Random articles!

[giza]

I do a lot of reading online, and I bookmark those articles that I find interesting. Here's a collection of what I've come across over the past few weeks:

• How to stay alive - I found this article in an issue of Police Magazine. It contains tips for new police officers on how to well, stay alive when dealing with suspects. I don't know of any law enforcement types that read this LJ, but I think the article is good reading and contains practical advice, should you ever find yourself in a similar situation.


• A20 - A Pain From The Past - A great little article about the A20 gate, the different ways it got implemented on systems, and why it's such a pain for people who work with the bare metal.


• But Macs Are Slower, Right? - An article about Macs and how their speed compares to PCs. Remember kids, if you are comparing a clock speed from a G4 chip versus a P4 chip (which is entirely different), then please stop making a fool of yourself, okay?


• But Macs Are More Expensive, Right - An article that looks at the costs of Macs.


• The Right to Read - An essay written by Richard Stallman some years ago on the issue of being able to use things you bought without having to get them activated (Quake 2, anyone?) or otherwise get permission from the copyright holder. It was updated in 2002 to cover things like the DMCA and Palladium.


• Rockin' on without Microsoft - One CEO's story about being audited by the SPA, treated like a criminal for missing a few licenses, and his company's transition to not using any microsoft products.

Finally, let's talk about Electronic Arts and why I think they suck. There was a recent article on Slashdot that linked to the LJ of ea_spouse that talks about the way EA treats their employees. It discussed mandatory unpaid overtime, working people from 9 AM to 10 PM 7 days a week, and the like. EA calls this "crunch time". but that's pretty much a lie, because crunch time is normally in the final days of a project when you want to meet a deadline. This is more like "pre-crunch crunch" which is happening MONTHS before the project is finished, just "in case the schedule starts to slip". It's really sad that management is abusing their employees like this, just trying to squeeze a little extra work out of them without having to pay anything extra. (cheapskates!)

Additional reading about the EA thing included this comment on Slashdot about long hours and employee productivity and this article on ZdNet about an overtime lawsuit that's been filed. Additionally, The New York Times wrote an article about the blog posting. Also written was this article explaining why overtime is just plain stupid.

That's all for now, hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!

Comments

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

That risk can be eliminated if you have a properly worded sales contract. You could negotiate something that says, "You agree to sell the Stinkpad 69a laptop for the next 3 years AND we agree to buy at least 100 of those machines per quarter".

On what planet does any customer have enough clout to dictate product line lifetimes to vendors? If it was 100,000 machines per quarter, then maybe.

[giza.livejournal.com]

On what planet does any customer have enough clout to dictate product line lifetimes to vendors?

Who said anything about *dictating* lifetimes? The conversation could concievably go like this:

"We want a contract where we can buy the same machine for the next 3 years. Think you could do that with Model A?"
"No, we plan on discontinuing that this year"
"How about model B?"
"Sure, we can sell that for 3 years. How many units do will you buy each quarter?"
"100"
"Okay, when we stop selling it to the general public in 2 years, we'll set aside 400 for your purchasing in the following year"
"Done!"

Make sense? From a business standpoint, you can get a contract for darn near anything. So long as each party gets something out of it, there's no reason why such an arrangement wouldn't work.