Tag: fuckedcompany

GM Bankruptcy

President Obama will push General Motors into bankruptcy protection on Monday, making a risky bet that by temporarily nationalizing the onetime icon of American capitalism, he can save at least a diminished automaker that is competitive.

nice. $50b and counting to keep a few 1000 overpaid schmucks around in up and coming detroit.

Glacial Distribution

Those movies then stay exclusive to the premium channels for 15 to 18 months — let me repeat 15 to 18 months! And from there it only gets worse. After the year and a half in premium channel jail, movies then go to the regular cable channels and big networks for airing. As I understand it, some online rentals are again okay during this time, but then, they often go back to the premium channels for a second run. That means they get pulled once again. This whole process often lasts for 7 years or more. It’s only after that time period that movies are really free to be distributed a bunch of different ways. That includes Netflix’s popular Watch Instantly streaming feature — so now you see why the selection of movies on that service is mostly older films.

Siemens bribes

There is something almost touching about the candour and trust with which Siemens went about a very dirty business. Take the 3 “cash desks” it set up in its offices, to which employees could bring empty suitcases to be filled with cash. As much as $1.4m could be withdrawn at a time to win contracts for its telecoms-equipment division

Ha. And to think that I recently got an unsolicited request to talk to them about making Siemens attractive for employees in a googly way. I told them it is not a marketing / hr problem and needs to start with the CEO.

Architecture astronauts

I believe the future is one in which eventually all or most of our data will be stored in the cloud. Desktops and cell phones will, for most tasks, be terminals to the cloud, and so the concept of synchronization will be meaningless for most users. To be sure, there are solid use cases for synchronization but I don’t think sync is the best model for most people in most scenarios. And yes, Mesh does allow you to store data in the cloud as another data point in the mesh. But adding the desktop sync layer is, for most people, just not necessary, and I suspect will be generally perceived by mainstream users as an irrelevant added layer of complexity.

exactly. you only need to “sync” if you think in terms of offline applications. no wonder ozzie would push for that

The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don’t solve an actual problem… they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization. And what is this Windows Live Mesh? It’s a way to synchronize files. Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not. But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That’s just the sample app. It’s a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0. It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

provides the takedown on “live mesh” that the lightweights at techcrunch were not able to do