Rule of thumb for bad news in the mainstream media: release it Friday so it's buried over the weekend. Rule of thumb for the web: don't infuriate thousands of your customers right before you decide to tune out for 48 hours:
Creative's executive team will be coming in to quite a mess Monday morning, thanks to its VP of Screw Ups, Phil O'Shaughnessy. Friday morning, he posted a warning on the Creative customer forums that told programmer Daniel_K to stop writing his own drivers for their X-Fi sound cards. The cards still won't work on Vista over a year after the OS was released, because Creative hasn't released drivers for them—but by Mr. O'Shaughnessy's account, Daniel_K is "stealing" from Creative by making the cards work. Then the weekend happened.
Over the weekend, Creative's forums have exploded with posts from angry customers who have sworn to stop buying their products. There's already a boycott site up at boycottcreative.com.
Gitorious aims to provide a great way of doing distributed opensource code collaboration
Traditional code- and project forges offer many great things and has without a question helped developers of open source software. However, there's always the issue of long-term maintainability; as humans we always get distracted, busy and or just plain tired of working with things in the long run.
Distributed version control provides a way around this by making everyones copy a full repository, so if people like someone elses stuff better, or that someone else is actively maintaining the project they can just pull from that person instead of the "official" repository. And if the project maintainer decides to, he can pull those changes into his mainline branch. That's what makes open source great.
Most politicians live off of a staple diet of pre-packaged 'strategies' and 'talking points,' mostly derived from polling data rather than personal convictions. After they've ingested this pablum they spew it back out and the press reports it as news
..It doesn't matter anymore if Obama wins. I'm not counting on people or events to pick the best candidate. Maybe he's not the best candidate; I think he is but maybe I'm wrong. But I do know this: he's the only one who doesn't speak to us as though we're all fools.
A lot of us are, though. And that's why skilled politicians and newspapermen are usually so successful. And that's why I'm not getting my hopes up about Obama becoming president.
The other day I saw a black SUV rev its engine and then zoom past a car on narrow street because the driver was impatient. As the SUV passed by I could see the driver, a soccer mom, casually talking on her cellphone. I looked back and saw that she had not made the light, so her NASCAR move was apparently for naught.
In the blog world I see people racing around trying every new gizmo/software and then offering up their immediate impressions as though this has great utility.
In the shorter run, economists are generally in three camps when it comes to strategies for recovery.
Professor Stiglitz calculates in a new book, written with Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, that the total costs, including the long-term bills we’re incurring, amount to about $25 billion a month. That’s $330 a month for a family of four.
One way or another, now or later, we’ll have to pay the bill. Professor Stiglitz calculates that the eventual total cost of the war will be about $3 trillion. For a family of five like mine, that amounts to a bill of almost $50,000.
What really goes on in the back rooms of car dealerships across America?
What does the car salesman do when he leaves you sitting in a sales office and goes to talk with his boss?
What are the tricks salespeople use to increase their profit and how can consumers protect themselves from overpaying?We hired Chandler Phillips, a veteran journalist, to go undercover by working at two new car dealerships in the Los Angeles area. First, he would work at a high-volume, high-pressure dealership selling Japanese cars. Then, he'd change over to a smaller car lot that sold domestic cars at "no haggle" prices.
We invite you to read the following account of Phillips' day-to-day experience on the car lots. Doing so will broaden your understanding of the dealership sales process. It will also cast a new light on the role of the car salesman.
Although he has no investment track record, Oz has a smooth manner, a doctorate in physics and many rich acquaintances. He raises $100 million and opens shop. He then studies the derivatives market and finds an event on which the market places fairly long odds, say 9:1. In other words, it costs $.10 to buy an option that pays $1 if the event occurs and $0 otherwise. The nature of the event is unimportant: it might be a large fall in the stock market, Florida getting hit by a Category 5 hurricane or Russian President Vladimir Putin dying before the end of the year.
..The probability is ninety percent that the bad event does not occur and Oz owes nothing to the option holders. With a gross return (before expenses) of $15,400,000, the investors are thrilled, and so is Oz. He collects $2 million in management fees (of which he has only spent $1 million), plus a performance bonus equal to 20 percent of the 'excess return', namely, 20 percent of $11,400,000. All in all, Oz nets over $3 million for doing absolutely nothing.
What can't you do with Firefox? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5817 brings you a SQLite Manager right in yer browser.
Site has interesting controls to change layout using style sheets
..listen to what the state of California allows its judges to say while instructing the jury:
"It becomes my duty as judge to instruct you concerning the law applicable to this case, and it is your duty as jurors to follow the law as I state it to you. . . . You are to be governed solely by the evidence introduced in this trial and the law as stated to you by me."
Note the arrogance. You must not only follow the law. You must follow it "as I state it to you." The idea of a reasonable man rising up to say, "But I've read the law and I don't think that's what it means," is beyond the pale of the judge's understanding of his duty.
In 1670 William Penn was indicted for preaching Quakerism under the "unlawful assembly" act. Despite the fact that he was obviously guilty according to the judge's interpretation of the law, four of the 12 jurors voted to acquit him. The judge had the jurors thrown in jail and starved for four days in an attempt to change their votes. It didn't work. Reluctantly, he ordered Penn released -- but the crown still wasn't finished with the recalcitrant jurors.
The four who voted for innocence were assessed fines for failing to follow the law and sent to prison until the fines should be paid. Three chose to pay the fine -- just to get things over with. The fourth juror, Edward Bushell, was of heartier stock and refused to pay. Instead he took his case to the Court of Common Pleas, where Chief Justice Vaughan eventually ruled that Bushell was right -- jurors could not be punished for a verdict. If anything established that the jury was the sole arbiter of law AND facts, it was this case.
Q: What qualities in managers set them apart as great leaders, in essence, where do you find the right balance between "hard" and "soft" skills?
A: We have 45 managers. Some of them we communicate with once a year, some once a month, some everyday. I usually have dinner with the Blumkins every month, and we go on vacation, because we’re friends. What we look for in managers is a passion for the business. They usually come to us. I’ve never bought from a financial seller. We can’t run the business so I am counting on them to behave well; we have very little in the form of contracts. The business needs to continue just the same after I hand them the check as before. My big question is whether he will still get up at 6 AM just the same with $500 million, and continue to send money to Omaha. I have to look them in the eye and decide whether they love the business or they love the money. It’s fine if they love the money, but they have to love the business more. Why do I come in at 7 every morning, can’t wait to get to work. It’s because I get to paint my own painting and I like applause.
A Canadian customer was calling to find out if there was a faster way to trigger menu commands than mousing up to the menus.
Agent: Certainly, sir. There are keyboard shortcuts for many of those commands. For example, suppose you want to trigger the Select All command…
Caller: Yes, I use that one all the time! How do I do it?
Agent: Well, you just press Control-A.
Caller (after a pause): Well, that’s not working for me.
Agent: Do you have a text document open in front of you?
Caller: Yes, I sure do.
Agent: OK, now press Control-A.
Caller: I am, but nothing happens.
Agent: The text isn’t highlighted?
Caller: No, there’s no change at all.
Agent: That’s odd. If you press Control-A, the whole document should be highlighted. Try it again. Press Control-A. Tell me exactly what’s happening.
Caller (nearing his Canadian breaking point): Listen. I’m pressing Control, eh? And nothing’s happening, eh?
During his 1969 concert at San Quentin prison, Johnny Cash proposed a paradigm shift in the field of developmental psychology. He used “A Boy Named Sue” to present two hypotheses:
I immediately welcomed the Boy Named Sue paradigm, although I realized that I might be biased by my middle name (Marion). Cash and his ambiguously named male collaborator, the lyricist Shel Silverstein, could offer only anecdotal evidence against decades of research suggesting that children with weird names were destined for places like San Quentin.
Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.
Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”
Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.
It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows.
