone should go to college" is elitist, exclusionary, and bigoted. Inherent in those claims are the belief that you *must* go to college in order to be a decent human being, and that anyone who opposes a 100% enrollment in college only does so in order to keep everyone else "down".
It's a foreign idea to these people to consider that a mechanic or carpenter might still be a decent person, still be a smart person, and even still be a happy person. To them, being a carpenter or mechanic is "dirty work", and considered unfit for any human to undertake. They have no problem reaping the benefits of that work being done, but they believe it's an insult to tell someone that they should consider anything other than white-collar work.
Hypocrites.
I don't know exactly what the deal is, but I don't see why they wouldn't allow it in Alabama. Scaling production up would allow the laptops to be cheaper. And besides, Alabama is almost like a 3rd world country.
Seriously, though, if the purpose is to build a laptop for children who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford a computer, there are enough poor kids in Alabama (or elsewhere in the US) for whom this project makes sense. Having some kind of access to computing is great for education, and I don't see why kids should be deprived of that simply because they live in the US.
Only then will any type of "activation" be acceptable.
No, not even then in my book. I use my computer for relatively important purposes, and the real purpose of the OS is to stay up and running and allow me to access my data and applications. That's priority number 1, and in fact most of what I care about.
Therefore, in my opinion, When I see an OS vendor who spends their time trying to figure out how to make their OS not-work and how to make it disallow access to my programs and applications, I must assume that they don't understand the first thing about what they're doing.
I know that explanation might sound too clever by half, but I am dead serious. When Microsoft should have been spending their time figuring out how to keep my system running at all times, they were instead engineering a kill switch. It's like if a shoemaker was trying to engineer a shoe so that it could easily be made uncomfortable or made to fall apart.
So my message to Microsoft: as long as you're spending your resources trying to figure out how to make my computer less useful and less reliable, I will not buy your OS anymore. Spend your immense resources on making an operating system that does what operating systems are supposed to do, and I may reconsider.
It's worth re-emphasizing that our fundamental strategy of not-buying Vista has not changed either.
Yeah, I hate huge bureaucratic companies that take monopolistic stances, overprice their services, and give crappy customer service. Hopefully Comcast will die and we can all switch to a good company like... Verizon?
Seriously, this all seems pretty slanted. The submission reads more like Verizon astroturfing than a legitimate post. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of FIOS and hope it comes to my area soon and is cheap. However, I'm not a huge fan of Verizon and don't see how they're much better than Comcast. In the end, I'd rather have the choice between Comcast and Verizon than to have one go out of business and to be completely stuck with either, without any choice whatsoever.
apple mp3 players are at places 1,2,4,5,6,7,8. the zune is number 9. (apple continues at places 11, 12, 13, 18
Well, and ignoring what shows up at number 1, that Apple shows up in all those places shows that the iPod *line* is dominating the market. It's not too astoundingly great for Microsoft that they can hit the top spot, considering that the iPod line is being split into every color of every size of every model. Combine all those models' sales and ask, "Who is selling the most MP3 players?" and I'm pretty sure you'll find that Apple is blowing everyone else out of the water.
Well even ignoring patent issues, FAT is not good enough. AFAIK (maybe I'm wrong?) there's no journaling, no file permission scheme to speak of, and even long filenames, case sensitivity, and support for volumes over 4GB are kind of hacked-on.
Ideally, I'd like to see a single filesystem that can be used for the system volume for any OS. But I think it should be practical for every OS to support at least one decent (not FAT) filesystem in common for read/write.
Yeah, I read elsewhere that the movie was created in the first place to be easily edited down into 4 episodes (but they tried not to be too obvious) because it will actually air on Comedy Central as the first 4 episodes in a new season. They'll have enough new episodes to fill out the rest of the season, and if its viewership is good, it could be picked up as a normal show again (by Comedy Central this time).
I actually don't particularly have a problem with people trying to make money from art, and I don't care too much whether the primary motivation is the money or the "art for art's sake". As an audience member, all I really care about is whether or not I like it.
But what I specifically don't agree with is when people are trying to use my government (yes, "my government", or if you prefer "our government", but the point is that the government is properly owned/run by the people) to prop up a failing poorly-run businesses while those same businesses attack the citizens my government is supposed to be protecting.
Or to put it another way, the purpose of my/our government is to protect me/us. The goal of my government should not be to ensure profitable business for Sony/Universal/EMI/Warner in spite of their own mismanagement and outdated business model. I don't mind these companies trying to make a buck, so long as they're doing it through legal means and trying to satisfy a real market. However, they absolutely should not be bringing copyright infringement suites against P2P people or engaging in anti-competitive practices. Given their behavior over the past few years, they should be investigated for things like price-fixing and racketeering.
That's my only beef. So if these companies insist on abusing their own customers, then it doesn't hurt my feelings to see them suffer and go out of business because of it.
I know, I just didn't want to kill the joke by being too correct.
The record industry does not equal music
That was largely my point. Advocates of the record industry tend to want to scare us by implying that, if their industry implodes, we won't have music anymore. But in fact, these two things are pretty separate. So if the record industry falls apart, I'm not sure I care very much.
Also, what do a lot of spam-blockers call good e-mail? Ham. So they're implying that spam is like ham, except that it's bad and you don't want it.
What about adding "dys" as a prefix to pepsi and using the resulting word to mean "stomach ache". I'm sure the makers of Pepsi don't want the product associated with stomach aches.
Why doesn't a company like Apple take on all those other pieces and start their own Record company to solicit artists.
Well I believe Apple is specifically barred from doing that after a trademark settlement with Apple Corps. The fact that they even have a music store has been the subject of a lot of legal wrangling. I think it's settled again, but I don't know if they've ever released the terms of the settlement, so I don't know if they're allowed yet to act as a record label.
Record labels, traditionally, did 3 things:
As digital distribution grows, they're growing increasingly irrelevant in terms of distribution. They aren't irrelevant yet, but they're getting there. Similarly, consumer technology becoming powerful enough to produce professional albums without the expensive recording studio. The need for a huge company's backing in order to fund recording is disappearing.
It's getting to be that the role of record companies is to try to market crap. They're not particularly expert at finding talent, producing albums, or distributing media anymore. They're good at taking generic and sometimes awful music and convincing millions of teenagers that it's the best thing ever. And if you talk to people working within these companies, you'll find out that many of them view their job as that: they're marketing/branding companies.
Whenever people talk about the "collapse" of the record industry, I always want to ask, "Do you honestly think people will stop making music?"
I wouldn't be surprised if things changed, but things are constantly changing. Ultimately though, people won't stop writing music, playing music, or performing music. The tendency of the human race to make music didn't start with the record industry, and in fact didn't start with musicians being able to get rich off of their talent. The fact is, Homo sapiens are a musical species. You'd have a hard time getting us to stop making music if you tried. If all the governments of the world made music illegal, people would still do it.
They need to do a better job of recruitment. On any given night I can find better bands playing at local clubs then I hear on the radio
But what I find really strange about the whole thing is that, when I go back to my hometown and listen to the radio, all the stations are playing 90% old stuff. I don't listen to the radio anymore (I don't drive), but I remember being in high school and when I turned to the lock rock stations, there was a lot of new music on. They'd play older stuff too, inter-splicing some classic rock songs, but the majority of the songs were from the prior 5 years. Now I go back and listen to the same radio stations, and 10 years later, most of the songs that they're playing are the same songs they played 10-15 years ago. Every once in a while you hear a new song, but mostly not.
So what the hell happened?
Is that a typo or joke? I don't get it. If it will really take that long, wouldn't it make sense to set some intermediate goals first? Like whatever they're making HTML 5, call it HTML 8, and set a roadmap for the intervening years?
Yeah, sometimes I'll just walk around, try to grab people. Sometimes it's just good to walk around to see what people are actually doing with their time anyway. The only problem that I have with that is that I don't always want to put people on the spot or interrupt what they're doing. So when I say "a meeting", i really just mean "multiple people in the same room talking about something." It could be 10 people, or is could be me and one other person who I'm talking to at his/her desk. To me, if it's scheduled and/or focussed on a specific topic, it's a meeting.
And part of the reason to schedule is specifically to avoid wasting man-hours. Sometimes I know that person has some down time, where they're either surfing the web or talking to me, and sometimes I'm happy to let them surf the web and sometimes I'd rather they talk to me. So I'll schedule it for when they have down-time or ask them to schedule it for when they have down-time, so that I can talk to them without keeping them from their work. But that's just the ideal. Sometimes you have to pull people away from their work for 15 minutes will waste less of their time than having them work on the wrong thing for 3 hours.
I know why people hate meetings, and I understand why there's the image of the PHB. I used to have this boss that would call me into useless meetings all day and show retarded Powerpoint movies. He was the cliché. But I also have come to realize that good communication is vital to getting projects done, and as a manager you have to try to make sure that communication is happening. Sometimes that means calling people into meetings, sitting them down, and making them talk.
Jeeze, I wish you people would read a little better before responding. I use Outlook. I use meeting invites all the time. I even block off hours of time when I expect that I will be busy. However, still, an empty block in my calendar doesn't actually give an indication of whether I can handle a meeting during that time. I don't expect everyone to call me to ask if they can have a meeting. But I do think the system sometimes gets used in a way that I don't consider to be very polite. IMO, if you don't really know me well enough to have any idea how I spend my day, and if you're sending me an invite to an event that I don't already know is coming, I would prefer to get some kind of phonecall first. Don't just send me an invite and then assume that I'm going to show up, even if I don't respond.
And yes, I've had that happen. The problem that I'm talking about is that people use e-mail and meeting invites instead of real communication, and if people really are that busy, a lot can get lost in the shuffle.
I understand that some organizations are micro-manager and meeting crazy.
I don't really micromanage, and I do delegate quite a lot. Jeeze, I wouldn't be able to get anything done if I didn't delegate. I've just had to work with people who are meeting-phobic and won't sit down and talk to each other, even when they really need to. For example, right now I have three managers who are constantly going back and forth every day on IM and e-mail, they sit just down the hall from each other, but when a problem pops up, they often won't just sit down and talk to each other about it because they "don't like meetings".
Ok, so they don't like meetings and don't think they're important, so then they when a problem comes up, they both set their teams working on solving the same problem. Often they're either duplicating effort or they're interfering with each other. Every now and then, they're even sending conflicting information to clients. So I have to call a meeting and say, "Hey guys, what the hell is going on?" They'll insist for the first 5 minutes of the meeting that they have it covered and don't need a meeting, but once they get talking, suddenly you hear a lot of "Oh, I didn't know you were doing that!" Or else, "Oh, that's a great idea, and we could be doing this too!"
Sometimes you really just have to get the right people into the same room for 15 minutes. I've known a bunch of people who don't like meetings and think they're just a tool for the PHB, and so they don't have them enough. I agree that there's such a thing as meeting that are too long, that are unfocussed, that are unproductive, and that have too many people in them, but I don't agree that the unhelpfulness of poorly-run meetings is an indicator that meetings should be kept to a minimum.
And like I said before, maybe I wouldn't have to have as many meetings myself if I had better employees who would just communicate productively on their own, but right after reading me say that is when you should be saying, "yeah, good luck with that". Better and more likely, I'll probably be getting some kind of assistant to make things easier on myself.
Somehow I doubt all that text was on the "Vista Capable PC" stickers.