Overrated -- the list

Past and present. You can't make this stuff up.
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Nonc Hilaire
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Re: Overrated -- the list

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Azrael wrote:So, what inspired you to pick the name "Logan"?
By the time my wife eliminated the names of every female who had any bad associations it was the only name left.
“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

Teresa of Ávila
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Azrael
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Re: Overrated -- the list

Post by Azrael »

Nonc Hilaire wrote:
Azrael wrote:So, what inspired you to pick the name "Logan"?
By the time my wife eliminated the names of every female who had any bad associations it was the only name left.
:lol: Brilliant!
cultivate a white rose
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Miss_Faucie_Fishtits
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Re: Overrated -- the list

Post by Miss_Faucie_Fishtits »

Azrael wrote:
Typhoon wrote:
Miss_Faucie_Fishtits wrote:
Azrael wrote:Giving boys names to girls

Stacy, Lesley, Ashley, Courtney, Casey, Lindsay . . . they all used to be boys names.

if you write a letter to "Stacy Smith" starting with "Dear Mrs. Smith", and Stacy turns out to be a he, you might lose a client.

Sometimes you can't find a picture on Google to determine the gender, or it's a picture of the wrong "Stacy Smith".
You can assume that anything that ends with a 'wye' or an 'ee' sound is a girly name. That's something the culture has decided. Hard consonants or nasty-sounding fricatives - that will be reserved for the guys.....'>>......
I would have liked to have seen someone try to tell that to Audie Murphy.
+1
SURE.....^_^......... " Audie, honey...... the soccer moms and metro-sexuals of all the tribes and nations have decided that they would like it better if you wore your skirt at least a handbreadth above the knee. Here, you can use my sidearm"......'>.......
She irons her jeans, she's evil.........
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Azrael
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Re: Overrated -- the list

Post by Azrael »

Read To Hell and Back and then get back to me.
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Azrael
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Re: Overrated -- the list

Post by Azrael »

Azrael wrote:Marissa Mayer

According to the media, she's practically a god; but one of the first things she does after taking the helm of Yahoo! was to scrap Yahoo! Babel Fish (formerly AltaVista Babel Fish). That was incredibly stupid. Babel Fish was great. It was one of the best things about Yahoo!, probably the best thing they had after Yahoo! email and Yahoo! Directory. What's next, Marissa? Are you going to sabotage Yahoo! Directory, too?

Edit: it looks like somebody beat her to it. It looks like Yahoo! Directory hasn't had much new material or editing to fix broken links since 2005.

It looks like Open Directory may be becoming a better bet.
I was wrong.

Marissa,

I'm sorry.

A lot of people have been unfair to you lately. So have I. I jumped to conclusions way too soon.

People have been trashing her in the media. Unfairly. I fell for it. Sorry.

She's a creative techie, rather than a corporate hack with a MBA. A lot of people feel threatened by her.

The MBA types are starting to feel obsolete.

They are.

This is a great article from Slate on Mayer

excerpt:

Mayer is an executive outsider not only as a woman but also as a techie. Her background is not in business or marketing, but in the actual guts of product development and management. This makes her far more of an outsider to business culture than women like Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Creative, technically oriented outsiders are founders, not corporate ladder-climbers: David Packard, Walt Disney, Ted Turner, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and even Bill Gates.

At the time of Mayer’s arrival, many executives at Yahoo were corporate hacks, not technical types. For them, to be replaced by a technical woman is doubly threatening. If technical women can do the work of male businessmen, we might not need male businessmen anymore!

One of these male businessmen is Jim Heckman, another of Yahoo’s recent casualties—in the Business Insider piece, he’s described as Levinsohn’s “top dealmaker”: “Jim Heckman breaks glass. He’s squinty-eyed and caffeinated. He makes deals. He uses your first name. He quotes the comedian Daniel Tosh of Tosh.0.”

Jim Heckman knows a lot about sports. He is, according to evidence, a macho blowhard. He wanted Yahoo to be “like a cable TV provider.” He is your worst nightmare as a boss. He is also aggrieved by Mayer’s ascendancy, judging by the 500 words Carlson spends on his plan to ax the ad tech department and change Yahoo into a content provider, which led to Mayer firing him “within 24 hours.” (Since Carlson reports intimately on Heckman’s disastrous final meeting with Mayer, his source had to be one of the two. It sure wasn’t Mayer—it’s an “unauthorized biography”—so we might safely conclude it’s Heckman, which might account for Carlson’s unsuccessful attempt to portray Heckman as the victim of a culture clash.)

Another male businessman, former Yahoo executive Michael Katz, is also aggrieved, which is why he’s currently suing Yahoo for firing him while “celebrating the second night of Hanukkah.” (For those not familiar with the Jewish faith, that’s a bit like complaining about being fired while observing the 10th day of Christmas.)
And then when you read about yet another male businessman, the VP who publicly threatened to fire whoever had leaked some corporate presentation, you realize that Yahoo was stuffed to the gills with this sort of nonsense before Mayer arrived.

These aren’t incidental details. They speak exactly to the sort of people whom Mayer is deposing, and to why they certainly could never have saved Yahoo, just bled it dry while it withered. I suspect one of the final quotes in Carlson’s piece is dead-on: “If [Mayer] hadn’t come in, all the smart people would have left.”

Mayer faces a very difficult task with Yahoo, but she at least has a chance of success. In terms of comprehensive product vision, Mayer is as close to Steve Jobs as anyone in the tech world today. Buying Tumblr, for example, makes sense because she’s buying what Yahoo really needs and what Google does not have: a sticky, entrenched social user base. The world values Steve Jobs and Marissa Mayer more than it does the likes of Steve Ballmer and John Sculley.

So do the rank and file. That’s why “[j]ust a few weeks in, Yahoo employee morale and productivity hit a high not seen in a decade,” as Carlson writes. Mayer was so much better than what had gone before that the receding tide of corporate imbecility was itself enough to elevate her to savior status.

end excerpt

Really sorry. I hope I've made it up to you, Marissa.

Keep up the good work!
cultivate a white rose
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