I'm of the firm conviction that the number of employees at dotcoms who actually were smart computer folks was very small.
There's no small number of people who learned a little bit of HTML and not much else in the dot-com era, who were laid off once the bubble burst and were unable and/or unwilling to expand their skill set and remain in the industry.
Ask any competent techie who was working during the dot-com bubble, and they'll tell you that the number of people who had no business being in tech (and, make no mistake, those people are still here today, just in much lower numbers) was incredibly high.
I miss the bubble mostly because it was one of the few times that computer folks got any real sort of respect in the corporate world.
That, and tech seemed more interesting and exciting back then, because it seemed like new, wacky things were coming out on a regular basis. "New" things these days seem to be much more evolutionary than revolutionary.
'00s - Housing/Mortgage/Junk Bonds - Buy up homes, hold them, sell them higher. Turn over, turn over, turn over. Create artificial "need", supply mortgages backed by investment bonds instead of hard money, etc. Sell those bonds based on high-risk loans as "smart investments".
Not exactly right. The loans given by banks for mortgages were well within legal limits a lot of the time (excepting the not-unheard-of outright fraud in some cases when subprime borrowers had their salaries inflated), using the whole fractional lending tradition (which is how our entire banking system works, really). So, there was just as much "real money" as any other loan had backing it.
However, then those loans were packed together, redivided, and sold as "safe high return investments" called Collateral Debt Obligations (CDOs) which then were purchased by hedge funds and other investment houses, with the assurance by Moody's that the vehicles were safe. Adjustable loans start defaulting, banks start getting scared and stop lending (this is the credit "crunch" people talk about), the financial sector takes a dump, investors flee to other investments (thus why commodities like oil and gold have skyrocked lately), the Fed starts lowering interest rates and going nuts trying to keep the monetary system from locking up tight, etc.
The real problem wasn't a matter of creating artificial need (Realtors have been trying to do that for decades, "no one is making more land", "prices always go up", etc), but rather that post-9/11 real estate and building was the only thing really working well as an industry, and in order to get in on the fun, *some* lenders significantly relaxed their underwriting standards in order to get people into houses.
Most startup companies are never profitable and fail. The only difference between the mom&pop and the silicon valley startup is how much they burn through. Both fail to make a profit in the first few years, and those that do are RARE exceptions. It's often said that you should expect to not make any profit in a new business for 3-5 years and plan your corporate finances accordingly.
Corporations have a responsibility (a real, legal responsibility) to their shareholders to make money, and as a result the rank-and-file is often a casualty. Blame the business paradigms that are currently in place.
The people who start those companies and run them benefit from their entrepreneurial actions and responsibilities. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, unfortunately, and so some people benefit disproportionately.
Besides, the rank-and-file are, with a few exceptions, mostly interchangeable cogs as far as business processes are concerned. Anyone with a brain knows that at any given time they can be let go and lives accordingly.
You seem to think that "making as much money as possible for your shareholders" is destructive greed. It is not.
Let's put it another way, have your rates for your wireless phone gone down? Is there more competition in wireless or less in the last 10 years? Telco greed in action.
If my cost to provide a service goes down, yet the market still bears the original price, why exactly would I lower what I charge for it? If anything, this is a problem with competition in the industry (or inflation), not "greed" on the part of the company.
Likewise, spending money on lobbying isn't greedy. It may be dubiously ethical, but spending money in order to get legislation passed that is favorable to your corporation can only be good for shareholders (who are the people the company is responsible for enriching).
In short, it seems that you are the one who doesn't quite get how the real world works.
The conflict between the Tamil and Sinhalese is ethnic and cultural, not religious if I recall correctly (buddhist monks have been known to run arms for the Tamil Tigers, for example).
However, it is possible you are correct that at least, in part, they're worried about the Tamil separatists. That particular group is absolutely fearless (they conduct suicide bombings that make incidents in Israel look tame by comparison), are strangely well-equipped (they have a navy?), and until recently were actually piggybacking on an Indian broadcast satellite to run their own programming. I'd imagine that using smartphones/PDAs for secure communication isn't out of the question.
Dunno how this is a ruse, per se. Doing press bits and what not in order to influence people to value a stock in a certain way isn't particularly dishonest. There's no real requirement for MS to say, "This is exactly the feature set that will be in our new product over a year from now!"
Inflated market today? Man..where are you living? Housing values are dropping like crazy in most of the US....and it is slowly starting to sink in to homeowners minds that their homes aren't worth what they think or want them to be worth. I"m looking to buy in the near future myself...it is definitely a buyers market.
My advice, do some more research than just repeating sound bites from NAR shills. While it is, indeed, true that the current market favors buyers vs sellers, that doesn't mean that you're getting a "good deal". The valuation curve for houses is still *way* off from the historical average, due to the ridiculously low hurdle for getting loans over the last few years (and collusion between lenders, realtors, and assessors) and the "flipping" craze. (And before you say, "no one is making more land, so prices will only go up!" -- there more land than we need, and more houses than anyone can sell -- an 18 month inventory is craziness... and they're still building!) Unless you really like the idea of being upside-down on your mortgage and/or property values for the next 2 decades, wait until the market is slightly on the upswing (since, no one can call a bottom). The current estimates are that the housing market will *start* recovering around, ohhh... 2012.
Actually a lot of the western 1st world have similar bubbles. The UK is about 6 months behind the US in this regard, and some of western europe has similar bubbles that are in various stages.
The US is probably the only one in north america though, I think.
I'd mod you up but I've already said the same elsewhere in this thread. Though I'd point out that if you're serious about having an e-business, you really probably want to shell out for something that has an SLA. At least then you have recourse when it's someone else's fault:)
I have to say, I'm really doubtful of the claims that they debited people's accounts that weren't active or not auto-billed. There's a *lot* of folks out there that have hatred for Dreamhost that borders on the fanatical. I see it all the time on dreamhoststatus.com (hell, from people who write to ask for status updates on that blog, when it explicitly says that it is not monitored for questions), and it's always someone who didn't know what they were doing, thinking that $10/mo shared hosting was a proper platform for an uptime-dependant e-business screaming their head off that DH is awful.
I'm not affiliated with DH in any way other than as one of those cheap shared-hosting folks, and I've had nothing but good experiences with DH. Their tech support replies within a few hours (and with no SLA, at that), downtime is minimal for $10/mo, and their maintenance of their oneclicks+updates has been good. I even leave processes (ssh logins, sure) up for days as SSH tunnels and have no problems.
Apparently I'm the one happy DH customer on the entire Intarbutts
While that was indeed a pretty inexcusable screwup, why the hell would you allow anyone to autobill you for hosting? Yeah sure, it's easier, but this is one of the many reasons that allowing people to just use your credit accounts is bad.
Yeah, by and large I like Dreamhost (except they need a more robust VPS offering). Their shared hosting is priced just right as far as I'm concerned.
Most of the complaints I see about DH are from wankers trying to run a 24/7/365 uptime business on shared hosting. They're amateurs that are trying to get by without paying for an SLA, and then get pissed when their shared hosting has unexpected downtime.
Aside from those wankers, most DH users (myself included) seem quite happy.
As as a fellow dreamhost user, I noticed recently that they started integrating Google Apps into the hosting management area of the control panel. Might be useful as an alternative to Squirrel Mail (which I also think is klunky, but I use it as IMAP usually, so almost never am actually in that interface).
In early 1998 content providers came up with a different model. In one variation, the video store pays the studio a one-time fee of $2-$4 per videotape and then pays 40% of rental revenues. This earns the store a profit per rental of about $2.25. (Figures taken from Said (1999).) With this sort of ``sharecropping'' arrangement, stores no longer have strong incentives to economize in video purchase, reducing the queuing for customers. In fact, this is the form of contract used in Blockbuster's ``guaranteed in stock'' promotion.
That was an example of Blockbuster's contractual arrangement with "content providers" so they could do their "guaranteed in stock" promotion without having to wait for distributors to have an item. By getting their copies directly from the content providers, they didn't need to hope that they could get the amount of copies they needed to back up their promotion without giving away lots of free rentals. In exchange, the content provider got some revenue from the arrangement. It is not a description of whether or not Blockbuster has the right to buy a copy wherever they want and then rent it.
The GIMP is almost as good as Photoshop now. (Not AS good as, but almost...)
Go say that in any digital art forum and see what reaction you get.
While GIMP has come a long way, it leaves a lot to be desired, even if we just consider the UI, not to mention its lack of CYMK (without a kludgey plugin).
For simple web and touchup, they're probably about equal technically. But Photoshop is much, much more than a simple graphic editing program at this point, so...
Blockbuster and Netflix, for instance, both purchase "rental" licenses from the movie houses; they can't just pick up copies in bulk and start renting.
No, they just buy them. They may even get bulk discounts from distributors!
Now, rental places may negotiate contracts with studios in order to get "exclusive early releases" of films for rent ("Only at blockbuster!", etc), but if you want, you too could rent out cookie cutter chick flicks!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm of the firm conviction that the number of employees at dotcoms who actually were smart computer folks was very small.
There's no small number of people who learned a little bit of HTML and not much else in the dot-com era, who were laid off once the bubble burst and were unable and/or unwilling to expand their skill set and remain in the industry.
Ask any competent techie who was working during the dot-com bubble, and they'll tell you that the number of people who had no business being in tech (and, make no mistake, those people are still here today, just in much lower numbers) was incredibly high.
Yeah there was a lot of nutty things people unnecessarily got overly excited about in the late 1990's, but Y2K wasn't one of them.
How is this any different than Second Life?
Hell, the Metaverse even had penis avatars making it arguably MORE like Second Life.
I miss the bubble mostly because it was one of the few times that computer folks got any real sort of respect in the corporate world.
That, and tech seemed more interesting and exciting back then, because it seemed like new, wacky things were coming out on a regular basis. "New" things these days seem to be much more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Not exactly right. The loans given by banks for mortgages were well within legal limits a lot of the time (excepting the not-unheard-of outright fraud in some cases when subprime borrowers had their salaries inflated), using the whole fractional lending tradition (which is how our entire banking system works, really). So, there was just as much "real money" as any other loan had backing it.
However, then those loans were packed together, redivided, and sold as "safe high return investments" called Collateral Debt Obligations (CDOs) which then were purchased by hedge funds and other investment houses, with the assurance by Moody's that the vehicles were safe. Adjustable loans start defaulting, banks start getting scared and stop lending (this is the credit "crunch" people talk about), the financial sector takes a dump, investors flee to other investments (thus why commodities like oil and gold have skyrocked lately), the Fed starts lowering interest rates and going nuts trying to keep the monetary system from locking up tight, etc.
The real problem wasn't a matter of creating artificial need (Realtors have been trying to do that for decades, "no one is making more land", "prices always go up", etc), but rather that post-9/11 real estate and building was the only thing really working well as an industry, and in order to get in on the fun, *some* lenders significantly relaxed their underwriting standards in order to get people into houses.
Most startup companies are never profitable and fail. The only difference between the mom&pop and the silicon valley startup is how much they burn through. Both fail to make a profit in the first few years, and those that do are RARE exceptions. It's often said that you should expect to not make any profit in a new business for 3-5 years and plan your corporate finances accordingly.
I hate to be the one to be blunt, but "so what?"
Corporations have a responsibility (a real, legal responsibility) to their shareholders to make money, and as a result the rank-and-file is often a casualty. Blame the business paradigms that are currently in place.
The people who start those companies and run them benefit from their entrepreneurial actions and responsibilities. Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, unfortunately, and so some people benefit disproportionately.
Besides, the rank-and-file are, with a few exceptions, mostly interchangeable cogs as far as business processes are concerned. Anyone with a brain knows that at any given time they can be let go and lives accordingly.
You seem to think that "making as much money as possible for your shareholders" is destructive greed. It is not.
Let's put it another way, have your rates for your wireless phone gone down? Is there more competition in wireless or less in the last 10 years? Telco greed in action.If my cost to provide a service goes down, yet the market still bears the original price, why exactly would I lower what I charge for it? If anything, this is a problem with competition in the industry (or inflation), not "greed" on the part of the company.
Likewise, spending money on lobbying isn't greedy. It may be dubiously ethical, but spending money in order to get legislation passed that is favorable to your corporation can only be good for shareholders (who are the people the company is responsible for enriching).
In short, it seems that you are the one who doesn't quite get how the real world works.
The conflict between the Tamil and Sinhalese is ethnic and cultural, not religious if I recall correctly (buddhist monks have been known to run arms for the Tamil Tigers, for example).
However, it is possible you are correct that at least, in part, they're worried about the Tamil separatists. That particular group is absolutely fearless (they conduct suicide bombings that make incidents in Israel look tame by comparison), are strangely well-equipped (they have a navy?), and until recently were actually piggybacking on an Indian broadcast satellite to run their own programming. I'd imagine that using smartphones/PDAs for secure communication isn't out of the question.
Don't worry, we all get a little lazy when it comes to learning new things after a while.
Dunno how this is a ruse, per se. Doing press bits and what not in order to influence people to value a stock in a certain way isn't particularly dishonest. There's no real requirement for MS to say, "This is exactly the feature set that will be in our new product over a year from now!"
An excellent summary. I'd mod you up if I wasn't already commenting.
My advice, do some more research than just repeating sound bites from NAR shills. While it is, indeed, true that the current market favors buyers vs sellers, that doesn't mean that you're getting a "good deal". The valuation curve for houses is still *way* off from the historical average, due to the ridiculously low hurdle for getting loans over the last few years (and collusion between lenders, realtors, and assessors) and the "flipping" craze. (And before you say, "no one is making more land, so prices will only go up!" -- there more land than we need, and more houses than anyone can sell -- an 18 month inventory is craziness... and they're still building!) Unless you really like the idea of being upside-down on your mortgage and/or property values for the next 2 decades, wait until the market is slightly on the upswing (since, no one can call a bottom). The current estimates are that the housing market will *start* recovering around, ohhh... 2012.
Actually a lot of the western 1st world have similar bubbles. The UK is about 6 months behind the US in this regard, and some of western europe has similar bubbles that are in various stages.
The US is probably the only one in north america though, I think.
Yeah but be careful not try catching a falling knife. House prices probably won't bottom out for at least a year.
I'd mod you up but I've already said the same elsewhere in this thread. Though I'd point out that if you're serious about having an e-business, you really probably want to shell out for something that has an SLA. At least then you have recourse when it's someone else's fault :)
I have to say, I'm really doubtful of the claims that they debited people's accounts that weren't active or not auto-billed. There's a *lot* of folks out there that have hatred for Dreamhost that borders on the fanatical. I see it all the time on dreamhoststatus.com (hell, from people who write to ask for status updates on that blog, when it explicitly says that it is not monitored for questions), and it's always someone who didn't know what they were doing, thinking that $10/mo shared hosting was a proper platform for an uptime-dependant e-business screaming their head off that DH is awful.
I'm not affiliated with DH in any way other than as one of those cheap shared-hosting folks, and I've had nothing but good experiences with DH. Their tech support replies within a few hours (and with no SLA, at that), downtime is minimal for $10/mo, and their maintenance of their oneclicks+updates has been good. I even leave processes (ssh logins, sure) up for days as SSH tunnels and have no problems.
Apparently I'm the one happy DH customer on the entire Intarbutts
That's a bit overdoing it for low-volume email, don't you think?
While that was indeed a pretty inexcusable screwup, why the hell would you allow anyone to autobill you for hosting? Yeah sure, it's easier, but this is one of the many reasons that allowing people to just use your credit accounts is bad.
Yeah, by and large I like Dreamhost (except they need a more robust VPS offering). Their shared hosting is priced just right as far as I'm concerned.
Most of the complaints I see about DH are from wankers trying to run a 24/7/365 uptime business on shared hosting. They're amateurs that are trying to get by without paying for an SLA, and then get pissed when their shared hosting has unexpected downtime.
Aside from those wankers, most DH users (myself included) seem quite happy.
As as a fellow dreamhost user, I noticed recently that they started integrating Google Apps into the hosting management area of the control panel. Might be useful as an alternative to Squirrel Mail (which I also think is klunky, but I use it as IMAP usually, so almost never am actually in that interface).
Not the most scholarly of sources, but:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2797/
That was an example of Blockbuster's contractual arrangement with "content providers" so they could do their "guaranteed in stock" promotion without having to wait for distributors to have an item. By getting their copies directly from the content providers, they didn't need to hope that they could get the amount of copies they needed to back up their promotion without giving away lots of free rentals. In exchange, the content provider got some revenue from the arrangement. It is not a description of whether or not Blockbuster has the right to buy a copy wherever they want and then rent it.
Reading for context is a useful skill.
Go say that in any digital art forum and see what reaction you get.
While GIMP has come a long way, it leaves a lot to be desired, even if we just consider the UI, not to mention its lack of CYMK (without a kludgey plugin).
For simple web and touchup, they're probably about equal technically. But Photoshop is much, much more than a simple graphic editing program at this point, so...
No, they just buy them. They may even get bulk discounts from distributors!
Now, rental places may negotiate contracts with studios in order to get "exclusive early releases" of films for rent ("Only at blockbuster!", etc), but if you want, you too could rent out cookie cutter chick flicks!