Your ability to resort to name calling instantly when anyone doesn't agree with you is another reason/. types work for the business types.
Really? You know so much about me, it's fascinating. And you assume that my behaviour on/. is identical to the one at home or at work or elsewhere in life. Do you treat your wife the same as your boss? Why then should I treat an anonymous coward on a website the same as real people in the real world that I really interact with?
of how much worse of Sun is because of market uncertainty.
Yes, except that this uncertainty is part of the process and in a serious enterprise will have been considered in the overal picture. If you orchestrate a merger at a size like this, you know the paperwork involved. Crying about these sales that didn't happen is like crying about taxes. You can do it, but the proper way to deal with it is to accept the fact and include it in your calculations.
In fact, as I understand, the regulators could have taken much longer, had they wanted to. So where is the joy about the profit that was made due to the short time? After all, if you call the one thing by a name, you should call its opposite by the opposite name, correct?
Same thing. You can not lose what you do not have. Not winning something is not a loss. Or at least I don't feel like I lost the 100 m dash at the last summer olympics. Might be because I didn't compete, you know? Likewise, even if you compete, not winning the lottery jackpot is not identical to losing a million bucks.
Again, few misuses of words by large organisations are not intentional. If the RIAA were to whine "we don't make as much money as we think we ought to", very few people would sympathize. If they say "piracy costs us umpty-dumpty bazillion bucks", people do, because we can all relate to how it feels to lose something.
Same here. Sun/Oracle could have saved/made $x in this time. I could have won the lottery. I should have received a raise. That nice girl over there ought to have looked at me for longer. Really, what's the difference? It's all hypothetical profit, not the loss of something. You don't lose money, time or love that you never had to begin with.
Now, excuse me, I have several billion dollars to lose in all those lotteries I don't play in. Can you imagine what it costs me every week to not win?
No, it is not. It is "money that we expected, but never made".
Cost is when you have $X and spend some of it. Not when you didn't make as much money as you'd have liked to. Heck, if that were the case, I'd have a couple million in "costs" every year, because where's that damn lottery jackpot that I'm waiting for?
Are you intentionally dense or is english not your first, second or third language?
I didn't doubt that "lost sales" exist.
I do insist to not call them "costs", because they aren't. Calling things by their proper names is a primary requirement for correct understanding and evaluation.
It never ceases to amaze me how some people think that things like files and folders are too confusing for the novice.
You've not looked on any novice desktop lately, have you? Most non-techies appear to stuff everything important unto the desktop itself. Doesn't look very much as if they "get" folders.
A "normal" person can navigate Virgin Megastore but they can't do the same thing with the same content in files and folders?
A normal person is very well equipped with spatial perception and orientation since it comes with the wetware. File and folder thinking doesn't. It may appear natural to you, but it is an acquired skill.
Not really. Good interface design runs deeper than a few aphorisms.
You want consistency within the same context, or in other words: All your light switches should work the same way, as should all your doors. But there's no reason that light switches and doors have to work the same way, and quite a few good reasons why they should work differently.
On a good mutating interface, the general tasks should behave consistently, and Apple is ensuring that with the SDK and UI guidelines as far as possible. e.g. scrolling, clicking, etc. works the same everywhere. But the specific tasks should have their specific input system and interface philosophy.
Can someone please SERIOUSLY ( no pro or anti apple fanaticism please) explain what exactly is so revolutionary about iPhone interface?
A five year old can use it, but it doesn't feel or look childish.
That's it in a nutshell. The interface is pure interface design sweetness. It's a bit like a great music piece - you can't analyse why it's so great because the greatness isn't in the individual notes or pitches or tempo changes, it's in the sum total and how everything fits together just perfectly.
Pfft. Same argument as the RIAA about piracy. "We certainly would have made $x bazillion, if only..."
Please, if you ever want to aspire to anything higher than tabloid journalism, do at the very least two things: 1 - add the word "estimated" or something to that effect when you're pulling figures out of your (or someone elses) ass 2 - do not use the word "cost" for lost sales or other imaginary did-not-happen income. Cost is when an expense has happened, i.e. money has been spent. Money that never came in is never a "cost".
Apple goes for "sexy" in everything it does. Tell me where Bing is sexy? It has no appeal whatsoever to anyone I know. Heck, 80% of the people I know probably don't even know what the heck it is and would guess it's a new clothes shop or something.
I also think Apple got into bed with MS once and still feels somewhat sorry about it. After initial great support (IE on Mac is said to have been far better than the windos version) MS did to them what they do to everyone: Let them hang. I doubt that brings them much love from Apple.
Interesting remark. You and I are reading different books, it seems. I don't doubt that even early humans had a lot more than gathering, hunting and mating in their lives. My argument wasn't regarding the contents of their lives, but rather the timeframe and the closeness between effort and reward. From what I've learnt, it wasn't until agriculture and/or herding evolved that timelines of half a year or more between investment and payoff became common. Way too late in human development to have much of an influence on our genes.
He's actually pointing out a major cause for mankind's current crisis. No matter if it's financial, political or climate trouble, you can always look at it and find one root cause: All these are issues we are biologically ill-equipped to deal with. Long-term problems with no immediate danger. When the human brain evolved, it didn't have spare room for that kind of processing, except in the general "deal with all the other complicated stuff, if you feel like it" area we call reasoning. Our main problem was not being eaten today, finding a mate soon and getting the tribe to that other place by the end of the month. "Next year" was about as far as our ancestors ever needed to plan, so we don't have any brain matter specialized to doing it. "May hurt me in 10 years time" is a waste of energy to think about when your survival until next week is far from certain.
But there's a difference between the guy who brings you coffee and the guy who compiles last quarter's numbers for you. One of the differences is what TFA touched upon: You can outsource and quickly switch the external company for the janitor service. Anyone who's outsourced IT knows that more often than not, the effort involved in the outsourcing dwarves the actual IT effort for that period (and sometimes, several others).
If you run a factory, that's true. In almost every other business, it's not.
IT makes 90% of what goes on in a modern company possible at all. ERP, CRM, CMS and about three dozen other "tools" are as vital to a company today as hammers and workbenches were to a craftsman hundreds of years ago. Janitors aren't. They clean up and we don't want to miss them, but they don't run the company.
IT isn't the brain of most non-tech companies, but it certainly is the heart - it keeps the blood/information flowing through the veins/channels. Going even a few hours without it is noticeable in most companies, IT going down for a day is the corporate equivalent of a heart attack.
You asked a simple question, you deserve a simple answer: Managers.
Over my years in IT, I have seen too many decisions being made by people who haven't updated their IT knowledge for 10 years or so. People who think that "FTP" doesn't stand for "Fuck This Protocol" and to whom SSH is "this new encrypted remote login tool". In addition, crypto is inherently difficult to understand, and a lot (I can't emphasize that enough) managers simply don't support anything they don't understand.
Cisco had the right idea of VPNs and making the whole encryption "thingy" become invisible. Unfortunately, that too required some managers to make decisions.
The only places I've ever seen where encryption is used a) consistently and b) well is where someone very high up understood at least enough about the issue to roll out a general policy or put a security officer in place and gave him authority over such decisions. And then proceeded to fire at least one high-ranking middle-management idiot for violating the policy.
Chairman Mao's policies killed a lot more than 20 million people.
And that is the best argument ever to not repeat that mistake of swinging a huge country around like a startup company, isn't it?
So if you're opposed to China being a democracy you must be a monster too.
I'm not opposed to that. I am opposed to this dumb, dimwitted, look-how-well-it-worked-for-Iraq argument that everyone needs democracy and capitalism right now. Real-life change simply doesn't work like that. In case you forgot, the introduction of democracy into a country not having the cultural or economic background to sustain it is what created WW2.
Oh, please. This is standard procedure in a lawsuit. Since the judges almost always try to get the parties to settle, you don't start with a reasonable demand, you start with the maximum the law allows for, because the other party does the same. Then you meet in the middle.
IANAL but I've done a number of corporate lawsuits, on both sides (suing and being sued). This is just how it works. If you actually get your initial demand, you'd be as surprised as everyone else.
To me, the major issue appears to be that ICANN doesn't have a clear vision on what the purpose of TLD is.
In the past, we had two types of TLDs: One for geographical/political designation (country TLDs) and one for organisation-type designation (.com/.net/.org/.mil/.edu).
The ones they added, and which I think everyone agrees were utterly stupid, are a mix of lobby-dumbness and content designation (.info,.pro,.aero)
What we need is a clear view on what the meaning of the TLD should be. But since we don't get that, because ICANN doesn't have a vision at all, we'll end up with a mess of crap, no matter which way they turn.
I wish we had any politicians left in the west. We don't. What we have is managers. Like all managers, their primary interest is staying on the job and collecting nice salaries, at least until they've build up new and valuable connections and can hop to the next well-paying job.
The word "Politician" includes the greek "polis", which is the body of citizens, or in american terms, "we, the people". If you know of a politician actually interested in the polis, bring him to the nearest endangered species reserve.
The more I think about my own mortality the more I view Religion as a coping mechanism.
Bingo.
Book: "The Golden Bough" by Frazer. Should be required reading in school. Explains very detailed just how religion came to be, and that it evolved out of two very deep desires of man. One is coping with death. The second is having some meaning in and control over the world which to early man was random, uncontrollable and very much frightening.
I think the chinese have taken their Sun Tzu very seriously. They've defeated the west with its own tools: Capitalism. Maybe the west could even defeat China on the battlefield. Right after that, the world economy would collapse, because both fiscal and productive ties to China are so strong.
Yeah, the old "democracy and free markets will solve everything" argument.
Most of the western countries didn't move to democracy without a civil war, revolution or other lots-of-people-dying event.
Do you want a revolution or a civil war in China?
The death toll of the French Revolution is estimated at a million. France has 1/20th the population of China. If you really support the potential death of 20 million people in the name of liberty, democracy and capitalism, then in my book you're a monster.
Not really, no. I'm serious. One thing that humans are fascinatingly good at is ignoring this "knowledge". There's some brain research that shows evidence of our brains actually being wired up so that we avoid facing this, on very low-levels. In other words: It's not a conscious decision, not even an unconscious one. Runs a lot deeper than that.
So, it's only true for broad definitions of "know". Yes, the fact is recallable from memory. But your brain goes to great lengths to ignore it, and almost always when you actually do recall it, it has about the same emotional impact as last year's sports numbers. Actually, for sports fans, less than that. But it shouldn't. Ever wondered why that is? Now you know. For some definitions of "know".:-)
"to discriminate" merely means to differentiate. And - newsflash - there are functional differences between blind and sighted people.
There are cases of discrimination that are justified, and those that are not. If you believe that, say, black people are not as intelligent as white people, you'd better show your evidence. However, blind, deaf and otherwise disabled people do have a functional difference to the rest of us. Like, they can't see (or hear, etc.).
That's a simple fact.
How we handle that fact is a decision of society. It is not any kind of natural law or right or whatever.
At this point, I feel a bit like saying: "Society has decided to go out of its ways to help you. But don't push it."
I personally don't mind giving disabled people a bit of support. I get very much ticked off when they think they have a right to it.
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He's not lying, you know. He's just waiting for the perfect year to start his two-year-plan...
Your ability to resort to name calling instantly when anyone doesn't agree with you is another reason /. types work for the business types.
Really? You know so much about me, it's fascinating. And you assume that my behaviour on /. is identical to the one at home or at work or elsewhere in life. Do you treat your wife the same as your boss? Why then should I treat an anonymous coward on a website the same as real people in the real world that I really interact with?
of how much worse of Sun is because of market uncertainty.
Yes, except that this uncertainty is part of the process and in a serious enterprise will have been considered in the overal picture. If you orchestrate a merger at a size like this, you know the paperwork involved. Crying about these sales that didn't happen is like crying about taxes. You can do it, but the proper way to deal with it is to accept the fact and include it in your calculations.
In fact, as I understand, the regulators could have taken much longer, had they wanted to. So where is the joy about the profit that was made due to the short time? After all, if you call the one thing by a name, you should call its opposite by the opposite name, correct?
Cost (transitive verb): cause the loss of
Same thing. You can not lose what you do not have. Not winning something is not a loss. Or at least I don't feel like I lost the 100 m dash at the last summer olympics. Might be because I didn't compete, you know? Likewise, even if you compete, not winning the lottery jackpot is not identical to losing a million bucks.
Again, few misuses of words by large organisations are not intentional. If the RIAA were to whine "we don't make as much money as we think we ought to", very few people would sympathize. If they say "piracy costs us umpty-dumpty bazillion bucks", people do, because we can all relate to how it feels to lose something.
Same here. Sun/Oracle could have saved/made $x in this time. I could have won the lottery. I should have received a raise. That nice girl over there ought to have looked at me for longer. Really, what's the difference? It's all hypothetical profit, not the loss of something. You don't lose money, time or love that you never had to begin with.
Now, excuse me, I have several billion dollars to lose in all those lotteries I don't play in. Can you imagine what it costs me every week to not win?
No, it is not. It is "money that we expected, but never made".
Cost is when you have $X and spend some of it. Not when you didn't make as much money as you'd have liked to. Heck, if that were the case, I'd have a couple million in "costs" every year, because where's that damn lottery jackpot that I'm waiting for?
Are you intentionally dense or is english not your first, second or third language?
I didn't doubt that "lost sales" exist.
I do insist to not call them "costs", because they aren't. Calling things by their proper names is a primary requirement for correct understanding and evaluation.
It never ceases to amaze me how some people think that things like files and folders are too confusing for the novice.
You've not looked on any novice desktop lately, have you? Most non-techies appear to stuff everything important unto the desktop itself. Doesn't look very much as if they "get" folders.
A "normal" person can navigate Virgin Megastore but they can't do the same thing with the same content in files and folders?
A normal person is very well equipped with spatial perception and orientation since it comes with the wetware. File and folder thinking doesn't. It may appear natural to you, but it is an acquired skill.
Not really. Good interface design runs deeper than a few aphorisms.
You want consistency within the same context, or in other words: All your light switches should work the same way, as should all your doors. But there's no reason that light switches and doors have to work the same way, and quite a few good reasons why they should work differently.
On a good mutating interface, the general tasks should behave consistently, and Apple is ensuring that with the SDK and UI guidelines as far as possible. e.g. scrolling, clicking, etc. works the same everywhere. But the specific tasks should have their specific input system and interface philosophy.
Can someone please SERIOUSLY ( no pro or anti apple fanaticism please) explain what exactly is so revolutionary about iPhone interface?
A five year old can use it, but it doesn't feel or look childish.
That's it in a nutshell. The interface is pure interface design sweetness. It's a bit like a great music piece - you can't analyse why it's so great because the greatness isn't in the individual notes or pitches or tempo changes, it's in the sum total and how everything fits together just perfectly.
Pfft. Same argument as the RIAA about piracy. "We certainly would have made $x bazillion, if only..."
Please, if you ever want to aspire to anything higher than tabloid journalism, do at the very least two things:
1 - add the word "estimated" or something to that effect when you're pulling figures out of your (or someone elses) ass
2 - do not use the word "cost" for lost sales or other imaginary did-not-happen income. Cost is when an expense has happened, i.e. money has been spent. Money that never came in is never a "cost".
I'm calling bullshit on this one.
Apple goes for "sexy" in everything it does. Tell me where Bing is sexy? It has no appeal whatsoever to anyone I know. Heck, 80% of the people I know probably don't even know what the heck it is and would guess it's a new clothes shop or something.
I also think Apple got into bed with MS once and still feels somewhat sorry about it. After initial great support (IE on Mac is said to have been far better than the windos version) MS did to them what they do to everyone: Let them hang. I doubt that brings them much love from Apple.
Interesting remark. You and I are reading different books, it seems. I don't doubt that even early humans had a lot more than gathering, hunting and mating in their lives. My argument wasn't regarding the contents of their lives, but rather the timeframe and the closeness between effort and reward. From what I've learnt, it wasn't until agriculture and/or herding evolved that timelines of half a year or more between investment and payoff became common. Way too late in human development to have much of an influence on our genes.
Please don't mod parent "Funny".
He's actually pointing out a major cause for mankind's current crisis. No matter if it's financial, political or climate trouble, you can always look at it and find one root cause: All these are issues we are biologically ill-equipped to deal with. Long-term problems with no immediate danger. When the human brain evolved, it didn't have spare room for that kind of processing, except in the general "deal with all the other complicated stuff, if you feel like it" area we call reasoning. Our main problem was not being eaten today, finding a mate soon and getting the tribe to that other place by the end of the month. "Next year" was about as far as our ancestors ever needed to plan, so we don't have any brain matter specialized to doing it. "May hurt me in 10 years time" is a waste of energy to think about when your survival until next week is far from certain.
I didn't say they aren't necessary.
But there's a difference between the guy who brings you coffee and the guy who compiles last quarter's numbers for you. One of the differences is what TFA touched upon: You can outsource and quickly switch the external company for the janitor service. Anyone who's outsourced IT knows that more often than not, the effort involved in the outsourcing dwarves the actual IT effort for that period (and sometimes, several others).
If you run a factory, that's true. In almost every other business, it's not.
IT makes 90% of what goes on in a modern company possible at all. ERP, CRM, CMS and about three dozen other "tools" are as vital to a company today as hammers and workbenches were to a craftsman hundreds of years ago. Janitors aren't. They clean up and we don't want to miss them, but they don't run the company.
IT isn't the brain of most non-tech companies, but it certainly is the heart - it keeps the blood/information flowing through the veins/channels. Going even a few hours without it is noticeable in most companies, IT going down for a day is the corporate equivalent of a heart attack.
You asked a simple question, you deserve a simple answer: Managers.
Over my years in IT, I have seen too many decisions being made by people who haven't updated their IT knowledge for 10 years or so. People who think that "FTP" doesn't stand for "Fuck This Protocol" and to whom SSH is "this new encrypted remote login tool". In addition, crypto is inherently difficult to understand, and a lot (I can't emphasize that enough) managers simply don't support anything they don't understand.
Cisco had the right idea of VPNs and making the whole encryption "thingy" become invisible. Unfortunately, that too required some managers to make decisions.
The only places I've ever seen where encryption is used a) consistently and b) well is where someone very high up understood at least enough about the issue to roll out a general policy or put a security officer in place and gave him authority over such decisions. And then proceeded to fire at least one high-ranking middle-management idiot for violating the policy.
Chairman Mao's policies killed a lot more than 20 million people.
And that is the best argument ever to not repeat that mistake of swinging a huge country around like a startup company, isn't it?
So if you're opposed to China being a democracy you must be a monster too.
I'm not opposed to that. I am opposed to this dumb, dimwitted, look-how-well-it-worked-for-Iraq argument that everyone needs democracy and capitalism right now. Real-life change simply doesn't work like that. In case you forgot, the introduction of democracy into a country not having the cultural or economic background to sustain it is what created WW2.
Oh, please. This is standard procedure in a lawsuit. Since the judges almost always try to get the parties to settle, you don't start with a reasonable demand, you start with the maximum the law allows for, because the other party does the same. Then you meet in the middle.
IANAL but I've done a number of corporate lawsuits, on both sides (suing and being sued). This is just how it works. If you actually get your initial demand, you'd be as surprised as everyone else.
To me, the major issue appears to be that ICANN doesn't have a clear vision on what the purpose of TLD is.
In the past, we had two types of TLDs: One for geographical/political designation (country TLDs) and one for organisation-type designation (.com/.net/.org/.mil/.edu).
The ones they added, and which I think everyone agrees were utterly stupid, are a mix of lobby-dumbness and content designation (.info, .pro, .aero)
What we need is a clear view on what the meaning of the TLD should be. But since we don't get that, because ICANN doesn't have a vision at all, we'll end up with a mess of crap, no matter which way they turn.
I wish we had any politicians left in the west. We don't. What we have is managers. Like all managers, their primary interest is staying on the job and collecting nice salaries, at least until they've build up new and valuable connections and can hop to the next well-paying job.
The word "Politician" includes the greek "polis", which is the body of citizens, or in american terms, "we, the people". If you know of a politician actually interested in the polis, bring him to the nearest endangered species reserve.
The more I think about my own mortality the more I view Religion as a coping mechanism.
Bingo.
Book: "The Golden Bough" by Frazer. Should be required reading in school. Explains very detailed just how religion came to be, and that it evolved out of two very deep desires of man. One is coping with death. The second is having some meaning in and control over the world which to early man was random, uncontrollable and very much frightening.
Agreed.
I think the chinese have taken their Sun Tzu very seriously. They've defeated the west with its own tools: Capitalism. Maybe the west could even defeat China on the battlefield. Right after that, the world economy would collapse, because both fiscal and productive ties to China are so strong.
Yeah, the old "democracy and free markets will solve everything" argument.
Most of the western countries didn't move to democracy without a civil war, revolution or other lots-of-people-dying event.
Do you want a revolution or a civil war in China?
The death toll of the French Revolution is estimated at a million. France has 1/20th the population of China. If you really support the potential death of 20 million people in the name of liberty, democracy and capitalism, then in my book you're a monster.
Ghandi was chinese?
Damn, my geography needs work...
We all "know we are going to die".
Not really, no. I'm serious. One thing that humans are fascinatingly good at is ignoring this "knowledge". There's some brain research that shows evidence of our brains actually being wired up so that we avoid facing this, on very low-levels. In other words: It's not a conscious decision, not even an unconscious one. Runs a lot deeper than that.
So, it's only true for broad definitions of "know". Yes, the fact is recallable from memory. But your brain goes to great lengths to ignore it, and almost always when you actually do recall it, it has about the same emotional impact as last year's sports numbers. Actually, for sports fans, less than that. But it shouldn't. Ever wondered why that is? Now you know. For some definitions of "know". :-)
"to discriminate" merely means to differentiate. And - newsflash - there are functional differences between blind and sighted people.
There are cases of discrimination that are justified, and those that are not. If you believe that, say, black people are not as intelligent as white people, you'd better show your evidence. However, blind, deaf and otherwise disabled people do have a functional difference to the rest of us. Like, they can't see (or hear, etc.).
That's a simple fact.
How we handle that fact is a decision of society. It is not any kind of natural law or right or whatever.
At this point, I feel a bit like saying: "Society has decided to go out of its ways to help you. But don't push it."
I personally don't mind giving disabled people a bit of support. I get very much ticked off when they think they have a right to it.