Exactly. It seems that the sysadmin has made the assumption that a person needs to be actively using a computer to be "working". BS. Maybe this guy plays a game of solitaire in the morning while listening to his voicemail, and then goes to a meeting for an hour, pours over some documents, or brainstorms on paper. This could easily look like two hours of playing solitaire when looking at the screenshots.
It's also entirely possible that, while valid, the sysadmin's complaint was ignored initially because the boss's superiors were not regular computer users, thus didn't see it as much of a problem.
I'm assuming that the screen shots probably showed Solitaire games in different states rather than one single game in a given state.
There's also the point that, no matter how clean the sysadmin's hands were, trying to eliminate one's boss will almost always backfire. Managers are inherently given more trust than the employees they manage. That's just the way it works.
Twice in my history of dealing with PayPal, I've sent $ for eBay auctions via PayPal, not received the merchandise, filed complaints with both eBay and PayPal.
Guess what? The person still got my money. The worst that happened was that eBay revoked one of the seller's ability to sell merchandise. Big whoop.
Now, my losses were in the $300 range, but I know of people who have lost a lot more money than that.
Here's how it worked: in the case of a dispute, PayPal would only refund your $ if the seller still had it in their PayPal account. They would take NO more aggressive action than that. So, if the person had already transferred or used the money, the buyer was out of luck.
If you paid out of the balance of your PayPal account, there was no other source of recourse available to you, unlike when you paid by credit card.
As a critique of this piece, it's not that thirty percent of travel agencies have closed. It's that thirty percent of them no longer have in-house CRS systems for flights. Why? Because airlines no longer pay travel agents commissions on tickets unless they do a LOT of business. And most don't.
Therefore, they no longer belong to the Airlines Reporting Corporation, which is a ticket clearinghouse. Because most of the agents I speak to *don't* belong to ARC any more, I think perhaps this statistic is skewed.
The agency may still belong to CLIA (Cruise Line Industry Assocation) or IATAN (International Assocation of Travel Agents Network). And they may belong to a consortium that offers them better commissions when booking travel partners.
That said, travel agencies who don't belong to a consortium are suffering greatly. But now companies like Expedia (for whom I work, so take this with a grain of salt) are allowing travel agents to book online and get commission.
Silicon Valley is alive and well? Then how come so many tech geeks I know are unemployed or working at Starbucks, bookstores, etc.?
It's true that there is a whimper of a pickup, but it's just a whimper. Many people are running out of unemployment $ and I expect that there will be a rise in foreclosures on houses as Santa Clara county continues to have one of the higher unemployement rates of urban areas in the country.
Heck, even VA-whatever just had another, quiet round of layoffs. Most people can't even remember how many rounds their companies have had -- it's *that* bad.
And, while there are still recruiters in business, not a single contact I have from last year works for the recruiting firm they did when I received their address. It's not that they've moved -- they're laid off.
I'd give it another six months at least before declaring it even alive. It's got too much brain activity to be clinically dead, but it's not out of the ICU yet.
The "employees" were 1099, meaning they were independent contractors and therefore not "real" employees and therefore not protected. This is a shitty way to run a business and one I was burned by a few years ago.
I've always been proud of the fact that my dad worked on one of the "search for life on Mars" projects -- the GCMS project (gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, affectionately dubbed the "green-colored Martian sniffer").
Those were the days when we did big space science, before we lost some of our hope.
But boy did it make the "what my parents do" presentations more interesting for me.
Dad's retired now, but he taught me how to program (a career I likely wouldn't have if it weren't for the space program) and gave me the foundation for a good geek life.
Who the fuck is NeXT? I buy lots of software, but have never used or even seen anything by this NeXT outfit...
Don't worry dear, that was before you were born. Clearly. NeXT made some of the best hardware and software for its time, ceased making hardware, then sold itself to Apple for $300M.
MacOS X is mostly NeXT stuff with a fresh coat of paint and a lot of stuff for compatibility.
Why was trading suspended. Is it such bad news that they think investors may freak out?
Actually, ALL trading is suspended (for a few minutes) when there's company news. That's why companies typically wait until after close-of-market for news -- so as not to interrupt trading.
What? They are going to fire 140 of their most profitible employees? Is there some PHB type who can make sense of this for me?
No. They're going to lay off 150(ish) of their *least* profitable employees.
Note that revenue != profit. While they received the bulk of their revenue from hardware, that was also a disproportionately large share of their loss.
Ergo, they expect, ultimately, to make more money as a software company. Worked for NeXT.
Today, between the time when I know that there will be an impact but I don't know how many of my friends will be jobless, I hope that any who need to find a new job will be able to. The valley is pretty scary right now.
For example, the TiVO -> VA commute (8 miles approx.) used to take 45 minutes to an hour during rush hour. Yesterday, it took 23 minutes from two miles further.
If there are layoffs, some of the VA guys came from other places (like Linuxcare) and may have the pain (as I did) of having been downsized in more than one Linux company.
StarOffice does NOT reliably open MSOffice documents. If a doc has been fast-saved, the version you will get is non-deterministic. We discovered this the hard way at TiVo.
The difference between the Mac community (which I'm also a part of) and the/. community is that the Linux community does not depend on a single vendor.
Thus, when Eazel closes and Linuxcare, TurboLinux, SuSE and VA Linux downsize (as has happened within the last year), the Linux community is largely unaffected.
When Apple's in trouble, the Mac community is more directly affected.
The downside to the Linux community approach is that people may not realize what corporate difficulties are ultimately costing them in terms of delivery of software, etc.
Hey, don't feel bad -- I have 25 years experience and no one from VA even calls me (when I'm looking and submit my resume), even when they promised to. Of course, I make more than VA is willing to pay (they do pay under market).
One thing to learn from this: HR (in any company, not just VA) is the most effective form of firewall known.
Java is a good primary language to teach in MIS, but not as a replacement for C/C++ in CS. Most CS-type work will not be done in Java. Much of the new MIS work, traditionally done in Cobol, will be done in Java if newly implemented.
So here I am, sitting listening to a Darwin-related talk at WWDC. Seems to me a lot of the folks on/. simply have hardware envy. Just because you can buy a cheaper monitor doesn't mean that it's really well-supported, especially digitally supported.
I have an iBook (with AirPort, which I'm using atm) and a cube with the 15" LCD.
The ADC connector isn't about proprietary hardware, it's about simplicity. It delivers analog and digital signal as well as USB and power and is superb at signaling the monitor when to sleep or wake. And, for you Californians, LCD monitors uses less power, so it's Better For The State.
The really interesting thing is the number of copies of an open source operating system (at least at its core) that Apple has shipped. Seems the pundits are quick to forget that. I mean, up until now, the single biggest shipper of hardware built upon open source software was TiVo.:)
Are you saying that you like Black Scorpion? Compared to that, Dark Angel is pure art.
That said, almost all my favorite shows have been cancelled in the last couple of years:
Total Recall 2070
La Femme Nikita
The Lone Gunman
Star Trek: Voyager
Cleopatra 2525
Stargate SG-1
Xena
As my husband says: <cue feminist rant> - most were series with strong female characters. Afaik, Cleo was the first hourly drama with a black female lead -- for example.
At least there's still Buffy, Angel and Andromeda. And Farscape.
Actually, It was not all that big # of coders-wise
Oh? Let's see:
First version of Aldus Persuasion: written by one person. First version of PageMaker: written by two people. First version of Internet Explorer for the Mac: written by four contractors. The original Macintosh Finder? Written by four people. OmniWeb, a great web browser? Written by two people -- part-time.
It's only when you get to feature bloat that you need a lot of coders.
The commercial apps I've worked on and shipped were all written between one and four people.
I *know* Eazel had more coders than that.
The question remains: how many QA staff did they have? Afaik, zero.
What the smart venture capitalist might now be saying is: if it costs a couple mil to launch a proprietary app AND its sales will produce some sort of revenue stream, and our experience with open source shows that it costs more and we don't have the revenue stream, maybe we should invest in proprietary software companies instead.
I suggest that anyone else considering getting funding for their company seriously consider how they will make revenue rather than burn this bridge for everyone.
Well, some of us have been through more than one recession in the industry. I was told by a recruiter the other day that coders with 2-3 years experience were still trying to bill $100 an hour as Java people -- and not getting any work. One wonders why.::cough::
There will be boom-and-bust cycles with "the next best thing" (a few years ago, it was biotech) but, by the time they become hyped, it's almost always too late to start one. Look at the Linux companies doing well: they were all around *before* Linux became a household buzzword.
And, really, I didn't say anything bad. The way the whole venture capital thing works is very simple: they invest in you because they expect to get their money back -- plus some extra. Then they take that and invest it somewhere else. And so on. It's like the classic "don't break the chain" chain letter thing -- and Eazel broke the chain.
Big Projects take a large amount of time to become stable, and also to become mature.
Based on the code size, a project I shipped of the same approximate size and complexity took four coders a year (three person years really) -- approximately, with overhead and marketing $1mil. Double that for Silicon Valley and double it again to be generous and that's still only 40% of what Eazel spent.
What Eazel really did was dry up venture capital for Linux software businesses in the future that might *have* a viable revenue model. So, while there's a rough version of Nautilus out there (on the basis of a proposed revenue stream on *another* product that wasn't designed or implemented), that development was funded by people who wanted their money back.
So, for those people who think it's "cool" that Eazel "gave" Nautilus to the Linux community, realize that they did so solely and only to buy your trust -- and they bought it with other people's money.
Money that, had it not been blown on the biggest self-indulgent hackfest in the open source community's history, might fund your job next year or two years hence. But now it won't.
Slashdot Mirror
Four other frameworks shamelessly stealing from Rails:
.Net with Ajax support.
Castle Project works on
Cake is a Rails-like framework for PHP, and Biscuit is another.
Lest the Java folks feel left out, there's also Trails.
I love the book, especially since I need it NOW, not when it'll be print published.
According to a friend who's an Apple engineer, some of the engineers call them iTampons.
It's also entirely possible that, while valid, the sysadmin's complaint was ignored initially because the boss's superiors were not regular computer users, thus didn't see it as much of a problem.
I'm assuming that the screen shots probably showed Solitaire games in different states rather than one single game in a given state.
There's also the point that, no matter how clean the sysadmin's hands were, trying to eliminate one's boss will almost always backfire. Managers are inherently given more trust than the employees they manage. That's just the way it works.
There are times when I hate being right. Sorry dude!
(forgot to log in before)
Twice in my history of dealing with PayPal, I've sent $ for eBay auctions via PayPal, not received the merchandise, filed complaints with both eBay and PayPal.
Guess what? The person still got my money. The worst that happened was that eBay revoked one of the seller's ability to sell merchandise. Big whoop.
Now, my losses were in the $300 range, but I know of people who have lost a lot more money than that.
Here's how it worked: in the case of a dispute, PayPal would only refund your $ if the seller still had it in their PayPal account. They would take NO more aggressive action than that. So, if the person had already transferred or used the money, the buyer was out of luck.
If you paid out of the balance of your PayPal account, there was no other source of recourse available to you, unlike when you paid by credit card.
As a critique of this piece, it's not that thirty percent of travel agencies have closed. It's that thirty percent of them no longer have in-house CRS systems for flights. Why? Because airlines no longer pay travel agents commissions on tickets unless they do a LOT of business. And most don't.
Therefore, they no longer belong to the Airlines Reporting Corporation, which is a ticket clearinghouse. Because most of the agents I speak to *don't* belong to ARC any more, I think perhaps this statistic is skewed.
The agency may still belong to CLIA (Cruise Line Industry Assocation) or IATAN (International Assocation of Travel Agents Network). And they may belong to a consortium that offers them better commissions when booking travel partners.
That said, travel agencies who don't belong to a consortium are suffering greatly. But now companies like Expedia (for whom I work, so take this with a grain of salt) are allowing travel agents to book online and get commission.
Silicon Valley is alive and well? Then how come so many tech geeks I know are unemployed or working at Starbucks, bookstores, etc.?
It's true that there is a whimper of a pickup, but it's just a whimper. Many people are running out of unemployment $ and I expect that there will be a rise in foreclosures on houses as Santa Clara county continues to have one of the higher unemployement rates of urban areas in the country.
Heck, even VA-whatever just had another, quiet round of layoffs. Most people can't even remember how many rounds their companies have had -- it's *that* bad.
And, while there are still recruiters in business, not a single contact I have from last year works for the recruiting firm they did when I received their address. It's not that they've moved -- they're laid off.
I'd give it another six months at least before declaring it even alive. It's got too much brain activity to be clinically dead, but it's not out of the ICU yet.
The "employees" were 1099, meaning they were independent contractors and therefore not "real" employees and therefore not protected. This is a shitty way to run a business and one I was burned by a few years ago.
I've always been proud of the fact that my dad worked on one of the "search for life on Mars" projects -- the GCMS project (gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, affectionately dubbed the "green-colored Martian sniffer").
Those were the days when we did big space science, before we lost some of our hope.
But boy did it make the "what my parents do" presentations more interesting for me.
Dad's retired now, but he taught me how to program (a career I likely wouldn't have if it weren't for the space program) and gave me the foundation for a good geek life.
Don't worry dear, that was before you were born. Clearly. NeXT made some of the best hardware and software for its time, ceased making hardware, then sold itself to Apple for $300M.
MacOS X is mostly NeXT stuff with a fresh coat of paint and a lot of stuff for compatibility.
_Deirdre
Actually, ALL trading is suspended (for a few minutes) when there's company news. That's why companies typically wait until after close-of-market for news -- so as not to interrupt trading.
_Deirdre
No. They're going to lay off 150(ish) of their *least* profitable employees.
Note that revenue != profit. While they received the bulk of their revenue from hardware, that was also a disproportionately large share of their loss.
Ergo, they expect, ultimately, to make more money as a software company. Worked for NeXT.
_Deirdre
Today, between the time when I know that there will be an impact but I don't know how many of my friends will be jobless, I hope that any who need to find a new job will be able to. The valley is pretty scary right now.
For example, the TiVO -> VA commute (8 miles approx.) used to take 45 minutes to an hour during rush hour. Yesterday, it took 23 minutes from two miles further.
If there are layoffs, some of the VA guys came from other places (like Linuxcare) and may have the pain (as I did) of having been downsized in more than one Linux company.
Hang in there guys.
_Deirdre
StarOffice does NOT reliably open MSOffice documents. If a doc has been fast-saved, the version you will get is non-deterministic. We discovered this the hard way at TiVo.
_Deirdre
The difference between the Mac community (which I'm also a part of) and the /. community is that the Linux community does not depend on a single vendor.
Thus, when Eazel closes and Linuxcare, TurboLinux, SuSE and VA Linux downsize (as has happened within the last year), the Linux community is largely unaffected.
When Apple's in trouble, the Mac community is more directly affected.
The downside to the Linux community approach is that people may not realize what corporate difficulties are ultimately costing them in terms of delivery of software, etc.
Hey, don't feel bad -- I have 25 years experience and no one from VA even calls me (when I'm looking and submit my resume), even when they promised to. Of course, I make more than VA is willing to pay (they do pay under market).
One thing to learn from this: HR (in any company, not just VA) is the most effective form of firewall known.
_Deirdre
With 25 years experience as a developer, I'm just now finishing my MS. Despite all my reservations, I've learned a lot. It was worth it.
Java is a good primary language to teach in MIS, but not as a replacement for C/C++ in CS. Most CS-type work will not be done in Java. Much of the new MIS work, traditionally done in Cobol, will be done in Java if newly implemented.
I have an iBook (with AirPort, which I'm using atm) and a cube with the 15" LCD.
The ADC connector isn't about proprietary hardware, it's about simplicity. It delivers analog and digital signal as well as USB and power and is superb at signaling the monitor when to sleep or wake. And, for you Californians, LCD monitors uses less power, so it's Better For The State.
The really interesting thing is the number of copies of an open source operating system (at least at its core) that Apple has shipped. Seems the pundits are quick to forget that. I mean, up until now, the single biggest shipper of hardware built upon open source software was TiVo. :)
_Deirdre
That said, almost all my favorite shows have been cancelled in the last couple of years:
Total Recall 2070
La Femme Nikita
The Lone Gunman
Star Trek: Voyager
Cleopatra 2525
Stargate SG-1
Xena
As my husband says: <cue feminist rant> - most were series with strong female characters. Afaik, Cleo was the first hourly drama with a black female lead -- for example.
At least there's still Buffy, Angel and Andromeda. And Farscape.
_Deirdre
Oh? Let's see:
First version of Aldus Persuasion: written by one person. First version of PageMaker: written by two people. First version of Internet Explorer for the Mac: written by four contractors. The original Macintosh Finder? Written by four people. OmniWeb, a great web browser? Written by two people -- part-time.
It's only when you get to feature bloat that you need a lot of coders.
The commercial apps I've worked on and shipped were all written between one and four people.
I *know* Eazel had more coders than that.
The question remains: how many QA staff did they have? Afaik, zero.
What the smart venture capitalist might now be saying is: if it costs a couple mil to launch a proprietary app AND its sales will produce some sort of revenue stream, and our experience with open source shows that it costs more and we don't have the revenue stream, maybe we should invest in proprietary software companies instead.
I suggest that anyone else considering getting funding for their company seriously consider how they will make revenue rather than burn this bridge for everyone.
_Deirdre
There will be boom-and-bust cycles with "the next best thing" (a few years ago, it was biotech) but, by the time they become hyped, it's almost always too late to start one. Look at the Linux companies doing well: they were all around *before* Linux became a household buzzword.
And, really, I didn't say anything bad. The way the whole venture capital thing works is very simple: they invest in you because they expect to get their money back -- plus some extra. Then they take that and invest it somewhere else. And so on. It's like the classic "don't break the chain" chain letter thing -- and Eazel broke the chain.
_Deirdre
Based on the code size, a project I shipped of the same approximate size and complexity took four coders a year (three person years really) -- approximately, with overhead and marketing $1mil. Double that for Silicon Valley and double it again to be generous and that's still only 40% of what Eazel spent.
_Deirdre
So, for those people who think it's "cool" that Eazel "gave" Nautilus to the Linux community, realize that they did so solely and only to buy your trust -- and they bought it with other people's money.
Money that, had it not been blown on the biggest self-indulgent hackfest in the open source community's history, might fund your job next year or two years hence. But now it won't.
_Deirdre