The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar

You Know You're DOOMED When...

your marketing people think Web 2.0 is twice as fast.

You've stumbled onto another issue of The Crapolla, a journal written for software professionals. No not the managers; I mean the people who do the work.

This Crapolla is sponsored by...

In This Issue...

Attack of the iWhiners!

Take a Letter

Vinod in cube 26 writes...

Dear Fek'Lar,

Would you kindly tell me the difference between strategic versus tactical?

Regards,

Vinod
Cube 26

Hello Vinod,

The difference between these two words is often muddled. Strategic refers to a long-term goal. A strategic goal may require many smaller milestones be accomplished before the strategic goal is achieved.

A tactical goal, on the other hand, is not long-term. It is an immediate task to be accomplished which may or may not lead to a strategic goal.

To put this simpler, the sales force is screwing the company tactically through promising anything to the customer to get a single sale. But product management is screwing the company strategically by designing and releasing products that won't work for many years to come!

I hope this helps, after all, you're not going to learn anything if you don't ask questions.

Fek

Oh My God, Get Over It!

The iPhone crowd are such a bunch of grumps! They stand in line for days to buy the new gadget because Steve told them to. Then they skip up and down the halls at work showing off the new shiny thing. Finally, when Apple drops the price, they act like they just caught their lover in bed with someone else.

You iCryBabies! You had no problem shelling out the extra 200 bucks when you did. You took off time from work to do it. That cost you money too, but you were too hoo doo'ed to notice. You signed up for an expensive mobile service offered by a company that goes out of its way to give your phone records to the government. In short, you made an economic choice that was very expensive. You loved this doo dad then, to be complaining about it now betrays that you are just a spoiled iBrat that had too much money in the first place.

The worst of these are the over paid people on TV like Matt Lauer and Keith Olbermann who whined on air about the 200 dollars. Holy crap! You get paid millions a year! I know, you could have bought another coffee enema from Starbucks with 200 smackers if those greedy people at Apple hadn't been true believers in capitalism!

Apple, for perhaps the first time in its history, is running on all cylinders. They knew there was an enormous amount of demand for the new thing-a-majigg, so they jacked up the price 200 bucks. This is called supply and demand economics, if you iPussies aren't familiar with it, you can use some of that iRebate to buy the audio version of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations from the iTunes store and listen to it on your iGizmo.

I have no problem with people buying the iPhone, or the iPod. But to cry and piss and moan that a company made a healthy profit when you obviously made one yourself at some time by evidence that you can afford such a luxury device, is hypocritical. Get over it, you iWhiners!

This Kid Doesn't need to be Suspended, He Needs AP Credit!

Take a look at this article. You can see the prank performed here.

So a kid shows initiative, cleverness, and creativity. We can't have that in high school, now can we? I've been to many college football games where these card tricks have been performed. I've been to games where the opposition has passed out cards trying to trick us into this very type of prank. It's non-destructive, it takes far more effort than spray painting a wall. This is is a college-level prank, and it's all in good fun.

So, of course this young man must be beaten down by the non-tolerant school authorities. Maybe this guy needs Ridilan to he won't be so uppity. He needs to sit down, shut up, and be a good little drone.

It's at times like this, I wish I owned a company so I could offer this kid a job. Being a confirmed non-conformist, I find the school's reaction obscene.

Well, That Didn't Take Long!

I'm pretty horrible at making predictions. If you ask me what will be big next year, don't bet on anything I tell you. I'm usually wrong. But it appears I'm on to something about the possible future of movies and television.

Remember back in crap200706 I wrote a piece called How's This For A Business Model? arguing that Hollywood should just give their content away in a move to kill piracy. I'm wondering if we're seeing the beginning of this.

I weaseled an invite to play with the public beta of Joost, a new system for streaming movies, television, and music videos to computers. The first weekend I had it I watched Dragonslayer and a couple episodes of Babylon 5 while chugging Diet Cokes and wiping out an entire box of Nacho flavored cupcakes. These weren't pirated copies, these were studio sanctioned streams at zero cost to me.

"But Fek", I hear you saying. "How does the studio get paid?" Just as I described in crap200706, every once in a while you've got to deal with an ad. Sometimes it's a small rectangle in the lower right corner, sometimes it's a full-screen interrupt of the program similar to television.

Speaking of television, the user interface looks suspiciously like it was designed for a TV remote control. There's no typing, just arrow and select buttons. The remote for my satellite receiver would be perfect for this, which leads me to think that down the road, this is aiming for my future digital television equipped with handy gigabit Ethernet port. My computer came with a TV-style remote control. So I whipped it out, and yup, works like a charm! Joost is completely rigged with the La-Z-Boy crowd in mind.

The only problem I have run into is a problem of bandwidth. I live on the very edge of DSL coverage, and thus have the slowest possible DSL service. My mother has DSL service three times as fast as mine. When I start a stream, it's choppy. I hit pause and go away for a while. The stream keeps buffering onto my drive, and later when I un-pause, the video plays well until a commercial is played. The commercial is choppy, then the video is fine when the program starts back up.

I gotta say I'm really encouraged. If this service makes it, we could be seeing a paradigm shift in television distribution. As I wrote, you won't be needing local TV stations, or cable companies, or satellite providers. The net will be the medium, and your TV will have enough computing power to fetch everything you want. Most will be free, and I belive there will still be pay-per-view programing, but the middleman is going to get squeezed out.

My only wrong statement was that I didn't think the suits in Hollywood would have the courage to try this model. I'm pleasantly surprised. Joost and services like it move us further down a path where we no longer buy pieces of plastic containing our entertainment. The over-priced plastic leads to piracy. The free stream leads to profits.

This Issue's Headline submission to the National Daily World Enquiring Globe.

Porn Star Paris Hilton Selling House

Looking For a New Crib Next to a Liquor Store

Let's play, "Who said this?"

Heard in the halls of various software companies.

"Away with you, you suck!"

"Are you doing a Jedi mind trick?"
"I would if this guy had a mind."

"Ah! Candy and a Diet Coke! It's the Yin and Yang of breakfast."

"Our crap is better than yours."

"I like Pete's Liquid Crack!"

Excuse Me

I need to see if Halloween candy is on sale yet.

Fek'Lar
They pay me to think. These are my thoughts. Do you think they are getting their money's worth?

Remember: The Crapolla contains my personal opinions. That's right they're mine, so get your own! And you kids get off my lawn!

Although written with the software professional in mind, my mind tends to wander all over the place, and I sometimes write about politics, mass stoopidity, dumb things I saw, and whatever else comes to mind.

From time to time, I use salty language, thus The Crapolla is not intended for children, or certain people in the Bush Administration.

feed available from http://www.lowcomdom.com/crapolla/index.rss

EOJ

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