His real complaint was probably about the MSCINDEX process swallowing up cycles, which is a very real problem on XP boxes and causes the behavior that he describes.
Not that he's the brightest bulb, but there's a real symptom here that can cause headaches.
We're talking about wholesale genocide here, that makes the Holocaust look like chump change in numbers.
I'm not an "end justifies the means" type guy so I find it funny to not attach a negative moral value to a genocide. I guess I'm just a bleeding heart liberal.
I'd still say that the Indians weren't too happy about it.
You're also making a value judgement on our progress; some people think that the stewardship that the Indians prized highly was a much better approach to sustaining humanity.
Plus, why would they remain in the Stone Age? Slower technological advances != no technological advances.
Thre most notorious, IMO, would be Wal-mart.
They don't start off as a service-sucker but after year 3-4 of your contract with them, the downward price pressure they force transforms them into one.
Normally at that point they're also responsible for a significant portion of your business (chances are you've pissed off or shed a lot of customers that are "lower priority") so pulling out becomes a dangerous proposition.
Look at the history of Wal-mart and Vlasic pickles for a wonderful example of it.
I'd venture that a lot of Native Americans would consider the colonization of America as "not in their best interests".
I don't think their current tax-free status WRT gambling institutions is considered a fair trade off for the smallpox infested blankets.
Keeping customers happy is definitely a major component of maximizing shareholder value but it's certainly not the only way.
Additionally, the stockholders are the owners. They're the ones who have money invested and want a return on that investment.
I'll agree 100% that Wall Street dances and finagling with the stock in artificial manners isn't in the best interests of either the stockholders or the company, but the goal of a company at the end of the day is to earn the owners money.
After all, if you start a pizza joint and hemmorage money for 6 months, chances are you're going to sell at a loss and stop doing the thing.
OK that's all well and good so let's discuss keeping customers happy.
Keeping customers happy is a well and noble goal except there's two things to consider:
Who's the customer you're trying to keep happy?
What's the impact on other customers?
From an Operations standpoint you see these two decisions made on a daily basis. If Company X fulfills order A for their high priority customer, it borks orders B and C for their lower volume customers who ordered first.
What's the right call? Do you piss off two low volume customers to appease your big guy, or do you tell the big guy that it's just the way the business works and you'll have to wait?
Additionally, you have what's often termed "service suckers". These account for between 5-10% of a company's customers typically. They're never happy and often cost money over the long haul to keep happy. The biggest nightmare for an Operations Director is the high volume service sucker. It's normally a better move to just drop the offending customer and refuse to do business with them. But that pisses off the stockholders who only see the next quarter gross profit loss and don't tie the extraneous balance sheet items back to the specific customer.
So while it's a noble idea to keep the customers happy as a driver to stockholder value, there's a balance to be struck between the costs of customer service and the revenue those customers provide to the firm.
Ultimately the CEO, CIO, and CFO have to meet with the Board of Directors (normally elected by said shareholders) and explain what their plan is and how it impacts the bottom line, thus increasing the wealth of the stockholders who have voted the Board in to do just that.
Bah I rambled. The point I'm trying to make is that maximizing stock holder value is a valid measurement simply because as the owner of the firm, they're ultimately concerned about the bottom line. The goal of the Board, however, is to appoint a CEO who has the vision to know what needs to be done over the next 5 years to maintain consistent earnings. Ultimately this does come back to the customer, and will be a driver in companies that are sustainable.
Just as an FYI - Bastille Linux is a program, not a flavor.
It should run on any flavor of Linux Distro with the appropriate tweaking.
It's really nice; I was introduced to it with the book "Hackproofing Linux" and it does a lot of neat stuff.
Sets up sudo (if it's not already configured)
Creates a second root user that is the "true" root user, and keylogs everything that root does, and alerts the true root of any attempted accesses
And a bunch of other stuff. I just thought the root stuff was extra sexy.
The argument is essentially that the UI for Microsoft products is also counterintuitive, and has similar problems to the linux GUI offerings.
There's also the idea that "lack of innovation" in Microsoft is why the UI has remained consistent.
This is also untrue. There are innovations between each suite of Microsoft Office products; some of them aren't the hottest (the extended clipboard is extremely cumbersome to anyone who's a hotkey copy/paster like myself) but nonetheless they are innovations.
Way back before I even knew about Linux I read about the Microsoft Office suite strategy - and one of the primary goals was a consistent UI that allowed an end-user to learn the UI of one Office app and by extension have a fair understanding of the remainder of the applications in the suite.
And frankly, they've done a wonderful job on that. Sure, there's tons of issues with the Office suite; Word has annoying bullet bugs, and tends to inherit properties from the pages you delete, applying them to the remainder of the document. There are template issues as well that can cause massive headaches. I hate using the product for documentation and would prefer using Textpad, but the Corporate Masters which pay me like pretty documents. Word is reasonable at that, and to the Corporate Masters it's the only game in town.
The crux of your argument is that the poor UI design of Microsoft has caused the shift to Linux, and I'd say that can never be the reason. The UI is no more intuitive than Microsoft. People who have grown up with Microsoft (such as myself) find the switch difficult. I'm a smart guy and use computers regularly (and every one of my comps has a linux partition to monkey with) but to claim that the UI is intuitive is laughable.
The simplest example is copy/paste. It doesn't "just work".
A more complicated example is almost every program you ever install on a Linux box. It's very rarely a trivial task.
You can make the argument that the choices taken away from the user in the Windows installation process can lead to security holes and instability - these are true.
But it's categorically untrue that the UI is what drives people from Microsoft.
If anything, the UI is what keeps users with Microsoft. Users stick with what's comfortable. Particularly with computers, which most end-users find complicated and difficult; when they acheive a level of competency with one set of programs they're loathe to switch.
Perhaps not as it's the X-box version, but there's a ton of vitriol being spewed at Ubisoft on a significant number of sites for their choice of copy protection.
Perhaps doubling the number of configurations would increase their stock on hand, and that would cost more money and cut down on profits
This has been stated before (or at least alluded to) but Dell's operations strategy is Just-In-Time.
They don't carry significant (read: almost any) inventory investment, but instead push the inventory upstream, forcing the suppliers to assume the risk.
This has quite a few implications. First off, you're dealing with negotiating a contract that states (roughly) that Dell wants the vendor to carry X amount of inventory at all times for use in any demand streams that may or may not be forecast.
This is a major hurdle to work around for a variety of reasons, and the parent nailed one of the primaries.
Simply put:
Increasing the complexity at the processor level increases the complexity of the models and the supply chain at a level that become much more difficult to manage successfully.
This is one of those wonderful little case studies in the business world where the best single point solution (offering both brands to increase revenue from the separate demand streams) does not increase revenue in the supply chain when observed holistically. While the single point improvement potentially increases gross revenue, Dell's operational strategy will incur additional costs that will be detrimental to the bottom line.
I'm not being argumentative; I am potentially underinformed and have just missed the pundits/economists that have written articles or made statements regarding this.
Could you cite a source (or three) that can indicate that this market crash is looming on the horizon?
Is it simply the idea of Communism + semi free market gumming up the works, or is there a "bubble" of some sort that is artificially inflating earnings?
There's also the potentially dangerous scenario Bruce Sterling outlines in Distration where they Chinese gov't decides IP is a bunch of hooey and releases code of anything and everything American, crashing the Information Market in America. Which could dodge the market crash in China, though the fallout would certainly affect them to some degree. (after all, a world economic power suddenly becoming close to zero value will affect the global scene)
How about the platypus? Kind of toughie for your final statement.
That said, I think evolution is a much better workable theory than "God did it" but there is a dogmatic aspect towards evolution within the scientific community, as there are . . . flaws . . . holes . . . fringe cases . . . whatever you want to call them that make current evolutionary theory a little more flimsy than current science wishes it was.
That said, a lot of the holes are being filled or explained through scientific analysis which is great stuff, but our current model does have a lot of work to go.
P.S. religion is a bunch of happy horseshit. If you want to believe in Jesus Claus that's up to you, but I'd try avoiding mixing it with rational thought and science.
If you are a parent you should take responsibility. What's wrong with having the PC in the same room as the TV set until you've taught the kid your values?
Don't you remember what it was like to be a kid? The whole point of a good 20-75% of your activity was based on getting away with something! Parents were kept in the dark as much as humanly possible. . . and just having the computer in the TV room isn't enough.
That said, I don't think this is going to stop kids from acquiring porn either. . . they'll shoplift a Hustler like we did back when I was a wee lad. (or if they're lucky, their buddy's truckdriver dad would have a stash under his bed. God bless you, Brandon's dad)
Frankly, I don't know how I feel about the bill. On one hand, if I was a parent this could potentially make my job of monitoring/protecting my kids a little easier. On the other hand, if this is an excuse for ISPs to raise rates then it's not a good thing, and it should be footed by the parents in the form of blocking software. I pay enough taxes for everybody else's kids already and wouldn't want my internet costs to go up because parents are preventing their kids from going to the sites I'm a member of.
I've felt like the Google interface is wasted in my hands. . . I just don't know how to use it effectively.
I'm so accustomed to arranging things into folders, and I can't for the life of me create any sort of organization in my Gmail box, and must resort to using the search tool to find anything.
Any tips on optimizing my Gmail experience? (I'm serious, any interface tips/tricks would be greatly appreciated)
You're making a statement that pharma companies are working for the "good" (i.e. their research is intrinsically beneficial to society) as a (potential) argument for closed sourcing.
My big beef with this is the idea that pharma companies are actually interested in doing "good".
They're not, for the most part. Antidepressant medication is a wonderful look at the BS they're pulling - Zoloft had a 48% improvement in depression in clinical trials compared to the placebo at 42%. 6% improvement for a host of different side effects, many severe and potential risks to life in the cases of preexisting liver/kidney conditions.
Look to the male enhancement market as well.
Considering the recent FDA news stories (for the last 6 months or so) regarding impropriety in the drug approval process and I think the argument for more transparent, open models hold a lot of merit.
In summation, the pharma industry (and more importantly, our national health) would potentially be improved by a more open standard than we currently have in place.
Slashdot Mirror
Fight Club was a phenomenal book that survived the transition to a movie, and then some.
Not that he's the brightest bulb, but there's a real symptom here that can cause headaches.
We're talking about wholesale genocide here, that makes the Holocaust look like chump change in numbers.
I'm not an "end justifies the means" type guy so I find it funny to not attach a negative moral value to a genocide. I guess I'm just a bleeding heart liberal.
You're also making a value judgement on our progress; some people think that the stewardship that the Indians prized highly was a much better approach to sustaining humanity.
Plus, why would they remain in the Stone Age? Slower technological advances != no technological advances.
They don't start off as a service-sucker but after year 3-4 of your contract with them, the downward price pressure they force transforms them into one.
Normally at that point they're also responsible for a significant portion of your business (chances are you've pissed off or shed a lot of customers that are "lower priority") so pulling out becomes a dangerous proposition.
Look at the history of Wal-mart and Vlasic pickles for a wonderful example of it.
I'd venture that a lot of Native Americans would consider the colonization of America as "not in their best interests".
I don't think their current tax-free status WRT gambling institutions is considered a fair trade off for the smallpox infested blankets.
Additionally, the stockholders are the owners. They're the ones who have money invested and want a return on that investment.
I'll agree 100% that Wall Street dances and finagling with the stock in artificial manners isn't in the best interests of either the stockholders or the company, but the goal of a company at the end of the day is to earn the owners money.
After all, if you start a pizza joint and hemmorage money for 6 months, chances are you're going to sell at a loss and stop doing the thing.
OK that's all well and good so let's discuss keeping customers happy.
Keeping customers happy is a well and noble goal except there's two things to consider:
Who's the customer you're trying to keep happy?
What's the impact on other customers?
From an Operations standpoint you see these two decisions made on a daily basis. If Company X fulfills order A for their high priority customer, it borks orders B and C for their lower volume customers who ordered first.
What's the right call? Do you piss off two low volume customers to appease your big guy, or do you tell the big guy that it's just the way the business works and you'll have to wait?
Additionally, you have what's often termed "service suckers". These account for between 5-10% of a company's customers typically. They're never happy and often cost money over the long haul to keep happy. The biggest nightmare for an Operations Director is the high volume service sucker. It's normally a better move to just drop the offending customer and refuse to do business with them. But that pisses off the stockholders who only see the next quarter gross profit loss and don't tie the extraneous balance sheet items back to the specific customer.
So while it's a noble idea to keep the customers happy as a driver to stockholder value, there's a balance to be struck between the costs of customer service and the revenue those customers provide to the firm.
Ultimately the CEO, CIO, and CFO have to meet with the Board of Directors (normally elected by said shareholders) and explain what their plan is and how it impacts the bottom line, thus increasing the wealth of the stockholders who have voted the Board in to do just that.
Bah I rambled. The point I'm trying to make is that maximizing stock holder value is a valid measurement simply because as the owner of the firm, they're ultimately concerned about the bottom line. The goal of the Board, however, is to appoint a CEO who has the vision to know what needs to be done over the next 5 years to maintain consistent earnings. Ultimately this does come back to the customer, and will be a driver in companies that are sustainable.
Bastille Linux is a program, not a flavor. It should run on any flavor of Linux Distro with the appropriate tweaking.
It's really nice; I was introduced to it with the book "Hackproofing Linux" and it does a lot of neat stuff.
Sets up sudo (if it's not already configured) Creates a second root user that is the "true" root user, and keylogs everything that root does, and alerts the true root of any attempted accesses
And a bunch of other stuff. I just thought the root stuff was extra sexy.
The argument is essentially that the UI for Microsoft products is also counterintuitive, and has similar problems to the linux GUI offerings.
There's also the idea that "lack of innovation" in Microsoft is why the UI has remained consistent.
This is also untrue. There are innovations between each suite of Microsoft Office products; some of them aren't the hottest (the extended clipboard is extremely cumbersome to anyone who's a hotkey copy/paster like myself) but nonetheless they are innovations.
Way back before I even knew about Linux I read about the Microsoft Office suite strategy - and one of the primary goals was a consistent UI that allowed an end-user to learn the UI of one Office app and by extension have a fair understanding of the remainder of the applications in the suite.
And frankly, they've done a wonderful job on that. Sure, there's tons of issues with the Office suite; Word has annoying bullet bugs, and tends to inherit properties from the pages you delete, applying them to the remainder of the document. There are template issues as well that can cause massive headaches. I hate using the product for documentation and would prefer using Textpad, but the Corporate Masters which pay me like pretty documents. Word is reasonable at that, and to the Corporate Masters it's the only game in town.
The crux of your argument is that the poor UI design of Microsoft has caused the shift to Linux, and I'd say that can never be the reason. The UI is no more intuitive than Microsoft. People who have grown up with Microsoft (such as myself) find the switch difficult. I'm a smart guy and use computers regularly (and every one of my comps has a linux partition to monkey with) but to claim that the UI is intuitive is laughable.
The simplest example is copy/paste. It doesn't "just work".
A more complicated example is almost every program you ever install on a Linux box. It's very rarely a trivial task.
You can make the argument that the choices taken away from the user in the Windows installation process can lead to security holes and instability - these are true.
But it's categorically untrue that the UI is what drives people from Microsoft.
If anything, the UI is what keeps users with Microsoft. Users stick with what's comfortable. Particularly with computers, which most end-users find complicated and difficult; when they acheive a level of competency with one set of programs they're loathe to switch.
This has been stated before (or at least alluded to) but Dell's operations strategy is Just-In-Time.
They don't carry significant (read: almost any) inventory investment, but instead push the inventory upstream, forcing the suppliers to assume the risk.
This has quite a few implications. First off, you're dealing with negotiating a contract that states (roughly) that Dell wants the vendor to carry X amount of inventory at all times for use in any demand streams that may or may not be forecast.
This is a major hurdle to work around for a variety of reasons, and the parent nailed one of the primaries.
Simply put:
Increasing the complexity at the processor level increases the complexity of the models and the supply chain at a level that become much more difficult to manage successfully.
This is one of those wonderful little case studies in the business world where the best single point solution (offering both brands to increase revenue from the separate demand streams) does not increase revenue in the supply chain when observed holistically. While the single point improvement potentially increases gross revenue, Dell's operational strategy will incur additional costs that will be detrimental to the bottom line.
After all, there's two revenue streams when it comes to DVDs - rental and resale.
Netflix has an excellent rental model, but a nonexistent resale model.
Amazon, OTOH, is positioned in the exact opposite.
This synergy can combine both models' strengths and potentially increase revenue significantly.
(And until I read your post I didn't realize they'd gotten it right!) Im dum.
"Have you ever tried sugar, or PCP?"
Maybe pedantic but PCP is funnier in delivery.
(Source: Strategic Grill Locations, Mitch Hedberg's first album)
And in a side note, I'm sorry to see Mitch go, he was an incredible comedian.
IME, Slashdot does both. ;)
Burn, Karma, Burn!
I'm not being argumentative; I am potentially underinformed and have just missed the pundits/economists that have written articles or made statements regarding this.
Could you cite a source (or three) that can indicate that this market crash is looming on the horizon?
Is it simply the idea of Communism + semi free market gumming up the works, or is there a "bubble" of some sort that is artificially inflating earnings?
There's also the potentially dangerous scenario Bruce Sterling outlines in Distration where they Chinese gov't decides IP is a bunch of hooey and releases code of anything and everything American, crashing the Information Market in America. Which could dodge the market crash in China, though the fallout would certainly affect them to some degree. (after all, a world economic power suddenly becoming close to zero value will affect the global scene)
Soundwave clicks a button on himself, which then uploads the MP3, "Ravage" to some popular P2P networks, encumbered by DRM.
Lawyers then swarm around Soundwave, destroying anything in their paths.
Yeah, lawyers, not robots. Potatoe, potahto.
Ravage, Upload!
It's so busy with tourists during your summer month.
And naturally, I put in my weak ass $.02 before reading your post and now I can't upmod ya. I blame Christianity.
That said, I think evolution is a much better workable theory than "God did it" but there is a dogmatic aspect towards evolution within the scientific community, as there are . . . flaws . . . holes . . . fringe cases . . . whatever you want to call them that make current evolutionary theory a little more flimsy than current science wishes it was.
That said, a lot of the holes are being filled or explained through scientific analysis which is great stuff, but our current model does have a lot of work to go.
P.S. religion is a bunch of happy horseshit. If you want to believe in Jesus Claus that's up to you, but I'd try avoiding mixing it with rational thought and science.
Don't you remember what it was like to be a kid? The whole point of a good 20-75% of your activity was based on getting away with something! Parents were kept in the dark as much as humanly possible. . . and just having the computer in the TV room isn't enough.
That said, I don't think this is going to stop kids from acquiring porn either. . . they'll shoplift a Hustler like we did back when I was a wee lad. (or if they're lucky, their buddy's truckdriver dad would have a stash under his bed. God bless you, Brandon's dad)
Frankly, I don't know how I feel about the bill. On one hand, if I was a parent this could potentially make my job of monitoring/protecting my kids a little easier. On the other hand, if this is an excuse for ISPs to raise rates then it's not a good thing, and it should be footed by the parents in the form of blocking software. I pay enough taxes for everybody else's kids already and wouldn't want my internet costs to go up because parents are preventing their kids from going to the sites I'm a member of.
Ty guys, I'll have to organize my inbox when I'm at work next.
I'm so accustomed to arranging things into folders, and I can't for the life of me create any sort of organization in my Gmail box, and must resort to using the search tool to find anything.
Any tips on optimizing my Gmail experience? (I'm serious, any interface tips/tricks would be greatly appreciated)
My big beef with this is the idea that pharma companies are actually interested in doing "good".
They're not, for the most part. Antidepressant medication is a wonderful look at the BS they're pulling - Zoloft had a 48% improvement in depression in clinical trials compared to the placebo at 42%. 6% improvement for a host of different side effects, many severe and potential risks to life in the cases of preexisting liver/kidney conditions.
Look to the male enhancement market as well.
Considering the recent FDA news stories (for the last 6 months or so) regarding impropriety in the drug approval process and I think the argument for more transparent, open models hold a lot of merit.
In summation, the pharma industry (and more importantly, our national health) would potentially be improved by a more open standard than we currently have in place.
Speed me right into the 90s where things really get kickin, cuz of the chicks.