fredz - Slashdot User

Comment It used to work for me (Score 1) 69

by fredz on Wednesday October 09, 2013 @03:54PM (#45084635) Attached to: Mountain View To Partially Replace Google Wi-Fi

One downside of free WiFi is that there is no one to call when it stops working. I live in Mountain View, and when Google WiFi first came out it was good enough that I dropped my DSL. I was very happy with it for about a year, but then it got intermittent at my house, working well on some days and not at all on others. After a few more months it wouldn't work at all from early evening until after midnight, presumably because everyone else was also trying to use it at that time. After that I switched to Comcast - they are overpriced and a pain to deal with, but at least when I call to complain that my service has failed they manage to fix it eventually.

As a side note, it always worked well a few hundred feet from my house, so I assume that the back end was working OK.

Auto Incorrect 86

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @06:19PM from the slip-of-the-finger dept.

theodp writes "Combine smartphone auto correction and fat-fingered virtual keyboard typing, writes Rob Walker, and the results can be hilarious and even shocking. The website Damn You, Autocorrect collects the awesomely embarrassing text messages that you never meant to send. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to masturbate some chicken for bisexuals night!"

Fine-Structure Constant Maybe Not So Constant 105

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday September 05, 2010 @06:49PM from the variety-is-the-spice-of-life dept.

Kilrah_il writes "The fine-structure constant, a coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, has been measured lately by scientists from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and has been found to change slightly in light sent from quasars in galaxies as far back as 12 billion years ago. Although the results look promising, caution is advised: 'This would be sensational if it were real, but I'm still not completely convinced that it's not simply systematic errors' in the data, comments cosmologist Max Tegmark of MIT. Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., acknowledges that 'it's a competent team and a thorough analysis.' But because the work has such profound implications for physics and requires such a high level of precision measurements, 'it needs more proof before we'll believe it.'"

Comment HP profit sharing was 12% of pre-tax profits. (Score 1) 320

by fredz on Tuesday November 04, 2003 @10:23PM (#7392609) Attached to: Christmas Bonuses?

Back when Hewlett Packard was one of the greatest companies in the world they gave 12% of pre-tax profits as 'Profit Sharing.' Profit sharing was paid out twice per year. Almost everyone in the company was included. In good years each profit sharing check would be close to one months pay, in bad years they would be much smaller.

HP no longer gives the 12%. Agilent (a spin off of HP) doesn't have any profit to share, and if they did they would give far less than 12% of pre-tax profits. They both have changed to formulas based on factors like return on assets and revenue growth, with an explicit goal of sharing less of the profit.

Profit sharing had the obvious motivational benefits, but it also made employees feel that they were part of a great company and not simply cogs in a machine. This was part of what made HP so successful.

You can debate whether HP was so successful that it could afford to give 12%, or was HP so successful because it gave 12%. My belief is that profit sharing was one of many things that made HP great. By itself it neither makes nor breaks the company, but it was one important factor in HP's former success.

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