Well, if you think of "mobile" as being the brightly colored toy you dangle above babies to keep them entertained then this makes a certain amount of sense...
...soon as you pulled out in a show of spite, EU governments would stop protecting your commercial rights to your products. Presto! Legal (well, quasi-legal) pirating! And as thousands of european hackers thumb their noses at you, WELL-CRACKED versions of your software start to contaminate your home market back here, much like the cracked software we see from China and Iran right now.
Those markets don't even need to be profitable in and of themselves. It's important to chase them even if just to reduce the sheer volume of hackers cracking your products.
You can't just take the community as a whole, and assume it has widespread adoption as a primary goal.
I don't have a strong opinion here (I use Windows, and Bill hasn't told me what my opinion is, yet) but maybe it should be the primary goal. Widespread adoption would lead to positive benefits for you, wouldn't it?
Think of the available Internet bandwidth if all of the zombie Windows spam machines and virus spewers were on more secure Linux OSs. That would be good for everybody.
Think of the game software that would be able to run on Linux natively. Not thousands of titles, but hundreds of thousands in the coming decades.
Heck, you're obviously bright. I'm sure you can think of many more benefits from widespread adoption than I could (remember, I use Windows). Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth.
From the article: ...it would be more like the shielding used by the Romulans in the Star Trek episode "Balance of Terror" in 1966, which hid their spaceships at the push of a button.
...it's called a "cloaking device", you insensitive clod!
It is not a 'magic cloak,' however, because it will not work for the full range of visible light and needs to be adjusted precisely for the shape of the object.
...I think it's not a 'magic cloak' because magic only works in books and movies.
...the cost of quality cable or satellite programming has gone up, but the quality has been on a steady decline because of the loss of ad revenue.
Another byproduct of this is that we continue to see more advertising per unit of content. I recently discovered that new DVDs have previews at the beginning that I cannot skip. WTF, I already paid them for their content, now I have to have commercials to watch a DVD that I own? Do I really have to rip all of my own DVDs and re-burn them without commercials?
I replied without logging in a second ago. Here it is under my name.
...are you another one of their muppets that have never been out of the USA?
Well, I've been to France, Germany, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Israel, Spain, Monaco, and Puerto Rico. I've also been to St Thomas in the Virgin Islands, which certainly felt like a foreign country. I've always wanted to visit England and Ireland, but that hasn't happened yet.
...muppets...
Did you really ask me if I was a cloth covered puppet? Dictionary.com says muppet also means a stupid person. Well, my IQ usually tests at about 150 to 160, but that's hardly authoritative. I graduated from university Magna Cum Laude, but again, hardly authoritative. I guess you'll have to judge for yourself.
As far as discriminating against you, no, I probably wouldn't. The US and UK have a more balanced trade relationship, in addition to the vast amounts of shared culture. You face similar costs of living to mine. We can compete. Not so someone living in the third world.
You are right that I just assumed that the OP was American. The whine sounded familiar.
And what if the rest of the world decided to take the same attitude as you?
...there's next to zero opportunity round here for coders...
Maybe if UK took a little bit of my attitude there would be more opportunity round there? Look, I'm no fan of isolationism or tarrifs, but I recognize that offshoring leads to the same types of problems globally that the Walmart Economy causes locally. I just think that it's terribly shortsited to deplete the capital pool faster than its natural rate of growth. The current trend of offshoring is not balanced. This will be ameliorated when the (American) Baby Boomers begin to move out of the workforce en masse.
Hey, I'm sorry if I offended you.
Dang, this was a long post.
On the other hand, if this is in fact a case of a foreign company blowing off the job, the original poster is unlikely to ever recover any of their funds. Unless the service provider is a really big firm or posted a performance bond somewhere (unlikely), the company probably has no cash to seize, and the assets (if any) are going to be valued at near zero. Sue all you want; they'll just shrug and smile.
In future offshoring efforts, either find a bonded provider (with good terms on the bond) or agree to complete payment on complete acceptance. Alternatively, you could just find people who help support your Social Security system, national defense, and infrastructure and pay THEM to work for you. (We call them Americans, and they're bound by the same laws you are! Neat, huh?)
Dude, don't be so negative. It's news to some of us because we haven't seen it before. It matters because we like to see smart people doing smart things. These people were creative and determined, maybe that will inspire others to to try cool things, as well.
Well, I read about half of it. This guy, IMO, is not a great writer, nor a great bearer of insight into the issues involved (NS is both). A lot of his 'annotations' sound like he's just trying to argue with NS. I think the 'monkey' part was imaginative, but most of the rest was dreck. I don't think this guy was a good choice to update NS's work.
Our current administration responds with typical aplomb. Citing the use of Weapons of Mass Defecation, the Dept of Homeland Security responds with large quantities of Alka Seltzer, probably administered by thousands of H1B visa holders and former Enron employees.
Cheney hails Bush for his brilliantly combined Defense/Economic package, sewing up the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination.
I can hear it now: "Cheney's great in 2-K-8!"
I think I just scared myself.
Re:For what it's worth...
on
Inside TechTV/G4
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't want to start an argument here, so please forgive me for seeming pedantic.
I would respectfully suggest that if your performance indicators and performance bonuses are encouraging behaviors that result in your show going off the air, or losing your core audience without creating a similarly robust replacement, then you are using the wrong indicators. So, maybe the management failure is not in the control booth. Maybe it's in the front office, or in the corporate headquarters.
If the financial requirements cause you to degrade the quality of your product, then either your product is not ready for the market (or vice versa) or you have not been sufficiently creative in your market planning. Bringing the business side and the 'entertainment' side together is the job of management.
At least, that's the way the schools I attend teach it. Anyway, thanks for listening.
For what it's worth...
on
Inside TechTV/G4
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't think people are shocked that it happened, but I do think it's good to get the straight scoop about how the situation evolved.
As a moderately geeky business major, I see this as a management failure, so having this story helps me understand how not to screw up something good. If some geeky broadcast majors read this article, maybe they can help prevent some other geeky goodness from failing later.
From th article: According to the study, an hour of time spent using the Internet reduces face-to-face contact with friends, co-workers and family by 23.5 minutes, lowers the amount of time spent watching television by 10 minutes and shortens sleep by 8.5 minutes.
Looks like a good way to gain about 18 minutes/hour...
Actually, I just read that several of their suppliers have started to resist the rfid implementation because of cost and poor performance. I think they said that the rfids were only getting about 60% accuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, are an idiot.
Well, if you think of "mobile" as being the brightly colored toy you dangle above babies to keep them entertained then this makes a certain amount of sense...
... do we like the french, now?
I have an AOL email account, so I expect to be still getting spam a thousand years from now.
It's...in my head... Disco... Please... For the love of God... Someone help me! AAAAA...
...soon as you pulled out in a show of spite, EU governments would stop protecting your commercial rights to your products. Presto! Legal (well, quasi-legal) pirating! And as thousands of european hackers thumb their noses at you, WELL-CRACKED versions of your software start to contaminate your home market back here, much like the cracked software we see from China and Iran right now.
Those markets don't even need to be profitable in and of themselves. It's important to chase them even if just to reduce the sheer volume of hackers cracking your products.
Ethics be damned...
Best...subject line...ever...
Is that sort of like being less bloated?
More like much, much, MUCH less bloated.
You can't just take the community as a whole, and assume it has widespread adoption as a primary goal.
I don't have a strong opinion here (I use Windows, and Bill hasn't told me what my opinion is, yet) but maybe it should be the primary goal. Widespread adoption would lead to positive benefits for you, wouldn't it?
Think of the available Internet bandwidth if all of the zombie Windows spam machines and virus spewers were on more secure Linux OSs. That would be good for everybody.
Think of the game software that would be able to run on Linux natively. Not thousands of titles, but hundreds of thousands in the coming decades.
Heck, you're obviously bright. I'm sure you can think of many more benefits from widespread adoption than I could (remember, I use Windows). Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth.
From the article:
...it would be more like the shielding used by the Romulans in the Star Trek episode "Balance of Terror" in 1966, which hid their spaceships at the push of a button.
...it's called a "cloaking device", you insensitive clod!
It is not a 'magic cloak,' however, because it will not work for the full range of visible light and needs to be adjusted precisely for the shape of the object.
...I think it's not a 'magic cloak' because magic only works in books and movies.
...the cost of quality cable or satellite programming has gone up, but the quality has been on a steady decline because of the loss of ad revenue.
Another byproduct of this is that we continue to see more advertising per unit of content. I recently discovered that new DVDs have previews at the beginning that I cannot skip. WTF, I already paid them for their content, now I have to have commercials to watch a DVD that I own? Do I really have to rip all of my own DVDs and re-burn them without commercials?
Lame. Very lame.
...but how fast can it open Photoshop CS?
...to the age-old question:
"Are we mice, or are we men?"
I replied without logging in a second ago. Here it is under my name.
...are you another one of their muppets that have never been out of the USA?
...muppets...
...there's next to zero opportunity round here for coders...
Well, I've been to France, Germany, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Israel, Spain, Monaco, and Puerto Rico. I've also been to St Thomas in the Virgin Islands, which certainly felt like a foreign country. I've always wanted to visit England and Ireland, but that hasn't happened yet.
Did you really ask me if I was a cloth covered puppet? Dictionary.com says muppet also means a stupid person. Well, my IQ usually tests at about 150 to 160, but that's hardly authoritative. I graduated from university Magna Cum Laude, but again, hardly authoritative. I guess you'll have to judge for yourself.
As far as discriminating against you, no, I probably wouldn't. The US and UK have a more balanced trade relationship, in addition to the vast amounts of shared culture. You face similar costs of living to mine. We can compete. Not so someone living in the third world.
You are right that I just assumed that the OP was American. The whine sounded familiar.
And what if the rest of the world decided to take the same attitude as you?
Maybe if UK took a little bit of my attitude there would be more opportunity round there? Look, I'm no fan of isolationism or tarrifs, but I recognize that offshoring leads to the same types of problems globally that the Walmart Economy causes locally. I just think that it's terribly shortsited to deplete the capital pool faster than its natural rate of growth. The current trend of offshoring is not balanced. This will be ameliorated when the (American) Baby Boomers begin to move out of the workforce en masse. Hey, I'm sorry if I offended you. Dang, this was a long post.
On the other hand, if this is in fact a case of a foreign company blowing off the job, the original poster is unlikely to ever recover any of their funds. Unless the service provider is a really big firm or posted a performance bond somewhere (unlikely), the company probably has no cash to seize, and the assets (if any) are going to be valued at near zero. Sue all you want; they'll just shrug and smile.
In future offshoring efforts, either find a bonded provider (with good terms on the bond) or agree to complete payment on complete acceptance. Alternatively, you could just find people who help support your Social Security system, national defense, and infrastructure and pay THEM to work for you. (We call them Americans, and they're bound by the same laws you are! Neat, huh?)
Dude, don't be so negative.
It's news to some of us because we haven't seen it before.
It matters because we like to see smart people doing smart things.
These people were creative and determined, maybe that will inspire others to to try cool things, as well.
Well, I read about half of it. This guy, IMO, is not a great writer, nor a great bearer of insight into the issues involved (NS is both). A lot of his 'annotations' sound like he's just trying to argue with NS. I think the 'monkey' part was imaginative, but most of the rest was dreck. I don't think this guy was a good choice to update NS's work.
I think I just read about these guys in The Da Vinci Code.
Our current administration responds with typical aplomb. Citing the use of Weapons of Mass Defecation, the Dept of Homeland Security responds with large quantities of Alka Seltzer, probably administered by thousands of H1B visa holders and former Enron employees. Cheney hails Bush for his brilliantly combined Defense/Economic package, sewing up the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination. I can hear it now: "Cheney's great in 2-K-8!" I think I just scared myself.
I don't want to start an argument here, so please forgive me for seeming pedantic.
I would respectfully suggest that if your performance indicators and performance bonuses are encouraging behaviors that result in your show going off the air, or losing your core audience without creating a similarly robust replacement, then you are using the wrong indicators. So, maybe the management failure is not in the control booth. Maybe it's in the front office, or in the corporate headquarters.
If the financial requirements cause you to degrade the quality of your product, then either your product is not ready for the market (or vice versa) or you have not been sufficiently creative in your market planning. Bringing the business side and the 'entertainment' side together is the job of management.
At least, that's the way the schools I attend teach it. Anyway, thanks for listening.
I don't think people are shocked that it happened, but I do think it's good to get the straight scoop about how the situation evolved.
As a moderately geeky business major, I see this as a management failure, so having this story helps me understand how not to screw up something good. If some geeky broadcast majors read this article, maybe they can help prevent some other geeky goodness from failing later.
Just my two cents worth.
From th article:
According to the study, an hour of time spent using the Internet reduces face-to-face contact with friends, co-workers and family by 23.5 minutes, lowers the amount of time spent watching television by 10 minutes and shortens sleep by 8.5 minutes.
Looks like a good way to gain about 18 minutes/hour...
...becoming ridiculous?
Actually, I just read that several of their suppliers have started to resist the rfid implementation because of cost and poor performance. I think they said that the rfids were only getting about 60% accuracy.