Why does everyone keep crapping on HD DVD and BluRay for their DRM and then give DVD a free pass?
AACS (the DRM on HD DVD/BluRay) is just an extension of CSS (on DVD).
It is people's support of DVD that put money in the movie companies' pockets and told them that DRM on video media was clearly acceptable to the public. And so they did it again, just tightening it up a bit this time.
See, that's the problem with buying DRMed content. You encourage companies to release only DRMed content. And yeah, you might break the DRM this time, but eventually they'll make a DRM you can't crack. And then where you will be?
CSS still makes it impossible to legally make a video iPod where you "rip your own". Sure, there are plenty of shady solutions out there, but it restricts fully-supported commerical solutions. It was the integration that made rip-mix-burn easy and made the iPod a success by expanding its reach to many more people. We can't have this with video.
DRM is killing us, and the people who cracked (like DVDJon) aren't actually helping the problem. We need a real solution, and that means governmental.
"Why not just say a minimum of 5 years? That would increase the probability of finding someone who meet the technical requirements."
It would not. It would increase the probability of an individual candidate meeting the technical requirements. But I'd get far fewer candidates, which is the problem I expressed in the post you are replying to (several levels down now). So I need to give a smaller number so I get more candidates to look at.
"There are plenty of embedded systems that are not comsumer, but are battery operated. In any case, I don't see why not having experience with battery-operated systems is a key issue for a software team, even if they are going to build a battery-operated system."
Yeah, I know. However, in my experience, those people don't know the stuff I need. I work with a bunch of people who design laptops, and they don't really save power in the way I need people to save power. I could explain it all, but I'm not going to. Suffice to say there are things that makers of larger battery powered devices (like cars or laptops) don't know and I need them to know.
"This sounds rather subjective. What were they missing that others were not?"
It's completely subjective.
For starters, the vast majority of them have never actually brought up an embedded system or written drivers for it. They make a system by buying a reference board (or perhaps getting one their company already uses) and run a config script for VXWorks to adapt it to the hardware. Anyone can do that. I need people who can bring up a new board and write the drivers for it and truly adapt the OS.
The other thing they are missing is any kind of power management knowledge. Routers are built for maximum performance, not for min power usage. Telecoms (phone switching) are even less concerned with power. As long as their device doesn't overheat, they don't care how much power it uses.
"Perhaps you do. But it's usually hard to trace a company's performance back to the quality of a particular team. Are the inferior teams generating less money for the company?"
I agree with your sentiment. But just because you can get away with hiring worse people is no excuse to. And yes, my people are helping the company make money directly. My people have been able to do more with less hardware than other teams. And when you have a competitive price environment, being able to make a device with less expensive hardware in it is a big advantage in turning a profit.
And when my group consistently delivers on time and with high quality, my team becomes the go to team. My team and myself were directly responsible for the software for the largest-selling product my company made in the last year and the year before. And so when it came time to who was going to be responsible for the software for the likely best-selling product for my company this year, we were chosen again.
True short runs might be done by hand, but thousands are done automatically.
These pick and place machines are very programmable.
When a PCB is designed, the type and location of each component is noted and saved in a file. When you want to manufacture that PCB, you send that file to the PCB maker. The PCB maker uses that file to make the silkscreen for the board, and then plugs that file into the pick and place machine. Then he just has to set up the machine to tell it which bin the 1K resistors (and other parts) are in. It then picks up the parts from the right bins and puts them on the board in the right locations.
The machine is then set up to make that board. It can be done in a few hours, including adjustments. And all you have to do is save the resulting config file to a disk, then load it again later and put the same parts in the same bins as before and it'll start stuffing boards again.
The pick and place machine is quicker to train and reconfigure than humans are.
That's why they are used. If you use a hard connection in a portable device, when the user sits down, the connectors are stressed. And you can pop the connector right off the board. The IIci was large enough, rigid enough and didn't fit in a pocket, so it wasn't a problem.
Cell phones aren't made in Michigan. They're made in China. You've made a big mistake here:
Eimo Americas is a: "Solutions provider specializing in prototyping, tooling and mass manufacturing of plastic products for various industries."
Eimo Americas makes plastic cases, not phones. You're showing an automated (probably prototype) line for making plastic parts, which is very easy. Putting the parts in the case ia manual labor-intensive job. Think of a flip-phone and how the flex from the top to the bottom gets through that hinge. It doesn't come that way, and it isn't done by machine.
Oh, and another problem with your example of this, Eimo is a division of Foxconn.
Foxconn is the company which was recently raked over the coals for making iPods with lots of low-paid employees in China.
It's possible to insert some through-hole components by machine, that's true. Others are too large to stay put when the board is moved between machines on the conveyor though, so they have to be placed and soldered at one station, something that isn't possible with a place machine. Additionally, some SM components cannot be placed by machine, and others could be, but they can't be soldered with the rest of the components, so they are placed and soldered by hand.
The surface mount components are installed by machine. Large components cannot be inserted by machine.
ECS is doing the same thing you see a picture of at that other site. They install some stuff by machine, some by hand.
The machines cost about $100,000 (I asked when viewing a line). But they can insert a lot of components the one in the pic is inserting at least 40 different components (you can see from the reels), probably 100+ total SM components in the same time as one of those women inserts their components. So, it replaces 100+ women, the women make $50 a month, two shifts a day. That's replacing $10,000 worth of people a month at chinese wages.
As you can see, they can't afford not to use these machines. And really, if you care about quality at all, you especially can't afford not to use these machines. These machines are far more accurate, so your yield goes way up.
It's true that the wages in China make labor-intensive assembly feasible. But you've picked a bad example of labor-intensive assembly. Any device that is sold with a tight-fitting case on it (like a cell phone) is going to have a lot more manual labor required, because attaching subassemblies, routing flexes and stuffing it in that case can't be done by machine. A motherboard is sold to you bare (not in a case), and thus can be automated a lot more.
As I said twice already, hiring the wrong person reduces the efficacy of my current employees. Leaving the position unfilled for a while doesn't hurt me, just not help. That's a net gain. Besides, if I fill the position with the wrong person, it takes time to fire them and get the right one. In the meantime, I maybe could have found the right guy (or woman). I'm not really allowed to go a long time without hiring a person, even if I felt I could manage the load. Oddly, I'm also pressured to request more job openings even if I don't feel I need them. I don't know why, perhaps my chain of command is trying to bulk up to look more important?
I have trained several people. Two of my employees are college hires with little experience in production-level software at all, let alone in embedded areas. Another had less than 1 year of experience out of college, but in the embedded area. Another applied for the position despite not quite meeting all the requirements and was hired. He had about 5 years experience in testing/qualification and had bringup experience. The other two met the qualifications pretty much to a T. One of these last two is my only H1-B employee of the six.
One of the six is very good, the rest are great. I'm not going say which, to preserve a little anonymity. Every one of them still had to learn quite a bit in their positions, you generally do not find people ready to hit the ground running.
I think you read too many of your own feelings into the post.
2-3 years was a minimum, not a maximum. I probably should have written it as just "2 years".
I should have put battery-powered on the "consumer electronics" thingy. But yes, it's very specialized. And I didn't say I wouldn't intterview people who have general experience. I said we generally won't interview people who have only telecoms experience (in their embedded experience). I've interviewed a lot of them, and found they're just not what I'm looking for. So I save myself some trouble.
I didn't have a tons of experience in these areas when I was hired. And I've interviewed plenty of people who don't meet all the criteria. I even write that in my post that we consider people who don't meet all the criteria.
I tried to do everything I could to defuse comments like your own, you ignore what I wrote and argue about what I already clarified anyway.
If you talked to my boss and my bosses boss, you might not complain about my choosiness so much. I have the best team in my division, and everyone acknowledges it. One of the people I hired was in a testing/qualification position, and I still hired him because he seemed to have what it takes. And I was right. So I don't feel like I'm narrowing the field too much. Of course, I could be wrong.
What's the difference between qualified and suitable? I don't understand that.
---EXAMPLE ONLY. THIS DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A JOB POSTING---
I need a candidate with experience in embedded systems operating system development, driver development and hardware bringup. Must be able to use the suitable diagnostic equipment. Knowledgable in embedded systems issues related to consumer electronics.
Knowledgable in intraboard and interboard communications systems. Knowledgable in power management for embedded systems. 2-3 years experience in embedded systems required.
(In acknowledgement of the regular way this stuff works, the last 3 are really somewhat flexible, we'd need 2 out of 3 basically. Candidates know this and still apply without filling all the requirements and we consider them even though they don't fill all the requirements)
Also, even though they might think they fit the descriptions, we generally will not interview "comms people" (although I get their resumes from the recruiters). These are people with phone or router experience instead of consumer electronics. They are technically embedded systems, but I've found their priorities are so different and their experience is completely orthagonal to what is useful for me, most notably in the power management area.
Got anything for me? I have to warn I'm somewhat picky too. I've interviewed over 30 candidates for a position before, so just finding a couple doesn't mean they are good enough. I'm not going to hire people who don't really know what they are doing, they'll just slow down the excellent people I already have.
But it is my decision as a hiring manager. And I know why I did it.
As I pointed out before, it's not like I pay the salaries of my hires. It isn't even in my regular budget. Only HR really cares, and again, we don't even talk money until after we've decided whether we want a candidate or not anyway.
I exhausted all candidates that applied for the position. And the position was widely posted and the postings of the company I work for are widely watched, at rare times even appearing in the regular news. It's not my job to go find candidates who decide to hide in a corner instead of applying for available positions. It's the recruiting department's, and they have sent me monster and hotjobs resumes in the past, so I guess they look there.
I have interviewed over 30 candidates for a position before. I've looked at a hundred candidates for a position before.
There's no satisfying you. You'll believe what you want to believe. All I can hope is some day you're on the other side of the table and have to make the same decisions I do. We'll see what you do then.
Only 1 person of the 5 who work for me is an H1-B worker.
As to mixing personal and financial, I'm not sure whether to say "I'm not" or "I'd be a fool not to". Depends on how you think of it
The the people who took them over and took them public were the same kind of people who ran pets.com and such. They're there to try to make the company look successful, rather than actually build a strong company. They're concerned about the stock price, and less about the actual value of the company. If that appeals to market timers (such as yourself), that's great. Personally, I'm more interested in is the company doing smart things that would make them valuable in the long term and preferably even improve the state of the art and thus improve their customers lives some small amount.
Ask instead buys search technology from Google, after their years of insisting they have natural-language queries no longer holds water with investors.
Whether I like it or not, Xbox has made a mark. I actually kind of like it. But that's not the point. Xbox made the mark by losing over $50 a customer. Not just giving away money and getting it back in software and peripheral sales, but actually the Xbox divison has reported a loss roughly 50 times the size of the number of Xboxes sold.
It is easy to do big business by selling things below market (see the phrase "they're doing a land office business". Buy.com and pets.com did it in 90s. So it's difficult for me to ascribe some kind of level of brains or skill to MS for doing this. And it certainly wouldn't convice me to buy into MS as an investor based upon the cash flow of Xbox.
What MS has to hope to do is now monetize all those customers they bought. They need to do this in exactly the way pets.com and buy.com weren't able to do. It's going to be a tricky thing to do and I don't see any reason that MS is up to it. They're walking away from Xbox (orig) as fast as they can, probably because they can never get to revenue neutral on it. And they're pushing 360, it's a great machine with many awful games and it's still being outsold by PS2.
Microsoft has laid the groundwork. Whether its for their grave or a big success I just can't tell yet.
I don't feel like MS and Ask always work similarly, I was only referring to the Xbox division.
I do agree MSN search sucks. I attempted to spend a month using each search engine because I felt like I needed to "put my money where my mouth is" when I dumped on Google for doing something any company could do (search). I went the distance on most of the search engines and still use Yahoo search instead of Google to this day. But I couldn't do it with MSN. After a week and a half, I had to quit. It was just too awful. It had just been improved and has been improved again since. But it's still awful. MS just can't get search right.
Just hiring any pair of hands is not useful in the area I'm in. I need qualified people who can do their own work without a lot of hand-holding. If I hire unqualified people, I just end up making more work for the existing people, trying to help the unqualified people deal with being over their heads.
As anyone in the tech industry knows (esp. in the.com crunch), not having enough people means you just work the existing workers harder. Ironically, this raises productivity, which then Alan Greenspan (who I respect in most ways) misinterprets as some kind of natural/beneficial increase in the productivity of the workforce, instead of overworking people.
Pool 1: American workers. Pool 2: American workers + foreign workers.
I'm not saying foreign workers are more likely to be suitable by percentage.
But pool 2 is bigger than pool 1 and includes pool 1 as a subset, so if you have exhausted all candidates already from pool 1, moving on to pool 2 (and fighting politically for the ability to do so) is natural.
Camp existed long before the advent of the two working parents family.
There are all-summer camps. But most kids only spend 1-2 weeks at camp. And yes, during this time, the parents are usually on a vacation without them.
But none of this means the parents don't love their children, and there's still plenty of summer left in which to spend a lot of time with them. Of course, some parents still don't spend a lot of time with them, but it isn't camp that makes them bad parents.
Is when Bush does something like this, people come out of the woodwork to explain how the intentions are good.
It doesn't matter if the administration's intentions are good. The point is we have a court system and separation of powers for a reason. And it is the law of the land.
No matter how good one's intentions are, if they violate this (by not getting actual subpoenas), they're comminting a grave crime, and creating a situation where one branch (in this case the one headed by one man) can begin to take control of the actions of the entire government.
It's a constitutional issue. And this is another egregious violation of it. This is beyond absurdity now. We the people created this government, we should have to put up with it not following the restrictions we set down upon it. These people should be ejected from office.
I've worked in the industry for quite some time now. Since 1991.
And it is very common to have many positions open you simply cannot fill. In the late 1990s it was even more true.
I remember at that time, see that one department, which was triple the size of most others fit onto a half-floor just like all the other departments. I asked the pertinent people and found that they could fit in that space because 2/3rds of their positions were unfilled.
I was not a hiring manager at the time, but I can say now that it very likely goes like this. You open a position. You get a lot of candidates. You interview the candidates and find none are suitable. You don't even talk money seriously with a candidate until after they pass the interview anyway. And then, the hiring manager doesn't care much anyway becuase it's not like he's paying out of his own pocket.
So, you never rejected anyone due to salary, and yet you still can't find anyone. It's natural then to say "if only we had a larger pool of candidates to draw from". And being able to draw from foreigners can help with this.
It's tough being picky about your candidates, but not being picky creates more problems in the long run.
I agree it doesn't matter whether global warming is man-made or not. But regardless, if we like people being able to live on the island of Manhattan without having to live on houseboats, we have to fight this.
Even if it is natural, we can fight this, and we can win.
China is already changing their car emissions laws. They've made a hydroelectric generator so large that people around the world are pissed off about it (Three Gorges Dam). They'll fall in line too.
He was using the service. The people who offered the service had the police tell him to stop using it.
He came back and used it again.
No gray area here. No reason to get weird about differentiating sex offenders. They didn't even know he was a sex offender until he was booked, so it just didn't come into it.
Additionally, it is not a public service, you don't have a right to use it. Instead of free, you could call it "complimentary". If the offerer of the service withdraws the offer to you, you can't use it anymore.
I played it, and in the games I played it was as immersive as a regular controller or even more so.
But I have to say I think it won't be great for all things. I was very interested to see there was a game pad for the Wii, and I hope the Wavebird keeps working for it too.
To me, the Wiimote opens possibilities. But I don't like to see other possibilities eliminated by removing the kind of controller that would work best for Super Smash Brothers (for example).
I waited in line to play the DS at E3 2004. We were treated to some unfinished games and the DS itself.
The DS felt like nothing but a pile of gimmicks.
Two screens felt like a gimmick to distract from Sony's one large, hi-res screen. The touch screen was very gimmicky, and the games using it were even more gimmicky. Microphone? Gimmick.
Really, the only things the DS added that made sense were two more buttons (X & Y) and wireless multiplayer. And the wireless multiplayer didn't even work on GBA games. And additionally even Nintendo didn't seem like they were serious about making DS games, they seemed to look at it as a great platform to play GBA games on. All their A titles at the time were still being released as GBA games. Nintendo's next hardware they started working on was a new GBA (Micro). The original DS titles that came out were no particularly good and the flow of them stopped completely for months.
So it looked like N was just making a gimmick to respond to the threat of the PSP and then immediately started walking away from it as a failed effort. We found out differently later.
I do agree the DS is winning because of the games that are on it. Nintendo is nurturing developers who make good games that are well designed to be played on the go. This is in stark contrast to Sony, who has about 33,291 driving games for the PSP, and in my opinion, driving games are typically too intense to work well on the go. I have a PSP, but I don't like to use it. I haven't used it for months, and won't until Loco Roco comes out.
My doctor has used a device like this for about 10 years now.
You just put your head in, it reads it, prints it out, you go in the regular exam room and they put the same prescription on the old "better, worse" machine and verify the results. That's it unless you are astigmatic. It might even help with that.
It basically works by shining the E into your eye and looking at it on your retina. When it is sharp on your retina, it has the correction factor right.
And unless you want it quieter, there's no point. The problem with the Xbox 360 is merely that if you put it in an enclosed space, it just makes too much heat. It's not that it can't exhaust the heat. Well, since this produces the same amount of heat (slightly more) in the same space, it'll have exactly the same problem.
So unless you just want to make your 360 quieter, skip this. And the real noise in the 360 comes from the DVD drive anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps a dollar on each of the SDRAM and flash.
$1/unit adds up fast. $2 a unit even faster.
If they sell a million units a year, that's up to $2M.
Why does everyone keep crapping on HD DVD and BluRay for their DRM and then give DVD a free pass?
AACS (the DRM on HD DVD/BluRay) is just an extension of CSS (on DVD).
It is people's support of DVD that put money in the movie companies' pockets and told them that DRM on video media was clearly acceptable to the public. And so they did it again, just tightening it up a bit this time.
See, that's the problem with buying DRMed content. You encourage companies to release only DRMed content. And yeah, you might break the DRM this time, but eventually they'll make a DRM you can't crack. And then where you will be?
CSS still makes it impossible to legally make a video iPod where you "rip your own". Sure, there are plenty of shady solutions out there, but it restricts fully-supported commerical solutions. It was the integration that made rip-mix-burn easy and made the iPod a success by expanding its reach to many more people. We can't have this with video.
DRM is killing us, and the people who cracked (like DVDJon) aren't actually helping the problem. We need a real solution, and that means governmental.
I totally agree SS1 is mainly a modern X-15. But that in itself is something. SS1 is a lot simpler and a lot cheaper, both to develop and to run.
It's a step. But there is still a long way to go. SS1's shuttlecock system of landing won't work at LEO reentry speeds.
"Why not just say a minimum of 5 years? That would increase the probability of finding someone who meet the technical requirements."
It would not. It would increase the probability of an individual candidate meeting the technical requirements. But I'd get far fewer candidates, which is the problem I expressed in the post you are replying to (several levels down now). So I need to give a smaller number so I get more candidates to look at.
"There are plenty of embedded systems that are not comsumer, but are battery operated. In any case, I don't see why not having experience with battery-operated systems is a key issue for a software team, even if they are going to build a battery-operated system."
Yeah, I know. However, in my experience, those people don't know the stuff I need. I work with a bunch of people who design laptops, and they don't really save power in the way I need people to save power. I could explain it all, but I'm not going to. Suffice to say there are things that makers of larger battery powered devices (like cars or laptops) don't know and I need them to know.
"This sounds rather subjective. What were they missing that others were not?"
It's completely subjective.
For starters, the vast majority of them have never actually brought up an embedded system or written drivers for it. They make a system by buying a reference board (or perhaps getting one their company already uses) and run a config script for VXWorks to adapt it to the hardware. Anyone can do that. I need people who can bring up a new board and write the drivers for it and truly adapt the OS.
The other thing they are missing is any kind of power management knowledge. Routers are built for maximum performance, not for min power usage. Telecoms (phone switching) are even less concerned with power. As long as their device doesn't overheat, they don't care how much power it uses.
"Perhaps you do. But it's usually hard to trace a company's performance back to the quality of a particular team. Are the inferior teams generating less money for the company?"
I agree with your sentiment. But just because you can get away with hiring worse people is no excuse to. And yes, my people are helping the company make money directly. My people have been able to do more with less hardware than other teams. And when you have a competitive price environment, being able to make a device with less expensive hardware in it is a big advantage in turning a profit.
And when my group consistently delivers on time and with high quality, my team becomes the go to team. My team and myself were directly responsible for the software for the largest-selling product my company made in the last year and the year before. And so when it came time to who was going to be responsible for the software for the likely best-selling product for my company this year, we were chosen again.
I figure I'm doing something right.
True short runs might be done by hand, but thousands are done automatically.
These pick and place machines are very programmable.
When a PCB is designed, the type and location of each component is noted and saved in a file. When you want to manufacture that PCB, you send that file to the PCB maker. The PCB maker uses that file to make the silkscreen for the board, and then plugs that file into the pick and place machine. Then he just has to set up the machine to tell it which bin the 1K resistors (and other parts) are in. It then picks up the parts from the right bins and puts them on the board in the right locations.
The machine is then set up to make that board. It can be done in a few hours, including adjustments. And all you have to do is save the resulting config file to a disk, then load it again later and put the same parts in the same bins as before and it'll start stuffing boards again.
The pick and place machine is quicker to train and reconfigure than humans are.
That's why they are used. If you use a hard connection in a portable device, when the user sits down, the connectors are stressed. And you can pop the connector right off the board. The IIci was large enough, rigid enough and didn't fit in a pocket, so it wasn't a problem.
c ontact
Cell phones aren't made in Michigan. They're made in China. You've made a big mistake here:
Eimo Americas is a:
"Solutions provider specializing in prototyping, tooling and mass manufacturing of plastic products for various industries."
Eimo Americas makes plastic cases, not phones. You're showing an automated (probably prototype) line for making plastic parts, which is very easy. Putting the parts in the case ia manual labor-intensive job. Think of a flip-phone and how the flex from the top to the bottom gets through that hinge. It doesn't come that way, and it isn't done by machine.
Oh, and another problem with your example of this, Eimo is a division of Foxconn.
http://vicksburg.eimoam.com/default.aspx?content=
Foxconn is the company which was recently raked over the coals for making iPods with lots of low-paid employees in China.
It's possible to insert some through-hole components by machine, that's true. Others are too large to stay put when the board is moved between machines on the conveyor though, so they have to be placed and soldered at one station, something that isn't possible with a place machine. Additionally, some SM components cannot be placed by machine, and others could be, but they can't be soldered with the rest of the components, so they are placed and soldered by hand.
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-335-5.h tm
The surface mount components are installed by machine. Large components cannot be inserted by machine.
ECS is doing the same thing you see a picture of at that other site. They install some stuff by machine, some by hand.
The machines cost about $100,000 (I asked when viewing a line). But they can insert a lot of components the one in the pic is inserting at least 40 different components (you can see from the reels), probably 100+ total SM components in the same time as one of those women inserts their components. So, it replaces 100+ women, the women make $50 a month, two shifts a day. That's replacing $10,000 worth of people a month at chinese wages.
As you can see, they can't afford not to use these machines. And really, if you care about quality at all, you especially can't afford not to use these machines. These machines are far more accurate, so your yield goes way up.
It's true that the wages in China make labor-intensive assembly feasible. But you've picked a bad example of labor-intensive assembly. Any device that is sold with a tight-fitting case on it (like a cell phone) is going to have a lot more manual labor required, because attaching subassemblies, routing flexes and stuffing it in that case can't be done by machine. A motherboard is sold to you bare (not in a case), and thus can be automated a lot more.
More than I can afford to hire the wrong person.
As I said twice already, hiring the wrong person reduces the efficacy of my current employees. Leaving the position unfilled for a while doesn't hurt me, just not help. That's a net gain. Besides, if I fill the position with the wrong person, it takes time to fire them and get the right one. In the meantime, I maybe could have found the right guy (or woman). I'm not really allowed to go a long time without hiring a person, even if I felt I could manage the load. Oddly, I'm also pressured to request more job openings even if I don't feel I need them. I don't know why, perhaps my chain of command is trying to bulk up to look more important?
I have trained several people. Two of my employees are college hires with little experience in production-level software at all, let alone in embedded areas. Another had less than 1 year of experience out of college, but in the embedded area. Another applied for the position despite not quite meeting all the requirements and was hired. He had about 5 years experience in testing/qualification and had bringup experience. The other two met the qualifications pretty much to a T. One of these last two is my only H1-B employee of the six.
One of the six is very good, the rest are great. I'm not going say which, to preserve a little anonymity. Every one of them still had to learn quite a bit in their positions, you generally do not find people ready to hit the ground running.
I think you read too many of your own feelings into the post.
2-3 years was a minimum, not a maximum. I probably should have written it as just "2 years".
I should have put battery-powered on the "consumer electronics" thingy. But yes, it's very specialized. And I didn't say I wouldn't intterview people who have general experience. I said we generally won't interview people who have only telecoms experience (in their embedded experience). I've interviewed a lot of them, and found they're just not what I'm looking for. So I save myself some trouble.
I didn't have a tons of experience in these areas when I was hired. And I've interviewed plenty of people who don't meet all the criteria. I even write that in my post that we consider people who don't meet all the criteria.
I tried to do everything I could to defuse comments like your own, you ignore what I wrote and argue about what I already clarified anyway.
If you talked to my boss and my bosses boss, you might not complain about my choosiness so much. I have the best team in my division, and everyone acknowledges it. One of the people I hired was in a testing/qualification position, and I still hired him because he seemed to have what it takes. And I was right. So I don't feel like I'm narrowing the field too much. Of course, I could be wrong.
What's the difference between qualified and suitable? I don't understand that.
---EXAMPLE ONLY. THIS DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A JOB POSTING---
I need a candidate with experience in embedded systems operating system development, driver development and hardware bringup. Must be able to use the suitable diagnostic equipment. Knowledgable in embedded systems issues related to consumer electronics.
Knowledgable in intraboard and interboard communications systems.
Knowledgable in power management for embedded systems.
2-3 years experience in embedded systems required.
(In acknowledgement of the regular way this stuff works, the last 3 are really somewhat flexible, we'd need 2 out of 3 basically. Candidates know this and still apply without filling all the requirements and we consider them even though they don't fill all the requirements)
Also, even though they might think they fit the descriptions, we generally will not interview "comms people" (although I get their resumes from the recruiters). These are people with phone or router experience instead of consumer electronics. They are technically embedded systems, but I've found their priorities are so different and their experience is completely orthagonal to what is useful for me, most notably in the power management area.
Got anything for me? I have to warn I'm somewhat picky too. I've interviewed over 30 candidates for a position before, so just finding a couple doesn't mean they are good enough. I'm not going to hire people who don't really know what they are doing, they'll just slow down the excellent people I already have.
But it is my decision as a hiring manager. And I know why I did it.
As I pointed out before, it's not like I pay the salaries of my hires. It isn't even in my regular budget. Only HR really cares, and again, we don't even talk money until after we've decided whether we want a candidate or not anyway.
I exhausted all candidates that applied for the position. And the position was widely posted and the postings of the company I work for are widely watched, at rare times even appearing in the regular news. It's not my job to go find candidates who decide to hide in a corner instead of applying for available positions. It's the recruiting department's, and they have sent me monster and hotjobs resumes in the past, so I guess they look there.
I have interviewed over 30 candidates for a position before. I've looked at a hundred candidates for a position before.
There's no satisfying you. You'll believe what you want to believe. All I can hope is some day you're on the other side of the table and have to make the same decisions I do. We'll see what you do then.
Only 1 person of the 5 who work for me is an H1-B worker.
That'd be a great combination.
As to mixing personal and financial, I'm not sure whether to say "I'm not" or "I'd be a fool not to". Depends on how you think of it
The the people who took them over and took them public were the same kind of people who ran pets.com and such. They're there to try to make the company look successful, rather than actually build a strong company. They're concerned about the stock price, and less about the actual value of the company. If that appeals to market timers (such as yourself), that's great. Personally, I'm more interested in is the company doing smart things that would make them valuable in the long term and preferably even improve the state of the art and thus improve their customers lives some small amount.
Ask instead buys search technology from Google, after their years of insisting they have natural-language queries no longer holds water with investors.
Whether I like it or not, Xbox has made a mark. I actually kind of like it. But that's not the point. Xbox made the mark by losing over $50 a customer. Not just giving away money and getting it back in software and peripheral sales, but actually the Xbox divison has reported a loss roughly 50 times the size of the number of Xboxes sold.
It is easy to do big business by selling things below market (see the phrase "they're doing a land office business". Buy.com and pets.com did it in 90s. So it's difficult for me to ascribe some kind of level of brains or skill to MS for doing this. And it certainly wouldn't convice me to buy into MS as an investor based upon the cash flow of Xbox.
What MS has to hope to do is now monetize all those customers they bought. They need to do this in exactly the way pets.com and buy.com weren't able to do. It's going to be a tricky thing to do and I don't see any reason that MS is up to it. They're walking away from Xbox (orig) as fast as they can, probably because they can never get to revenue neutral on it. And they're pushing 360, it's a great machine with many awful games and it's still being outsold by PS2.
Microsoft has laid the groundwork. Whether its for their grave or a big success I just can't tell yet.
I don't feel like MS and Ask always work similarly, I was only referring to the Xbox division.
I do agree MSN search sucks. I attempted to spend a month using each search engine because I felt like I needed to "put my money where my mouth is" when I dumped on Google for doing something any company could do (search). I went the distance on most of the search engines and still use Yahoo search instead of Google to this day. But I couldn't do it with MSN. After a week and a half, I had to quit. It was just too awful. It had just been improved and has been improved again since. But it's still awful. MS just can't get search right.
They're a bad investment, they've been a horrible company (friend worked there early on) for a long time now.
Ask may be growing their market share, but it's only by basically buying it.
It's like Xbox. It sold because basically because MS was putting a $100 bill into every box.
If you think Xbox is a big success, buy into Ask. If you think in old fashioned ways like profit and return on investment, you'd do well to move on.
Just hiring any pair of hands is not useful in the area I'm in. I need qualified people who can do their own work without a lot of hand-holding. If I hire unqualified people, I just end up making more work for the existing people, trying to help the unqualified people deal with being over their heads.
.com crunch), not having enough people means you just work the existing workers harder. Ironically, this raises productivity, which then Alan Greenspan (who I respect in most ways) misinterprets as some kind of natural/beneficial increase in the productivity of the workforce, instead of overworking people.
As anyone in the tech industry knows (esp. in the
Pool 1: American workers.
Pool 2: American workers + foreign workers.
I'm not saying foreign workers are more likely to be suitable by percentage.
But pool 2 is bigger than pool 1 and includes pool 1 as a subset, so if you have exhausted all candidates already from pool 1, moving on to pool 2 (and fighting politically for the ability to do so) is natural.
Camp existed long before the advent of the two working parents family.
There are all-summer camps. But most kids only spend 1-2 weeks at camp. And yes, during this time, the parents are usually on a vacation without them.
But none of this means the parents don't love their children, and there's still plenty of summer left in which to spend a lot of time with them. Of course, some parents still don't spend a lot of time with them, but it isn't camp that makes them bad parents.
Is when Bush does something like this, people come out of the woodwork to explain how the intentions are good.
It doesn't matter if the administration's intentions are good. The point is we have a court system and separation of powers for a reason. And it is the law of the land.
No matter how good one's intentions are, if they violate this (by not getting actual subpoenas), they're comminting a grave crime, and creating a situation where one branch (in this case the one headed by one man) can begin to take control of the actions of the entire government.
It's a constitutional issue. And this is another egregious violation of it. This is beyond absurdity now. We the people created this government, we should have to put up with it not following the restrictions we set down upon it. These people should be ejected from office.
Where are you getting your info on camp?
In the US, it's difficult to get a job before you are 15 due to labor laws.
It is also very uncommon to go to camp at age 15 or older.
I never went to camp, but my friends went to camp between the ages of 10 and 13.
I've worked in the industry for quite some time now. Since 1991.
And it is very common to have many positions open you simply cannot fill. In the late 1990s it was even more true.
I remember at that time, see that one department, which was triple the size of most others fit onto a half-floor just like all the other departments. I asked the pertinent people and found that they could fit in that space because 2/3rds of their positions were unfilled.
I was not a hiring manager at the time, but I can say now that it very likely goes like this. You open a position. You get a lot of candidates. You interview the candidates and find none are suitable. You don't even talk money seriously with a candidate until after they pass the interview anyway. And then, the hiring manager doesn't care much anyway becuase it's not like he's paying out of his own pocket.
So, you never rejected anyone due to salary, and yet you still can't find anyone. It's natural then to say "if only we had a larger pool of candidates to draw from". And being able to draw from foreigners can help with this.
It's tough being picky about your candidates, but not being picky creates more problems in the long run.
I agree it doesn't matter whether global warming is man-made or not. But regardless, if we like people being able to live on the island of Manhattan without having to live on houseboats, we have to fight this.
Even if it is natural, we can fight this, and we can win.
China is already changing their car emissions laws. They've made a hydroelectric generator so large that people around the world are pissed off about it (Three Gorges Dam). They'll fall in line too.
He was using the service. The people who offered the service had the police tell him to stop using it.
He came back and used it again.
No gray area here. No reason to get weird about differentiating sex offenders. They didn't even know he was a sex offender until he was booked, so it just didn't come into it.
Additionally, it is not a public service, you don't have a right to use it. Instead of free, you could call it "complimentary". If the offerer of the service withdraws the offer to you, you can't use it anymore.
I played it, and in the games I played it was as immersive as a regular controller or even more so.
But I have to say I think it won't be great for all things. I was very interested to see there was a game pad for the Wii, and I hope the Wavebird keeps working for it too.
To me, the Wiimote opens possibilities. But I don't like to see other possibilities eliminated by removing the kind of controller that would work best for Super Smash Brothers (for example).
I waited in line to play the DS at E3 2004. We were treated to some unfinished games and the DS itself.
The DS felt like nothing but a pile of gimmicks.
Two screens felt like a gimmick to distract from Sony's one large, hi-res screen.
The touch screen was very gimmicky, and the games using it were even more gimmicky.
Microphone? Gimmick.
Really, the only things the DS added that made sense were two more buttons (X & Y) and wireless multiplayer. And the wireless multiplayer didn't even work on GBA games. And additionally even Nintendo didn't seem like they were serious about making DS games, they seemed to look at it as a great platform to play GBA games on. All their A titles at the time were still being released as GBA games. Nintendo's next hardware they started working on was a new GBA (Micro). The original DS titles that came out were no particularly good and the flow of them stopped completely for months.
So it looked like N was just making a gimmick to respond to the threat of the PSP and then immediately started walking away from it as a failed effort. We found out differently later.
I do agree the DS is winning because of the games that are on it. Nintendo is nurturing developers who make good games that are well designed to be played on the go. This is in stark contrast to Sony, who has about 33,291 driving games for the PSP, and in my opinion, driving games are typically too intense to work well on the go. I have a PSP, but I don't like to use it. I haven't used it for months, and won't until Loco Roco comes out.
My doctor has used a device like this for about 10 years now.
You just put your head in, it reads it, prints it out, you go in the regular exam room and they put the same prescription on the old "better, worse" machine and verify the results. That's it unless you are astigmatic. It might even help with that.
It basically works by shining the E into your eye and looking at it on your retina. When it is sharp on your retina, it has the correction factor right.
And unless you want it quieter, there's no point. The problem with the Xbox 360 is merely that if you put it in an enclosed space, it just makes too much heat. It's not that it can't exhaust the heat. Well, since this produces the same amount of heat (slightly more) in the same space, it'll have exactly the same problem.
So unless you just want to make your 360 quieter, skip this. And the real noise in the 360 comes from the DVD drive anyway.