My point was that although we're at a point where we may be able to (very) manually filter a group of eggs based on one or two genes, we're nowhere near being able to look at all the genes at one time. So while we're being overfocused on what we think is important - Alzheimers, ALS, whatever - there's no telling what we're missing.
OK, if we're in a situation of sorting through a bunch of eggs/sperm and trying to pick the 'best' one, then it may not seem like a big deal. A child is going to be born, the parents aren't going to change, we're just trying to tilt the table a bit as to one gene or another.
Imagine that someone had gone to Stephen Hawking's parents and said 'well, you have a gene that makes your children more likely to have ALS (an admittedly terrible disease to have), maybe we should screen your eggs/sperm and filter that out'. Given that Hawking's gift of scientific understanding is so rare, could you assume that this would have no effect ?
I know if I was about to become a parent and genetic testing told me my child would either have a terrible disease I would be horrified by the prospect...but I don't know that this is any way a 'right' thing to be doing. Think about Hawking, that's all I have to say.
I one thing I haven't seen much comment on through the whole.NET debacle is whether MS is going to force everyone into their.NET VM. I can't imagine that the next version of SQL Server (for example) is going to be rewritten in C# and run in a VM, so they must have a real compiler left somewhere in the company. Plus device drivers still need to live underneath the VM, not on top of it.
Can end users still buy VC++ instead of Visual Studio.NET ? I tried poking around on the MS web site and couldn't see it. MS seems to be trying really hard to convince everyone that.NET is the only way to write code now (hey, it's not like anyone's going to miss Win32:) ).
From all the news articles I've read, the PDA market was growing well into early 2001, then fell into a large tailspin. The numbers you are quoting are probably far more indicative of the start of 2001 then then end.
The other thing to consider is that you are quoting numbers about unit shipments, while I'm sure that the '44%' number being quoted for Palm is in terms of revenue. The average selling price of a Palm has come way down over the last year due to price competition and Palm's introduction of new very low-end units. I'm seeing m100's selling for C$150 - that would make them under US$100...that's dramatically lower than their entry level PDA's at the start of 2001 (more than 44% so).
Finally, good old anecdote : I see lots of people with Palms & Visors, but they are of all different models....the people I know with Palms don't talk about upgrading them or getting new ones. I have not actually seen an iPaq or Jornada in the 'wild'....not sitting in the airport, not at my doctor's or dentist's office, nada. If they are taking over the world they must be doing it somewhere else.:)
Palm sales aren't down because people are buying so many HP's & Compaq's....a 44% decline in Palm's unit sales would be more units than HP and Compaq sell in a year. Palm sales are down because people with Palm 3's (or even older) are still using them to do the same simple tasks they've done since day 1 and have no reason to upgrade. They saturated the market but haven't managed to create upgrade demand.
Over the last year or so Canada has had a big media consolidation much like that of the US....so now 3 or 4 companies own most of the media outlets. Rogers happens to open a bunch of radio stations, SportsNet (TV cable channel) and several national magazines. Bell (our main DSL provider) now owns a digital satellite business, CTV (national broadast TV network), The Sports Network (cable TV) and the Globe & Mail (largest national paper).
So what's the point ? They're both now on the RIAA/MPAA side of the fence, in that they plan to make far more money off content than internet access. So, rather than tell me that I'm a bandwidth hog so they're going to cap me at 384 kbps (or whatever) they tell me I'm a hog and I'll have to pay surcharges ? So what's the point ?
I run Gnutella & Kazaa and I damned well like it. If I had a bandwidth capped connection I could leave it on all day and know it will work, only slower. I can live with that. If I have a surcharged connection I suddenly have to worry about too many file transfers running up my bill and my getting a rude shock at the end of the month. Bandwidth surcharges will frighten non-technical users away from P2P. Period. End of sentence.
Now, given that our internet access comes from media/content behemoths does anyone think it's a coincidence that they're choosing to go to surcharges rather than bandwidth caps ? I don't, and I don't think I'm fucking paranoid either. 'Media Convergence' has been pretty blatant here, as an example:when Rogers moved off @Home to their own e-mail domain users obviously had to switch their accounts around. I'm in my car driving home listening to a Rogers-owned all-news AM station (because they have the best traffic reports) and there's a spot on that day being the deadline for moving your Rogers account over. Not an ad, not a public service announcment, a news article about cable modem e-mail accounts. Strangely enough there were no news articles on any other ISPs that day.:) Welcome to the future, the Rogers-Bell duopoly will be more than happy to take all your money and give you less.
The M in GeForceMX does *not* stand for mobility. nVidia's mobile chips are called GeForce2Go. The GeForceMX chips are just scaled down GeForce2 designs for economy 3D video cards. They probably do give off less heat than high-end GeForce chips, but all that means is they don't require their own heat sinks/fans.
Exactly - the way that companies act on patents is because of the patent system. I work for a large computer/tech company that has a philosophy of essentially 'patent everything'....so that when the day comes that someone accuses you of infringing on their patents you know you'll have something they want to cross-license.
What will likely happen in the licensing talks is that they'll (eventually) cross-license to get access to each other's patents - it happens all the time with 'mature' companies.
After all, a nice profitable duopoly is way better than a prolonged legal battle where the lawyers get everyone's money in the end.
I'm actually a bit the opposite - I see the BK commercials and think "Man, I'd love to have a set of those tacky plastic toys on my desk at work".....my problem is that even thinking about eating at BK makes my stomach crawl. Why couldn't they have sold out to Subway instead ?
OT:In the US, did BK have an AOL/LOTR tie-in ? A non-techy friend of mine was at BK and brought me back a CD-ROM because it was a 'LOTR Trivia Challenge'.....turns out it's an AOL signup disc and the trivia challenge is on AOL.
AOL & Burger King, now that's an unholy alliance.:)
If SPDIF will give me 'every bit of audio' wouldn't this make for an easy way to get around the various 'copy protection' scheme they're trying on CD's ?
I bought a new disc last week that seems to have a drop-out in the chorus of one track when I play it on my laptop's CD-ROM drive. I haven't had a chance to place it in a 'real' CD player to see if still happens.....but it's really, really annoying.
I've already seen companies that produce a CardBus card and then come out with a PCI solution....which is nothing more than a simple PCI-Cardbus bridge which you then plug their Cardbus card into. If Proxim doesn't bring one of these out on their own you should be able to find them around.
When I used to work on PCMCIA products we used a lot of these in desktops for development/test as it was cheaper than buying laptops....not to mention a lot handier for debugging hardware - we ripped apart a couple of laptops so we could scope the bus, but we rarely got them back together right.:)
I got through to the CNN articles by going through cnnfn.com - according to CNN the Pentagon has also been hit by a plane today, and the White House has been evacuated. Bush is currently in Florida but is supposed to return to DC today.
That's funny....as I sit here with an NT box & 2 Win2K boxes in front of me I'm a Linux zealot with no knowledge of NT. Actually I work on server software (and formerly on Win device drivers) and I know that NT 3.51, although having a butt-ugly UI, was the most stable OS MS ever produced. NT 4 was noticeably worse and Win2K seems somewhere in the middle, although I've only started using it in the last few months.
Moving things like a webserver into the kernel would be an absolutely terrible idea for anything except a dedicated web server box/appliance. As it happens, there are thousands upon thousands of servers out there doing just that, so Tux is a possible niche solution for that market. Since many of these boxes only run one application, people may not be as picky about it running in kernel space. Alternately, since TUX seems to run almost 3x the speed of Apache on Linux, you could use TUX to build web server appliances on last-gen hardware that would still have very respectable performance numbers.
To put it more simply, TUX is like an appliation-specific Linux distro. Don't use it for your database box, don't use it for your workstation, don't use it for anything but your web server.
Moving things like web servers, graphics or mouse handling into the kernel of a general purpose OS is a bad thing to do, whether you're MS or anyone else. NT 4 was noticeably less stable than NT 3.51 and all in the name of making the mouse pointer less jumpy when the CPU was loaded.
Jon, please stop quoting the net value of the video game industry as a defense against its critics. In an argument over whether certain types of experiences promote certain types of behavior the economic impact is not relevant
Example : if I stood up and defended the tobacco industry by saying that it has an economic impact of $X Billion and that there are a lot of smokers all over the world, so it's a very mainstream activity I would expect a flaming, since this has nothing to do with the medical effects of smoking. Why then are these suddenly valid defenses of the video game industry ? Leave out the faulty arguments next time.
PS:Millions of copies sold don't make the Backstreet Boys good musicians!!!
The advertising industry has always had a strange approach to things (IMHO) - if you look at how they treat magazines the ad rate is primarily dependant on subscription rates, not total circulation. For some reason the industry feels that people that subscribe to a magazine are either more likely to read the ads or are just more valuable than people who pick up a copy at the local bookshop. This is why some magazines give such deep discounts for subscribers - they need that base to boost their add rates which is where their real money is coming from.
Microsoft has never been a supporter of Bluetooth to start with. I was involved in Bluetooth development for a short period over two years ago, when the BT SIG was trying to complete development of the 1.0 spec's. MS was completely absent from the meetings and could not be convinced to attend. One possible reason for this was because the SIG had a rule that all intellectual property put into the standards became freely licensed to all SIG members. If I remember correctly they had actually planned to remove this rule after the 1.0 specs were finished to entice MS into joining the SIG to work on V1.1 - but then I moved off BT work so I don't know what happened.
Another possible reason is that Bluetooth is just not a PC-centric technology, and as much as some of the SIG members tried it's not a great LAN technology. From a user's point of view it might seem great to have all these devices talking to each other, but MS at the time only wanted to talk about PC issues and the investment required just so someone could hotsync without a cable probably didn't seem worth it. I have no idea where the WinCE group was - I think this was during the period when they were taking a bit of a market pounding (ie their first two releases)...I don't remember seeing them involved at all.
Disclaimer : my involvement in Bluetooth work was short and now seems long ago, so my observations may be a bit fuzzy.
One of the problems with supporting Bluetooth under Windows, for MS or anyone else, is that it doesn't fit neatly into MS's existing software architectures, whereas 802.11 'looks' so much like ethernet that it's a no-brainer to adopt.
Bluetooth has several protocol layers involved, and if these layers aren't standardized then you'll never get two Bluetooth applications to work on the same PC because they'll each want to install their own protocol stack. Think what would happen if every ethernet vendor and/or network application developer wrote their own TCP/IP stack....that's where Bluetooth is headed if MS snubs them.
One of the things affects who gets teased/bullyed and how long it goes on for is, quite simply, how much the bully in question enjoys bullying a particular person. This in turn depends at least partly on how the bullied person responds to the bully. I don't think it's a big stretch to say that kids who are clinically depressed would respond differently than kids who are not...so even though the depression might not be the original reason the bullying began, it could easily be a factor in its continuation.
OK, I wasn't trolling when I wrote this...I was just asleep.
I saw the article, I checked out Libranet's site and I was a little taken back/confused by their free/not free business model. Of course they can charge whatever they want...but everyone else who wants to charge me for Linux at least puts it on a physical medium for me, possibly even with a dead tree to keep it company. This was the first time I've ever seen anyone charging for downloading a distro...and then I posted a dumb question on Slashdot and started getting flamed.:)
OK, here's the obligatory argument - no matter how you justify it or how much you might feel you deserve it, can you legally charge people for the GPL'd work of others ?
Oh my god, I have never productivity lower than what I've seen working in large companies. Have some dot-com's suffered from professional slackers who hide behind the lifestyle so nobody can tell they're not working ? Sure. But they probably never suffered from being so disorganized that they can't efficiently use their staff. I know plenty of people in large companies who talk about work getting heavy when you have to actually work eight hours per day, cutting out the paid lunch and the water cooler time is a bitch.
Big companies are full of suits on autopilot, doing just enough to get that middle-of-the-road job evaluation, picking up their cheque every two weeks and counting down their 13.5 years to retirement. If I had to bet on which company was producing more $/employee, I would take Wizards over Hasbro any day.
Of course, large corporations have no inefficiencies...NONE! Or maybe large companies can't afford to spend on "frivolous" things because 5-10% of their employees work in HR and contribute nothing to the bottom line.
Work in a small software company and you can know everyone there & what they're working on. Move to a large company and meet people from HR, and facilities, and planning and 16 other departments that not only don't write software, but don't know anything about computers....so now you need twice as many IT people to provide 'deskside service' to keep all their Windoze machines working after they got nailed by the 'Anna Kournikova' virus. Then one day you look around you and shout 'does anyone else here actually write software ?'
Anyone who thinks large companies are more efficient than small companies never worked at one. Big companies just waste their money differently, so there's none left over for free coffee, snacks or pool tables.
Slashdot Mirror
My point was that although we're at a point where we may be able to (very) manually filter a group of eggs based on one or two genes, we're nowhere near being able to look at all the genes at one time. So while we're being overfocused on what we think is important - Alzheimers, ALS, whatever - there's no telling what we're missing.
OK, if we're in a situation of sorting through a bunch of eggs/sperm and trying to pick the 'best' one, then it may not seem like a big deal. A child is going to be born, the parents aren't going to change, we're just trying to tilt the table a bit as to one gene or another.
Imagine that someone had gone to Stephen Hawking's parents and said 'well, you have a gene that makes your children more likely to have ALS (an admittedly terrible disease to have), maybe we should screen your eggs/sperm and filter that out'. Given that Hawking's gift of scientific understanding is so rare, could you assume that this would have no effect ?
I know if I was about to become a parent and genetic testing told me my child would either have a terrible disease I would be horrified by the prospect...but I don't know that this is any way a 'right' thing to be doing. Think about Hawking, that's all I have to say.
(Yes, I know, 'God does not play dice')
I one thing I haven't seen much comment on through the whole .NET debacle is whether MS is going to force everyone into their .NET VM. I can't imagine that the next version of SQL Server (for example) is going to be rewritten in C# and run in a VM, so they must have a real compiler left somewhere in the company. Plus device drivers still need to live underneath the VM, not on top of it.
.NET is the only way to write code now (hey, it's not like anyone's going to miss Win32 :) ).
Can end users still buy VC++ instead of Visual Studio.NET ? I tried poking around on the MS web site and couldn't see it. MS seems to be trying really hard to convince everyone that
The JBOSS book from SAMS is supposed to be published next month :
The Official Jboss Development and Administration Guide
From all the news articles I've read, the PDA market was growing well into early 2001, then fell into a large tailspin. The numbers you are quoting are probably far more indicative of the start of 2001 then then end.
:)
The other thing to consider is that you are quoting numbers about unit shipments, while I'm sure that the '44%' number being quoted for Palm is in terms of revenue. The average selling price of a Palm has come way down over the last year due to price competition and Palm's introduction of new very low-end units. I'm seeing m100's selling for C$150 - that would make them under US$100...that's dramatically lower than their entry level PDA's at the start of 2001 (more than 44% so).
Finally, good old anecdote : I see lots of people with Palms & Visors, but they are of all different models....the people I know with Palms don't talk about upgrading them or getting new ones. I have not actually seen an iPaq or Jornada in the 'wild'....not sitting in the airport, not at my doctor's or dentist's office, nada. If they are taking over the world they must be doing it somewhere else.
Palm sales aren't down because people are buying so many HP's & Compaq's....a 44% decline in Palm's unit sales would be more units than HP and Compaq sell in a year. Palm sales are down because people with Palm 3's (or even older) are still using them to do the same simple tasks they've done since day 1 and have no reason to upgrade. They saturated the market but haven't managed to create upgrade demand.
Over the last year or so Canada has had a big media consolidation much like that of the US....so now 3 or 4 companies own most of the media outlets. Rogers happens to open a bunch of radio stations, SportsNet (TV cable channel) and several national magazines. Bell (our main DSL provider) now owns a digital satellite business, CTV (national broadast TV network), The Sports Network (cable TV) and the Globe & Mail (largest national paper).
:) Welcome to the future, the Rogers-Bell duopoly will be more than happy to take all your money and give you less.
So what's the point ? They're both now on the RIAA/MPAA side of the fence, in that they plan to make far more money off content than internet access. So, rather than tell me that I'm a bandwidth hog so they're going to cap me at 384 kbps (or whatever) they tell me I'm a hog and I'll have to pay surcharges ? So what's the point ?
I run Gnutella & Kazaa and I damned well like it. If I had a bandwidth capped connection I could leave it on all day and know it will work, only slower. I can live with that. If I have a surcharged connection I suddenly have to worry about too many file transfers running up my bill and my getting a rude shock at the end of the month. Bandwidth surcharges will frighten non-technical users away from P2P. Period. End of sentence.
Now, given that our internet access comes from media/content behemoths does anyone think it's a coincidence that they're choosing to go to surcharges rather than bandwidth caps ? I don't, and I don't think I'm fucking paranoid either. 'Media Convergence' has been pretty blatant here, as an example:when Rogers moved off @Home to their own e-mail domain users obviously had to switch their accounts around. I'm in my car driving home listening to a Rogers-owned all-news AM station (because they have the best traffic reports) and there's a spot on that day being the deadline for moving your Rogers account over. Not an ad, not a public service announcment, a news article about cable modem e-mail accounts. Strangely enough there were no news articles on any other ISPs that day.
The M in GeForceMX does *not* stand for mobility. nVidia's mobile chips are called GeForce2Go. The GeForceMX chips are just scaled down GeForce2 designs for economy 3D video cards. They probably do give off less heat than high-end GeForce chips, but all that means is they don't require their own heat sinks/fans.
Exactly - the way that companies act on patents is because of the patent system. I work for a large computer/tech company that has a philosophy of essentially 'patent everything'....so that when the day comes that someone accuses you of infringing on their patents you know you'll have something they want to cross-license.
What will likely happen in the licensing talks is that they'll (eventually) cross-license to get access to each other's patents - it happens all the time with 'mature' companies.
After all, a nice profitable duopoly is way better than a prolonged legal battle where the lawyers get everyone's money in the end.
I'm actually a bit the opposite - I see the BK commercials and think "Man, I'd love to have a set of those tacky plastic toys on my desk at work".....my problem is that even thinking about eating at BK makes my stomach crawl. Why couldn't they have sold out to Subway instead ?
:)
OT:In the US, did BK have an AOL/LOTR tie-in ? A non-techy friend of mine was at BK and brought me back a CD-ROM because it was a 'LOTR Trivia Challenge'.....turns out it's an AOL signup disc and the trivia challenge is on AOL.
AOL & Burger King, now that's an unholy alliance.
If SPDIF will give me 'every bit of audio' wouldn't this make for an easy way to get around the various 'copy protection' scheme they're trying on CD's ?
I bought a new disc last week that seems to have a drop-out in the chorus of one track when I play it on my laptop's CD-ROM drive. I haven't had a chance to place it in a 'real' CD player to see if still happens.....but it's really, really annoying.
I've already seen companies that produce a CardBus card and then come out with a PCI solution....which is nothing more than a simple PCI-Cardbus bridge which you then plug their Cardbus card into. If Proxim doesn't bring one of these out on their own you should be able to find them around.
:)
When I used to work on PCMCIA products we used a lot of these in desktops for development/test as it was cheaper than buying laptops....not to mention a lot handier for debugging hardware - we ripped apart a couple of laptops so we could scope the bus, but we rarely got them back together right.
I got through to the CNN articles by going through cnnfn.com - according to CNN the Pentagon has also been hit by a plane today, and the White House has been evacuated. Bush is currently in Florida but is supposed to return to DC today.
That's funny....as I sit here with an NT box & 2 Win2K boxes in front of me I'm a Linux zealot with no knowledge of NT. Actually I work on server software (and formerly on Win device drivers) and I know that NT 3.51, although having a butt-ugly UI, was the most stable OS MS ever produced. NT 4 was noticeably worse and Win2K seems somewhere in the middle, although I've only started using it in the last few months.
Moving things like a webserver into the kernel would be an absolutely terrible idea for anything except a dedicated web server box/appliance. As it happens, there are thousands upon thousands of servers out there doing just that, so Tux is a possible niche solution for that market. Since many of these boxes only run one application, people may not be as picky about it running in kernel space. Alternately, since TUX seems to run almost 3x the speed of Apache on Linux, you could use TUX to build web server appliances on last-gen hardware that would still have very respectable performance numbers.
To put it more simply, TUX is like an appliation-specific Linux distro. Don't use it for your database box, don't use it for your workstation, don't use it for anything but your web server.
Moving things like web servers, graphics or mouse handling into the kernel of a general purpose OS is a bad thing to do, whether you're MS or anyone else. NT 4 was noticeably less stable than NT 3.51 and all in the name of making the mouse pointer less jumpy when the CPU was loaded.
Jon, please stop quoting the net value of the video game industry as a defense against its critics. In an argument over whether certain types of experiences promote certain types of behavior the economic impact is not relevant
Example : if I stood up and defended the tobacco industry by saying that it has an economic impact of $X Billion and that there are a lot of smokers all over the world, so it's a very mainstream activity I would expect a flaming, since this has nothing to do with the medical effects of smoking. Why then are these suddenly valid defenses of the video game industry ? Leave out the faulty arguments next time.
PS:Millions of copies sold don't make the Backstreet Boys good musicians!!!
The advertising industry has always had a strange approach to things (IMHO) - if you look at how they treat magazines the ad rate is primarily dependant on subscription rates, not total circulation. For some reason the industry feels that people that subscribe to a magazine are either more likely to read the ads or are just more valuable than people who pick up a copy at the local bookshop. This is why some magazines give such deep discounts for subscribers - they need that base to boost their add rates which is where their real money is coming from.
Microsoft has never been a supporter of Bluetooth to start with. I was involved in Bluetooth development for a short period over two years ago, when the BT SIG was trying to complete development of the 1.0 spec's. MS was completely absent from the meetings and could not be convinced to attend. One possible reason for this was because the SIG had a rule that all intellectual property put into the standards became freely licensed to all SIG members. If I remember correctly they had actually planned to remove this rule after the 1.0 specs were finished to entice MS into joining the SIG to work on V1.1 - but then I moved off BT work so I don't know what happened.
Another possible reason is that Bluetooth is just not a PC-centric technology, and as much as some of the SIG members tried it's not a great LAN technology. From a user's point of view it might seem great to have all these devices talking to each other, but MS at the time only wanted to talk about PC issues and the investment required just so someone could hotsync without a cable probably didn't seem worth it. I have no idea where the WinCE group was - I think this was during the period when they were taking a bit of a market pounding (ie their first two releases)...I don't remember seeing them involved at all.
Disclaimer : my involvement in Bluetooth work was short and now seems long ago, so my observations may be a bit fuzzy.
One of the problems with supporting Bluetooth under Windows, for MS or anyone else, is that it doesn't fit neatly into MS's existing software architectures, whereas 802.11 'looks' so much like ethernet that it's a no-brainer to adopt.
Bluetooth has several protocol layers involved, and if these layers aren't standardized then you'll never get two Bluetooth applications to work on the same PC because they'll each want to install their own protocol stack. Think what would happen if every ethernet vendor and/or network application developer wrote their own TCP/IP stack....that's where Bluetooth is headed if MS snubs them.
One of the things affects who gets teased/bullyed and how long it goes on for is, quite simply, how much the bully in question enjoys bullying a particular person. This in turn depends at least partly on how the bullied person responds to the bully. I don't think it's a big stretch to say that kids who are clinically depressed would respond differently than kids who are not...so even though the depression might not be the original reason the bullying began, it could easily be a factor in its continuation.
Just a thought.
OK, I wasn't trolling when I wrote this...I was just asleep.
:)
I saw the article, I checked out Libranet's site and I was a little taken back/confused by their free/not free business model. Of course they can charge whatever they want...but everyone else who wants to charge me for Linux at least puts it on a physical medium for me, possibly even with a dead tree to keep it company. This was the first time I've ever seen anyone charging for downloading a distro...and then I posted a dumb question on Slashdot and started getting flamed.
OK, here's the obligatory argument - no matter how you justify it or how much you might feel you deserve it, can you legally charge people for the GPL'd work of others ?
Oh my god, I have never productivity lower than what I've seen working in large companies. Have some dot-com's suffered from professional slackers who hide behind the lifestyle so nobody can tell they're not working ? Sure. But they probably never suffered from being so disorganized that they can't efficiently use their staff. I know plenty of people in large companies who talk about work getting heavy when you have to actually work eight hours per day, cutting out the paid lunch and the water cooler time is a bitch.
Big companies are full of suits on autopilot, doing just enough to get that middle-of-the-road job evaluation, picking up their cheque every two weeks and counting down their 13.5 years to retirement. If I had to bet on which company was producing more $/employee, I would take Wizards over Hasbro any day.
Of course, large corporations have no inefficiencies...NONE! Or maybe large companies can't afford to spend on "frivolous" things because 5-10% of their employees work in HR and contribute nothing to the bottom line.
Work in a small software company and you can know everyone there & what they're working on. Move to a large company and meet people from HR, and facilities, and planning and 16 other departments that not only don't write software, but don't know anything about computers....so now you need twice as many IT people to provide 'deskside service' to keep all their Windoze machines working after they got nailed by the 'Anna Kournikova' virus. Then one day you look around you and shout 'does anyone else here actually write software ?'
Anyone who thinks large companies are more efficient than small companies never worked at one. Big companies just waste their money differently, so there's none left over for free coffee, snacks or pool tables.