If you've costed in the salary of a professional, fringe benefits, vacation, employer's contribution to social security, etc. and then add in a multiplier to account for the infrastructural overhead services (people in accounting, facilities maintenance, management, etc.) in a large corporation or university, this figure is not at all unusual.
That said, however, Microsoft enjoys a surfeit of talent that, like ATT Bell Labs in its day (when it, too, had a monopoly) could afford to do lots of interesting work.
Unfortunately, the need for innovative work to reinforce and expand the existing business model and never ever undermine it is constraining and prevents the company from releasing the full talent of its employees.
So what you see instead are people leaving Microsoft to start entirely new ventures.
Especially when they go to the cheerleading blonde on the floor of the stock exchange, reporting chipper and cheerfully as if a sporting event had just transpired.
Of course, Headline News can't compete on the same playing field of pretty vacuous blondes that appear with crossed legs on the set of Fox.
It's a great idea, to move around to different computers and log in and not skip a beat.
Actually, since 1992 at MyCorp my desktop settings move around with me to any of a hundred different computers just by virtue of NIS and NFS mounted home directories with all my preferences.
Just type in a username and passwd to the prompt and off we go.
But this gets to my favorite gripe: computer systems are forever going to great lengths to authenticate me,
Why the hell doesn't the computer have to authenticate itself before I go typing a valuable username and passwd?
Just because the screen displays some particular image and widget doesn't mean anything about the man behind the screen.
This problem is kind of like those ATM machines that enterprising individuals would install in shopping malls for half a day.
Of course, anyone can turn off their enhancements and see the plain old
reality, but most people don't bother most of the time because things
are ugly that way.
There's less need for optical sensor feeds to change reality than you might think.
In my experience, most people have moved the alteration of perception part back deeper into their brains.
They already live in a mediated reality here and now in 2004.
It's hard to get the PHB's to agree to something that's not 1.0
Convince using death by a thousand cuts
"Fortunately all of our Linux servers were immune during the latest vulnerability. Did I mention we haven't had to reboot them in months? And that our licensing costs are zilch?"
"You can use my Knoppix disk to get work done while we go cleanup the damage. My Linux box at home never dies unless it's a hardware problem."
"Unless we try some alternatives, we're going to need your signature on this PO to buy some more CALs so our customers can access that new app. Oh, and we'll need to buy another Exchange server, too. Our existing machines just can't handle the load."
someone at Slate is going to lose their job over this article.
They don't actually have to actively fire this guy.
Assigning him to follow stump speeches for the Bush and the Kerry campaigns should be sufficient to encourage him to seek more pleasant employment elsewhere:)
Heh. Thinking about how all those credit card companies are looking for people with great credit ratings, carrying over high balances month to month, and never ever missing a payment.
You could sum up all of these business strategies as looking for that most ephemeral and elusive market segment: rich fools.
The rule probably refers to the fact that the rope has to support its own weight in addition to the mass you're hanging. The longer the rope, the more of its own weight has to be supported.
An equally valid concern to the weight of the longer piece of rope is that any given rope will have some distribution of strengths on a given length, with deviations.
Thus, a 100 ft length of rope will more likely contain a weaker section (as well as stronger sections, but those won't matter since the break will occur at the weakest section) than will a 1 ft length of rope.
A similar argument applies to the distribution of people controlling nuclear weapons!
The larger the number, the more likely that one of them will be sufficiently crazy to actually push the button and make the whole structure collapse.
BTW, you don't want to be anywhere near a tense rope, steel cable, or chain. When it fails, the remaining pieces can whip around at speeds that will cause mortal damage.
Of course, nobody should be surprised by this anymore
Actually, everyone should be surprised by this.
Not that they gave money to Republicans, but that they didn't give money to the Democrats.
The wise corporations cover both bases, so that no matter which party is in power they can still get on the horn and obtain access to legislators like the common voter cannot.
I've been researching MP3 players and found the Neuros. It has an extensive list of different formats, including Ogg as well as the others.
The key features of the Neuros that are motivating me to buy one are the "record stream from FM" (as well as record from any audio input or onbord mic) to MP3 or WAV, and the "broadcast low power FM" (so I can listen through my car stereo on an unused frequency.)
To be balanced, though: there were some user complaints about the power level of the FM broadcast not being sufficient, but these were not universal. The Neuros II, which seems to have come out in the past couple of days, is supposed to help fix some of the version 1 drawbacks.
Frankly, about the only thing the Neuros lacks now are 100bT with on board Apache, 802.11[abg] interfaces (it has USB 2.0), but there don't seem to be many player/recorders out there with those right now.
Have you ever tried walking from one end of the strip to the other in the middle of summer?
Even though it's typically quite hot outside, you can almost feel the cooling breeze from the flyer sheets being whiffed in front of your face.
Vegas is full of juxtapositions that are hard to reconcile: lots of water in a desert; lots of money among fools; girly fliers of blond bimboes being handed out by sober-looking, middle-aged Hispanic immigrants trying to feed their families.
complaining that a year or so ago critics were being patted down before being allowed into movie screenings.
You can see where this is headed, right?
Cell phones with cameras becoming more commonplace; people will expect to videoconference call with their new head mounted Borg appliances in a few years, then theatre owners and many others will become disturbed if people turn on their phones and share their experiences with a friend or two million.
Increased communication and transparency in society from ubiquitous video phones will be a good advent, though, from the standpoint that bullshit will be seen through more easily.
It may still only have a small impact on the more fundamental problem that
many people live within artficially constrained reality, divorcing themselves from information they don't want to see (i.e., $WE are not always all good and right and $THEY are not always bad and wrong).
Then, instead of watching important things like Senate committee meetings on CSPAN, people will choose to tune into mud wrestling babes.
By not being compliant to standards - speaking about IE and page rendering - MS forces the webmasters to create the webpages that are displaying correctly only under the `one and true':) browser.
So I have to ask the question.
With so many corporate IT departments shelling out big bucks for MS products, haven't any of them complained to MS about CSS and other glitches in IE non-compliance with W3C standards?
Do they just ignore their customers, provide a stonewall answer (it'll be in Longhorn) or what?
Or don't all the corporate webmasters care about this weirdness in IE?
Canadian tar pits that could result in a trillion barrels of oil when processed.
The oil locked into the Athabascan tar sands have been known for a number of decades; experts in the 1970's were trying to figure out economical ways of extracting the oil.
The article claims extraction is now possible for $10 per bbl.
I'm skeptical. The figure probably assumes some economies of scale in production to arrive at a cost that, if compared to recent prices, would make it a no-brainer to go forward.
Then, too, there's always the issue of how much sulfur is in this oil, which can affect the downstream price at the refinery.
I have a hard time imagining some database queries consistently causing a computer system to crash while other queries do not.
What sounds much more likely is that the concern is not about computer systems crashing, but that other non-computer "systems" might "crash" as a consequence of disclosure.
For example, a system in which foreign influence is peddled to affect U. S. government policy.
IIRC, Massachusetts was the last state holding out for an appeal of the Justice Department's settlement with Microsoft.
How has that settlement been working in practice?
There seems to be simmering small changes and perturbations as the agreement is reviewed, such as protocol licensing (MCPP).
Quoting from the Infoworld article:
Microsoft still enjoys a 90 percent market share in the browser and desktop operating system markets, said Stephen Houck, representing the so-called California group of states that sued Microsoft in the antitrust case. The licensing program's effect on competition is difficult to find, he said.
Kollar-Kotelly agreed. "At this point, it's difficult to measure its impact on the marketplace," she said.
The changes to the program are largely cosmetic, Ed Black, president and chief executive officer of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said after the hearing. The two-year extension of the licensing program is the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship, he said.
If Judge Kollar-Kotelly finds the agreement not to be working effectively, then perhaps it's time for the court to review the agreement to see what changes might be made in order to effectively rectify the ongoing illegal monopoly and to restore a competitive marketplace.
Lately, my AM radio statio has been playing self-serving advertisements playing up the fact that, unlike cable TV, movies in theaters, etc, radio is still free.
Free, that is, and they don't mention, if you don't mind wasting your time polluting your unconscious mind with the drivel of commercial culture for close to 50% of the listening experience.
Likewise, if you get your email from a provider that locks the front gates enough with good spam protection, it's acceptable.
But "free" email accounts are typically so spam infested that the true cost becomes apparent.
But if you're stuck with XP, I'd suggest a VERY minimal install of XP,
My thought, too. If the kiosk app had to be running Windows and not be able to run anything else, I'd probably look into Windows XP Embedded.
From what little I've heard, XP Embedded would even make a pretty good desktop OS because it doesn't have as much gratuitous intertangling with browsers and media players as plain XP.
Nice limited functionality; you add only components that you want. Technically a good way to go for the general desktop and not just kiosks and POS terminals, but the business and marketing people in Redmond have other objectives...
It was just a joke between a couple friends' that eventually got out of hand.
That's what you think.
All of your supposedly rational analysis cannot sway my faith in the sacred writ. "And it will come to pass that Gates shall recognize his pre-ordained duty to greatness and cut checks to the faithful forwarders."
There's even a prophetic passage in the original email alluding to a naysayer arising and ultimately meeting an untimely demise on a skateboard passing through a flock of pigeons.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've costed in the salary of a professional, fringe benefits, vacation, employer's contribution to social security, etc. and then add in a multiplier to account for the infrastructural overhead services (people in accounting, facilities maintenance, management, etc.) in a large corporation or university, this figure is not at all unusual.
That said, however, Microsoft enjoys a surfeit of talent that, like ATT Bell Labs in its day (when it, too, had a monopoly) could afford to do lots of interesting work.
Unfortunately, the need for innovative work to reinforce and expand the existing business model and never ever undermine it is constraining and prevents the company from releasing the full talent of its employees.
So what you see instead are people leaving Microsoft to start entirely new ventures.
Gotta love that Headline News.
Especially when they go to the cheerleading blonde on the floor of the stock exchange, reporting chipper and cheerfully as if a sporting event had just transpired.
Of course, Headline News can't compete on the same playing field of pretty vacuous blondes that appear with crossed legs on the set of Fox.
Yes, indeed.
I'm surprised the advertisements on Slashdot don't target the demographic more effectively with, say, appeals for "new, more challenging job"
It's a great idea, to move around to different computers and log in and not skip a beat.
Actually, since 1992 at MyCorp my desktop settings move around with me to any of a hundred different computers just by virtue of NIS and NFS mounted home directories with all my preferences.
Just type in a username and passwd to the prompt and off we go.
But this gets to my favorite gripe: computer systems are forever going to great lengths to authenticate me,
Just because the screen displays some particular image and widget doesn't mean anything about the man behind the screen.
This problem is kind of like those ATM machines that enterprising individuals would install in shopping malls for half a day.
be tax deductable
Which really means that the actual cost of this professional expense deduction is:
- 2/3 you
- 1/3 govt
- 0/3 your employer
And before you jump to say that the employer is paying taxes that prop up what the government subsidizes, think again.Long ago I read somewhere that the smell of a human corpse was considered the most repugnant to the human nose.
From an evolutionary perspective, in the propagation of disease, I can well imagine why.
Of course, anyone can turn off their enhancements and see the plain old reality, but most people don't bother most of the time because things are ugly that way.
There's less need for optical sensor feeds to change reality than you might think.
In my experience, most people have moved the alteration of perception part back deeper into their brains.
They already live in a mediated reality here and now in 2004.
It's hard to get the PHB's to agree to something that's not 1.0
Convince using death by a thousand cuts
someone at Slate is going to lose their job over this article.
They don't actually have to actively fire this guy.
Assigning him to follow stump speeches for the Bush and the Kerry campaigns should be sufficient to encourage him to seek more pleasant employment elsewhere:)
Heh. Thinking about how all those credit card companies are looking for people with great credit ratings, carrying over high balances month to month, and never ever missing a payment.
You could sum up all of these business strategies as looking for that most ephemeral and elusive market segment: rich fools.
The rule probably refers to the fact that the rope has to support its own weight in addition to the mass you're hanging. The longer the rope, the more of its own weight has to be supported.
An equally valid concern to the weight of the longer piece of rope is that any given rope will have some distribution of strengths on a given length, with deviations.
Thus, a 100 ft length of rope will more likely contain a weaker section (as well as stronger sections, but those won't matter since the break will occur at the weakest section) than will a 1 ft length of rope.
A similar argument applies to the distribution of people controlling nuclear weapons!
The larger the number, the more likely that one of them will be sufficiently crazy to actually push the button and make the whole structure collapse.
BTW, you don't want to be anywhere near a tense rope, steel cable, or chain. When it fails, the remaining pieces can whip around at speeds that will cause mortal damage.
Of course, nobody should be surprised by this anymore
Actually, everyone should be surprised by this.
Not that they gave money to Republicans, but that they didn't give money to the Democrats.
The wise corporations cover both bases, so that no matter which party is in power they can still get on the horn and obtain access to legislators like the common voter cannot.
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of congressman...
Easily - if there's a lobbyist in the middle, or perhaps Fanne Fox (for those old enough to remember Wilbur Mills...)
I've been researching MP3 players and found the Neuros. It has an extensive list of different formats, including Ogg as well as the others.
The key features of the Neuros that are motivating me to buy one are the "record stream from FM" (as well as record from any audio input or onbord mic) to MP3 or WAV, and the "broadcast low power FM" (so I can listen through my car stereo on an unused frequency.)
To be balanced, though: there were some user complaints about the power level of the FM broadcast not being sufficient, but these were not universal. The Neuros II, which seems to have come out in the past couple of days, is supposed to help fix some of the version 1 drawbacks.
Frankly, about the only thing the Neuros lacks now are 100bT with on board Apache, 802.11[abg] interfaces (it has USB 2.0), but there don't seem to be many player/recorders out there with those right now.
Have you ever tried walking from one end of the strip to the other in the middle of summer?
Even though it's typically quite hot outside, you can almost feel the cooling breeze from the flyer sheets being whiffed in front of your face.
Vegas is full of juxtapositions that are hard to reconcile: lots of water in a desert; lots of money among fools; girly fliers of blond bimboes being handed out by sober-looking, middle-aged Hispanic immigrants trying to feed their families.
complaining that a year or so ago critics were being patted down before being allowed into movie screenings.
You can see where this is headed, right?
Cell phones with cameras becoming more commonplace; people will expect to videoconference call with their new head mounted Borg appliances in a few years, then theatre owners and many others will become disturbed if people turn on their phones and share their experiences with a friend or two million.
Increased communication and transparency in society from ubiquitous video phones will be a good advent, though, from the standpoint that bullshit will be seen through more easily.
It may still only have a small impact on the more fundamental problem that many people live within artficially constrained reality, divorcing themselves from information they don't want to see (i.e., $WE are not always all good and right and $THEY are not always bad and wrong).
Then, instead of watching important things like Senate committee meetings on CSPAN, people will choose to tune into mud wrestling babes.
By not being compliant to standards - speaking about IE and page rendering - MS forces the webmasters to create the webpages that are displaying correctly only under the `one and true'
So I have to ask the question.
With so many corporate IT departments shelling out big bucks for MS products, haven't any of them complained to MS about CSS and other glitches in IE non-compliance with W3C standards?
Do they just ignore their customers, provide a stonewall answer (it'll be in Longhorn) or what?
Or don't all the corporate webmasters care about this weirdness in IE?
Canadian tar pits that could result in a trillion barrels of oil when processed.
The oil locked into the Athabascan tar sands have been known for a number of decades; experts in the 1970's were trying to figure out economical ways of extracting the oil.
The article claims extraction is now possible for $10 per bbl.
I'm skeptical. The figure probably assumes some economies of scale in production to arrive at a cost that, if compared to recent prices, would make it a no-brainer to go forward.
Then, too, there's always the issue of how much sulfur is in this oil, which can affect the downstream price at the refinery.
I have a hard time imagining some database queries consistently causing a computer system to crash while other queries do not.
What sounds much more likely is that the concern is not about computer systems crashing, but that other non-computer "systems" might "crash" as a consequence of disclosure.
For example, a system in which foreign influence is peddled to affect U. S. government policy.
IIRC, Massachusetts was the last state holding out for an appeal of the Justice Department's settlement with Microsoft.
How has that settlement been working in practice?
There seems to be simmering small changes and perturbations as the agreement is reviewed, such as protocol licensing (MCPP).
Quoting from the Infoworld article:
If Judge Kollar-Kotelly finds the agreement not to be working effectively, then perhaps it's time for the court to review the agreement to see what changes might be made in order to effectively rectify the ongoing illegal monopoly and to restore a competitive marketplace.
Lately, my AM radio statio has been playing self-serving advertisements playing up the fact that, unlike cable TV, movies in theaters, etc, radio is still free.
Free, that is, and they don't mention, if you don't mind wasting your time polluting your unconscious mind with the drivel of commercial culture for close to 50% of the listening experience.
Likewise, if you get your email from a provider that locks the front gates enough with good spam protection, it's acceptable.
But "free" email accounts are typically so spam infested that the true cost becomes apparent.
But if you're stuck with XP, I'd suggest a VERY minimal install of XP,
My thought, too. If the kiosk app had to be running Windows and not be able to run anything else, I'd probably look into Windows XP Embedded.
From what little I've heard, XP Embedded would even make a pretty good desktop OS because it doesn't have as much gratuitous intertangling with browsers and media players as plain XP.
Nice limited functionality; you add only components that you want. Technically a good way to go for the general desktop and not just kiosks and POS terminals, but the business and marketing people in Redmond have other objectives...
This just in:
Label making fever sweeps the nation
Don't I know it.
At MyCorp, not only does every piece of property have a small bar code sticky label on it, but they've put bar codes on our office doors, too!
I'm just waiting for the policy announcement about the new employee forehead tattoo...
This raises the question 'what would SSN flat sound like?
It would sound like the soft exhalation of breath from people getting their first social security checks.
"You mean, that's it?"
It was just a joke between a couple friends' that eventually got out of hand.
That's what you think.
All of your supposedly rational analysis cannot sway my faith in the sacred writ. "And it will come to pass that Gates shall recognize his pre-ordained duty to greatness and cut checks to the faithful forwarders."
There's even a prophetic passage in the original email alluding to a naysayer arising and ultimately meeting an untimely demise on a skateboard passing through a flock of pigeons.