There are plenty of ways to cut costs ethically. These guys tried to take an unethical shortcut and it bit them. As for quality suffering, the process of cost reduction in ANY product will sometimes take a wrong turn here or there. But if you take a look at almost any product category in 2003 and compare it to, say 1973, I think you will find that the products are higher quality at lower prices. Thank goodness for "rampant commercialism".
Agreed. It's the "genetic diversity" thing again. Yes there are some cost benefits to having 150 of the same model from a maintenance standpoint, but this capacitor issue is a perfect example of why it can be dangerous as well. At the very least you might want to buy the same model in small batches over time to minimize the chance that you got all of them with the same set of defects. The only good thing is that Dell will make good in some way or lose you as a customer.
Whatever happened to Columbia occured in flight, and the damage was therefore unpreventable.
Just s/Columbia/Challenger/ and you'll see that statement doesn't hold water. Should they have launched Columbia at all?
NASA has already said they had problems in the past with insulation falling off the booster tank. We don't know the details of those failure modes yet, but what if the problem was that moisture gets behind the insulation, condenses as ice on the tank surface, and then forcibly separates a chunk of insulation from the tank with ice attached? How much flaking of ice-covered insulation was considered acceptable before it became a safety risk?
There had been an o-ring malfunction before (one of the two rings in a joint was burned through), but it happened in warm weather, to which NASA middle management said "see, it's not cold related," and the engineers didn't have a good response to that argument. Like it or not, you have to be able to prove your argument to win it.
Pulleeeze. My argument would have been "Things shrink when they get cold, Mr. PHB. If you need proof, take a look down next time you get out of the pool."
The "3rd party extensions" they are referring to are Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), so yes that will help to neuter a lot of spyware. I think this option was added in IE6. You'll still need to disable any companion background programs using MSConfig or some other utility.
Yes, patches break things, even if they are very well tested. However, after some amount of testing you would hope that 99% of people would be able to install the patch without problem and maybe 1% would have problems of some sort. Given a large enough installed base, of course, this could add up to hundreds or even thousands of hosed installations. But, it would also result in thousands or millions of patched installations.
This is similar to vaccinations that are required by law in many countries. If we give those vaccinations we know that some small fraction (much less than 1%) will have complications or even death from them. However, if we don't give the vaccinations and enough people are susceptible to a particular disease, we risk having an entire society put out of commission and many more deaths as a result.
So, if you are running a data center in the post-SQL-Slammer era, are you going to get too far behind on critical security patches? I hope not. But what if your customers don't want to take the downtime to install the patch, or what if the patch causes problems on their system?
For several years I have been using spam-magnet accounts like hotmail.com and yahoo.com. I feel like Elaine in that episode of Seinfeld when she finds out her favorite form of birth control (The Sponge) is being taken off the market. She hoards all she can find and then has to decide if every guy she meets is "spongeworthy". That's what we are all trying to do with our email accounts, trying to decide who to give the primo ones and who gets the seldom-checked Hotmail address.
Due to some friends getting Klez, my "good" emails have leaked out and are receiving spam. So no matter what you do the email shell game is not a complete strategy for spam management.
In your case I think that address is so worthless at this point that you're going to have to give up on it. Put a vacation message on it and move on.
Darn, I'm not a mod right now or you'd be +1 richer.
If you make it easy for users to file bug reports they'll do a lot of the work for you. Yes, someone needs to remove duplicates and separate out the feature requests but the bugs that really count are the ones that your users are seeing.
If you're looking to exterminate crash-type bugs, you might check into BugToaster. The basic data is free for the taking on their site, but detailed reports will cost you.
>> That Time Warner executive should have been fired.
Great plan, if you want to see Time Warner die. Once employees know the penalty for thinking outside the corporate party line is immediate dismissal, you'll get a company full of managers who are too timid to challenge any decision regardless of how stupid it seems to be.
Well-reasoned dissent and debate is important to any decision making process. The site is slashdotted so I can't read the original article, but is it just possible that MS is encouraging such debate internally to see whose arguments hold water?
I've seen people expect the back button works that way, and they've been confused when they click Back multiple tims and it doesn't show them all the pages they have been to. However, I don't see that the "new" approach offers that many benefits. The pattern of previous page visits is a tree. Any approach that tries to flatten out a tree is going to surprise (or annoy) someone. Most browsers have a History feature that lets you see where you've been and that works a lot like the proposed Back design.
What you are proposing would require a Flux Capacitor.:-)
Re:Like a lawyer?
on
Complications
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In most cases the doctor you go to first is your family doctor. Unless it's some life-threatening thing they will recommend tests and medication, exercise, etc to see if the condition resolves. If the problem doesn't resolve then they may refer you to a surgeon. When you get to the surgeon they will do their own evaluation but most likely will agree with your family doctor that surgery is the right path. So a good part the reason that surgeons recommend surgery is that their referrals are from other doctors who believe their patients need surgery!
As for lawyers, very few would recommend that you sue for most disputes until you've tried a few letters or other ways of resolving the issue. The big liability cases get all the press because the numbers are so big (at least for the lawyers) but those are rare compared to everyday legal matters.
Click "Start | Programs | Administrative Tools | Services". Find the "Messenger" service on the list, stop it, and set it to "Disabled". Would you be more likely to download some bloated 4MB patch from Windows Update that did the same thing? Would you prefer a desktop icon that turns it off, right next to your "Free AOL and Internet" icon?
Before we had kids, my wife and I both spent long hours working and I could not really understand people who weren't "committed to their jobs". After kids, our hours aren't as long because of other commitments (ballet, bowling, music lessons, play dates, etc) and I'm a bit more sympathetic to those people. It's changed our lives a lot and there's no way we could have seen the whole impact except to live through it.
Anyway, you've both decided that you want kids badly enough to adopt them. I assume you want to spend some time with them, but you're planning on taking a second job. When will you spend time with the kids? Instead of increasing revenue, can you maybe reduce expenses? I'm not trying to be mean or judgemental here, just want to make sure that you realize the tradeoff you are making.
It's also entirely possible that the MSN upgrade has nothing to do with this problem. It sounds like some piece of software is insisting on an Internet connection. This is very common with many viruses and spyware that wants to phone home. Have you checked for viruses and spyware? If your dad installed syware like Gator you could see this behavior, for example.
It's certainly possible to make good interfaces to facilitate debugging binary-only code. Most likely the kernel developers have decided that their time is better spent in other places, rather than making life easier for the binary-only module developers. =That decision is made easier by open source bias, of course, and the lack of a large user constituency that would be intolerant of breaking old apps.
If Linux ever becomes a mass-market operating system, the kernel developers are going to have to reprioritize things. Imagine telling a company with 10,000 Linux desktops that they would have to fix, recompile, retest, and redeploy a major in-house app because a deprecated kernel interface had been removed. Linux can make these kind of changes only because it's not yet mainstream.
Antivirus software just cannot detect it. That's because you gave permission to install it via some sneaky click-wrap license. You know, those ones you never read? AV companies have the technology, but they would probably get their pants sued off if they called another company's product malicious when it was merely annoying or nosy--and when the user supposedly consented to it being there.
The wintel world (win9x) needs something that can get Gator and friends out the door. There are plenty of them already, like Pest Patrol, Spybot S&D, and Ad Aware.
Great idea, guys! If the OS/2 source were opened a lot of talented people would spend their time maintaining yet another operating system code base that's going nowhere. It's almost as good as a Linux code fork! Divide and conquer! We can point to it as an example of OS competition to forestall those state lawsuits. Let's have Bill release any MS rights so IBM can do this now!
Oh, sorry, I forgot I wasn't in the Microsoft employee chat room.
It seems like the ransom model is really just a copyright/patent model with an additional dollar limit on it. That is, the code is released when a particular amount of money is made OR when a particular time limit is reached. That limits the profit upside of any particular development, but doesn't protect from the downside.
Plus, it's not the gross revenue I would care about, it's the net. Lets say I release a product under a ransom model and I've priced the ransom with the assumption that maintaining and enhancing it will take half my time. I budget the other half the time for lucrative consulting. Unfortunately, the product ends up sucking down nearly all my time just to get enough buyers, and the sales aren't enough to yield a good salary. At some point the buyers dry up completely because they figure it's easier to wait for the time limit than to pay.
Absolutely, you can render your system very unstable if you start using the firewall to block normal network messages. I've seen this quite often with novice users who install ZA and then block darned near everything going out of their PC. Then they're puzzled because their Internet connection doesn't work. "But thank goodness I stopped some hacker thing named 'svchost'..."
If you don't know how to use power tools, then stop before you lose a finger.
I would rather have only 5 paying readers than 5 million non-paying readers.
Then you can't do math. Let's say the 5 paying readers give you a very generous $100 a year for their subscription, that's $500 for the year.
Now, let's say the 5 million non-paying readers each visit your site once during that year and view just 2 pages during the visit. That's 10 million page views. Let's say you put one banner ad on each of those pages. At a lowly CPM of just $1 you will earn $1,000 for the year.
Most likely it's much more favorable towards an ad-based site, since subscribers rarely want to pay $100 for an annual subscription and most people view more than 2 pages per year at the site.
Either approach can work to finance a site, but you really have to run the numbers.
It would be nice to have a "sandbox browser setting" for people who don't trust themselves to practice safe browsing.
It's been there since IE4, but it takes about four more clicks than the average user can muster: Tools | Internet Options | Security | Internet zone | High
If the market share for non-IE browsers and non-Windows platforms was higher, the scumware makers would take the trouble to build software for them. Programs like Gator and SaveNow are about social engineering, and human gullibility is platform-independent.
The math isn't hard, either. Start with 50K/mo. Hosting and bandwidth is probably $15K/mo. Office space and other expenses are maybe $15K/mo, although they may have committed to a budget-busting lease a few years before. If each person averages $5K/mo (60K/yr in salary+benefits, commission, or frelance) and there is $20K/mo left, they can pay for FOUR people.
Think I'm too high on hosting? OK, take it down $5K and you can add another person. Office space too expensive? Okay, knock $5K off there too and add another person. Now you have six people. Maybe you can convince people to work for $4K/mo on average, pay the freelancers less, or chop out benefits, that could get you to a staff of seven or eight.
Play with the numbers all you want, it's not fun because eventually you realize what all the big pubs know, in an content production organization your big expense is people costs. You reduce costs with layoffs or freelance cutbacks, which leads to less content and lower quality due to poor editing, which leads to disgruntled readers. Repeat until death spiral ends.
Yes, they invite the public. However, their store is private property. They can ask you to leave any time they want, for any reason. If you want a lesson on this, go into your local shopping mall and stand outside one of the stores with a "this store sucks" sign. Then try to use the "you invited the public" argument.
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There are plenty of ways to cut costs ethically. These guys tried to take an unethical shortcut and it bit them. As for quality suffering, the process of cost reduction in ANY product will sometimes take a wrong turn here or there. But if you take a look at almost any product category in 2003 and compare it to, say 1973, I think you will find that the products are higher quality at lower prices. Thank goodness for "rampant commercialism".
Agreed. It's the "genetic diversity" thing again. Yes there are some cost benefits to having 150 of the same model from a maintenance standpoint, but this capacitor issue is a perfect example of why it can be dangerous as well. At the very least you might want to buy the same model in small batches over time to minimize the chance that you got all of them with the same set of defects. The only good thing is that Dell will make good in some way or lose you as a customer.
Whatever happened to Columbia occured in flight, and the damage was therefore unpreventable.
Just s/Columbia/Challenger/ and you'll see that statement doesn't hold water. Should they have launched Columbia at all?
NASA has already said they had problems in the past with insulation falling off the booster tank. We don't know the details of those failure modes yet, but what if the problem was that moisture gets behind the insulation, condenses as ice on the tank surface, and then forcibly separates a chunk of insulation from the tank with ice attached? How much flaking of ice-covered insulation was considered acceptable before it became a safety risk?
The "3rd party extensions" they are referring to are Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), so yes that will help to neuter a lot of spyware. I think this option was added in IE6. You'll still need to disable any companion background programs using MSConfig or some other utility.
Yes, patches break things, even if they are very well tested. However, after some amount of testing you would hope that 99% of people would be able to install the patch without problem and maybe 1% would have problems of some sort. Given a large enough installed base, of course, this could add up to hundreds or even thousands of hosed installations. But, it would also result in thousands or millions of patched installations.
This is similar to vaccinations that are required by law in many countries. If we give those vaccinations we know that some small fraction (much less than 1%) will have complications or even death from them. However, if we don't give the vaccinations and enough people are susceptible to a particular disease, we risk having an entire society put out of commission and many more deaths as a result.
So, if you are running a data center in the post-SQL-Slammer era, are you going to get too far behind on critical security patches? I hope not. But what if your customers don't want to take the downtime to install the patch, or what if the patch causes problems on their system?
For several years I have been using spam-magnet accounts like hotmail.com and yahoo.com. I feel like Elaine in that episode of Seinfeld when she finds out her favorite form of birth control (The Sponge) is being taken off the market. She hoards all she can find and then has to decide if every guy she meets is "spongeworthy". That's what we are all trying to do with our email accounts, trying to decide who to give the primo ones and who gets the seldom-checked Hotmail address.
Due to some friends getting Klez, my "good" emails have leaked out and are receiving spam. So no matter what you do the email shell game is not a complete strategy for spam management.
In your case I think that address is so worthless at this point that you're going to have to give up on it. Put a vacation message on it and move on.
Darn, I'm not a mod right now or you'd be +1 richer.
If you make it easy for users to file bug reports they'll do a lot of the work for you. Yes, someone needs to remove duplicates and separate out the feature requests but the bugs that really count are the ones that your users are seeing.
If you're looking to exterminate crash-type bugs, you might check into BugToaster. The basic data is free for the taking on their site, but detailed reports will cost you.
>> That Time Warner executive should have been fired.
Great plan, if you want to see Time Warner die. Once employees know the penalty for thinking outside the corporate party line is immediate dismissal, you'll get a company full of managers who are too timid to challenge any decision regardless of how stupid it seems to be.
Well-reasoned dissent and debate is important to any decision making process. The site is slashdotted so I can't read the original article, but is it just possible that MS is encouraging such debate internally to see whose arguments hold water?
I've seen people expect the back button works that way, and they've been confused when they click Back multiple tims and it doesn't show them all the pages they have been to. However, I don't see that the "new" approach offers that many benefits. The pattern of previous page visits is a tree. Any approach that tries to flatten out a tree is going to surprise (or annoy) someone. Most browsers have a History feature that lets you see where you've been and that works a lot like the proposed Back design.
What you are proposing would require a Flux Capacitor. :-)
In most cases the doctor you go to first is your family doctor. Unless it's some life-threatening thing they will recommend tests and medication, exercise, etc to see if the condition resolves. If the problem doesn't resolve then they may refer you to a surgeon. When you get to the surgeon they will do their own evaluation but most likely will agree with your family doctor that surgery is the right path. So a good part the reason that surgeons recommend surgery is that their referrals are from other doctors who believe their patients need surgery!
As for lawyers, very few would recommend that you sue for most disputes until you've tried a few letters or other ways of resolving the issue. The big liability cases get all the press because the numbers are so big (at least for the lawyers) but those are rare compared to everyday legal matters.
Click "Start | Programs | Administrative Tools | Services". Find the "Messenger" service on the list, stop it, and set it to "Disabled". Would you be more likely to download some bloated 4MB patch from Windows Update that did the same thing? Would you prefer a desktop icon that turns it off, right next to your "Free AOL and Internet" icon?
Before we had kids, my wife and I both spent long hours working and I could not really understand people who weren't "committed to their jobs". After kids, our hours aren't as long because of other commitments (ballet, bowling, music lessons, play dates, etc) and I'm a bit more sympathetic to those people. It's changed our lives a lot and there's no way we could have seen the whole impact except to live through it.
Anyway, you've both decided that you want kids badly enough to adopt them. I assume you want to spend some time with them, but you're planning on taking a second job. When will you spend time with the kids? Instead of increasing revenue, can you maybe reduce expenses? I'm not trying to be mean or judgemental here, just want to make sure that you realize the tradeoff you are making.
It's also entirely possible that the MSN upgrade has nothing to do with this problem. It sounds like some piece of software is insisting on an Internet connection. This is very common with many viruses and spyware that wants to phone home. Have you checked for viruses and spyware? If your dad installed syware like Gator you could see this behavior, for example.
It's certainly possible to make good interfaces to facilitate debugging binary-only code. Most likely the kernel developers have decided that their time is better spent in other places, rather than making life easier for the binary-only module developers. =That decision is made easier by open source bias, of course, and the lack of a large user constituency that would be intolerant of breaking old apps.
If Linux ever becomes a mass-market operating system, the kernel developers are going to have to reprioritize things. Imagine telling a company with 10,000 Linux desktops that they would have to fix, recompile, retest, and redeploy a major in-house app because a deprecated kernel interface had been removed. Linux can make these kind of changes only because it's not yet mainstream.
Antivirus software just cannot detect it.
That's because you gave permission to install it via some sneaky click-wrap license. You know, those ones you never read? AV companies have the technology, but they would probably get their pants sued off if they called another company's product malicious when it was merely annoying or nosy--and when the user supposedly consented to it being there.
The wintel world (win9x) needs something that can get Gator and friends out the door.
There are plenty of them already, like Pest Patrol, Spybot S&D, and Ad Aware.
There's a lot of good information on spyware at Doxdesk and Spyware Info.
Great idea, guys! If the OS/2 source were opened a lot of talented people would spend their time maintaining yet another operating system code base that's going nowhere. It's almost as good as a Linux code fork! Divide and conquer! We can point to it as an example of OS competition to forestall those state lawsuits. Let's have Bill release any MS rights so IBM can do this now!
Oh, sorry, I forgot I wasn't in the Microsoft employee chat room.
"This Court does not possess the institutional competence to deal with issues of this complexity..."
Finally, a team that has the sense to punt on fourth down, even though the guys paying the money want to go for it.
Actually, I think that's a third down punt in Canadian football.
It seems like the ransom model is really just a copyright/patent model with an additional dollar limit on it. That is, the code is released when a particular amount of money is made OR when a particular time limit is reached. That limits the profit upside of any particular development, but doesn't protect from the downside.
Plus, it's not the gross revenue I would care about, it's the net. Lets say I release a product under a ransom model and I've priced the ransom with the assumption that maintaining and enhancing it will take half my time. I budget the other half the time for lucrative consulting. Unfortunately, the product ends up sucking down nearly all my time just to get enough buyers, and the sales aren't enough to yield a good salary. At some point the buyers dry up completely because they figure it's easier to wait for the time limit than to pay.
Absolutely, you can render your system very unstable if you start using the firewall to block normal network messages. I've seen this quite often with novice users who install ZA and then block darned near everything going out of their PC. Then they're puzzled because their Internet connection doesn't work. "But thank goodness I stopped some hacker thing named 'svchost'..."
If you don't know how to use power tools, then stop before you lose a finger.
I would rather have only 5 paying readers than 5 million non-paying readers.
Then you can't do math. Let's say the 5 paying readers give you a very generous $100 a year for their subscription, that's $500 for the year.
Now, let's say the 5 million non-paying readers each visit your site once during that year and view just 2 pages during the visit. That's 10 million page views. Let's say you put one banner ad on each of those pages. At a lowly CPM of just $1 you will earn $1,000 for the year.
Most likely it's much more favorable towards an ad-based site, since subscribers rarely want to pay $100 for an annual subscription and most people view more than 2 pages per year at the site.
Either approach can work to finance a site, but you really have to run the numbers.
It would be nice to have a "sandbox browser setting" for people who don't trust themselves to practice safe browsing.
It's been there since IE4, but it takes about four more clicks than the average user can muster:
Tools | Internet Options | Security | Internet zone | High
If the market share for non-IE browsers and non-Windows platforms was higher, the scumware makers would take the trouble to build software for them. Programs like Gator and SaveNow are about social engineering, and human gullibility is platform-independent.
The math isn't hard, either. Start with 50K/mo. Hosting and bandwidth is probably $15K/mo. Office space and other expenses are maybe $15K/mo, although they may have committed to a budget-busting lease a few years before. If each person averages $5K/mo (60K/yr in salary+benefits, commission, or frelance) and there is $20K/mo left, they can pay for FOUR people.
Think I'm too high on hosting? OK, take it down $5K and you can add another person. Office space too expensive? Okay, knock $5K off there too and add another person. Now you have six people. Maybe you can convince people to work for $4K/mo on average, pay the freelancers less, or chop out benefits, that could get you to a staff of seven or eight.
Play with the numbers all you want, it's not fun because eventually you realize what all the big pubs know, in an content production organization your big expense is people costs. You reduce costs with layoffs or freelance cutbacks, which leads to less content and lower quality due to poor editing, which leads to disgruntled readers. Repeat until death spiral ends.
Yes, they invite the public. However, their store is private property. They can ask you to leave any time they want, for any reason. If you want a lesson on this, go into your local shopping mall and stand outside one of the stores with a "this store sucks" sign. Then try to use the "you invited the public" argument.