It isn't uncommon for a large software company to offer competing products when they need to support legacy products for large contracts, or aquire them through aquisitions. Microsoft offers the "Works" office suite along with "Office." The same question can be asked of them... why not offer "Personal Office" instead of confusing the market with the "Works" suite? They may be going in that direction, I don't know.
This annoucement is interesting, and I welcome it! Open Office could use all the help it can get.
Is it surprising that finding good people is the hard part? Is it any different than the effort it takes lure a world-class CEO to run your company in hopes of making many times his salary/bonus/stock options in return?
Most companies are lazy, and don't try to measure the value of any employee in a company, just hire people to fit a job description and cross their fingers. To make matters worse, after hiring the wrong person they don't know how to get rid of them. Is all this really a revelation? People are lazy, and as implied all over the article and the comments to it, not enough companies seem to try hard enough. Is it not like buying a lotto ticket and hoping your numbers are drawn to be rich? Finding the right people vastly improve the odds of the company's success. That's what it's all about. End of story.
The software patent system is such an abomination the only way to fix it is to bring light of the situation by making a mockery of it, much like Amazon is doing.
Let's say the OSS community forms a non-profit, call it SPAAM (Software Patents Are a Mockery), brainstorms possible patent applications, and files them in a shotgun approach. The worst case scenario a few patents get granted (i.e., made unavailable to the multi-national for-profits) and best case some light is brought to the rediculous situation the patent system has brought onto itself. Power to the people!
After the advent of client/server and GUI interfaces the mainframe was declared dead. Yet the web happened, and all of a sudded all the inefficiencies of the GUI interface was replaced with, effectively, a 3270 terminal because it's a more efficient network model. Enter data, submit, wait for a response, just like a mainframe, but somehow... new?
In the past few years, virtualization has become a huge topic, and it's most interesting following the developments of Xen and Vmware and Solaris Containers and all the hardware vendors just now designing and building support for virtualization... and then I realize again... haven't we been here before? Virtualization is old technology, tried and true on the mainframe, and it's going to be some more years before it becomes a commodity. Oh it'll be here, someday, but again, don't hold your breath waiting the mainframe to go away as yet another generation realizes the advantages of what as invented long ago.
I dunno... we had Deloitte consultants come in before, and the one girl was really hot. I don't know why they were here or what they did but I don't think it matters. Couldn't have described it better myself! That's what you get with the big consulting firms... the good looking people making the big bucks, talking a big game and producing little, very slowly.
I haven't ever seen an opponent of software patents complain about the speed at which a patent is granted. Somehow the "improvement" of the system needed to involve speeding up the granting of nebulous and superfluous patents?
That being said, I'm all for any attempt at improvement, and peer reviews will certainly make it interesting. Bring it on!
It's nice that there still is someone with a chance to push Microsoft around (a little), while we see countless other articles of large companies caving in to them. Good luck proving the 20-200% improvements that Intel is claiming. Using NAND for a disk cache is interesting, especially if it's uses an intelligent and configurable algorithm. The value is questionnable at the existing 512k-1M sizes, but for notebook computer, what it's made for, I could see a definite "maybe."
However isn't this the same technology used in the new diskless disk drives that, by the specs I've seen, are slower than disk based drives?
Good thing I didn't switch to Road Runner You're assuming that Verizon doesn't or won't do the same? Gotta love the naive.
Let's see here, if packet shaping is going on with newsgroup applications, P2P, audio, video, VoIP, and on-demand web sites (remember "net neutrality" ?), then what's left? The Internet is no longer open and free folks, regardless of ISP.
It's not up to you to redistribute material against the owners wish. There wasn't anything in that post justifying music piracy, just stating fact. The record companies aren't much different than venture capital firms who front the money to build the product (an album in this case), advertise it, and as a result get the lion's share of the profits regardless of how good the talent is. If the musicians are legitimately very good they will get their share next time contract negotiations come around, or they can tour with their new found fame in the mean time.
If you came up with a killer product idea, but needed $10 million to create it, you might talk to a venture capital firm. That firm might agree and sign a contract to get, say, 90% of the company in exchange for their monitary risk. It may work out for both sides, but the venture capital firm makes the lion's share of the profits of someone else's idea and talent. Sometimes a necessary evil... a means to get your product out there. Record companies give that value, like it or hate it.
The RIAA is struggling to keep it's niche, but they will have to adapt to this new economy, and they will still make their money, DRM or not, because their service has value.
The economics of music works something like this: Record labels get the vast majority of profits for recordings. The artists get the majority of their income from live shows. Even if the artists make $0 from their albums, and their music is any good, they can tour. Most of us go to work 250 days a year, and give the fruits of our labor to our employers (patents, etc). This is all about the RIAA's profits, not the musician's.
In fact, this whole "war" between science and religion is doing horrendous things to both sides. Let science be science and let religion be religion. What your saying is equivalent to proposing racial segregation as a way to peace. It's the collaboration of both sides that leads to understanding and elimination of prejudices. The following is a quote from Stephen Hawking on the history of the universe:
"If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist."
One can envision this being stated by both religious and scientific philosophers. Albert Einstein has made occasional references to God, as:
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
There isn't as much of a gap as many believe, and much opportunity for collaboration. However I'm also not so naive to believe that science and religion are close to agreement either, just as assuming that racial tension in Kentucky went away 30 years ago with the Civil Rights movement.
Why should my ISP be paid twice? Because they want more money. Because they can.
It's also deeper than the ISP. This means that, for example, Google will have to pay all the baby bells who provide the lines, AND all the ISPs who provide the last mile service. Without net neutrality all the big guys will get together, pay each other money to dedicate first tier bandwidth, and the consumers will be left with scraps.
Don't think that double-payment to ISPs or carriers is a new concept... the goverments of the world have set the standard with double and triple taxation.
Dell doesn't seem to be advertising this thing at all I was very surprised the other day when I saw Dell's Ubuntu offering as the primary ad on their home page. That's a more advertising than I thought they would do!
People have given up on DSL? I'm not really sure where the DSL fanboism comes from. I'll qualify my comments by saying that I've had cable modem service for 8 years, never DSL, but I've used dedicated T1 or T3 internet for 20 years. I've watched pricing and bandwidth for competing DSL services but there's nothing about DSL that's compelled me to switch. Price is no better, bandwidth is guaranteed, but less bandwidth is available, while I've see my Cable bandwidth increase each year. Verizon FIOS is getting very close to me but I'm not even sure that's compelling enough because it's not cheaper, bandwidth is not guaranteed, and I haven't seen specs that indicate there will be more bandwith available to ME over Cable.
Honestly, the only time consumers should be concerned about bandwidth is for massive downloads or VoIP. I've had VoIP for 3 years and it has more than adequately replaced my land line at half the cost. Massive downloads are better done via torrents, which download off hours anyway. Based on my cell phone experience, I can't imagine wireless for home service is an upgrade from any of this!!
There's a big difference here. Unlike telemarketers, most everyone will need their service at some point. Tell them the job you want and the price it would take for you to leave your current position, and not to call until they get it. Next time they call you will welcome them with open arms. In all likelihood you will never hear from them again. Win-win!
who needs to load up three days worth of AV? How about those who DON'T WANT TO load it up every 3 days! Seriously if you have a device with enough storage for your entire library, you don't have to re-load it unless you add new content.
Anyone who has interface or functionality concerns on their device should try out the Rockbox software http://rockbox.org/ to see if it meets your needs. Here is a list of the supported devices, which may be a good list to cross-check your purchase of an older player.
Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio
iriver: H100, H300 and H10 series
Apple: iPod 4th gen (grayscale and color), 5th/5.5th gen video, 1st gen Nano and Mini 1st/2nd gen (Nano 2nd gen is not supported)
Cowon: iAudio X5 (including X5V and X5L), M5 (including M5L)
Toshiba: Gigabeat X and F series (the S model is not supported)
SanDisk: Sansa E200 series (the R models are not supported)
I used this on an iRiver H3xx series until it died, and from a gadget and customization perspective it's great, and still allows you to boot into your old firmware if you ever have the urge. Note that this is also available for iPods. Sometimes adding little things like bookmarking for long audio books or adding a codec not included by the original manufacturer makes all the difference in the world.
Alot of newer MBAs do not consider I.T. workers capital. As I understand it is true that this class of workers were highly valued prior to the 80's, untouchable in layoffs. Anyone who's been employeed in the 80's and beyond know full well that is no longer true.
In fact at a one big company I know of they are going through an outsourcing effort where management was required to hire from a consulting firm for some critical production support staff. Six resumes were submitted, none of them were qualified. When word got back to upper management, their response was "the consulting company is complaining that your interview process is unfair. You need to hire from that bunch." Sounds like it's not about quality or cost cutting.. it's about a deal between upper management and a consulting firm... make the quick buck on side deals, hope that production issues don't occur, but if they do find a new job. It's the same thing as H1B outsourcing, at a micro-level.
The situation we're seeing here is caused by just the opposite effect: upper management is looking to cut short-term costs. They're not willing to pay for the quality they want. It is upper management that makes these decisions based upon cost, but first-line management should know when they have a quality employee and when they don't, and act appropriately on an individual basis. Most companies don't have good management, don't know how to measure the bottom-line benefit of good employees and make cost-cutting decisions on salary alone. A superstar employee at 2x the salary could add 10x their salary to the bottom line. Without the desire to look for the superstar employees, all they know how to do to add to the bottom line is to cut salaries, and deal with inefficiency issues later (at which time they start distributing their resume).
I'm glad to see this topic getting some attention. On paper it seems hard to argue that anyone isn't getting a good deal because the US company gets work done, the H1B worker gets higher wages than they could in their own country, and the oursourcing company gets a substantial cut of the difference for providing the resource. The odd man out here is the US worker and this is where the government needs to step up and at least make sure everything is kept clean.
US workers just need to understand that employers do pay more for higher quality. US workers have an automatic edge in communication (native English), and in many cases education. In IT, think of a university degree (US) vs vocational school training in a broad survey of IT skills. It takes a while in the workplace for an Indian IT worker to catch up in those areas.
What isn't always clean is the treatment of the H1B worker. I've worked with a lot of Indian H1Bs and I can't tell you how many times I've heard the following story: "I wanted to come work in the US, make money, and go back to India with a pile of cash and buy a place of my own, then once I got to the US I wanted to stay. My employer knows that an H1B is 6 years of holding a green card as a carrot in front of me where he charges high wages for my skills and pays me low wages. During that time I have to do what he wants, work where he wants, or else I will be sent back to India."
To me It seems the first couple of years is payback for the sponsorship for the work visa, but 6 years is closer to indentured servitude. In most cases the worker is qualified for the green card much before that 6 years is up and the consulting company will purposefully delay the processing to make sure that worker cannot leave. It's immigration policy, which is designed to protect the american worker, but there's tons of room for abuse, and big multi-nationals make sure the system works for them, NOT the individual workers involved... which includes both the US and Indian worker in this case.
what Microsoft does to IE, it's still going to be IE. End of Story And I'd expand that thought to all browsers. You ever notice the similarities between a web page and a 3270 terminal? HTML was intended for static content, and has been showing signs of age for over a decade. When web developers have to deal with bloatware like AJAX frameworks and pull hair out over javascript incompatibilities just to make the UI just a little more interactive, it seems times are ripe for a better solution. You can't polish a turd.
a) he doesn't need the money. Seriously. Do you really believe that if someone doesn't need money they no longer take it? Does Donald Trump now do charity work? Did Larry Ellison recently retire? When did US Congressmen stop taking campaign contributions from multi-national corporations? Did Dick Cheney disassociate himself from all his and his friend's oil interests before going along with the invasion of Iraq? I want to live in your world.
Intel's switch from NetBurst/P4 to Pentium M architecture has more to do with performance than noise and power consumption. P4's maxed out at 4ghz due largely to heat constraints, and when benchmarks started making it obvious that the Pentium-M outperforms it at half the clock rate, it became apparent that Pentium-M was a superior architecture with room to grow, and thus emerged core 2 duo.
It seems to me there's undo fascination with external drives. Yes people should do backups, and yes this is a gadget to easily get them there... but they're slower than internal drives and sometimes proprietary (how do you get at your data if the box dies?).
I can see using an external USB drive for backup if you intend to take it somewhere, often. If you leave it in house and have multiple PCs, use a consumer NAS solution (e.g., Buffalo, Infrant, D-Link). Otherwise, the best solution is to buy an internal drive and get backup software that you can schedule to run nightly (e.g., rsync). It's much cheaper, faster, more flexible from both a hardware and software perspective, and it sits safely in your case.. quiet, no blinking lights, and the cat can't knock it over.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't uncommon for a large software company to offer competing products when they need to support legacy products for large contracts, or aquire them through aquisitions. Microsoft offers the "Works" office suite along with "Office." The same question can be asked of them... why not offer "Personal Office" instead of confusing the market with the "Works" suite? They may be going in that direction, I don't know. This annoucement is interesting, and I welcome it! Open Office could use all the help it can get.
Is it surprising that finding good people is the hard part? Is it any different than the effort it takes lure a world-class CEO to run your company in hopes of making many times his salary/bonus/stock options in return?
Most companies are lazy, and don't try to measure the value of any employee in a company, just hire people to fit a job description and cross their fingers. To make matters worse, after hiring the wrong person they don't know how to get rid of them. Is all this really a revelation? People are lazy, and as implied all over the article and the comments to it, not enough companies seem to try hard enough. Is it not like buying a lotto ticket and hoping your numbers are drawn to be rich? Finding the right people vastly improve the odds of the company's success. That's what it's all about. End of story.
The software patent system is such an abomination the only way to fix it is to bring light of the situation by making a mockery of it, much like Amazon is doing.
Let's say the OSS community forms a non-profit, call it SPAAM (Software Patents Are a Mockery), brainstorms possible patent applications, and files them in a shotgun approach. The worst case scenario a few patents get granted (i.e., made unavailable to the multi-national for-profits) and best case some light is brought to the rediculous situation the patent system has brought onto itself. Power to the people!
I knew this news was coming.
After the advent of client/server and GUI interfaces the mainframe was declared dead. Yet the web happened, and all of a sudded all the inefficiencies of the GUI interface was replaced with, effectively, a 3270 terminal because it's a more efficient network model. Enter data, submit, wait for a response, just like a mainframe, but somehow... new?
In the past few years, virtualization has become a huge topic, and it's most interesting following the developments of Xen and Vmware and Solaris Containers and all the hardware vendors just now designing and building support for virtualization... and then I realize again... haven't we been here before? Virtualization is old technology, tried and true on the mainframe, and it's going to be some more years before it becomes a commodity. Oh it'll be here, someday, but again, don't hold your breath waiting the mainframe to go away as yet another generation realizes the advantages of what as invented long ago.
I haven't ever seen an opponent of software patents complain about the speed at which a patent is granted. Somehow the "improvement" of the system needed to involve speeding up the granting of nebulous and superfluous patents?
That being said, I'm all for any attempt at improvement, and peer reviews will certainly make it interesting. Bring it on!
It's nice that there still is someone with a chance to push Microsoft around (a little), while we see countless other articles of large companies caving in to them. Good luck proving the 20-200% improvements that Intel is claiming. Using NAND for a disk cache is interesting, especially if it's uses an intelligent and configurable algorithm. The value is questionnable at the existing 512k-1M sizes, but for notebook computer, what it's made for, I could see a definite "maybe."
However isn't this the same technology used in the new diskless disk drives that, by the specs I've seen, are slower than disk based drives?
Let's see here, if packet shaping is going on with newsgroup applications, P2P, audio, video, VoIP, and on-demand web sites (remember "net neutrality" ?), then what's left? The Internet is no longer open and free folks, regardless of ISP.
If you came up with a killer product idea, but needed $10 million to create it, you might talk to a venture capital firm. That firm might agree and sign a contract to get, say, 90% of the company in exchange for their monitary risk. It may work out for both sides, but the venture capital firm makes the lion's share of the profits of someone else's idea and talent. Sometimes a necessary evil... a means to get your product out there. Record companies give that value, like it or hate it.
The RIAA is struggling to keep it's niche, but they will have to adapt to this new economy, and they will still make their money, DRM or not, because their service has value.
The economics of music works something like this: Record labels get the vast majority of profits for recordings. The artists get the majority of their income from live shows. Even if the artists make $0 from their albums, and their music is any good, they can tour. Most of us go to work 250 days a year, and give the fruits of our labor to our employers (patents, etc). This is all about the RIAA's profits, not the musician's.
"If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist."
One can envision this being stated by both religious and scientific philosophers. Albert Einstein has made occasional references to God, as:
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
There isn't as much of a gap as many believe, and much opportunity for collaboration. However I'm also not so naive to believe that science and religion are close to agreement either, just as assuming that racial tension in Kentucky went away 30 years ago with the Civil Rights movement.
It's also deeper than the ISP. This means that, for example, Google will have to pay all the baby bells who provide the lines, AND all the ISPs who provide the last mile service. Without net neutrality all the big guys will get together, pay each other money to dedicate first tier bandwidth, and the consumers will be left with scraps.
Don't think that double-payment to ISPs or carriers is a new concept... the goverments of the world have set the standard with double and triple taxation.
Honestly, the only time consumers should be concerned about bandwidth is for massive downloads or VoIP. I've had VoIP for 3 years and it has more than adequately replaced my land line at half the cost. Massive downloads are better done via torrents, which download off hours anyway. Based on my cell phone experience, I can't imagine wireless for home service is an upgrade from any of this!!
There's a big difference here. Unlike telemarketers, most everyone will need their service at some point. Tell them the job you want and the price it would take for you to leave your current position, and not to call until they get it. Next time they call you will welcome them with open arms. In all likelihood you will never hear from them again. Win-win!
I used this on an iRiver H3xx series until it died, and from a gadget and customization perspective it's great, and still allows you to boot into your old firmware if you ever have the urge. Note that this is also available for iPods. Sometimes adding little things like bookmarking for long audio books or adding a codec not included by the original manufacturer makes all the difference in the world.
In fact at a one big company I know of they are going through an outsourcing effort where management was required to hire from a consulting firm for some critical production support staff. Six resumes were submitted, none of them were qualified. When word got back to upper management, their response was "the consulting company is complaining that your interview process is unfair. You need to hire from that bunch." Sounds like it's not about quality or cost cutting.. it's about a deal between upper management and a consulting firm... make the quick buck on side deals, hope that production issues don't occur, but if they do find a new job. It's the same thing as H1B outsourcing, at a micro-level.
I'm glad to see this topic getting some attention. On paper it seems hard to argue that anyone isn't getting a good deal because the US company gets work done, the H1B worker gets higher wages than they could in their own country, and the oursourcing company gets a substantial cut of the difference for providing the resource. The odd man out here is the US worker and this is where the government needs to step up and at least make sure everything is kept clean.
US workers just need to understand that employers do pay more for higher quality. US workers have an automatic edge in communication (native English), and in many cases education. In IT, think of a university degree (US) vs vocational school training in a broad survey of IT skills. It takes a while in the workplace for an Indian IT worker to catch up in those areas.
What isn't always clean is the treatment of the H1B worker. I've worked with a lot of Indian H1Bs and I can't tell you how many times I've heard the following story: "I wanted to come work in the US, make money, and go back to India with a pile of cash and buy a place of my own, then once I got to the US I wanted to stay. My employer knows that an H1B is 6 years of holding a green card as a carrot in front of me where he charges high wages for my skills and pays me low wages. During that time I have to do what he wants, work where he wants, or else I will be sent back to India."
To me It seems the first couple of years is payback for the sponsorship for the work visa, but 6 years is closer to indentured servitude. In most cases the worker is qualified for the green card much before that 6 years is up and the consulting company will purposefully delay the processing to make sure that worker cannot leave. It's immigration policy, which is designed to protect the american worker, but there's tons of room for abuse, and big multi-nationals make sure the system works for them, NOT the individual workers involved... which includes both the US and Indian worker in this case.
Intel's switch from NetBurst/P4 to Pentium M architecture has more to do with performance than noise and power consumption. P4's maxed out at 4ghz due largely to heat constraints, and when benchmarks started making it obvious that the Pentium-M outperforms it at half the clock rate, it became apparent that Pentium-M was a superior architecture with room to grow, and thus emerged core 2 duo.
It seems to me there's undo fascination with external drives. Yes people should do backups, and yes this is a gadget to easily get them there... but they're slower than internal drives and sometimes proprietary (how do you get at your data if the box dies?).
I can see using an external USB drive for backup if you intend to take it somewhere, often. If you leave it in house and have multiple PCs, use a consumer NAS solution (e.g., Buffalo, Infrant, D-Link). Otherwise, the best solution is to buy an internal drive and get backup software that you can schedule to run nightly (e.g., rsync). It's much cheaper, faster, more flexible from both a hardware and software perspective, and it sits safely in your case.. quiet, no blinking lights, and the cat can't knock it over.