I tend to suspect that the oh-so-clever accounting techniques and special purpose entities Andrew Fastow cooked up to keep Enron's debts off their books was far more complicated than Ken could understand. (They're certainly too much for my little brain.) But instead of asking tough questions, Ken just shrugged and signed off on them.
Didn't Lay earn a PhD in Economics from Univeristy of Houston? I'd say he was smart enough to fathom the ins and outs of shady accounting practices and off-the-books recordkeeping.
Finally someone is speaking truth to the Google Love-Fest masses.
Google may or may not succeed in the long run but it's not because they have some yet-unknown-secret-business-strategy-that-will-cha nge-the-world-forever. You'd think from some of these posts that they've cured cancer or something (Google-cillin?)
Good grief people! Didn't any of you learn from the bubble?
I went through their hiring process looking to take on a management role, it was slow and focused on the wrong things.
This was my experience as well just recently. 4 rounds of interviews all focused on trying to convince me that Google is changing the world and not really interested in me or my skills. Granted, I was not interviewing for an engineering position but the arrogance of all the interviewers really convinces me that Google is poised for a fall somewhere down the line.
Everyone inside is so certain that traditional business models are outdated and that Google will succeed simply because they are Google. My father taught me long ago the old adage: "Pride goeth before a fall". Watch and see.
I'd be a bit hesitant to add a microdrive to my cell phone.
I'd be a little hesitant to add a microwave to my cell phone too. I mean, all of that raditation so close to my head, not to mention the added weight....huh? What's that you say?
Yep, we did too. 23 pounds of pure portable bliss! A little larger than my mom's sewing machine even though they looked the same to me.
I still remember playing around with WordStar and SuperCalc on that tiny 5" screen - since they did not have WYSIWYG it was always a challenge to get something to print out right. I never did figure out dBaseII.
I think the biggest problem with recruiters today is that the vast majority of them are not at all technical and yet, they are trying to recruit people who are very, very skilled in their professions. I find it extraordinarily difficult just to have an initial phone conversation with them.
The primary requirement for a technical recruiter is that they are at least aware of the technology that they are trying to recruit for. That means knowing the various acronyms (that Sequel and SQL are the same thing for example); that programming experience can be somewhat interchangeable; and that some technology is new and there will never be a candidate with 15+ years experience in.Net
The other problem I run into frequently are recruiters who cannot discern the difference between tech-only jobs (aka programming) versus non-technical (but still tech-savy) business or management positions.
I am not a programmer anymore, nor do I wish to be, but I am a technical project manager. I still keep current on new technologies and my previous experience as a programmer and DBA make me qualified to manage even though I have not "officially" programmed for several years.
It would be nice if recruiters could understand the difference and not automatically exclude me from certain positions just because I do not have direct and recent programming experience in "X"-language. Or, conversely, send me job reqs that are programming-only positions.
Man, the only thing that brings out the ultra-geek in a person is a discussion about 35mm vs. digital photography. I can see that everyone on this board must be some kind of professional photographer on assignment with National Geographic
"You can have my trusty Nikon 35mm f2.8 when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!"
I guess the only thing that would make this discussion even better would be how to make my digital camera run Debian.
I finally broke down and bought my wife a digital SLR for Christmas this year. Now that good quality DSLRs have broken the $1000 barrier, it just makes sense. She already had an assortment of lenses and other accessories from her 5 year old 35mm SLR. The new camera has many more features such as auto stabilizer while keeping all of the settings flexibility of her old 35mm.
Honestly, I'm not sure how we got along with it for so long.
You forget that there is an important element that newspaper publishers must consider in order to allow an online subscription to count as paid circulation.
Circulation determines advertising rates and advertising is where newspapers make 99% of their revenue. Subscriptions barely even cover the cost of printing the paper.
Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) has ruled that for online subscriptions to count as paid circulation, it must cost at least 25% of the normal physical delivery rates and that the online edition must bear a reasonable likeness of the printed edition in order to count. That means ads must be included in the online edition -otherwise it doesn't count.
You can wish all you want for an ad-free newspaper but wishing won't make it so.
We've got the solution and have had it for 6 years already. We use XML to render the newspaper - no PDFs to download.
We produce an exact replica of the print edition online; small file sizes, no downloads, and full browser compatibility without plugins.
The beauty of XML is that our clients can re-purpose their content into whatever format they want: HTML, RSS, Text, etc... You can separate the ads from the articles and pictures. Display just a text version of the article or show it exactly as it appears in the print version.
Our software make the paper fully searchable (full text - not just keywords) not just on the current edition but the entire historical archive if they choose to do so. We've got clients who have digitized all their old editions back to the late-1700's.
I don't want to advertise here but we've already figured this out and our business is doing quite well these days.
I was reading a blog the other day and a poster described the current parties as such:
Democrats: They rob you but make sure that to leave a meal on the table so you won't starve.
Republicans: They rob you and leave some crumbs and leftovers.
Neo-Cons: They rob you, take all the food from the pantry, take the fridge, table and kick your dog on the way out.
And I added this one:
Christian-Right Conservatives: They're the homeowners that wake up to find out they're being robbed so they help by loading the plasma TV into the van and wave as the thieves drive off.
Re:How did they cause these injuries?
on
Slacker or Sick
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Nah, it was Minnie Mouse pr0n!
Re:How did they cause these injuries?
on
Slacker or Sick
·
· Score: 1
The only reason Covad is still around is because they were the first to go into bankruptcy and managed to come out of it before the whole industry implosion. They're definitely not the same company.
I managed them as an account for 3 years and they are still the best out there - a lot of good people who really know what they're doing.
I agree and this is something I've been saying for years. The phone companies are just like the RIAA -- they don't want to change unless they're forced to. They'll give lip service to competition but they're not really gonna open up their switch.
Of course they're gonna put the DSLAM in the CO, cause it'll be safe there. And they know that the vast majority of users don't live in the 18,000 foot loop, or that they have 60 year old copper out on the poles with splitters on them forcing a max dial-up speed of 36 kbps.
I remember the hoopla when Covad, Northpoint, and Rhythms came out only to die quick, horrible deaths because the BBells wouldn't let them connect at the local CO.
Investors spent BILLIONS on new infrastructure in the US in the late 90's. We've got so much dark fiber laying around but nobody's there to light it. There's no technical reason why the big telco's can't bring competition to the more dense metrolpolitan areas. Fact is, they either A) choose not to, or B) can't pull their heads out of their collective asses. They don't give a crap about consumer broadband because they're currently busy squeezing the tit of wireless dry - trying to reach that last person in America without a cell phone. The new thing now is sending video to your cell phone. Just what I want; to watch the Superbowl on a 1.5" screen. Thanks.
The market has been deregulated since '84 and again in '96 and in all this time, they can't really decide how they want to approach the market with data services. The demand is there and they know it. Problem is that they still *think* like phone companies. Voice is all they know and all they understand.
I used to think this too...until you notice that we are behind Canada which is far more interspersed and rural than the US. Why isn't there more competitive broadband offerings in Manhattan, or LA, or Chicago? Plenty of new infrastructure there.
The geography argument used to have merit and is still partially to blame for the slow adoption of broadband, especially in the midwest and mountain-west states. It's difficult to get reliable phone service in some of these markets. I think I just read a couple of months ago where the last party line system in American was finally upgraded. How long has private number calling been around? 50 years or so?
No, the real reason is, of course, monopolistic business models of the big telcom companies. They may be shrinking in numbers and merge-crazy at the moment, but they still follow the old Ma' Bell way of doing business. Let us not forget that they still own all the wires. God be damned if they're going to let some little piss-ant BroadBandCommCorp connect to THEIR switch! You call that a router?! HA!!
Add to this fact that the only future-thinking most of these executives are doing is in the way of wireless. All of the other markets (residental, business, long distance, broadband, payphones, yellow pages) can all go to hell as far as they are concerned, except that they provide the steady revenues which keep the boardroom and shareholders happy. And it allows them to perpetually stick their toes in the water with 17G Wireless or whatever the hell the latest promise is without ever delivering a real product.
Cable companies are just as bad, if not worse, but in a different way. They want nothing more than to eat the table scraps of the phone companies by sending phone to the set-top box or blowing money down the tubes by constantly fucking up VOD because their HFC plant doesn't support upstream. DOCSIS still sucks and they know it. It won't offer any real advantages until version 3.0 scheduled to come out the same time Duke Nukem Forever ships.
We had the opportunity to kick ass in this area but we let it slip away with the telcom crash following the.com implosion.
Just try to find an investor these days willing to put even more money in laying the fiber optic cable necessary to bring competitive broadband to consumers
With this crowd, you can provide perspective by asking "how would you feel if the original storyboards from the three original star wars movies were destroyed by fire, along with the original models of the millenium falcon, et al?"
And you would get applause if it were the storyboards from the last three star wars movies. Maybe even admissions of guilt for setting the blaze too....
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to suspect that the oh-so-clever accounting techniques and special purpose entities Andrew Fastow cooked up to keep Enron's debts off their books was far more complicated than Ken could understand. (They're certainly too much for my little brain.) But instead of asking tough questions, Ken just shrugged and signed off on them.
Didn't Lay earn a PhD in Economics from Univeristy of Houston? I'd say he was smart enough to fathom the ins and outs of shady accounting practices and off-the-books recordkeeping.
Bingo!
Finally someone is speaking truth to the Google Love-Fest masses.
Google may or may not succeed in the long run but it's not because they have some yet-unknown-secret-business-strategy-that-will-cha nge-the-world-forever. You'd think from some of these posts that they've cured cancer or something (Google-cillin?)
Good grief people! Didn't any of you learn from the bubble?
I went through their hiring process looking to take on a management role, it was slow and focused on the wrong things.
This was my experience as well just recently. 4 rounds of interviews all focused on trying to convince me that Google is changing the world and not really interested in me or my skills. Granted, I was not interviewing for an engineering position but the arrogance of all the interviewers really convinces me that Google is poised for a fall somewhere down the line.
Everyone inside is so certain that traditional business models are outdated and that Google will succeed simply because they are Google. My father taught me long ago the old adage: "Pride goeth before a fall". Watch and see.
This wouldn't have succeeded at my company. We're still running Windows NT 4.0 which doesn't support USB so we're automatically protected.
Ha-Ha! Suckers!
I'd be a bit hesitant to add a microdrive to my cell phone.
I'd be a little hesitant to add a microwave to my cell phone too. I mean, all of that raditation so close to my head, not to mention the added weight....huh? What's that you say?
um...nevermind.
Duke Nukem Forever has so far pushed everybody's limits!
Yep, we did too. 23 pounds of pure portable bliss! A little larger than my mom's sewing machine even though they looked the same to me.
I still remember playing around with WordStar and SuperCalc on that tiny 5" screen - since they did not have WYSIWYG it was always a challenge to get something to print out right. I never did figure out dBaseII.
I still remember loading WordStar on our Osborne-1 from 5-1/4 floppies.
What a machine!
http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.htmlI think the biggest problem with recruiters today is that the vast majority of them are not at all technical and yet, they are trying to recruit people who are very, very skilled in their professions. I find it extraordinarily difficult just to have an initial phone conversation with them.
The primary requirement for a technical recruiter is that they are at least aware of the technology that they are trying to recruit for. That means knowing the various acronyms (that Sequel and SQL are the same thing for example); that programming experience can be somewhat interchangeable; and that some technology is new and there will never be a candidate with 15+ years experience in .Net
The other problem I run into frequently are recruiters who cannot discern the difference between tech-only jobs (aka programming) versus non-technical (but still tech-savy) business or management positions.
I am not a programmer anymore, nor do I wish to be, but I am a technical project manager. I still keep current on new technologies and my previous experience as a programmer and DBA make me qualified to manage even though I have not "officially" programmed for several years.
It would be nice if recruiters could understand the difference and not automatically exclude me from certain positions just because I do not have direct and recent programming experience in "X"-language. Or, conversely, send me job reqs that are programming-only positions.
Indeed, and once we see a lawsuit against Navin R. Johnson, well know for sure.
Navin can countersue because he was not given proper artist credit for his smash hit "I'm Picking Out a Thermos For You."
Man, the only thing that brings out the ultra-geek in a person is a discussion about 35mm vs. digital photography. I can see that everyone on this board must be some kind of professional photographer on assignment with National Geographic
"You can have my trusty Nikon 35mm f2.8 when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!"
I guess the only thing that would make this discussion even better would be how to make my digital camera run Debian.
I finally broke down and bought my wife a digital SLR for Christmas this year. Now that good quality DSLRs have broken the $1000 barrier, it just makes sense. She already had an assortment of lenses and other accessories from her 5 year old 35mm SLR. The new camera has many more features such as auto stabilizer while keeping all of the settings flexibility of her old 35mm.
Honestly, I'm not sure how we got along with it for so long.
You forget that there is an important element that newspaper publishers must consider in order to allow an online subscription to count as paid circulation.
Circulation determines advertising rates and advertising is where newspapers make 99% of their revenue. Subscriptions barely even cover the cost of printing the paper.
Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) has ruled that for online subscriptions to count as paid circulation, it must cost at least 25% of the normal physical delivery rates and that the online edition must bear a reasonable likeness of the printed edition in order to count. That means ads must be included in the online edition -otherwise it doesn't count.
You can wish all you want for an ad-free newspaper but wishing won't make it so.
We've got the solution and have had it for 6 years already. We use XML to render the newspaper - no PDFs to download.
We produce an exact replica of the print edition online; small file sizes, no downloads, and full browser compatibility without plugins.
The beauty of XML is that our clients can re-purpose their content into whatever format they want: HTML, RSS, Text, etc... You can separate the ads from the articles and pictures. Display just a text version of the article or show it exactly as it appears in the print version.
Our software make the paper fully searchable (full text - not just keywords) not just on the current edition but the entire historical archive if they choose to do so. We've got clients who have digitized all their old editions back to the late-1700's.
I don't want to advertise here but we've already figured this out and our business is doing quite well these days.
It'd be way too cool if this device emitted the brown noise.
A whole bunch of teenagers crapping their pants. Hilarious.
Of course it wouldn't affect the elderly since they're already crapping their pants.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
...you control America....er, wait....
I was reading a blog the other day and a poster described the current parties as such:
Democrats: They rob you but make sure that to leave a meal on the table so you won't starve.
Republicans: They rob you and leave some crumbs and leftovers.
Neo-Cons: They rob you, take all the food from the pantry, take the fridge, table and kick your dog on the way out.
And I added this one:
Christian-Right Conservatives: They're the homeowners that wake up to find out they're being robbed so they help by loading the plasma TV into the van and wave as the thieves drive off.
Nah, it was Minnie Mouse pr0n!
Rats! I was gonna say that. You beat me to it.
The only reason Covad is still around is because they were the first to go into bankruptcy and managed to come out of it before the whole industry implosion. They're definitely not the same company.
I managed them as an account for 3 years and they are still the best out there - a lot of good people who really know what they're doing.
I agree and this is something I've been saying for years. The phone companies are just like the RIAA -- they don't want to change unless they're forced to. They'll give lip service to competition but they're not really gonna open up their switch.
Of course they're gonna put the DSLAM in the CO, cause it'll be safe there. And they know that the vast majority of users don't live in the 18,000 foot loop, or that they have 60 year old copper out on the poles with splitters on them forcing a max dial-up speed of 36 kbps.
I remember the hoopla when Covad, Northpoint, and Rhythms came out only to die quick, horrible deaths because the BBells wouldn't let them connect at the local CO.
I call bulls**t
Investors spent BILLIONS on new infrastructure in the US in the late 90's. We've got so much dark fiber laying around but nobody's there to light it. There's no technical reason why the big telco's can't bring competition to the more dense metrolpolitan areas. Fact is, they either A) choose not to, or B) can't pull their heads out of their collective asses. They don't give a crap about consumer broadband because they're currently busy squeezing the tit of wireless dry - trying to reach that last person in America without a cell phone. The new thing now is sending video to your cell phone. Just what I want; to watch the Superbowl on a 1.5" screen. Thanks.
The market has been deregulated since '84 and again in '96 and in all this time, they can't really decide how they want to approach the market with data services. The demand is there and they know it. Problem is that they still *think* like phone companies. Voice is all they know and all they understand.
I used to think this too...until you notice that we are behind Canada which is far more interspersed and rural than the US. Why isn't there more competitive broadband offerings in Manhattan, or LA, or Chicago? Plenty of new infrastructure there.
The geography argument used to have merit and is still partially to blame for the slow adoption of broadband, especially in the midwest and mountain-west states. It's difficult to get reliable phone service in some of these markets. I think I just read a couple of months ago where the last party line system in American was finally upgraded. How long has private number calling been around? 50 years or so?
No, the real reason is, of course, monopolistic business models of the big telcom companies. They may be shrinking in numbers and merge-crazy at the moment, but they still follow the old Ma' Bell way of doing business. Let us not forget that they still own all the wires. God be damned if they're going to let some little piss-ant BroadBandCommCorp connect to THEIR switch! You call that a router?! HA!!
Add to this fact that the only future-thinking most of these executives are doing is in the way of wireless. All of the other markets (residental, business, long distance, broadband, payphones, yellow pages) can all go to hell as far as they are concerned, except that they provide the steady revenues which keep the boardroom and shareholders happy. And it allows them to perpetually stick their toes in the water with 17G Wireless or whatever the hell the latest promise is without ever delivering a real product.
Cable companies are just as bad, if not worse, but in a different way. They want nothing more than to eat the table scraps of the phone companies by sending phone to the set-top box or blowing money down the tubes by constantly fucking up VOD because their HFC plant doesn't support upstream. DOCSIS still sucks and they know it. It won't offer any real advantages until version 3.0 scheduled to come out the same time Duke Nukem Forever ships.
We had the opportunity to kick ass in this area but we let it slip away with the telcom crash following the .com implosion.
Just try to find an investor these days willing to put even more money in laying the fiber optic cable necessary to bring competitive broadband to consumers
The two parties just announced that they will work out their differences over a cup of hot coffee
With this crowd, you can provide perspective by asking "how would you feel if the original storyboards from the three original star wars movies were destroyed by fire, along with the original models of the millenium falcon, et al?"
And you would get applause if it were the storyboards from the last three star wars movies. Maybe even admissions of guilt for setting the blaze too....