While it doesn't always happen, the company that provides the best prices and best selection to the consumers should be the winner. In music Apple unbundled the album and created a reasonable price point. More music is being sold, but music publishers are making less money. Consumer wins. In publishing the total cost of a book should be authors cut + cost of manufacturing + cost of distribution + marketing costs + profit for publisher + profit to distributer = total cost of book. E-books should dramatically reduce the cost of manufacturing and distribution and if things follow the music model, more books will be sold allowing for a reduction in profit margin due to volume. The consumer wins, if Apple and Amazon can strong arm the publishers not to add savings from manufacturing and distribution to their profit margins.
It is their membership. Over the past year, private sector Union jobs have declined by over a million workers. Ironically the public sector has gone the other way.
Unions work for collective bargaining only when the changes made are beneficial for both the worker and the employer. The 40 hour work week, child labor laws, safety standards and health benefits actually improved the productivity of workers and thus the bottom line for the employer.
In this particular case, I believe IBM Alliance just wants to form an official IBM union as seed corn for the IT industry. I suspect from the issues they submit press releases on that they are not interested in the success of IBM the company and only play lip service to IBMers as employees. If they, or any traditional union represented the IT employees, it is likely the difficulties in finding mutually beneficial improvements will only speed the outsourcing.
There is room for a collective bargaining counter to upper management, but it would more it would be more likely to succeed outside the traditional union infrastructure.
Government jobs, Federal, State and Local are almost treated like a jobs program. Everyone has heard the noise when tax receipts (I refuse to call it revenue) fall short and people have to be let go. The stimulus plan was the Federal government borrowing money to save the jobs of State and Local employees. In my town alone Police, Fire, Teachers and Construction have been hired with two years of stimulus funds. When the money runs out in a year, do we get a new Federal stimulus?
The Feds don't have to be efficient, because they have no competition, and if you put 25% of government workers out, unemployment goes up another 5%. There is no reason to do things better if it reduces the number of workers.
It is hard to concentrate on multiple tasks at once. While a good sysadmin won't fall for this on the best days, an overworked one will occasionally just do stuff that looks right.
If you want real security, any change should require two people (who don't know each other in physically different locations) to implement, an approved change control document that identifies the change and reason for it, and an auditor that goes follows behind the change to make sure it doesn't open any holes.
I'm going for funny on this.........
Humans are the biggest weakness in the chain. Don't hire them, or at least hire the most non-people types you can. Hire the non-team players and the ones that argue with everyone. When someone calls them and asks them to go to a web site, they'll say screw you and hang up.
How about games for 40 year olds? No, not Pac-man and Pole Position, but games adults can play and enjoy now. Apologies to the middle aged that play FPS and others of the new genre, but there is a market for less intensive product.
LTSP is an outstanding product that scales incredibly well compared to other virtual desktop solutions. While a little off topic, LTSP Cluster is an excellent addition to large scale LTSP deployments. https://www.ltsp-cluster.org/
Better yet donate it to some freedom loving international society with the rule it never be implemented, so some future shareholder won't be temped to make money with it. Then all the other companies can say "Sorry government, can't limit access because that is patented." Ok that's silly, the guys with the guns can do what they want, but maybe this patent can keep us free another 17 years.
Humans are hardwired for fear and have to learn to think factually. Like most scientific issues that become political, fear and misinformation dominate over political fact. There will always be a certain segment of the population that believes vaccines cause autism and global warming is a trick to tax us with cap and trade. With vaccines you wait for the kids of autism avoiders to die of measles and polio. With global warming change the message from tax to disincentive to tax credit to incentive. Energy independence (make it a defense issue), tax credits for solar and wind that make the payback for a home owner less than a decade (I suspect a five year payback will get homeowners and home builders forking over for energy improvements).
I think you prove the point that people only hear what they want. MSNBC is just as biased as Fox News. CNN is trying to stay in the middle, but they are getting the same pressures to target an audience. The most popular cable news shows draw 1-3 million people daily (1% of the US population), they don't have an incentive to be balanced and general. I suspect newspapers, online and paper, magazines, etc. all have the same issues. DON'T piss off the target audience.
Technology has the potential to break the monopoly of school districts and classrooms. Right now kids are taught primarily one way. In groups of 20-30 they sit in classrooms and get education from a teacher. The quality of the teacher in process and as fountain of knowledge gos a long way in determining the success of the student. With proper infrastructure each kid can be taught in the way they learn best from the best instructors with the local teachers being facilitators of finding the knowledge. In addition to no child being left behind, we can get no child held back.
Maybe the PRC government did it at the request of the MPAA to cut down on piracy? You can't video tape a 3D movie from your seat.
Seriously, when are corporations going to realize that the PRC is an oppressive government and no matter how much they let Wal-Mart grow, or let us feed them KFC, or build our toys for us, we are not making them more free? They are playing capitalist so they don't go the way of the Soviet Union, but if you threaten their leadership, they will shut you down.
Gen X is in its peak earning years. 40 somethings are the people maintaining the infrastructure most of this runs on. Corralling the 20 and 30 something worker-bees. We're the ones that started working for the startups of the 80's after they became big and have the institutional knowledge to do things the correct way. Sure there are plenty of hot shot young-uns, but most of the economy is managed and maintained by people in 40's and 50's.
Most universities don't teach good system management. The CS departments are training developers and programmers. Since good SA's like stability and good developers like chaos the two normally don't mix. Does OSU have a SA degree program?
I have a sneaking suspicion that more security will lead to less internet freedom. Sure it'll be nice if you didn't have to worry about phishing sites or spam, but at what cost? A more secure internet means oppressive regimes can track dissidents. It means companies can track your behavior online, and well-meaning governments can limits legitimate freedoms.
Sherlock Holmes is a solid movie with good acting and an interesting take on the Holmes story line. It'll probably evolve into an interesting series of movies. Alvin and the Chipmunks is well made mindless children's fare. For the 4-8 age group love it and it is doing extremely well in the box office. Avatar on the other hand is a visually stunning movie, but the noble savage storyline is strait from the 70's. It is not a bad movie by any stretch, but without the special effect advancement, would this movie garner any attention? Will Avatar's real legacy be laying the groundwork for better integrated CGI rather than the story told?
Support this: http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/
So we don't have to fight the closed systems like we did with the PC. Really, robotics is going through its early DIY stage, where most interesting stuff is built by hand using lots of modified parts. Anything we can do, as it moves into mainstream products, to keep the DIY rights to open the hardware and change the software if we want, helps our future freedom.
In the long run getting multiple competitors in the CPU space is good. The problem is trust busting worked when the competitors were slow moving oil companies or railroads, by the time this gets through the court system the market will be significantly different. What computer were you using at the turn of the century?
The reason a corporation give money to a charity isn't because it believes in the charity, but because it will get a blurb in paper saying how good they are and increase the brand good will. Does anyone really expect a corporation to spend $25000 so it can be on the news with a headline "Chase supports legalizing Drugs". I won't even get to the quagmire around abortion. I'm sure if they do this again, they'll pre-screen organizations that are allowed to participate. Frankly I'd been more concerned if they screened out an organization that helps people get out of credit card debt.
This shows how government works. This issue was important when Netscape had significant market share and MS just brought out IE. They used their OS dominance to kill Netscape as a company, and that is when the anti-monopoly police should have stepped in and taken swift action. Of course they have used the monopoly to dominate the office suite market and to horn in Exchange, MSSQL and now Sharepoint. The original DOJ solution of breaking up MS and forcing the OS and the office suite to stand on their own was the real solution to this issue. I would have added a third company specializing in enterprise software to the mix.
What I really want is to separate the purchase of hardware from the purchase of software. When I buy a computer I don't want to chose between twelve versions of windows, I want some Linux options, or a least a no OS option.
We used to yell at the TV, complain at the breakfast table to our spouse, hit the steering wheel. If we were really engaged, we'd write a letter to the editor or call the radio station. There was no option for TV, except being in the right place at the right time (the tornado hit my trailer). Now, we can respond within seconds of an article being published, vent anger or correct mistakes. Add insight and expand the story. I find the comments more interesting than the story a surprising amount of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
While it doesn't always happen, the company that provides the best prices and best selection to the consumers should be the winner. In music Apple unbundled the album and created a reasonable price point. More music is being sold, but music publishers are making less money. Consumer wins. In publishing the total cost of a book should be authors cut + cost of manufacturing + cost of distribution + marketing costs + profit for publisher + profit to distributer = total cost of book. E-books should dramatically reduce the cost of manufacturing and distribution and if things follow the music model, more books will be sold allowing for a reduction in profit margin due to volume. The consumer wins, if Apple and Amazon can strong arm the publishers not to add savings from manufacturing and distribution to their profit margins.
It is their membership. Over the past year, private sector Union jobs have declined by over a million workers. Ironically the public sector has gone the other way. Unions work for collective bargaining only when the changes made are beneficial for both the worker and the employer. The 40 hour work week, child labor laws, safety standards and health benefits actually improved the productivity of workers and thus the bottom line for the employer. In this particular case, I believe IBM Alliance just wants to form an official IBM union as seed corn for the IT industry. I suspect from the issues they submit press releases on that they are not interested in the success of IBM the company and only play lip service to IBMers as employees. If they, or any traditional union represented the IT employees, it is likely the difficulties in finding mutually beneficial improvements will only speed the outsourcing. There is room for a collective bargaining counter to upper management, but it would more it would be more likely to succeed outside the traditional union infrastructure.
Lotus 123, Visicalc, WordPerfect, ... I guess you can give MS PowerPoint.
Government jobs, Federal, State and Local are almost treated like a jobs program. Everyone has heard the noise when tax receipts (I refuse to call it revenue) fall short and people have to be let go. The stimulus plan was the Federal government borrowing money to save the jobs of State and Local employees. In my town alone Police, Fire, Teachers and Construction have been hired with two years of stimulus funds. When the money runs out in a year, do we get a new Federal stimulus? The Feds don't have to be efficient, because they have no competition, and if you put 25% of government workers out, unemployment goes up another 5%. There is no reason to do things better if it reduces the number of workers.
It is hard to concentrate on multiple tasks at once. While a good sysadmin won't fall for this on the best days, an overworked one will occasionally just do stuff that looks right. If you want real security, any change should require two people (who don't know each other in physically different locations) to implement, an approved change control document that identifies the change and reason for it, and an auditor that goes follows behind the change to make sure it doesn't open any holes. I'm going for funny on this.........
Humans are the biggest weakness in the chain. Don't hire them, or at least hire the most non-people types you can. Hire the non-team players and the ones that argue with everyone. When someone calls them and asks them to go to a web site, they'll say screw you and hang up.
How about games for 40 year olds? No, not Pac-man and Pole Position, but games adults can play and enjoy now. Apologies to the middle aged that play FPS and others of the new genre, but there is a market for less intensive product.
LTSP is an outstanding product that scales incredibly well compared to other virtual desktop solutions. While a little off topic, LTSP Cluster is an excellent addition to large scale LTSP deployments. https://www.ltsp-cluster.org/
Better yet donate it to some freedom loving international society with the rule it never be implemented, so some future shareholder won't be temped to make money with it. Then all the other companies can say "Sorry government, can't limit access because that is patented." Ok that's silly, the guys with the guns can do what they want, but maybe this patent can keep us free another 17 years.
Complete the programming job, then fill in the calendar when you are done.
Humans are hardwired for fear and have to learn to think factually. Like most scientific issues that become political, fear and misinformation dominate over political fact. There will always be a certain segment of the population that believes vaccines cause autism and global warming is a trick to tax us with cap and trade. With vaccines you wait for the kids of autism avoiders to die of measles and polio. With global warming change the message from tax to disincentive to tax credit to incentive. Energy independence (make it a defense issue), tax credits for solar and wind that make the payback for a home owner less than a decade (I suspect a five year payback will get homeowners and home builders forking over for energy improvements).
I think you prove the point that people only hear what they want. MSNBC is just as biased as Fox News. CNN is trying to stay in the middle, but they are getting the same pressures to target an audience. The most popular cable news shows draw 1-3 million people daily (1% of the US population), they don't have an incentive to be balanced and general. I suspect newspapers, online and paper, magazines, etc. all have the same issues. DON'T piss off the target audience.
Technology has the potential to break the monopoly of school districts and classrooms. Right now kids are taught primarily one way. In groups of 20-30 they sit in classrooms and get education from a teacher. The quality of the teacher in process and as fountain of knowledge gos a long way in determining the success of the student. With proper infrastructure each kid can be taught in the way they learn best from the best instructors with the local teachers being facilitators of finding the knowledge. In addition to no child being left behind, we can get no child held back.
Etch A Sketch
Maybe the PRC government did it at the request of the MPAA to cut down on piracy? You can't video tape a 3D movie from your seat. Seriously, when are corporations going to realize that the PRC is an oppressive government and no matter how much they let Wal-Mart grow, or let us feed them KFC, or build our toys for us, we are not making them more free? They are playing capitalist so they don't go the way of the Soviet Union, but if you threaten their leadership, they will shut you down.
Gen X is in its peak earning years. 40 somethings are the people maintaining the infrastructure most of this runs on. Corralling the 20 and 30 something worker-bees. We're the ones that started working for the startups of the 80's after they became big and have the institutional knowledge to do things the correct way. Sure there are plenty of hot shot young-uns, but most of the economy is managed and maintained by people in 40's and 50's.
Most universities don't teach good system management. The CS departments are training developers and programmers. Since good SA's like stability and good developers like chaos the two normally don't mix. Does OSU have a SA degree program?
I have a sneaking suspicion that more security will lead to less internet freedom. Sure it'll be nice if you didn't have to worry about phishing sites or spam, but at what cost? A more secure internet means oppressive regimes can track dissidents. It means companies can track your behavior online, and well-meaning governments can limits legitimate freedoms.
Sherlock Holmes is a solid movie with good acting and an interesting take on the Holmes story line. It'll probably evolve into an interesting series of movies. Alvin and the Chipmunks is well made mindless children's fare. For the 4-8 age group love it and it is doing extremely well in the box office. Avatar on the other hand is a visually stunning movie, but the noble savage storyline is strait from the 70's. It is not a bad movie by any stretch, but without the special effect advancement, would this movie garner any attention? Will Avatar's real legacy be laying the groundwork for better integrated CGI rather than the story told?
Support this: http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/ So we don't have to fight the closed systems like we did with the PC. Really, robotics is going through its early DIY stage, where most interesting stuff is built by hand using lots of modified parts. Anything we can do, as it moves into mainstream products, to keep the DIY rights to open the hardware and change the software if we want, helps our future freedom.
Plus these same corporations buy in bulk. If you buy in 10K lots, you'd be surprised how low the cost per seat can go.
In the long run getting multiple competitors in the CPU space is good. The problem is trust busting worked when the competitors were slow moving oil companies or railroads, by the time this gets through the court system the market will be significantly different. What computer were you using at the turn of the century?
The reason a corporation give money to a charity isn't because it believes in the charity, but because it will get a blurb in paper saying how good they are and increase the brand good will. Does anyone really expect a corporation to spend $25000 so it can be on the news with a headline "Chase supports legalizing Drugs". I won't even get to the quagmire around abortion. I'm sure if they do this again, they'll pre-screen organizations that are allowed to participate. Frankly I'd been more concerned if they screened out an organization that helps people get out of credit card debt.
This shows how government works. This issue was important when Netscape had significant market share and MS just brought out IE. They used their OS dominance to kill Netscape as a company, and that is when the anti-monopoly police should have stepped in and taken swift action. Of course they have used the monopoly to dominate the office suite market and to horn in Exchange, MSSQL and now Sharepoint. The original DOJ solution of breaking up MS and forcing the OS and the office suite to stand on their own was the real solution to this issue. I would have added a third company specializing in enterprise software to the mix. What I really want is to separate the purchase of hardware from the purchase of software. When I buy a computer I don't want to chose between twelve versions of windows, I want some Linux options, or a least a no OS option.
We used to yell at the TV, complain at the breakfast table to our spouse, hit the steering wheel. If we were really engaged, we'd write a letter to the editor or call the radio station. There was no option for TV, except being in the right place at the right time (the tornado hit my trailer). Now, we can respond within seconds of an article being published, vent anger or correct mistakes. Add insight and expand the story. I find the comments more interesting than the story a surprising amount of the time.