Obligatory Futurama Quote:
Fry: Oh, God. It's the future. My parents... my co-workers...
my girlfriend... I'll never see any of them again. [Long Pause]... Yahoo!
I live in a rural area and fiber glass cables are running through the street to serve people in another township up the hill. I can't get anything faster than 56k though, we can only get a second line which stinks because of the huge interference (and verizon doesn't want to fix it). And those stupid backward FCC laws which state that EVERYONE should be able to get internet... they state that the minimum acceptable is 14kbits or something along those lines. Because I can on occasion get a whole whopping 30k on 1 line when I connect, Verizon thinks they shouldn't fix the problem. That the internet disconnects when the other phone line rings is not a problem according to them. And yes, I have tried connecting on their box outside, same issues. I have cat5e running through the house for phone and a separate cat5e for network.
That is what the Universal Service Fund is doing for us: getting drained by executives and local politicians speculating whether we should get DSL/Cable (they have been speculating the last 2 years) or if they shouldn't invest in it because a nearby school might get shut down. It is going to take at least 2-3 years before somebody is MAYBE going to connect our houses to the main cable running through our street. Another problem is that the township does not want to give permission to Atlantic BB because they would be a monopoly on the local market then. Verizon could offer DSL but doesn't want to upgrade their sucky phone lines (it costs too much).
I know this because a good friend of mine is an executive for the broadband company and has been in negotiations for the last 2 years. The time negotiations take place are then being brought in by the companies (and probably local politicians too) as expenses for the Universal Service Fund ($100/hour for an executive to go to sit, eat and drink + travelling costs).
Linux already has different filesystems that have implemented the "features" of WinFS for decades. Take ReiserFS, JFS, EXT3... they are all journaled database-like systems. Even some engines in MySQL can do what WinFS wants to do. What Windows REALLY needs is native support for said filesystems, so they can go on with the rest of the world.
Except that Einstein suxored at school especially at maths. Same with me. Only in the last year of my schooling I started to appreciate maths. Not that I am a new Einstein, I'm not interested in mathematics, but you might hear from me again later in the computer (Mac, Linux) world.
If you didn't know, a lot of those people are already dead. Look what happened in Gitmo a few weeks ago: they started commiting suicide and more will follow. What would you do if you were sitting there for 3-5 years and no hope of ever getting out or even getting a trial.
Maybe it's just my imagination or psyche doing this:
All the OS software has those friendly icons. Tux smiles, the GNU gnu smiles, the mozilla dragon smiles, heck even the SuSE animal smiles.
The Closed source software, doesn't want to have anything to do with animals. The Windows "flag" looks kinda like a torn battleflag, the SCO tree looks like you have been drinking for a while and then looked at the tree, passport looks like it wants to invade your wallet. That's just what I noticed...
Ever seen the movie: Time Machine. They start mining the earth about 2050 and then a little later, an accident blows up the moon after which the whole earth gets instable creating 2 species of people, the once that live under the ground and the once that live on the earth.
I for one do "need" an SUV or truck for commuting (1h - 50 miles). I live in a mountaineous area where all year long, deer jump in front of your car or bear are wandering on the roads. Not to mention that I have to go through one of our national park's to get to work, and in the winter (which apparently lasts 6 months over here) I need a 4WD to get over the hill. I have a Tahoe which with all the improvements I made gets about 20-25mpg. I am also quite long (>6ft) thus a roomy car is very easy (the Cavalier of one of my family members does not fit me - knees are up against the steering wheel)
I do agree that in the "big city" you don't need a car like that, I can't imagine why people would even want such a thing in NYC. I even have problems parking in a rural area (I quite often "push" other vehicles with my spare tire when their drivers left too much space) and parrallel parking is quickly learned then.
I also don't know why the initial mileage is so low (it is advertised 10-15mpg). I changed the stock spark plugs & wires, made some alterations to the fuel control chip and put up an aftermarket exhaust and it runs much more economical. Those things needed replaced anyway (a lot of rust thanks to snow and salt). There is also a lot of 'snake oil' for better mileage (and sometimes, you can take that expression literally) but changing oil regularly and not using the "recommended" products seems to help a bit, I have to use fuel system cleaner sometimes also due to the weather (snow getting in your tank while fueling up). Performance and aftermarket parts are way better (especially air & fuel systems) and cheaper than the regular parts. Oh yeah, fuel up in the morning (I have to gas up 6.30 in the morning) I can drive much longer on the same "amount" of gas.
I have been in different companies and someone has to have access as an administrator to install everything. Then again, a lot of management doesn't know what is going on at the IT department and just approves everything 1999 style.
I just changed a few fields in the database I was installing and now my domain name is registered until 2099.
5000 lines / year boils down to about 25 lines / 8 hours, close to 3 lines per hour. What the heck are they doing there. Not to mention that in a big company like that, you have project and code management:
#Source control code # #Windows Vista (forever) v4.4.4
oooh, an hour work
# #This code will open a port so we can control users # main () {
void port(5000)
#I ran into some problem here
# Fixme: crashes randomly
function (open) { } }
Well, I hate to bring it to you, but "Made in the USA" merely means most of the time that the final product was assembled in the USA. The different parts of the product still were made by some slaves in probably worse conditions than brought out in the article. Then all parts are shipped from all over the world (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia) and assembled either by hand thanks to a low-wage (immigrant) worker or by robot in the USA and a sticker: made in the USA. And if you don't believe me, go work for a large fortune xxx company to see for yourself.
Back in the day, I had some 286's laying around and since my smokin' 486's made them obsolete, I took the fan's out and mounted them in a mobile home to blow cool air around. Going to do the same thing in my car. Big deal...
What your parent means is that the corpies HAVE to use it since they are Enterprise licensed for a very good price (read $1m/year for unlimited use of all software products depending on size). I know what parent means, it is stuffed down your throat while other implementations are cheaper and better. I worked at a company like that before. I implemented an Apache server with Linux for parked domains and had to make Apache & Linux reply as they were IIS & W2k3 because M$ was going to revoke their licenses otherwise, they also demanded my resignation.
An example: I currently work at a company and need to integrate AD into some Mac's. One of their AD admins says that the AD & OpenLDAP implementation of my Mac OS X is way better, easier to set up 2x login and 3 small screens and has some nice features that they don't even have in the Windows world (eg. the appointing of a group in AD to administer the local settings of the computer while they still don't have to have special rights in the AD).
Well, I work at an office implementing Sarbanes-Oxley on their environment (auditing, removing administrator rights). One of the department managers doesn't like it very much and gives me problems. It's not only the users you have to educate (because they are dumb) but sometimes you have to go through a whole lot of problems to implement something after which a rogue manager with some administrator rights destroys it own handed.
that the cost of outsourcing is higher than the hype tells it to be. A lot of businesses try to outsource to India, and while it might work better for some companies, I guess the cost of a = inferior customer satisfaction and b = more people needed for the same work equals c = higher costs in the long run. And since a is more important for Apple they've seen outsourcing is not a good idea.
Don't get me wrong over b, I guess there are great people out there, but first of all: they don't speak English very well (ever called an outsourced helpdesk and you know), second of all: they are not educated as we in the westerner countries, so they need to be educated more and longer on the job while we are supposed to get that education through our schools. It's not the inhabitants fault, but India is pretty close to a 3rd world country.
Next to that they also have a higher constant cost. TFA mentions shipping over some people for education in the states. They can do it 2 ways: ship someone from west -> east and pay big $$$ (250k/year) for someone willing to do that and ship over his family and belongings back and forth every 3-6 months for 30k/year and cover the costs over there for 50k/year. Or ship 20 people every month from east -> west for 2 weeks and cover their costs for 400k/year.
If you don't do it yourself and outsource your outsourcing to a "specialized" company, you'll see that the costs equal the costs you have here but without the hassle of outsourcing, keeping your customers happy only thing is that you have to keep in account the unions.
I don't know, while outsourcing could be helping keeping costs down, I think the only thing that should be outsourced is labour by hand without customer contact. This is not because the people over there don't have brains, but simply because of the differences in language and culture. They are trying to fix that too, but what do you think when you call the D-Link helpdesk and "Bob" speaks with an Indian accent and ask how the weather is down there in Ohio? Yes, they have cue sheets with different lines that people in the US would use, but it just sounds wrong, try it.
And just so I wouldn't break Godwin's law: why didn't hitler outsource his stuff to India?
In the EU you can't get something for free (anti-monopolistic laws) so it has to be either inherited in the price or billed to the people.
That means that I still get billed, no matter how loud they yell "free SMS" for the subscription or the card, there is a maximum number of SMS I can send for that. Usually it costs about 5-15cents but could cost up to 1.5E per message. I get billed for that and since it's not a necessity I get taxed the highest possible rate (21% in Belgium). So now they want to tax extra per message? And why would that be? It's as stupid as the tax they have to pay for EMPTY MEDIA (yes, there is a special extra tax per disc) so-said to help the artists that lose money because you copy their stuff on such discs. Even if I burn my Ubuntu CD on that disc, I get taxed, even if they are just for backups.
that XML, the technology they have tried to push through ASP,.NET & Web (all v2.0) and other gimmicks that survive for only a day is all of a sudden too slow and has to be converted into BINARY XML for crying out loud for better performance.
That means in my latest Ajax application, I have to get my server convert my data to a binary format, send it to the client who has to unconvert it into real text and a decent XML. I don't understand but imho are open things (documents, actually any representation of data) in plain text handled better with less overhead than binary data that is impossible to alter without a Hex editor.
They usually run MS Windows on it, the US government should be more suspicious about MS opening their source code to some chinese government than the chinese putting a special chip in it.
The point is: China actually DOES have WMD, similar to the ones the USA has or even better. I think the current ruler of Iran also has a good point: USA wants us to point and remove WMD, we want them to do the same thing... now, in the American press he is being painted worse as Saddam but I know people who come from the regime of Saddam and they said that, as long as Saddam was in power, they had a relatively good life.
Right now, they don't have anything anymore and anything they do have gets taken by some or another clan or tribe. Of course, the "good life" comes with certain restrictions, but Saddam had a pretty good hand in the different clans/tribes and the overall stability of the country.
And since we're blaming Saddam for his torture: See what happens in Guantanamo Bay and many other 'off-shore' american prisons. And since we're blaming Saddam for his WMD: The USA alone has enough WMD power spread throughout the world to destroy the whole world population several times (as if once is not enough) And since we're blaming Saddam for his religious intolerance: John Ashcroft anyone? You can find tons of court actions from certain religions against cities, states and even up until the high court for different religions being limited in their activities. We won't even start talking about things like free speech etc.
Really, even I can smell an awful ammonia smell whenever I open up my spindle of CDR's but I know if you put cayenne pepper where a dog has to smell, that kills them quite quickly when done regularly. My grandparents dog came up their porch and pee-ed all over it all the time. They used cayenne pepper and after about a week the dog had his 4 paws in the air.
Go to the bulk barn and get black pepper (still in tact, not ground up already) and an assortment of chillie peppers, cayanne peppers, and anything else that makes your eyes water when you open the big bulk lids! When you get home, grind up the black peppers as you use them (they will be fresher and more effective). Mix the black and various other peppers together in a sandwich bag, and then spread it in your garden wherever the dogs/cat go. They always sniff first, and they will get a nose full of pepper and go away unhappy. You will have to repaet every few days for about two week. The dogs remember not to go to your lawn because of the peppers after a few times. You will end up spending as little as $5.00 or less. A little goes a long way.
It is required in Sarbanes-Oxley. I know because I have to implement it. But apparently the government was exempt from those laws?
Obligatory Futurama Quote: Fry: Oh, God. It's the future. My parents ... my co-workers ...
my girlfriend ... I'll never see any of them again. [Long Pause] ... Yahoo!
I live in a rural area and fiber glass cables are running through the street to serve people in another township up the hill. I can't get anything faster than 56k though, we can only get a second line which stinks because of the huge interference (and verizon doesn't want to fix it). And those stupid backward FCC laws which state that EVERYONE should be able to get internet... they state that the minimum acceptable is 14kbits or something along those lines. Because I can on occasion get a whole whopping 30k on 1 line when I connect, Verizon thinks they shouldn't fix the problem. That the internet disconnects when the other phone line rings is not a problem according to them. And yes, I have tried connecting on their box outside, same issues. I have cat5e running through the house for phone and a separate cat5e for network. That is what the Universal Service Fund is doing for us: getting drained by executives and local politicians speculating whether we should get DSL/Cable (they have been speculating the last 2 years) or if they shouldn't invest in it because a nearby school might get shut down. It is going to take at least 2-3 years before somebody is MAYBE going to connect our houses to the main cable running through our street. Another problem is that the township does not want to give permission to Atlantic BB because they would be a monopoly on the local market then. Verizon could offer DSL but doesn't want to upgrade their sucky phone lines (it costs too much). I know this because a good friend of mine is an executive for the broadband company and has been in negotiations for the last 2 years. The time negotiations take place are then being brought in by the companies (and probably local politicians too) as expenses for the Universal Service Fund ($100/hour for an executive to go to sit, eat and drink + travelling costs).
Linux already has different filesystems that have implemented the "features" of WinFS for decades. Take ReiserFS, JFS, EXT3... they are all journaled database-like systems. Even some engines in MySQL can do what WinFS wants to do. What Windows REALLY needs is native support for said filesystems, so they can go on with the rest of the world.
Except that Einstein suxored at school especially at maths. Same with me. Only in the last year of my schooling I started to appreciate maths. Not that I am a new Einstein, I'm not interested in mathematics, but you might hear from me again later in the computer (Mac, Linux) world.
If you didn't know, a lot of those people are already dead. Look what happened in Gitmo a few weeks ago: they started commiting suicide and more will follow. What would you do if you were sitting there for 3-5 years and no hope of ever getting out or even getting a trial.
Maybe it's just my imagination or psyche doing this:
All the OS software has those friendly icons. Tux smiles, the GNU gnu smiles, the mozilla dragon smiles, heck even the SuSE animal smiles.
The Closed source software, doesn't want to have anything to do with animals. The Windows "flag" looks kinda like a torn battleflag, the SCO tree looks like you have been drinking for a while and then looked at the tree, passport looks like it wants to invade your wallet. That's just what I noticed...
Ever seen the movie: Time Machine. They start mining the earth about 2050 and then a little later, an accident blows up the moon after which the whole earth gets instable creating 2 species of people, the once that live under the ground and the once that live on the earth.
The only cure for MS is Linux
I for one do "need" an SUV or truck for commuting (1h - 50 miles). I live in a mountaineous area where all year long, deer jump in front of your car or bear are wandering on the roads. Not to mention that I have to go through one of our national park's to get to work, and in the winter (which apparently lasts 6 months over here) I need a 4WD to get over the hill. I have a Tahoe which with all the improvements I made gets about 20-25mpg. I am also quite long (>6ft) thus a roomy car is very easy (the Cavalier of one of my family members does not fit me - knees are up against the steering wheel)
I do agree that in the "big city" you don't need a car like that, I can't imagine why people would even want such a thing in NYC. I even have problems parking in a rural area (I quite often "push" other vehicles with my spare tire when their drivers left too much space) and parrallel parking is quickly learned then.
I also don't know why the initial mileage is so low (it is advertised 10-15mpg). I changed the stock spark plugs & wires, made some alterations to the fuel control chip and put up an aftermarket exhaust and it runs much more economical. Those things needed replaced anyway (a lot of rust thanks to snow and salt). There is also a lot of 'snake oil' for better mileage (and sometimes, you can take that expression literally) but changing oil regularly and not using the "recommended" products seems to help a bit, I have to use fuel system cleaner sometimes also due to the weather (snow getting in your tank while fueling up). Performance and aftermarket parts are way better (especially air & fuel systems) and cheaper than the regular parts. Oh yeah, fuel up in the morning (I have to gas up 6.30 in the morning) I can drive much longer on the same "amount" of gas.
I have been in different companies and someone has to have access as an administrator to install everything. Then again, a lot of management doesn't know what is going on at the IT department and just approves everything 1999 style.
I just changed a few fields in the database I was installing and now my domain name is registered until 2099.
Good bye and thanks for all the fish, now that all the mass of them darn dolphin's are gone, the water dropped by 2mm. Easy explanation.
The end is near - I knew it.
5000 lines / year boils down to about 25 lines / 8 hours, close to 3 lines per hour. What the heck are they doing there. Not to mention that in a big company like that, you have project and code management:
#Source control code
#
#Windows Vista (forever) v4.4.4
oooh, an hour work
#
#This code will open a port so we can control users
#
main () {
void port(5000)
#I ran into some problem here
# Fixme: crashes randomly
function (open) {
}
}
OK, time for lunch...
Well, I hate to bring it to you, but "Made in the USA" merely means most of the time that the final product was assembled in the USA. The different parts of the product still were made by some slaves in probably worse conditions than brought out in the article. Then all parts are shipped from all over the world (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia) and assembled either by hand thanks to a low-wage (immigrant) worker or by robot in the USA and a sticker: made in the USA. And if you don't believe me, go work for a large fortune xxx company to see for yourself.
Back in the day, I had some 286's laying around and since my smokin' 486's made them obsolete, I took the fan's out and mounted them in a mobile home to blow cool air around. Going to do the same thing in my car. Big deal...
What your parent means is that the corpies HAVE to use it since they are Enterprise licensed for a very good price (read $1m/year for unlimited use of all software products depending on size). I know what parent means, it is stuffed down your throat while other implementations are cheaper and better. I worked at a company like that before. I implemented an Apache server with Linux for parked domains and had to make Apache & Linux reply as they were IIS & W2k3 because M$ was going to revoke their licenses otherwise, they also demanded my resignation.
An example: I currently work at a company and need to integrate AD into some Mac's. One of their AD admins says that the AD & OpenLDAP implementation of my Mac OS X is way better, easier to set up 2x login and 3 small screens and has some nice features that they don't even have in the Windows world (eg. the appointing of a group in AD to administer the local settings of the computer while they still don't have to have special rights in the AD).
Well, I work at an office implementing Sarbanes-Oxley on their environment (auditing, removing administrator rights). One of the department managers doesn't like it very much and gives me problems. It's not only the users you have to educate (because they are dumb) but sometimes you have to go through a whole lot of problems to implement something after which a rogue manager with some administrator rights destroys it own handed.
that the cost of outsourcing is higher than the hype tells it to be. A lot of businesses try to outsource to India, and while it might work better for some companies, I guess the cost of a = inferior customer satisfaction and b = more people needed for the same work equals c = higher costs in the long run. And since a is more important for Apple they've seen outsourcing is not a good idea.
Don't get me wrong over b, I guess there are great people out there, but first of all: they don't speak English very well (ever called an outsourced helpdesk and you know), second of all: they are not educated as we in the westerner countries, so they need to be educated more and longer on the job while we are supposed to get that education through our schools. It's not the inhabitants fault, but India is pretty close to a 3rd world country.
Next to that they also have a higher constant cost. TFA mentions shipping over some people for education in the states. They can do it 2 ways: ship someone from west -> east and pay big $$$ (250k/year) for someone willing to do that and ship over his family and belongings back and forth every 3-6 months for 30k/year and cover the costs over there for 50k/year. Or ship 20 people every month from east -> west for 2 weeks and cover their costs for 400k/year.
If you don't do it yourself and outsource your outsourcing to a "specialized" company, you'll see that the costs equal the costs you have here but without the hassle of outsourcing, keeping your customers happy only thing is that you have to keep in account the unions.
I don't know, while outsourcing could be helping keeping costs down, I think the only thing that should be outsourced is labour by hand without customer contact. This is not because the people over there don't have brains, but simply because of the differences in language and culture. They are trying to fix that too, but what do you think when you call the D-Link helpdesk and "Bob" speaks with an Indian accent and ask how the weather is down there in Ohio? Yes, they have cue sheets with different lines that people in the US would use, but it just sounds wrong, try it.
And just so I wouldn't break Godwin's law: why didn't hitler outsource his stuff to India?
What if no one shot first, then there would be no shooting.
That's what I have my iBook/PowerBook for. Ooh, such a cute and small thingy. Is that really a computer? It looks soooo cute. OMG Pony's.
In the EU you can't get something for free (anti-monopolistic laws) so it has to be either inherited in the price or billed to the people.
That means that I still get billed, no matter how loud they yell "free SMS" for the subscription or the card, there is a maximum number of SMS I can send for that. Usually it costs about 5-15cents but could cost up to 1.5E per message. I get billed for that and since it's not a necessity I get taxed the highest possible rate (21% in Belgium). So now they want to tax extra per message? And why would that be? It's as stupid as the tax they have to pay for EMPTY MEDIA (yes, there is a special extra tax per disc) so-said to help the artists that lose money because you copy their stuff on such discs. Even if I burn my Ubuntu CD on that disc, I get taxed, even if they are just for backups.
that XML, the technology they have tried to push through ASP, .NET & Web (all v2.0) and other gimmicks that survive for only a day is all of a sudden too slow and has to be converted into BINARY XML for crying out loud for better performance.
That means in my latest Ajax application, I have to get my server convert my data to a binary format, send it to the client who has to unconvert it into real text and a decent XML. I don't understand but imho are open things (documents, actually any representation of data) in plain text handled better with less overhead than binary data that is impossible to alter without a Hex editor.
They usually run MS Windows on it, the US government should be more suspicious about MS opening their source code to some chinese government than the chinese putting a special chip in it.
The point is: China actually DOES have WMD, similar to the ones the USA has or even better. I think the current ruler of Iran also has a good point: USA wants us to point and remove WMD, we want them to do the same thing... now, in the American press he is being painted worse as Saddam but I know people who come from the regime of Saddam and they said that, as long as Saddam was in power, they had a relatively good life.
Right now, they don't have anything anymore and anything they do have gets taken by some or another clan or tribe. Of course, the "good life" comes with certain restrictions, but Saddam had a pretty good hand in the different clans/tribes and the overall stability of the country.
And since we're blaming Saddam for his torture: See what happens in Guantanamo Bay and many other 'off-shore' american prisons.
And since we're blaming Saddam for his WMD: The USA alone has enough WMD power spread throughout the world to destroy the whole world population several times (as if once is not enough)
And since we're blaming Saddam for his religious intolerance: John Ashcroft anyone? You can find tons of court actions from certain religions against cities, states and even up until the high court for different religions being limited in their activities.
We won't even start talking about things like free speech etc.
Really, even I can smell an awful ammonia smell whenever I open up my spindle of CDR's but I know if you put cayenne pepper where a dog has to smell, that kills them quite quickly when done regularly. My grandparents dog came up their porch and pee-ed all over it all the time. They used cayenne pepper and after about a week the dog had his 4 paws in the air.
Go to the bulk barn and get black pepper (still in tact, not ground up already) and an assortment of chillie peppers, cayanne peppers, and anything else that makes your eyes water when you open the big bulk lids! When you get home, grind up the black peppers as you use them (they will be fresher and more effective). Mix the black and various other peppers together in a sandwich bag, and then spread it in your garden wherever the dogs/cat go. They always sniff first, and they will get a nose full of pepper and go away unhappy. You will have to repaet every few days for about two week. The dogs remember not to go to your lawn because of the peppers after a few times. You will end up spending as little as $5.00 or less. A little goes a long way.