There were a lot of MSFT marriages in 2000, about a year after the stock peaked. Groups with little creative opportunity had the most married employees, while groups with substantial creative opportunity (XBox) had the least.
The effects of marriage differ from person to person. Some run home at 5.00 to spend time with the spouse and kids. Others stay in the office burning the midnight oil to stay away from the kids. In both cases the employee is defining their life around marriage rather than work. In one case it is a positive definition while the other is negative.
It would be interesting to compare creative output of gay/lesbian couples to straight couples. Gay men are sterotyped as being more creative -- perhaps this has something to do with finding a positive life partner that doesn't end up producing a major time sink (kids).
My earliest programming memories were on Apple II systems writing looping code in Logo or BASIC. In college, I concentrated on theoretical computer science, possibly because the general limits of computational machinery were made obvious to me through those early years on the apple.
Write some code in Visual Basic.NET and the first thing you notice is that you need a 4GB dual Xeon box just to boot the IDE! In a more efficient environment like VS6 or GCC+Emacs you have to write some complex code before you begin to notice performance limitations of the host machine.
I suppose this is analogous to hopping up 1960's muscle cars versus today's ricecars. The muscle cars were simple enough that owners could make meaningful performance upgrades. Modern cars benefit somewhat from a new chip, but most owners just change the bodywork and add lots of wings.
That having been said, I like my TiBook at least as much as I like my old Apple ][.
5. The ink would run out at predetermined time and only refills made by the company would work.
Have you ever used a refillable ink pen? I just upgraded from a $25 Lamy roller ball pen to a $95 Rotring fountain pen. The Lamy takes $6 refills, while a well of ink for the Rotring costs $7. At my rate of consumption, I need a new roler ball refill every three weeks. When I last had a fountain pen, it took me a year to use half of an ink well.
Now the Lamy and Rotring pens are very expensive compared to your average bic stic, probably due to the much lower volume of premium pens sold compared to bics. Baron Bich's pens enabled him to putter around the world in his yacht with about 80,000 bottles of fine wine onboard (some from his vinyard) and play games like America's Cup.
6. Only the purchaser may use the pen.
Fountain pen users rarely let anyone else touch their pen. It is widely believed that a gold-nibbed pin will mold itself to the user's style of writing. And you thought only PDAs needed handwriting training!
Well, of all the superior operating systems that run on more than 35 architectures, and you can bet there are a lot of them, NetBSD is the most superior. This is handy to remember in case your review goals include "developing superior embedded systems." When you are in a team of 85 engineers working to develop superior products, you need something to make your work stand out. You need the most superior embedded Open Source OS (on Earth). Don't forget!
Having too much cash on hand makes MSFT look like a dollar-denominated money market fund rather than an aggressive technology hedge fund. Dropping some of the cash, or at least moving it to Euros will help the total company value.
However, the promise of a mass market software company is that engineering effort is spread over a nearly unlimited number of shipped units, creating an insanely large return on investment. Now that Microsoft is getting more involved in hardware like XBox and holding on to large piles of cash, it starts to look more like a traditional company.
The MSFT pay rate is good compared to Montana / India / China, but cannot compete with an urban center like Seattle. Unfortunately, Microsoft has now flooded Washington with people with low expectations, limited vision, and excellent standardized test taking skills.
If you have a combination of decent technical skills and good people skills, it is not hard to acquire more cash and equity outside Microsoft than inside. Whether equity has any value is certainly up for debate, but start by looking at a July 1999 - March 2003 MSFT chart.
Too bad the software industry isn't a standardized test!
After the dot-com meltdown, geeks are just starting to find employment again. The remaining employers are unwilling to pay for benefits like health insurance, but are happy to buy computer equipment. So the display manufacturers are keeping resolution down until we can afford to get new glasses.
Commerce only works in the presence of a free flow of information. The buyer and seller should know something about each other, or have reasonable confidence that they can gain relevant information to conduct a transaction. Then they need to know about the stuff they are exchanging.
As there is a lot of money in commerce, fraud is a serious danger. In order to mitigate fraud, law enforcement needs to be invited to the party. The law brings government along, and more information becomes available as a result.
While this intrudes on the privacy of the people conducting business, it also multiplies the value of business people who maintain a good reputation and are in good standing with the relevant authorities. Thus is born the merchant class, those who sacrafice some personal freedom and anonymity in exchange for the potential to profit.
Now if you just want to do a one off transaction, feel free to hire a merchant. This is particularly common when purchasing a house or condo. Rather than become familiar with the law, standards and precadent of the real estate industry and relevant government, buyers typically work with Real Estate Agents. Agents must have their orders finalized by a broker, who must satisfy further educational requirements.
See also, Stock and Commodities brokers, shipping agents, car dealers, etc.
Now recal the last big art sale at Sothoby's. At least one of the bidders was representing an anonymous billionaire or maybe even Saddam Hussein back on their yacht a thousand miles away.
The internet is growing up, it is not just a private club anymore. Welcome to the real world.
Go onto EBay and get some nice US Robotics Courrier HST modems, one for each room. Next, find some speedy 486DX-50 (not DX2-50) boxen, also one per room.
As you add more and more 486 and HST modems, both your compute speed and comm throughput tends towards infinte.
This is the beauty of the Home Beowulf Network!
Ethernet is for wussies. Real Men (tm) do it at 16.8k.
I think a lot of non-open source, non-in-house developed UNIX applications probably won't ever be ported to Mac OS X because it's not taken seriously by folks who write these kinds of apps as a viable platform.
Funny, that is what everyone was saying about Linux six years ago.
I bought my first mac, a TiBook, about six months ago for a WiFi job. I'm now working at a telecom shop that is making the transition from a wholesale (word of mouth sales) to semi-retail business model (lots of marketing). I'm finding that my little grey unix box is awesome for creating marketing design documents, due to its native support of PDF documents and high acceptance within the publishing industry.
Y2K was the mass paranoia that brought computer purchases into Q4 lockstep. Rather than seeing purchases spread across the year, there is a residual purchasing due to the Y2K "upgrades."
It could be argued that Y2K also changed IT thinking from "wouldn't it be cool if..." to "OMG we'd better check the numbers." Once people started to check the date in all systems, they began to refocus on numbers elsewhere.
Enron fell. Worldcom fell. Others fell. USA went to war. Now wireless telecom is the new new thing.
Excessively "cheap" spending practices are just as dangerous as "excessive" spending. The key to successful operation is taking the middle road between two hazardous extremes.
The US has enough agricultural production to feed the world, it also has enough technology to destroy the world many times over. Between these two extremes lies a solution to global problems.
The problem with food distribution in starving countries is that when food is scarce, it becomes the currency of trade. The powerful warlords then hoard food in order to maintain their power while the rest of the nation starves.
If we give them internet access, they will be too busy downloading pr0n and playing warcraft to raid the food distribution efforts
In my early computer years I had a brief flirtation with the Apple Mac, which I liked a lot. But I turned my back on that religion when I took a job editing a PC magazine.
Someone needs to tell this guy about Jaguar and Panther. He seems to like pain, having used Windows from 1.0 to 3.11, so maybe linux will be good for him.
Slashdot Mirror
It was Messenger 3.5, so I'm back to Fire.
I'm installing MSN Messenegr on my powerbook.
Just invest your US$ in Euros!
It seems that you are saying that a nice sports car will increase creative productivity? Sweet!
There were a lot of MSFT marriages in 2000, about a year after the stock peaked. Groups with little creative opportunity had the most married employees, while groups with substantial creative opportunity (XBox) had the least.
The effects of marriage differ from person to person. Some run home at 5.00 to spend time with the spouse and kids. Others stay in the office burning the midnight oil to stay away from the kids. In both cases the employee is defining their life around marriage rather than work. In one case it is a positive definition while the other is negative.
It would be interesting to compare creative output of gay/lesbian couples to straight couples. Gay men are sterotyped as being more creative -- perhaps this has something to do with finding a positive life partner that doesn't end up producing a major time sink (kids).
Compared to vi Emacs is bloatware. But VS.Net developers hold Emacs up as a model of simplicity and efficiency...
My earliest programming memories were on Apple II systems writing looping code in Logo or BASIC. In college, I concentrated on theoretical computer science, possibly because the general limits of computational machinery were made obvious to me through those early years on the apple.
Write some code in Visual Basic.NET and the first thing you notice is that you need a 4GB dual Xeon box just to boot the IDE! In a more efficient environment like VS6 or GCC+Emacs you have to write some complex code before you begin to notice performance limitations of the host machine.
I suppose this is analogous to hopping up 1960's muscle cars versus today's ricecars. The muscle cars were simple enough that owners could make meaningful performance upgrades. Modern cars benefit somewhat from a new chip, but most owners just change the bodywork and add lots of wings.
That having been said, I like my TiBook at least as much as I like my old Apple ][.
Can your uC play Oregon Trail?
I bet it comes with a free TCP/IP stack too!
The Phantom Console will be among Worldcom's offerings?
5. The ink would run out at predetermined time and only refills made by the company would work.
Have you ever used a refillable ink pen? I just upgraded from a $25 Lamy roller ball pen to a $95 Rotring fountain pen. The Lamy takes $6 refills, while a well of ink for the Rotring costs $7. At my rate of consumption, I need a new roler ball refill every three weeks. When I last had a fountain pen, it took me a year to use half of an ink well.
Now the Lamy and Rotring pens are very expensive compared to your average bic stic, probably due to the much lower volume of premium pens sold compared to bics. Baron Bich's pens enabled him to putter around the world in his yacht with about 80,000 bottles of fine wine onboard (some from his vinyard) and play games like America's Cup.
6. Only the purchaser may use the pen.
Fountain pen users rarely let anyone else touch their pen. It is widely believed that a gold-nibbed pin will mold itself to the user's style of writing. And you thought only PDAs needed handwriting training!
you will need monkeys.
LOTS of monkeys.
Well, of all the superior operating systems that run on more than 35 architectures, and you can bet there are a lot of them, NetBSD is the most superior. This is handy to remember in case your review goals include "developing superior embedded systems." When you are in a team of 85 engineers working to develop superior products, you need something to make your work stand out. You need the most superior embedded Open Source OS (on Earth). Don't forget!
Hella Cool Beans?
Now SCO can sue Linksys too!
Having too much cash on hand makes MSFT look like a dollar-denominated money market fund rather than an aggressive technology hedge fund. Dropping some of the cash, or at least moving it to Euros will help the total company value.
However, the promise of a mass market software company is that engineering effort is spread over a nearly unlimited number of shipped units, creating an insanely large return on investment. Now that Microsoft is getting more involved in hardware like XBox and holding on to large piles of cash, it starts to look more like a traditional company.
The MSFT pay rate is good compared to Montana / India / China, but cannot compete with an urban center like Seattle. Unfortunately, Microsoft has now flooded Washington with people with low expectations, limited vision, and excellent standardized test taking skills.
If you have a combination of decent technical skills and good people skills, it is not hard to acquire more cash and equity outside Microsoft than inside. Whether equity has any value is certainly up for debate, but start by looking at a July 1999 - March 2003 MSFT chart.
Too bad the software industry isn't a standardized test!
Hey, I've got a Sony G520, willing to trade for any of those crappy Apple Cinema displays :)
After the dot-com meltdown, geeks are just starting to find employment again. The remaining employers are unwilling to pay for benefits like health insurance, but are happy to buy computer equipment. So the display manufacturers are keeping resolution down until we can afford to get new glasses.
*duh*
Commerce only works in the presence of a free flow of information. The buyer and seller should know something about each other, or have reasonable confidence that they can gain relevant information to conduct a transaction. Then they need to know about the stuff they are exchanging.
As there is a lot of money in commerce, fraud is a serious danger. In order to mitigate fraud, law enforcement needs to be invited to the party. The law brings government along, and more information becomes available as a result.
While this intrudes on the privacy of the people conducting business, it also multiplies the value of business people who maintain a good reputation and are in good standing with the relevant authorities. Thus is born the merchant class, those who sacrafice some personal freedom and anonymity in exchange for the potential to profit.
Now if you just want to do a one off transaction, feel free to hire a merchant. This is particularly common when purchasing a house or condo. Rather than become familiar with the law, standards and precadent of the real estate industry and relevant government, buyers typically work with Real Estate Agents. Agents must have their orders finalized by a broker, who must satisfy further educational requirements.
See also, Stock and Commodities brokers, shipping agents, car dealers, etc.
Now recal the last big art sale at Sothoby's. At least one of the bidders was representing an anonymous billionaire or maybe even Saddam Hussein back on their yacht a thousand miles away.
The internet is growing up, it is not just a private club anymore. Welcome to the real world.
Your home has phone lines, right?
Go onto EBay and get some nice US Robotics Courrier HST modems, one for each room. Next, find some speedy 486DX-50 (not DX2-50) boxen, also one per room.
As you add more and more 486 and HST modems, both your compute speed and comm throughput tends towards infinte.
This is the beauty of the Home Beowulf Network!
Ethernet is for wussies. Real Men (tm) do it at 16.8k.
I think a lot of non-open source, non-in-house developed UNIX applications probably won't ever be ported to Mac OS X because it's not taken seriously by folks who write these kinds of apps as a viable platform.
Funny, that is what everyone was saying about Linux six years ago.
I bought my first mac, a TiBook, about six months ago for a WiFi job. I'm now working at a telecom shop that is making the transition from a wholesale (word of mouth sales) to semi-retail business model (lots of marketing). I'm finding that my little grey unix box is awesome for creating marketing design documents, due to its native support of PDF documents and high acceptance within the publishing industry.
Y2K was the mass paranoia that brought computer purchases into Q4 lockstep. Rather than seeing purchases spread across the year, there is a residual purchasing due to the Y2K "upgrades."
It could be argued that Y2K also changed IT thinking from "wouldn't it be cool if..." to "OMG we'd better check the numbers." Once people started to check the date in all systems, they began to refocus on numbers elsewhere.
Enron fell. Worldcom fell. Others fell. USA went to war. Now wireless telecom is the new new thing.
Excessively "cheap" spending practices are just as dangerous as "excessive" spending. The key to successful operation is taking the middle road between two hazardous extremes.
The US has enough agricultural production to feed the world, it also has enough technology to destroy the world many times over. Between these two extremes lies a solution to global problems.
The problem with food distribution in starving countries is that when food is scarce, it becomes the currency of trade. The powerful warlords then hoard food in order to maintain their power while the rest of the nation starves.
If we give them internet access, they will be too busy downloading pr0n and playing warcraft to raid the food distribution efforts
Lets give them internet first!
Someone needs to tell this guy about Jaguar and Panther. He seems to like pain, having used Windows from 1.0 to 3.11, so maybe linux will be good for him.
until some federal genius decides to label O'Reilly as a terrorist organization due to their sponsorship of "hacking"?