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How They Get the Big BucksHow They Get the Big BucksHow They Get the Big Bucks 11/18/2003 12:16 AM For a thin-client deployment that's not going well, this IT shop brings in some highly paid consultants. Fish notices that one of them of them appears to be taking notes on everything that's said or done, using a handheld computer ... This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)How They Get the Big BucksGrok Headline matches for How They Get the Big BucksSave Big Bucks With Small BucksSave Big Bucks With Small Bucks 04/15/2005 10:07 AM Did you realize that $2 per day can become $100,000? The big bucksThe big bucks 05/13/2004 03:31 AM USA Today May 13 2004 7:11AM GMT Big bucks in Bluetooth?Big bucks in Bluetooth? 07/22/2004 06:31 PM Electric New Paper Jul 22 2004 9:04PM GMT Big bucks from BillBig bucks from Bill 02/12/2004 11:37 PM USA Today Feb 13 2004 4:10AM GMT BEA Systems Bucks UpBEA Systems Bucks Up 08/13/2004 02:15 PM The software company's stock rises on improved second-quarter numbers. 3Com and 3 Bucks (and Change)3Com and 3 Bucks (and Change) 09/20/2004 10:45 AM At more than $4 a stub, every 3Com share comes with $3.25 cash. T-Rex Bones Don't Bring Big BucksT-Rex Bones Don't Bring Big Bucks 05/19/2004 06:08 AM CBS News May 19 2004 10:08AM GMT Dollar Tree Bucks UpDollar Tree Bucks Up 05/27/2004 01:55 PM Dollar Tree had a pretty good quarter. But will steep gas prices alter its outlook? Big Bucks for Biometric ScreeningBig Bucks for Biometric Screening 06/02/2004 05:37 AM The Department of Homeland Security awards a $10 billion contract to a group of companies, led by Accenture, to build a system to screen and track foreign visitors to the United States. Heyer's Bubbly BucksHeyer's Bubbly Bucks 06/15/2004 11:47 AM Steven Heyer will leave Coca-Cola with a $23-million severance package. Ten Years and Fifteen BucksTen Years and Fifteen Bucks 12/19/2004 02:58 PM
« Pigs are pigs all the world over. » Happy 40th Conrad and 30-*mumble* JJ! I think we have all earned the joy of good single malts and reading pandering crap like this knowing we're too old for the target market. James Earl Jones might have been cool, but RMS? Paging Brad Kuhn, paging Brad Kuhn....:) 'Tis a pity I gave up such ancient technology as the answering machine years ago. When I came home tonight there was a big package from my mother who sent a few gifts, a few bags of dried cranberries and load of mail from the last few months which mostly consisted of quarterly retirement fund reports noting how much money they've lost this quarter and a slew of credit card offers. In contrast, the banks in Finland will mostly tell you to piss off if you want a MasterCard unless you have a job, even with a decent amount of money in the bank and no debt, and will give you a low line of credit and make you pay an annual fee. Of course, there's nowhere near the problem of personal debt here either. After chopping up most of those I found an envelope from the City of St. Louis which struck me as odd since I've not lived there in almost a decade. I opened it and much to my amazement I found a harsh letter for a 10 year-old $15 parking ticket. Yes, TEN YEARS. Jesus christ in a merry widow with a cat 'o nines, even criminals enjoy a shorter statute of limitations on far worse crimes than being busted by the meter nazis. Fifteen whole dollars, which is something like 5 euro these days, induced them to send a threatening letter of doom. Our records indicate that parking tickets issued to a vehicle registered in your name are delinquent. Your failure to satisfy this matter immediately will result in the forwarding of this debt to a national collection agency and may result in additional collection fees equal to 20 percent of the amount due. [emphasis theirs] Holy shit, I'm in for a whole $15 and the $3 for collection. I'll bet Trump never got a lame letter like this when he was in the hole for a few billion bucks and I'm getting busted for a lousy $15?! The only thing worse than the US Postmaster on your ass is the parking ticket collective, even the parking nazis in Helsinki have an Orwellian logo to remind you that there is no escape from the everseeing eye of the "Time Expired" vultures. Why can't they just send me a letter that says something like that they're sorry that it took them 10 years to notice that I have one whole parking ticket outstanding and that they'd like me to pay up instead of the dramatic language of doom? I doubt that Finland would extradite me for a parking ticket back home, but I wonder if the US Customs guys would bust me if I ever reenter the US and send me to Gitmo as a parking terrorista. Who knew living on the edge could be so easy and so dreadfully dull at the same time? Speaking of pigs, I found out about kinkkubingo [ham bingo] today at work. Bingo makes me think of old ladies [sorry mom] in church basements obsessing on their cards to win pocket money. Ham bingo is, apparently, a Christmas tradition of bingo or a raffle for a Christmas ham. I say 'apparently' as Google doesn't turn up much and my close Finnish girlfriend upon whom I rely to keep me informed on such important bits of cultural ephemera had never heard of it. DTM has a Kalkunnabingo [turkey bingo] every Sunday with Miss Bitch but, being a former fag hag supreme, I get a little suspicious when gay clubs start raffling off meat. :) It sounds like a bit of harmless holiday fun and might even be combined with a drinking game for pikkujoulu entertainment. And, just in time for Christmas tree trimming, the paper lomo that you can cut out, glue together and enjoy. The Lomo people also have a cute advent calendar, too. Maybe I'll send one of the paper lomos to the parking crusaders with the pysäköinninvalvonta eyeball glued onto the front of it for grins. Blogs, bosses and bucksBlogs, bosses and bucks 06/25/2004 08:31 PM I had a good time yesterday at Supernova, but it seemed that one of the points I made on our panel caused some consternation among some listeners, so let's look at it. I had heard a certain amount of what I thought was wildly overoptimistic forecasting of the widespread adoption of blogging as a tool in corporate America. For instance, Tim Bray said: "Any corporation that doesn't do this in the future is going to be playing catch-up. They can use the technology to make the enterprise provide a more human face to world." (I copied this quote from a trade journal article on the conference and promptly lost the URL. Sorry. I wasn't taking notes myself so if it's wrong, apologies in advance.) I agree with Tim and the other optimists that blogging can give enterprises a more human face. But will they let it? What I said yesterday is that I thought the successes to date in public blogging by software developers at places like Microsoft and Sun weren't likely to be duplicated in other, more traditional corporations any time soon. Software professionals are relatively unique in feeling that (a) their talents are in demand and (b) if they get fired from one job they can probably (except maybe at the very bottom of an economic cycle) get another one pretty easily. In other words, they feel more empowered to spout off on their blogs without fearing for their livelihood than the typical American worker does. I'm not sure why, but Tim seemed to take this comment to mean that I thought that people in other fields -- I think he mentioned construction, it's hard to remember -- wouldn't succeed as bloggers because they're "not as interesting." Of course, that's not what I said, and it's precisely the opposite of what I think. Everyone has stories to tell, and everyone's stories are worth telling: that's a credo of the digital storytelling movement that I've been involved with for a decade now. The stories that programmers are telling in the current explosion of blogs have given their work a vital new visibility; as developers tell their stories to each other, creating a pool of technical, practical and philosophical knowledge, they are also giving the public a new and fascinating window onto their discipline. (I'm as aware of this as anyone -- my work on my book is infinitely easier thanks to the profusion of programming blogs.) Do I think it would be a Good Thing for this pattern to be duplicated in other fields? Of course -- and it's happening in some, predictably in those areas where individual professionals have a tradition of independence (the legal world, academia). But the utopian vision of blogging somehow flattening corporate hierarchies and allowing Cluetrain-like voices of authenticity to trumpet forth from every Fortune 500 headquarters? Maybe it's possible on the sort of time scale that Supernova keynoter Tom Malone talked about -- from hunter-gatherers to agriculture, that sort of thing. But I don't think it's going to happen in our lifetimes. I'm sorry to be the pessimist at the party. But for large numbers of workers in America, particularly those at big companies, the dominant fact of life remains don't piss off your boss. And, in an era of health-insurance lock-in and easy outsourcing and offshoring, many U.S. workers remain doubtful that they can simply waltz into a new job should their activities displease the current hierarchy to which they report. So the odds of them feeling at ease publishing honest Web sites about their work lives are extremely poor. The blogs you're going to see from within most traditional companies will be either uninformative snoozes or desperate attempts at butt-covering and -kissing. Not because people don't have great stories to tell -- but because telling the truth has too high a cost. Someone at Supernova got up and said that he worked in investment banking and thought it was a field that was ripe for blogging. No doubt! I'm assuming that your typical investment banker has managed to sock away some private unemployment insurance cash (also known in some industries as "fuck you" money, something Dick Cheney apparently has in abundance). For those with such resources, blog on! For those lucky enough to
work for a company that says "blog on" and means it, cherish
your luck. But for most of the rest of the working population, the
blogging revolution will be happening in some other office. Grokster And EFF Get Big Bucks BackerGrokster And EFF Get Big Bucks Backer 03/28/2005 04:42 PM Internet Billionare <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Cuban">Mark Cuban</a> has announced his intention to financially support the EFF and Grokster. Cuban, who believes that any ruling could potentially hurt innocent businessmen like himself, announced his plans on his weblog; he said that "the EFF and others came to me and asked if I would finance the legal effort against MGM. I said yes. I would provide them the money they need." Tomorrow, the US Supreme Court will hear the case of MGM vs. Grokster. Involving more than 28 of the world's biggest media companies, the lawsuit also includes P2P vendors Kazaa and Morpheus and attempts to set a precedent against other uses of p2p technology. Grokster is being defended by the EFF. The case has been brought to the Supreme Court after a lower court ruled in Grokster’s favour, and the media companies appealed. In a post on Saturday, Cuban remarked that "If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only." He went onto say that "It wont be a good day when high school entrepreneurs have to get a fairness opinion from a technology oriented law firm to confirm that big music or movie studios wont sue you because they can come up with an angle that makes a judge believe the technology might impact the music business. It will be a sad day when American corporations start to hold their US digital innovations and inventions overseas to protect them from the RIAA, moving important jobs overseas with them." The EFF plan to use the so called "Betamax" defence. "The copyright law principles set out in the Sony Betamax case have served innovators, copyright industries, and the public well for 20 years," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF's IP attorney. "We at EFF look forward to the Supreme Court reaffirming the applicability of Betamax in the 21st century."  View: EFF
Information | Cuban's
BlogRead full story... Save Big Bucks When InvestingSave Big Bucks When Investing 03/24/2005 08:58 AM Why spend more than you have to when investing? i'd take a hundred bucks if profiledi'd take a hundred bucks if profiled 08/04/2004 06:50 PM it's gonna happen anyway, i might as well get paid The Right Taps Blogs for BucksThe Right Taps Blogs for Bucks 08/09/2004 05:33 AM Conservative bloggers try to replicate the fund-raising and organizing success of left-leaning sites by setting up RedState.org. Not that the Republican Party needs any fund-raising help, progressives retort. By Louise Witt. Get into Google for under a thousand
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