Posts by Ian Michael Gumby

? More Money Than Sense ?

First I agree that the selling point of sending someone your heart beat is silly.

The point is that they are trying to say is that your watch is no longer just a watch.

If you're old enough to remember when the first electronic LCD watches were introduced.. there were some high end models. Meaning those who bought gold cased plastic battery operated watches as jewelry. Does the author think those people as foolish also? (Most likely before Jasper's time).

Now I can understand that... but then again, I'd want to add a Patek to my collection.

The cool thing and selling point of the watch is that you can change the face at any time, depending on your mood.

In terms of accuracy.... its a joke. Sure 50ms is good enough. Most likely they link to your phone and get the time from the closest cell tower.

If you wanted better accuracy... you would take the radio signal from a known clock and known X,Y,Z coordinate. You know your approximate GPS location to within 100 meters. Now you can calculate the time fairly accurately. The other issue to consider is how often you do this and how accurate is the electric clock in the device?

Now I would pay $$$ for a really accurate watch tied to GPS that did just that. One that could fit in to your pocket. For ~5K you could buy a base station clock for your network that does this.... but it won't fit in to your pocket... ;-)

But I digress. Its an interesting toy... as a collectible... the higher end models may be worth the price.

Re: One for...

"What could we name this one?"

Why the 'Flying Dutchman' of course.

Considering that you have a relatively limitless supply of solar wind from the sun, it could sail forever...

(Which is the life of the craft. )

I guess the first step would be to write computer sailing programs. Where you enter your destination and let the computer plot the course tracking your GPS, wind speed and direction, etc ...

Could be fun.

Re: No thanks

You clearly don't know contract law.

There's a clause in almost every contract that states that if a paragraph is unenforceable, only that paragraph is invalidated and the rest of the contract stands.

Re: "...restored to full pay ..."

April 1st is the first day of Q2.

Its no coincidence that they are doing this in Q4 and Q1...

Many of us have escaped the borg. ;-)

I escaped almost 10 years ago.

@JDX Re: Sarcasm?

In corporate America, they love exempt employees.

You end up putting in more that 40 hours a week, including your own personal skills enhancement.

What separates a good company from a bad is if they will pay to send you to a course for a week or a conference.

To your point, I put in 60-80 hours a week doing my day job and then keeping the skills fresh.

That's why I'm billable at a top rate.

Am I a work-a-holic? Yup. But the nice thing is that I enjoy my work. So its not a big deal.

If you're one of those guys who wants a 9-5 job and then goes home to his family... that's your choice and I respect you for that. But some of us... our work is part of our life.

Re: Learn their jobs !

No, its a sincere program.

Again suppose you have 100 guys on the bench who know Sybase. But Sybase isn't new and the legacy systems at clients are being transitioned out.

So you need to get them trained up on Oracle.

Here you provide online training and redbooks so that they can learn the basics and you now have a staff with marketable skills.

The 90% salary reduction is a way to offset the cost of the training. Especially if these employees are not exempt. (Hourly)

You are still putting in a 40+ hour work week, yet 32 hours are billable, 8 are non-billable but still company directed .

@Re: @Erik Is this actually warranted?

Wow, are you sure you don't work for IBM?

Your math is wrong.

If you are salaried, your salary is based on a 40 hour work week.

You are now getting paid 90% of your salary while you are supposed to spend 32 hours working on your day job, and then 8 hours working on updating your skills. So you are still working on work related material for 90% of your salary.

In IBM parlance, you've just changed your PBCs to include those 8 hours a week learning 'X'. You are not working less hours.

If you want to convince yourself that you're getting a 10% raise... LOL... you deserve working for IBM.

Of course here's another sad fact. That loss of 8 hours a week... that impacts your bonus because its non-billable to the customer (unless someone does some funny bookkeeping) so it impacts your personal revenue number that helps to determine your bonus and/or your rank.

@Erik Re: Is this actually warranted?

There are two sides to this coin.

IBM is kind of in a catch-22.

Over the past decade IBM has made record profits by cutting to the bone. Buying back shares to help reduce the number of shares on the market to help boost their stock price.

Now they have a problem.

No SO customer will buy from IBM if IBM can't provide the skills required. That makes the SO employee dead weight. What good is an employee who knows lotus notes when the market wants someone to support Outlook?

Or if an Oracle DBA is certified on their regular products but not Exadata?

Or they don't know 'Big Data'....

So IBM has to retrain their employees. Those who don't skill up are gone.

IBM also has to figure out how to subsidize the cost of the training. After all, you can't charge the client if your employee is off training.

This isn't a good thing for IBM. It says long term, IBM is toast because they can't attract the necessary talent and they don't invest in their people.

To your point, on US contracts, customers don't want offshore labor onshored. They will beat up IBM on this and reduce IBM's profit margins.

This is definitely yet another warning sign of IBM's impending doom.

@Dan

Doesn't matter.

Go and read the ADA. There's the Federal Law, then each state has their own, and most cities even have their own. Actually its not just ADA but also Fair Housing and other laws that deal with discriminatory practices and what constitutes a protected class.

If you decide to drive for Uber, then you have to follow the law. It is Uber's responsibility to make sure that their drivers know the law and that they follow the law. In these cases, both the driver and the service are on the hook. (The driver is not an Uber employee and has no shield.)

Suspension of the driver doesn't go far enough. Drop the driver from the service. Period. That driver is a risk for repeat offenses and there are more drivers willing to do this.

@PleebSmash Re: Back to the drawing board

TAMR is already taken.

One of Stonebraker's companies. This one out of MIT.

@AC Huh?

Ok...

Here's the thing.

Getty is a stock photo house. The article and the article referenced talk about Getty using the images from their stock. (If you have a problem of Getty stealing your photos. By all means sue them.)

I did a simple test.

I tried getting images from a local hadoop user group on getty.

Guess what? Using the search term 'Hadoop' I got back 15 images from a stock photo that was used in a Bloomberg article.

I then did this with Microsoft's Bing tool.

Got back member photos and group icons.

Now, if I had to say... The reuse of the indexed photos and images by Microsoft would clearly be copyright infringement.

If you have to pick a fight... its Microsoft which is clearly violating the copyright holders rights and they should be sued.