Rainboy's Lair

Het financieel dagblad bericht vandaag dat Hedgefonds Centaurus wil dat Atos Origin zijn zelfstandigheid opgeeft. Grappig dat een Hedgefonds spreekt van zelfstandigheid terwijl ieder beurs genoteerd bedrijf al helemaal geen zelfstandigheid meer heeft. Vooral niet als er Hedgefonds bedrijven zoals Centaurus zich er al ingekocht hebben.

‘Atos is een mooi bedrijf, met getalenteerde mensen en een goede clientèle, maar strategisch is het kansloos,’ aldus Oppetit. ‘Het bedrijf is te klein om een generalist te zijn, terwijl het niet gespecialiseerd genoeg is om in nichemarkten een positie te verwerven. Daarom denken we dat de strategie opnieuw tegen het licht gehouden moet worden.’

Wel jammer dat er veel clientele en getalenteerde mensen hard wegelopen door het huidige beleid binnen Atos Origin en op CAO niveau wordt het bedrijf door de FNV ook al niet meer serieus genomen. Erg jammer, want het was best een mooi bedrijf toen het nog Origin was, helaas is dit door de fransen aardig kapot gemaakt, of is dit nu de schuld van het Hedgefonds ?

link naar het volledige artikel in het Financieel Dagblad.

News broke late yesterday that Google was preparing to launch a new site call Knol that will combine parts of Wikipedia and Squidoo to create a new user generated authoritative online knowledgebase of everything.All the details aren’t fully clear yet. What we do know is that Google will offer a revenue share from each page: “If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads,” although we don’t know at this stage how much. We know that unlike Squidoo or other sites who offer a percentage share of advertising revenue, Knol cuts out the middle man. Think of it this way; presuming Google normally splits 50% (no one knows the exact number, at it changes at different levels) of revenue from an Adsense unit with a normal publisher, in the case of someone like Squidoo or even a blog with writers writing on a rev share model they then get a percentage of the 50%; Knol on the other hand could offer a proper 50% of the actual original cost of the ad, not a percentage of the percentage: that is not only a great big advantage, it’s also verging on unfair competition.

Okay fine, want to call it knol? guess google is also going into Industrial Cleaning Systems  ? http://www.knol.com seems to be such a company and is hosted at 040 Hosting.

Today we received a letter from ABN-AMRO (yes they still use the name). Telling us that since we as customer can use internet-banking we will NOT receive a monthly statement anymore as by 2008. If you still want to receive the monthly statements, you MUST fill in a forum, get two people to sign AND send it back to them.

YES ABN-AMRO THIS IS THE WAY TO THANK LOYAL CUSTOMERS!!! ****NOT****

I do not know which COW Monkey (see previous post) did draw this idea up, but it would be way more customer friendly to give the customer the choice not to change anything and therefor NOT need to interact. Instead we must take action otherwise ABN-AMRO just changes the service levels on you.

I wonder what ABN-AMRO would do if their IT provider would do the same thing ? If you do not fill in this form, get it signed by your CEO’s (before years end) we do not need to deliver you any uptime guarantee anymore.

I do not believe they would be so happy.

The soap around the Korean hostages which where freed this week gets more and more interesting, it seems that Korea does pay terrorist to buy more weapons. Keeping a close eye on the developments but now the Taliban did announce that Korea is indeed paying 20 mil. dollar it seems they give in to terrorism.

Do I like those Korean hostages to be killed then ? no of course not, but they started a very risky journey and knew the dangers (you won’t be popular as a religious group which is despised by the Taliban) now these few Koreans will be responsible for a whole lot more people being killed because one thing is sure, the Taliban will not use these 20 million to buy food for their people, instead they will invest in weapons to kill innocent civilians and other military forces around them.

If this story is true, Korea funds a war against all the countries having a presence in Afghanistan. How is this possible?!?!

There is of course still the possibility that the Taliban lies about the money transfer, will update this article when new information comes around.

Link to the news story

Lately a lot of news reach us about chinese playtoys which contain lots of toxics, a lot of people are blaming china for this but is this fair ? I do not believe it is fair to blame china, they need to be educated, however the big multinationals which did move their production to china to lower the production costs (by not having to follow the western laws and rules of producing a product) are the ones who make us and our children sick! we should ban these companies like Mattel and alike. As we say in dutch : Goedkoop is Duurkoop

While these are points which are discussed for a longer time, i want to write them down, just so i know, why i vote NO on anything which has to do with Europe.

1) US is allowed to request all out money transactions (yeah sure they say for terrorist investigations only, but guess that suddenly a lot of transactions are terrorist investigations), sorry i live in Europe not the US, why would the US need this for any reason ? As if China would give the US access to their banking system, i don’t think so!

2) US is allowed to blackmail Europe by the European union, again under disguise of terrorists the US is able to to request a lot of information of each passenger taking a flight from Europe to the USA. Worst part is the US threatened the European union they would not accept any flights from Europe anymore, now i for one would like to see that happening. And want to bet that such rule would be changed pretty fast for obvious reasons.

I know i do not live in Europe anymore, i do live in the United States of the World. But that doesn’t mean i like it.

It makes you wonder why we shift our jobs to countries like China and India, just for the quick gain, but what if they get all our jobs, would they pity us ? are we going to be the 3rd world country ? Nothing wrong with helping these countries, but, fact is, we need to eat too, are we prepared to give that all up, because some investors need to drive their brand new super car ? and live in castles? Personally i don’t believe so.

As i told before i do not believe in the current economy system, where share holders get to say everything about a company, i said it before, as soon a company goes to the stock exchange, they sell their company to the devil.

Now it’s the goal of any business to make from a little money, more money, but when you think its needed to sell your company off to stockholders, you just as well could have sold it to the old lady around the corner.

If you really want to know where i am ranting about.. try the following link, to see the SOAP of what happends when you sell your company to the devil himself.

Stay Real, Own your own company, grow healthy from your own income, if you can grow large in such a way, you are the real hero.

I’ll miss you, after 15 years i needed to say
goodbye to you my friend, but we will meet
again … Please forgive me for the things I
could have done better, and remember me
for the things I did well.

Love you for Eternity