Computer Genius Blog :: aka “TheGarage”

From the Office Lexicon:

GFF - ‘Give-A-F*ck Factor:’ usually expressed as a decreasing trend after (or during) a long, painful assignment. “My GFF was OK until the customer puked all over our bid and told us to start from scratch; now it’s approaching zero.”

Ohnosecond - That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a big mistake.

Cleans Up Well - A technical employee (usually a software developer) who can be brought to a product demonstration or customer meeting without embarrassing the company.

Hilarious, hilarious, hilarious! The longer you have toiled in the corporate environment, the funnier this stuff is.

via Dangerous Logic

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Seems there is still a problem with the foam debris falling off the shuttle.

NASA officials said today it would ground future space shuttle flights because foam debris that brought down Columbia is still a risk.

A sizable chunk of foam insulation that came flying off the shuttle Discovery’s fuel tank during Tuesday’s liftoff did not hit the orbiter and does not pose a risk to the seven astronauts.

But it is a problem NASA thought had been fixed, and represents a tremendous setback to a space program that has spent 2½ years trying to rise from the ashes of Columbia.

Here is what I think. Foam debris has always been a problem. The first flight shed foam debris on take-off. The second flight shed foam debris on take-off. Every subsequent flight shed foam debris on take-off. No one was ever aware of the problem until a piece of foam debris knocked a small hole in the orbiter’s outer protective coating causing the thing to burn on reentry.

The force required to lift that much weight into the air and accelerate it to 15,000 mph is tremendous. Of course stuff falls off it all the time. Any owner of a Harley-Davidson will immediately understand this.

Maybe NASA should look at lubricants or superconductivity instead of shielding as the primary method of protecting the shuttle from heat on reentry.

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The Russian people at least are taking the problem as serious as it really is:

Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.

I am telling ya, people are tired of spam. Spam, which is a nice name for virus, threatens the viability of the internet for all serious purposes, except for maybe porn. And it needs to be stopped. Not that I am advocating lynch mobs or anything like that, but the people of Russia get it, even if the government does not.

Another attack involved hundreds of people making phone calls to the American English Center and sending it numerous e-mails back, but Vardan Kushnir remained sure of his right to spam, saying it was what e-mails were for.

Under Russian law, spamming is not considered illegal, although lawmakers are working on legal projects that could protect Russian Internet users like they do in Europe and the U.S.

Hey, Kushnir, guess what a Louisville Slugger is for.

The people of Russia would not have to beat spammers to death if the government of Russia would do it for them, errr, well, at least put the spammers in jail for a long, long time.

The risk of spamming must meet or exceed the sometimes huge rewards of spamming or spam will never go away.

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Err, compact. To the tune of 14,500 souls, or 10% of its workforce.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Computer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. on Tuesday said it will cut 14,500 jobs, about 10 percent of its full-time staff, as part of a restructuring plan designed to save $1.9 billion annually and boost business performance.

The job cuts will occur over the next six quarters, the Palo Alto-based company said.

Most of the job cuts will come in support functions — such as information technology, human resources and finance — and the rest will be made inside business units.

The company said job cuts in sales positions will be minimal, and there will be little change to the headcount in research and development.

One of Houston’s largest employers since taking over Compaq, HP has 8,000 workers in Houston, mostly in HP’s technology solutions business, which includes data-storage products, manufacturing of ProLiant servers, a large research and development operation, call centers, customer support, and sales and marketing.

Face it. Hp/Compaq is in serious trouble and slahing 14,500 over the next year and an half may exacerbate the problem as the more talented and mobile professionals begin to jump ship ahead of any posible layoffs. Good people don’t want to be associatied with percieved loser. Successfully slashing that many people while trying to retain the most talented, and maintain employee moral, can be a touchy operation.

Heck, and we just built the big ole 47 lane highway out to HP/Compaq’s big campus near Tomball, just north or Houston. Well, maybe it will come in handy for something in the future.

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And return on investment is certainly the better metric when compared to measuring IT value by the dollar amount saved on resources. After all, what is more important: the cost of the project? Or the ultimate value (as measured by ROI) of the project?

The best talent doesn’t usually come cheap. The best, most successful projects are not usually completed by low-cost, inexperienced IT drones.

If a company is not getting a good return on investment (ROI) from technology, perhaps all the money saved through purchasing the cheapest IT resouces is actually a huge opportunity cost.

For example, what if CSX Corp had not chosen to implement its wireless dispatch system? Sure, they would have saved $400,000, but the cost of not doing the project would have been in the millions. A cost that would repeat itself every year until it converts to a missed opportunity as a competitor eventually gets it done.

JULY 11, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - One year after spending $400,000 on a wireless project designed to speed up communications with 450 independent truck drivers and cut costs, CSX Corp. reported last week that it may have hit a bonanza.

Jacksonville, Fla.-based CSX said the wireless notification application from Air2Web Inc. in Atlanta has cut the number of phone calls truckers make to the CSX Intermodal call center from 20,000 a week to 11,000, said John Dugan, technical director for intermodal applications at CSX Technology Inc.

And because drivers can now send short text messages and e-mail via Research In Motion Ltd. BlackBerry devices, they each save about an hour per day that they once spent waiting for a dispatcher, Dugan said. That alone improved driver productivity by 400 hours per day — a major reason why driver turnover dropped from 80% to 50% in the past year, he said.

Holding off on investment in IT projects are likely costing corporations far more money than they may be saving by not doing innovative new projects. Failed projects cost even more.

The good news is–as illustrated b the CSX project– that other trucking companies who utilize independant operaters will have to come up with some ways to accumulate a corresponding amount of value into their products in order to stay competivie with CSX.

One company’s innovation is the rest of the market’s inspiration. The lesson being: Keep up with technology advance, of die on the vine.

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…but are still higher than they were last year

In its latest quarterly job-cut survey of the telecommunications, computer, electronics and e-commerce sectors, the New York-based company reported 39,720 lost jobs for the quarter that ended June 30. That’s down 33% from the 59,537 jobs lost in the first quarter, which ended March 31.

The job cuts for the second quarter, however, were still 16% more than the 34,213 cuts announced in the same quarter a year ago, the company said. For the first six months of the year, Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported 99,257 tech job cuts; That’s up 56% over the 63,726 cuts recorded in the first half of 2004.

So… basically the tech job market still sucks, it just doesn’t suck as bad this quarter as it did last quarter. But the market still stucks much worse this year than it did last year. To someone who has been in the tech industry for twenty years, this is a far cry from a feel-good story.

“The economy is growing and many sectors are adding workers at a steady pace, but the technology sector has been conspicuously absent from this job creation,” Rick Cobb, executive vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement. “Some blame high oil prices — as one industry insider recently told USA Today, ‘Every dollar that goes into the fuel tank is a dollar that is not going to Best Buy.’”

“The other problem affecting the computer and electronics industries is that corporate customers have accumulated a large reserve of cash, but instead of investing it in new technology, they seem content to just hold on to it,” Cobb said. “The good news is that we had a significant drop in tech-sector job cuts last quarter, which could signal a return of better times.”

That is some pretty shaky “good news”. Relative to the past few years though, I guess some optimism in the market is some good knews.

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The 2nd most popular web browser bumped its market share to 8.71%

Since the beginning of the year, Firefox has increased its market share every month between 0.5% and 1%, mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer, according to NetApplications.com, which compiles its browser usage data from more than 40,000 Web sites monitored by its HitsLink.com service.

Hey, works for me.

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Drudge Headline: SEN. MCCAIN STARS IN BOOB RAUNCH FEST

He is playing a big boob.

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From a column called “Help Line” in the Houston Chronicle:

Q: I somehow ended up with an annoying downloaded file/program/pop-up, Aurora. I tried to delete it using Add/Remove programs on Control Panel. It takes me to the Web site www.mypctuneup.com and says that I have to download the uninstall program from them to get rid of it. It looks like they want you to take down your firewall and anti-virus first, so I’m naturally concerned. Is this safe to do?

A: The makers of spyware and adware are making it more and more difficult and involved to remove their parasitic malware.
I have seen required steps that involve having to fill out questionnaires and/or enter specific key codes all the way to what you are seeing, a need to download and execute a third-party uninstall application.

I don’t like this at all. I have used it, as it seems to be the most effective way to remove this particular piece of spyware.
I would not disable any firewalls or deactivate your anti-virus right off the bat. Try using it with those tools still enabled and see how it goes.

Lets see. We have an unauthorized, malicious piece of software on the PC. The maker of said software wants you to disable your firewall and anti-virus to remove it. Yeah, right! Do they think you are some kind of schmuck like Jay Lee of the Chronicle’s Help Line?

I would definitely classify that as some bad advice.

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Notice how everything is always calculated as a “cost” to either government or business? I regularly hear a PSA on KACC regarding allergies and how much money allergies cost the economy. How can allergies be a cost? Thirty five years ago, we didn’t know jack about allergies. Most people just suffered miserably through attacks. Many people died from severe attacks. Thousands of years ago before resistance built up, allergies may have wiped out entire societies. How can something that has always existed all of a sudden be considered a cost?

Well, take a look at how much all the lazy bastards out there are costing us:

BOSTON (Reuters) - U.S. workers say they squander over two hours a day at the workplace, with surfing the Web, socializing with co-workers and simply “spacing out” among the top time-wasting activities, according to a survey released on Monday.

Most U.S. companies assume about an hour of wasted time, but workers admit to actually frittering away more than twice as much time at a cost of $759 billion in annual paid salary that results in no apparent productivity, an online survey conducted by America Online and Salary.com showed.

For most of the jobs I have had over the last thirty years, I considered the entire day spent at the job to be a waste of time. The older I get, the more I realize just what a waste of time those jobs were. If only I didn’t need that damn money I could have spent my day on more productive things. Like daydreaming.

If all of these naturally occuring phenoms like lazziness and allergies can be considered a cost, it would be an opportunity cost. This article could just as easy have been titled “Corporations, unskilled managers fail to reduce cost of laziness”.

Paying for hourly work is stupid for almost every non-labor job desription anyway. It encourages laziness because it puts a fixed value on time. The only way for a worker to maximize income is to stretch the job out.

On the other hand, if a worker is payed according to productivity, maximizing income would be a function of completing as many units of productivity as possible in a given set of time.

Sometimes quantitative analysis doesn’t give you the right answer.

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Do we really need a AAA survery and a newspaper story to tell us that gasoline prices are higher than a giraffe’s ass?

The weekly AAA Texas gas price survey released Friday finds the average price of regular unleaded self-serve vitually unchanged at almost $2.13 per gallon. That’s about a nickel short of the record price and up about 31 cents from last year.

But the auto club says this week’s terrorist bombing in London and possible Gulf Coast refinery disruptions from the approach of Hurricane Dennis could drive up prices.

AAA Texas spokeswoman Carol Thorp says oil industry analysts don’t yet know what effect those events will have on refinery production — if any. However, she said prices could drop if security concerns cause travelers to scrap late-summer vacation plans.

Did you get that? “[I]ndustry analysts don’t yet know what effect those events will have on refinery production — if any.”

A survey and a news story in the paper and the upshot is that they dont have a clue.

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Finally, something NASA can excel at:

PASADENA, CALIF. - NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft completed a flawless journey to oblivion early Monday, slamming into an onrushing comet to vaporize itself in an Independence Day blaze of glory.

When it comes to building a device that is supposed to fly in to space and then destroy itself, NASA should have no peer.

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Is the employee discount the beginning of the end of retail mark-up in the automobile sales industry?

DETROIT (AP) - General Motors Corp. (GM)’s sales soared 41 percent in June to their highest monthly total in nearly 19 years thanks to a heavily promoted discount that allowed customers to buy cars and trucks at the employee rate, new sales figures showed Friday.

In response, DaimlerChrysler AG’ (DCX)s Chrysler Group said it will match GM starting July 6 with an employee discount program of its own. Despite falling sales, Ford Motor Co. (F) declined to match GM on Friday.

The commoditization of automobiles has been long in coming. Autos have been way overpriced for two decades.

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