And then it dawned on Seyk why the software and support were so bad: That's the way vendors make money. They push products on the market before they've been adequately tested, demand payment up front and then are often not available to deal with the sequelae of poorly performing products.
This is why open source software makes better business sense, and it should be heralded wall to wall, company to company. Print this article out and mail it to every company in your city/town/village. E-mail the link to formidable and small-time CIOs and CEOs.
We geeks can debate distributions, licensing issues, and window managers, but we have to come together when it comes to making open source software (of which most of us champion) viable to the corporate bottom line.
Nonsense. This self-serving bill expresses its author's technological naivety by transferring liability for copyright infringements from copyright violators to hardware manufacturers and software developers. Additionally, it grants the Secretary of Commerce broad, unwarranted powers over technology industries where market forces should dictate the development of such "certified security technologies." Finally, the vague definition of an "interactive digital device" in Section 109, Part 3, cannot be taken seriously by anyone but a trial lawyer. Such a definition could be interpreted so that the entire cellular phone and telco industries must encrypt all calls and that all internet traffic passing through a web browser must be encrypted (despite the Department of Justice's intense desire to the contrary). Nay, the potential cost to a wide range of technology industries is not equitable to the smaller, less significant beneficiaries of this bill, the author's top campaign contributors: the MPAA and other television studios.
In the real world, there is this thing called The Bottom Line. Companies are bound to it. To succeed, a company has to make more money (revenue/receipts/income) than it spends (overhead/outlays/expenses). Companies use budgets to measure how much they make and how much they spend. Capitalism. The private sector. Got it?
Enter the government agency whose sole purpose is to spend public funds (i.e. taxes), and if the moon is right, offer a useful service. Such agencies are not bound by The Bottom Line, because regardless of the utility of their existence, they are budgeted money to spend. (In public circles, this is known as the "Spend It Or Lose It" rule.) Consequently, money is spent on needless resources. Third-party software in-house programmers could have written. A dual-processor server running Ultimate Bulletin Board. Tens of thousands of dollars of support options for software nobody in-house wants to touch. Herein, the mighty Bureaucracy takes root.
I submit my place of employment, a state agency, as a prime example. Despite a streaming media viewership that numbers in the ones on a weekly basis, we continue to renew our RealNetworks licensing (don't laugh) for thousands of dollars a pop AND increase the volume of televised programs we will agree to stream. If we were a private company, we would have ceased and desisted all streaming media activities two years ago. And that was after I exercised some initiative and wrote a web-based scheduler application to handle a moderate volume of programming.
You see, proprietary software/support and government agencies go together like peanut butter and jelly. Government agencies don't have to justify the cost of software and support, because they don't have to deliver like private companies do. I've tried on several occasions to recommend open source solutions, but everytime my proposals have fallen on deaf ears because of budget concerns. You simply can't apply capitalist, prudent logic to this kind of mix.
Microsoft says the changes will make upgrading more simple and that they were made at the request of customers. It claims only 20% of customers will see price increases, 50% will pay the same and 30% will save money. Companies who upgrade a lot will save the most, it says.
Did anybody else get this? This is like that shopaholic girlfriend/significant other/wife that explains how she saved money by spending hundreds of dollars at a sale. Sheesh!
Free-agent CEO's & their compensation to blame
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 1
The difference between geeks getting layed off and steel workers and middle managers getting layed off is that now CEO's have little to no incentive to deliver results on a long-term basis. If they come in over expectations for a quarter or two, they're off to the next multi-national to rake in a ridiculous compensation package. And if they don't deliver? Don't worry, be happy. They get a multi-million dollar severance package on the way out.
How can you expect to build a winning business practice when your top guy isn't around long enough to have his name painted in his parking space?
The real signs that show if a company can weather a recession or not are 1) at least 3% dividend yield and 2) have debt less than 20% of stockholders equity. Redhat isn't even close in these benchmarks. Redhat is like many other new, shiny tech companies. Merging and moving and evolving rapidly. In other words, you're more likely to get spanked by tech stocks like Redhat in a recession than you are with blue chip companies and specific industries tailored for "hard times."
I always thought that WordPerfect 5.1 was the pinnacle of word processors. I had the priviledge (or curse depending on your point of view) of running for a law firm back when WP5.1 was the standard bearer, and when we began moving to the GUI-centric Word, the administrative staff rose up in revolt. They were so crafty with those keystrokes, it was simply amazing. I gravitated towards Word myself, because it was sexier and I was young and immature;) but I can guarantee you I was no more productive or quicker with Word than any of those secretaries were with crusty old WordPerfect 5.1.
This post and its immediate reply are disgusting. You have it upside down and backwards. It is these types of threats that a lot of dedicated people want to prevent. A lot of people got seriously hurt or killed today. This is no "Wag The Dog." I refuse to let your stupidity and divisiveness dominate the discussion like I've read from a lot of immature Slashdotters filled with self-importance.
I'm a libertarian, so I can see where you're coming from, but if there was ever a time for sound, swift response from our American government and its people, it is now. I will leave the debate over the proper response to another discussion.
For now, let's put petty philosophical differences aside, come together, and support the people we've entrusted to act accordingly. Give blood and/or donate whatever resources you can to the appropriate organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation Army.
looking more like corporate feudalism rather than democracy these days isn't it
No, it's looking more like corporate fascism. Underneath all the unreasonable banking fees, credit card APRs, and software EULAs, the average consumer is egregiously overtaxed to support major corporate bottom lines whereever he goes.
If you're going to call someone a moron, at least have the guts to post with your alias. Your points, though small, should begin with that much credibility.
Any voter so swayed by the media's impression of an election, including nightly news coverage, FUD campaign commercials, and newspaper editorials probably isn't deserving of a vote to begin with. The fact is that alternative parties have more ways to reach people than ever before. There was Ralph Nader on the Tonight Show. Harry Browne was heard on many talk radio shows across the country. The problem is that not enough people believe in what these guys were pitching.
This was most evident in John McCain's campaign for the Republican nomination. He received more of the spotlight than any of the candidates through the primaries, and early on enjoyed the support of moderate Republicans on the east coast. But despite his media coverage and campaign finance reform or bust pitch, his proposed direction for the Republican party met with the disapproval of his party's constituents. He had every opportunity to succeed and reach the people, and in the end, the people decided to go another way.
So you see, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and every other talking head on the cable news networks did not cast the only ballots in last year's elections. If you got over your vicimization problem like so many others, you would see this.
And for the record, I voted for Harry Browne, the Libertarian candidate.
Compare grass roots software born from the free time of a single person or small group to that of a major vendor's bloatware. On one hand you have Perl, Emacs, VI editor, Linux and others. Not ironically text based. Then you have marketroids conceptions that incessantly seize control of your desktop. Smart Tags, countless plug-ins, JavaScript, VBScript, browser integration into the operating system.
Nothing has facilitated the production of poorly designed software like the mouse has. When you sacrifice a single command prompt in favor of a GUI interface, you're declaring open season on your desktop. The marketroids are going to light up every pixel you have if even remotely possible. It's the difference between a tornado touching down on a little town's main street (read: command line) as opposed to touching down somewhere in Kansas (read: GUI).
Companies like RealNetworks and Microsoft don't give a damn if their software works as long as it drives people toward their services and content. And we can thank the Internet for that. Software to them is more about battling over the Windows registry to become the default viewer, the portal or home page. It's about getting the user to put the mouse in the proper coordinates and clicking away.
but of course, noone knows that because those are the only two choices presented to them before they get to the voting booth. Once there, the see a long list of names -- most of which they've never heard about before (thanks media!) so of *course* they're not going to vote for them.
How does it feel to be so wrong? This is the same kind of drivel younger voters fall back on time and time again. You *do* have a voice in who gets chosen to represent the party you registered with. This process is known as a primary where registered voters of a like party cast votes to nominate candidates to represent their parties in elections.
How hard is it to pick up the telephone and order a pizza? My God. You might begin to think we've been communicating via heralds on horseback until the last year or so.
This sounds like another obtuse dotcom business strategy. Is there something in the dial tone I'm not hearing? And I thought I was anti-telephone (don't have a cell phone).
Re-opt after 30 days? This is like all the other opt-out hoops we have to jump through. The recent Slashdot article regarding banks' opt-out policies for financial data sharing is a good place to start to better understand how big business and big government are working together to compromise your privacy in the name of "information sharing."
I called my bank, Bank One, to opt-out of this travesty, and the recording indicated that my request would take 90 days to be fully processed!!! In the blink of an electron, they can charge me $2.50 for teller assistance when I deposit a paycheck, but it takes them ninety days to essentially sit tight on my personal financial data. Unacceptable!!!
This is not better than nothing. I have written my state and U.S. representatives, Bank One, and the Direct Marketing Association (a major proponent of opt-out over opt-in policies) to voice my complete disgust with this practice.
As one smart Slashdot poster wrote, "Silence does not imply assent." Do not let this crap go on without voicing your opinion!
Cincinnati, OH- Two Reds pitchers were placed on this disabled list today. Johnny Johnson was placed on the 60-day DL with a blow tendon in his pitching elbow. Johnson is scheduled to undergo Tommy John surgery tomorrow. Linus Blazer, the phenom pitching robot, was placed on the 15-day DL to upgrade its repetoire. Blazer is scheduled to undergo a./configure; make; make install Thursday.
Does this include the repetoire of those Triple-A pitchers posing as major leaguers on expansion team rosters? Hell, you can accomplish this with a rubber batting tee. Does the 2500 pitch database include the Rick Ankiel heave to the backstop? What about the Nuke Laloosh "hit the bull" pitch? Can it scuff the baseball a la Mike Scott?
This is one reason why George W. Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty, a treaty that no other nation has ratified mind you (except Kosovo, I think). Of course, the world assigns the blame to the United States because of its expanded infrastructure and energy needs.
Furthermore, NASA satellite images of carbon monoxide emissions the world over prove that the United States is *not* to blame. The image shows that northern South America and western Africa have the highest carbon monoxide emissions in the world.
Whether commercial or free, I believe software should be just that: soft. I believe most folks need software that they can modify to meet their own specific needs. Free software or open source software meets this requirement best, especially because the changes we make come at no cost to us.
The sun is setting on the days of the killer app. As we apply digital solutions to more of life's problems, the more we will need software that is soft.
The examples you list of users controlling content are exactly that. Users controlling content. They also apply to the reduction of annoying whistles, bells, and other seizure-inducing graphics.
Smart tags is quite the opposite. It is the addition (or in my view saturation) of content that neither author nor user can control. Meta tags be damned. How myopic a solution is that?
The real acid test of whether Smart Tags will make the release of XP will be whether the Big Boys (e.g. CNN, Yahoo, Amazon, on-line newspapers worldwide, etc.) put their feet down and send MSFT the message that this dog doesn't hunt. Because this is more of an editorial/authoring issue than it is an end-user issue. Authors and editors have a more at stake what with their content being perverted.
Slashdot Mirror
At first when I read the article title, I thought it said, "MSN Forces Outlook POOP." Hmm...
This is why open source software makes better business sense, and it should be heralded wall to wall, company to company. Print this article out and mail it to every company in your city/town/village. E-mail the link to formidable and small-time CIOs and CEOs.
We geeks can debate distributions, licensing issues, and window managers, but we have to come together when it comes to making open source software (of which most of us champion) viable to the corporate bottom line.
SSSCA = Sucka.
Nonsense. This self-serving bill expresses its author's technological naivety by transferring liability for copyright infringements from copyright violators to hardware manufacturers and software developers. Additionally, it grants the Secretary of Commerce broad, unwarranted powers over technology industries where market forces should dictate the development of such "certified security technologies." Finally, the vague definition of an "interactive digital device" in Section 109, Part 3, cannot be taken seriously by anyone but a trial lawyer. Such a definition could be interpreted so that the entire cellular phone and telco industries must encrypt all calls and that all internet traffic passing through a web browser must be encrypted (despite the Department of Justice's intense desire to the contrary). Nay, the potential cost to a wide range of technology industries is not equitable to the smaller, less significant beneficiaries of this bill, the author's top campaign contributors: the MPAA and other television studios.
http://slashdot.org/articles/980721/1049204.shtml
Enter the government agency whose sole purpose is to spend public funds (i.e. taxes), and if the moon is right, offer a useful service. Such agencies are not bound by The Bottom Line, because regardless of the utility of their existence, they are budgeted money to spend. (In public circles, this is known as the "Spend It Or Lose It" rule.) Consequently, money is spent on needless resources. Third-party software in-house programmers could have written. A dual-processor server running Ultimate Bulletin Board. Tens of thousands of dollars of support options for software nobody in-house wants to touch. Herein, the mighty Bureaucracy takes root.
I submit my place of employment, a state agency, as a prime example. Despite a streaming media viewership that numbers in the ones on a weekly basis, we continue to renew our RealNetworks licensing (don't laugh) for thousands of dollars a pop AND increase the volume of televised programs we will agree to stream. If we were a private company, we would have ceased and desisted all streaming media activities two years ago. And that was after I exercised some initiative and wrote a web-based scheduler application to handle a moderate volume of programming.
You see, proprietary software/support and government agencies go together like peanut butter and jelly. Government agencies don't have to justify the cost of software and support, because they don't have to deliver like private companies do. I've tried on several occasions to recommend open source solutions, but everytime my proposals have fallen on deaf ears because of budget concerns. You simply can't apply capitalist, prudent logic to this kind of mix.
Did anybody else get this? This is like that shopaholic girlfriend/significant other/wife that explains how she saved money by spending hundreds of dollars at a sale. Sheesh!
How can you expect to build a winning business practice when your top guy isn't around long enough to have his name painted in his parking space?
The real signs that show if a company can weather a recession or not are 1) at least 3% dividend yield and 2) have debt less than 20% of stockholders equity. Redhat isn't even close in these benchmarks. Redhat is like many other new, shiny tech companies. Merging and moving and evolving rapidly. In other words, you're more likely to get spanked by tech stocks like Redhat in a recession than you are with blue chip companies and specific industries tailored for "hard times."
I always thought that WordPerfect 5.1 was the pinnacle of word processors. I had the priviledge (or curse depending on your point of view) of running for a law firm back when WP5.1 was the standard bearer, and when we began moving to the GUI-centric Word, the administrative staff rose up in revolt. They were so crafty with those keystrokes, it was simply amazing. I gravitated towards Word myself, because it was sexier and I was young and immature ;) but I can guarantee you I was no more productive or quicker with Word than any of those secretaries were with crusty old WordPerfect 5.1.
I'm a libertarian, so I can see where you're coming from, but if there was ever a time for sound, swift response from our American government and its people, it is now. I will leave the debate over the proper response to another discussion.
For now, let's put petty philosophical differences aside, come together, and support the people we've entrusted to act accordingly. Give blood and/or donate whatever resources you can to the appropriate organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation Army.
No, it's looking more like corporate fascism. Underneath all the unreasonable banking fees, credit card APRs, and software EULAs, the average consumer is egregiously overtaxed to support major corporate bottom lines whereever he goes.
Any voter so swayed by the media's impression of an election, including nightly news coverage, FUD campaign commercials, and newspaper editorials probably isn't deserving of a vote to begin with. The fact is that alternative parties have more ways to reach people than ever before. There was Ralph Nader on the Tonight Show. Harry Browne was heard on many talk radio shows across the country. The problem is that not enough people believe in what these guys were pitching.
This was most evident in John McCain's campaign for the Republican nomination. He received more of the spotlight than any of the candidates through the primaries, and early on enjoyed the support of moderate Republicans on the east coast. But despite his media coverage and campaign finance reform or bust pitch, his proposed direction for the Republican party met with the disapproval of his party's constituents. He had every opportunity to succeed and reach the people, and in the end, the people decided to go another way.
So you see, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and every other talking head on the cable news networks did not cast the only ballots in last year's elections. If you got over your vicimization problem like so many others, you would see this.
And for the record, I voted for Harry Browne, the Libertarian candidate.
Nothing has facilitated the production of poorly designed software like the mouse has. When you sacrifice a single command prompt in favor of a GUI interface, you're declaring open season on your desktop. The marketroids are going to light up every pixel you have if even remotely possible. It's the difference between a tornado touching down on a little town's main street (read: command line) as opposed to touching down somewhere in Kansas (read: GUI).
Companies like RealNetworks and Microsoft don't give a damn if their software works as long as it drives people toward their services and content. And we can thank the Internet for that. Software to them is more about battling over the Windows registry to become the default viewer, the portal or home page. It's about getting the user to put the mouse in the proper coordinates and clicking away.
How does it feel to be so wrong? This is the same kind of drivel younger voters fall back on time and time again. You *do* have a voice in who gets chosen to represent the party you registered with. This process is known as a primary where registered voters of a like party cast votes to nominate candidates to represent their parties in elections.
What, like webvan.com? Maybe you're being sarcastic; I couldn't tell.
This sounds like another obtuse dotcom business strategy. Is there something in the dial tone I'm not hearing? And I thought I was anti-telephone (don't have a cell phone).
Second, swallow camera.
Third, spin yourself around twenty times real fast.
Fourth, projectile vomit.
Fifth, pass out.
Finally, enjoy the taped recording of your physiological feat! Brush your teeth while your at it.
I called my bank, Bank One, to opt-out of this travesty, and the recording indicated that my request would take 90 days to be fully processed!!! In the blink of an electron, they can charge me $2.50 for teller assistance when I deposit a paycheck, but it takes them ninety days to essentially sit tight on my personal financial data. Unacceptable!!!
This is not better than nothing. I have written my state and U.S. representatives, Bank One, and the Direct Marketing Association (a major proponent of opt-out over opt-in policies) to voice my complete disgust with this practice.
As one smart Slashdot poster wrote, "Silence does not imply assent." Do not let this crap go on without voicing your opinion!
Cincinnati, OH- Two Reds pitchers were placed on this disabled list today. Johnny Johnson was placed on the 60-day DL with a blow tendon in his pitching elbow. Johnson is scheduled to undergo Tommy John surgery tomorrow. Linus Blazer, the phenom pitching robot, was placed on the 15-day DL to upgrade its repetoire. Blazer is scheduled to undergo a ./configure; make; make install Thursday.
But seriously, what about the spitball?
This is one reason why George W. Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty, a treaty that no other nation has ratified mind you (except Kosovo, I think). Of course, the world assigns the blame to the United States because of its expanded infrastructure and energy needs.
Furthermore, NASA satellite images of carbon monoxide emissions the world over prove that the United States is *not* to blame. The image shows that northern South America and western Africa have the highest carbon monoxide emissions in the world.
So, stuff that in your craw.
Here, here.
The sun is setting on the days of the killer app. As we apply digital solutions to more of life's problems, the more we will need software that is soft.
Smart tags is quite the opposite. It is the addition (or in my view saturation) of content that neither author nor user can control. Meta tags be damned. How myopic a solution is that?
The real acid test of whether Smart Tags will make the release of XP will be whether the Big Boys (e.g. CNN, Yahoo, Amazon, on-line newspapers worldwide, etc.) put their feet down and send MSFT the message that this dog doesn't hunt. Because this is more of an editorial/authoring issue than it is an end-user issue. Authors and editors have a more at stake what with their content being perverted.