> they are worth 10 times HP even though they move 10 times less PCs
You talk about crunching numbers but maybe your calculator is broken. Apple market cap may be 10x bigger but it does not mean the company is "worth" 10x more. It just means that people are comfortable paying a lot of money for stock that has a book per share value of 20% (compared to +70% for HP).
If you want to use "market cap" and "value" as synonyms, basically you can only talk about Berkshire-Hathaway (Warren Buffet) because it's the only company that steadily trade at its real value.
> if you look in the "service books" of a Blackberry device, you will find a lot of hard-coded IP addresses. This means that RIM is pointing all devices to a single server in a single data center on the end of a single circuit owned by a single provider.
Following this "logic", by using DNS it would have been possible to do what, change the single server in that single data center to another single server in another single data center? Or is it only when you use DNS that it becomes possible to do load-balancing and clustering?
Does this imply that some people involved with Wikileaks were paid? (Besides lawyers and besides the Australian rapist in chief, although he apparently managed to screw his book deal after he found out that the book was not going to be "one of the unifying documents of our generation" after all).
> But how's it going to be allocated back to the states?
Easy: national sales tax goes to fund the FBI and ATF, and every state gets the privilege to have federal agents coming down to burn alive members of religious cults suspected to also be gun runners.
Every state would benefit from a better funded federal government. More money would fund more illegal wiretaps of civil rights leaders. Or it could simply be put in a savings account for the next war or bailout that the federal government creates to please its strongest supporters.
> His statement has spurred reaction from the community; some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice.
I agree with them. Furthermore, I propose that anyone making fun of Steve Jobs in a cartoon should be stoned with bricked iPhones. Don't let the Infidels smear the name of The Prophet. Inch' Apple.
I don't have Woz phone number, I lost it when I switched from my iPhone to my iPhone2 (or was it from my iPhone2 to my iPhone3, or from my iPhone3 to my iPhone4 - it's hard to keep track of all those times I shelled out 600$ over the last 5 years just to be part of The Cool People).
As for history, can you send me an hyperlink, one that does not require Flash since I plan to read it on my iPad (after I'm done cleaning it for the 19th time today)? Or even better, is there an app for that, since all of my smart devices have a shitty browser and require an Objective-C version of existing websites?
And don't call me a douche, I prefer iSucker because I rent my music and eBooks from Apple (which makes sense, I don't even control the software that I can install on my the devices I paid for so there is no point in owning music either).
This is awesome because now you don't need to look for a wal-mart, strabucks, best buy and other when you want to go shopping, you just put your home address as the destination and you'll have a route all setup for you.
Silverlight is awesome in a controlled environment, such as an intranet. But in the wild, there are still too many fashion victims buying overpriced white computers and using braindead browsers to make this an effective solution.
> anyway it was 8 months before I got the job, six months of that was background checks
The hiring process as a permanent took forever but it did not really matter because I was already working there as a contractor; also the background check was not that long because I already had a security clearance from a previous gig. It's the first time you get a clearance that is painful, especially when you need the one that requires the local police of the area(s) where you lived over the past 10 years to confirm that you have a good reputation and have never been involved in an investigation (the cops need almost two months just for that certification).
As for the paperwork, what I meant is that basically it was all setup for me, anytime I had to do something it was usually online, or at least I got called to HR and guided through the papers I had to sign; it was unpleasant to deal with expense accounts, especially when going out of the country with the currency exchange, but there was a single guide and all I had to do was follow procedure.
All this, compared to what I have to do as a private contractor, is "no paperwork". Now I have to worry about a lot of stuff, forms, and various registrations, and even if I have someone to take care of the accounting, someone for the tax, someone for the legal work, I still have to manage a lot of things and check that I meet the various deadlines, and I have to check myself about whatever laws and regulations I have to follow. It's a lot of time wasted on paperwork and research, and a lot of it changes frequently. I am currently thinking about hiring a part-time general manager even if I am the single employee of my own company. Paperwork is insane, especially because I do business in more than one jurisdiction.
> I must be working at a different US government agency
I was in a good organization, one that was bringing in money, so I guess it was a bit better than some others where funding was tight. I think there are even better positions, such as officers in the army, but it was a good gig. Unfortunately politics were crazy, it was really hard to see any kind of progress, and the people that were better rewarded and promoted were the ones that kept to themselves and did not try to fix broken stuff. Because of the sheer volume of cash coming in, making a business case to improve something was very difficult, because the perception was always that the risk was not worth the savings.
On my first day there my boss told me that the problem in the IT group was that there was too much money so people were lazy and always went with the easy, expensive solutions. After a while I had to agree with him, this place was filled with extremely talented people but never getting no for an expense request, no matter the amount, created all kinds of lousy attitudes, such as "throwing hardware at it" or "throwing IBM at it". Also the big brass was always happy to tell the auditors that they had IBM this and IBM that so they would be reassured that IT was in good hands.
I've been working less than 1.5 year as an employee for a government agency. Then I left, but that short employment time granted me a 320$ monthly payment for 20 years after I reach 65 y/o. It's not that much because it is an amount in today's money, but it was just 1.5 years. In that same time to get the same pension as a private contractor I would need to save close to 1000$ a month, and it would also require Mr Market to give me a steady 8-9% return each year until I retire.
As a government employee I also had all kinds of health benefits, paid gym membership, many discounts on hotels, plane tickets and car rental, lower premium on house and car insurance, and more vacation that I needed; I also got a tax break because of the pension fund, and more tax breaks if I decided to apply for an optional group IRA, where the government would put money if I declined the gym membership. And no paperwork, I just had to sign on the dotted lines when they hired me.
As a contractor I now make more than twice the salary, I can put all kinds of stuff on my tax and shuffle things around to save a buck here and there, I can takes months of vacation whenever I want, but there is just no way that in the long run I'll have a better pension.
> the government employees are paid twice as much as the skills and experience warrant
I completely agree. One time I had to deploy a web application (COTS) in a government agency, and I had to show the ropes to the tech lead in charge of the web development team that was supposed to take over the maintenance. After the webapp was installed, the guy kept asking me to "install in the intranet"; I showed him that it was accessible from a browser on the internal network but he kept asking for this to be installed "in the intranet". I asked him to show me the "intranet", and I had to follow him to his workstation where there was an Intranet shortcut on the desktop. It was a bookmark for "http://intranet". Basically all I had to do was to edit a static index.html page to add a link to the new webapp, and the guy was happy that it was "installed" properly.
Surprisingly all maintenance for the web application (simple patches from the vendor) ended up being done by my company, because their internal "web development team" was too busy with other projects.
I don't know how much these guys were paid, but it was too much.
> With twice the pay you can pay for your own benefits.
Not with the kind of healthcare, pension and other benefits available in the public sector. Many employees of the government have a guaranteed pension rate, something that a private contractor has no way to get.
> The extent to which today's youngsters rely on technology was revealed following a study of 2,000 parents of children aged ten and under.
From this study they draw conclusions like the 1/3 nonsense in the headline. Incredibly accurate.
> Broadband providers in the UK may be forced to offer parents ways of protecting their children from harmful online content as part of a new Communications Act. [...] > Westcoastcloud has just released its internet security product Netintelligence as an App on iTunes for use in schools and will be releasing a home-use version later this year.
Now this whole thing makes sense. This is not about statistics, this is about marketing.
> Sarbox is a bit of a joke to increase white collar jobs [...] just not a step forward
Sarbox prevents the people in charge from hiding behind corporations. Now people making or authorizing phony accounting (the C-level jerks) can be sent to jail.
It's easy to become jaded and cynical when looking at the implementation of regulations, but have a look at the big picture, you will see that this is a big step forward. All the paper shuffling that you witness is a side effect of the big guys knowing that they will end up in jail if they put a number in the wrong column.
To the contrary, this is exactly how a lawful society evolves. Just look at the SEC in the USA; pretty much every rule in their book has been created to keep big companies on the straight and narrow in the interest of everybody, following abusive or at least fishy behavior - first Rockefeller & Cie, more recently Enron (which led to the Sarbox regulations).
Slashdot Mirror
> they are worth 10 times HP even though they move 10 times less PCs
You talk about crunching numbers but maybe your calculator is broken. Apple market cap may be 10x bigger but it does not mean the company is "worth" 10x more. It just means that people are comfortable paying a lot of money for stock that has a book per share value of 20% (compared to +70% for HP).
If you want to use "market cap" and "value" as synonyms, basically you can only talk about Berkshire-Hathaway (Warren Buffet) because it's the only company that steadily trade at its real value.
> if you look in the "service books" of a Blackberry device, you will find a lot of hard-coded IP addresses. This means that RIM is pointing all devices to a single server in a single data center on the end of a single circuit owned by a single provider.
Following this "logic", by using DNS it would have been possible to do what, change the single server in that single data center to another single server in another single data center? Or is it only when you use DNS that it becomes possible to do load-balancing and clustering?
> Some real morons running the show over there
Oh yeah, clearly the morons are over there
> have been unable to receive or send emails and messages through their phones
Maybe the users just don't hold their phones correctly, like it happened with another vendor...
> WikiLeaks volunteer
Does this imply that some people involved with Wikileaks were paid? (Besides lawyers and besides the Australian rapist in chief, although he apparently managed to screw his book deal after he found out that the book was not going to be "one of the unifying documents of our generation" after all).
> But how's it going to be allocated back to the states?
Easy: national sales tax goes to fund the FBI and ATF, and every state gets the privilege to have federal agents coming down to burn alive members of religious cults suspected to also be gun runners.
Every state would benefit from a better funded federal government. More money would fund more illegal wiretaps of civil rights leaders. Or it could simply be put in a savings account for the next war or bailout that the federal government creates to please its strongest supporters.
> His statement has spurred reaction from the community; some even asking to the Free Software movement to find a new voice.
I agree with them. Furthermore, I propose that anyone making fun of Steve Jobs in a cartoon should be stoned with bricked iPhones. Don't let the Infidels smear the name of The Prophet. Inch' Apple.
I don't have Woz phone number, I lost it when I switched from my iPhone to my iPhone2 (or was it from my iPhone2 to my iPhone3, or from my iPhone3 to my iPhone4 - it's hard to keep track of all those times I shelled out 600$ over the last 5 years just to be part of The Cool People).
As for history, can you send me an hyperlink, one that does not require Flash since I plan to read it on my iPad (after I'm done cleaning it for the 19th time today)? Or even better, is there an app for that, since all of my smart devices have a shitty browser and require an Objective-C version of existing websites?
And don't call me a douche, I prefer iSucker because I rent my music and eBooks from Apple (which makes sense, I don't even control the software that I can install on my the devices I paid for so there is no point in owning music either).
> this article inspired Jobs and Wozniak to start building blue boxes themselves, an effort that made them several thousand dollars.
this [visit] inspired Jobs and Wozniak to start building [a GUI] themselves, an effort that made them several [millions] dollars.
Now that is a pattern of real innovation.
No doubt you will be modded down to the darkest pit of trolliness, but know that some people agree with you nonetheless.
I'd like to make a smart comment here but I don't have time, I have a lot of stuff to delete before the feds knock to my door!
This is awesome because now you don't need to look for a wal-mart, strabucks, best buy and other when you want to go shopping, you just put your home address as the destination and you'll have a route all setup for you.
Yeah, like modal ads at the operating-system level...
> Sorry, the dinosaurs died 65 million years ago
Not the jumping ones
those guys got to see jumping dinosaurs, that must have been awesome!
Silverlight is awesome in a controlled environment, such as an intranet. But in the wild, there are still too many fashion victims buying overpriced white computers and using braindead browsers to make this an effective solution.
Maybe the real problem is the kind of water you use, not your electrical system.
Who needs javascript now that every website ends up being rewritten in Objective-C?
> anyway it was 8 months before I got the job, six months of that was background checks
The hiring process as a permanent took forever but it did not really matter because I was already working there as a contractor; also the background check was not that long because I already had a security clearance from a previous gig. It's the first time you get a clearance that is painful, especially when you need the one that requires the local police of the area(s) where you lived over the past 10 years to confirm that you have a good reputation and have never been involved in an investigation (the cops need almost two months just for that certification).
As for the paperwork, what I meant is that basically it was all setup for me, anytime I had to do something it was usually online, or at least I got called to HR and guided through the papers I had to sign; it was unpleasant to deal with expense accounts, especially when going out of the country with the currency exchange, but there was a single guide and all I had to do was follow procedure.
All this, compared to what I have to do as a private contractor, is "no paperwork". Now I have to worry about a lot of stuff, forms, and various registrations, and even if I have someone to take care of the accounting, someone for the tax, someone for the legal work, I still have to manage a lot of things and check that I meet the various deadlines, and I have to check myself about whatever laws and regulations I have to follow. It's a lot of time wasted on paperwork and research, and a lot of it changes frequently. I am currently thinking about hiring a part-time general manager even if I am the single employee of my own company. Paperwork is insane, especially because I do business in more than one jurisdiction.
> I must be working at a different US government agency
I was in a good organization, one that was bringing in money, so I guess it was a bit better than some others where funding was tight. I think there are even better positions, such as officers in the army, but it was a good gig. Unfortunately politics were crazy, it was really hard to see any kind of progress, and the people that were better rewarded and promoted were the ones that kept to themselves and did not try to fix broken stuff. Because of the sheer volume of cash coming in, making a business case to improve something was very difficult, because the perception was always that the risk was not worth the savings.
On my first day there my boss told me that the problem in the IT group was that there was too much money so people were lazy and always went with the easy, expensive solutions. After a while I had to agree with him, this place was filled with extremely talented people but never getting no for an expense request, no matter the amount, created all kinds of lousy attitudes, such as "throwing hardware at it" or "throwing IBM at it". Also the big brass was always happy to tell the auditors that they had IBM this and IBM that so they would be reassured that IT was in good hands.
I've been working less than 1.5 year as an employee for a government agency. Then I left, but that short employment time granted me a 320$ monthly payment for 20 years after I reach 65 y/o. It's not that much because it is an amount in today's money, but it was just 1.5 years. In that same time to get the same pension as a private contractor I would need to save close to 1000$ a month, and it would also require Mr Market to give me a steady 8-9% return each year until I retire.
As a government employee I also had all kinds of health benefits, paid gym membership, many discounts on hotels, plane tickets and car rental, lower premium on house and car insurance, and more vacation that I needed; I also got a tax break because of the pension fund, and more tax breaks if I decided to apply for an optional group IRA, where the government would put money if I declined the gym membership. And no paperwork, I just had to sign on the dotted lines when they hired me.
As a contractor I now make more than twice the salary, I can put all kinds of stuff on my tax and shuffle things around to save a buck here and there, I can takes months of vacation whenever I want, but there is just no way that in the long run I'll have a better pension.
> the government employees are paid twice as much as the skills and experience warrant
I completely agree. One time I had to deploy a web application (COTS) in a government agency, and I had to show the ropes to the tech lead in charge of the web development team that was supposed to take over the maintenance. After the webapp was installed, the guy kept asking me to "install in the intranet"; I showed him that it was accessible from a browser on the internal network but he kept asking for this to be installed "in the intranet". I asked him to show me the "intranet", and I had to follow him to his workstation where there was an Intranet shortcut on the desktop. It was a bookmark for "http://intranet". Basically all I had to do was to edit a static index.html page to add a link to the new webapp, and the guy was happy that it was "installed" properly.
Surprisingly all maintenance for the web application (simple patches from the vendor) ended up being done by my company, because their internal "web development team" was too busy with other projects.
I don't know how much these guys were paid, but it was too much.
aka "outsourcing risk", which is a no-brainer especially in heavily unionized organizations
> With twice the pay you can pay for your own benefits.
Not with the kind of healthcare, pension and other benefits available in the public sector. Many employees of the government have a guaranteed pension rate, something that a private contractor has no way to get.
> The extent to which today's youngsters rely on technology was revealed following a study of 2,000 parents of children aged ten and under.
From this study they draw conclusions like the 1/3 nonsense in the headline. Incredibly accurate.
> Broadband providers in the UK may be forced to offer parents ways of protecting their children from harmful online content as part of a new Communications Act.
[...]
> Westcoastcloud has just released its internet security product Netintelligence as an App on iTunes for use in schools and will be releasing a home-use version later this year.
Now this whole thing makes sense. This is not about statistics, this is about marketing.
> Sarbox is a bit of a joke to increase white collar jobs [...] just not a step forward
Sarbox prevents the people in charge from hiding behind corporations. Now people making or authorizing phony accounting (the C-level jerks) can be sent to jail.
It's easy to become jaded and cynical when looking at the implementation of regulations, but have a look at the big picture, you will see that this is a big step forward. All the paper shuffling that you witness is a side effect of the big guys knowing that they will end up in jail if they put a number in the wrong column.
> what a step backwards for the human race
To the contrary, this is exactly how a lawful society evolves. Just look at the SEC in the USA; pretty much every rule in their book has been created to keep big companies on the straight and narrow in the interest of everybody, following abusive or at least fishy behavior - first Rockefeller & Cie, more recently Enron (which led to the Sarbox regulations).