Remember that "The USA" is not really equivalent to the US nation and its people. The foreign and domestic politics of "The USA" are designed to maximize the wealth of a few dozen families that controls Congress and most big business in the US. At the expense of millions of Americans that has to do with living on minimum wage. The USA as the World Police is a construction created to serve these families interests, not the American people. The American people are just as much the victim of it as everyone else.
Ok, Second Life may or may not be pretty cool, but why is there one Slashdot article about it every two or three days? World of Warcraft is at least ten times as popular but does not get anywhere near the same coverage as Second Life does. It smells fishy.
For example, there was this article about a woman offering sex for 5000 World of Warcraft gold. It did not reach Slashdot. That ten times as funny and definitely more "interesting" than some kind of psychological experiment.:)
I guess you're writing from an American viewpoint. In the rest of the industrialised world the social security system is not collapsing. The reason it is collapsing in the US, is because the wealth is getting more and more unevenly distributed. No shit it's hard to provide welfare to everyone when a few dozen billionares takes it all and the rest has to get by with chump change. Productivity is increasing and we are all several times more efficient workers today than what we were only a decade ago. But we don't get the fruits of our labour -- it all ends up in Bill Gates and the rest of the super rich peoples pockets.
There is no reason that the richest nation in the world should not be able to offer the best welfare functions to its people... Other than greed, that is.
So, Obama has $19 million on hand from fund raising and donations and he can't drop a year's salary to this guy for the work he's done maintaining a MySpace site? And if the guy invested $10k of his own money on good faith that it would help the campaign... I'm shocked that he's not asking for more. I mean, isn't that chump change to Obama? And doesn't Obama have to dispose of that money before the election otherwise it's gotta go to charity (I'm not a politician, I forget the rules of soft money).
It is about principles. I have done alot of grunt work for a political party in Sweden, maybe it is different for the Democrats in the US, but in general, you don't get paid. You do it on your own free will because you want your party to succeed. A select few functionaries get paid, usually the minimum salary for their competence level possible and are still expected to do lots of volunteer work. I would be surprised if any of all the telemarketers that do the real work in Obama's fundraising campaign are paid anything above the minimum wage.
Only when you get higher up in the party hiearchy can you expect to earn a decent living doing political work. But even then you are severly underpaid compared to what you can earn in other sectors. Even Bush and his appointed staff could probably earn a much higher salary working for a private company than working for the US.
From that point of view, it really does not make sense that this person should be able to cash in on his volunteer work while thousands of other volunteer worker gets nothing. Sure, give him back his 10 grand he invested, but he really can not and should not expect to be able to earn money doing volunteer work.
1. It's obvious that you do not have much experience of the mobile industry. The fragmentation of the market has nothing to do with tech support, it has to do with development costs. For example, imagine a ringtone downloading service. A fairly basic service that most operators provide. That service has to work with 50+ incompatible phones and developing for that is no easy feat. And of course, it only gets worse the more complicated the application is. This leads to operators ditching the least profitable platforms because it is to costly to support. They want to consolidate the market and Apple, which in that environment is a small player, does not fit in.
2. Vodafone can declare and does declare what they want. And when they do, be sure that the manufacturers are listening. Your comparison with IPX/SPX is very much off base. I work for a mobile phone manufacturer and I can tell you that getting on Vodafone's coveted list of supported platforms is very much priority uno right now.
3. Ok, so they made the ZunePhone:). It is still stupid and will make manufacturers shun away from Windows CE, which BTW, isn't that bad compared to other mobile platforms. And no, MSNTV:s are not PC:s, Microsoft does not compete with Dell. Make better analogy.
As usual when it comes to the mobile phone market, it is all about the OPERATORS. If the OPERATORS doesn't like your phone, you can go home. Mobile phone manufacturers are dependent upon operators to sell their phones at a subsidized price which they recoup on expensive pricing plans. That is how the "buy a new phone for $1" scheme works. Only a small percentage of all phones are not sold through an operator.
So, if you want your phone to succeed, you must get the operators to like it. But what operators hate is fragmentation. They hate incompatible phones. Incompatibility means that it is harder for them to create value-added services for the devices, such as on-line stores and add-on applications. The more incompatible the phone is, the more effort it will take for them to create these kind of services.
Vodafone, the worlds largest operator, has declared that their three supported platforms for the future will be Linux, Windows CE and Symbian Series 60. Other operators are likely to follow suit. That leaves iPhone with its bastardized version of Mac OS X out. Additionally, if the device is as closed to third party apps as it has been speculated, it means that operators will like it even less. They want the platform to be open (for them) to create add-ons.
And Microsoft wont make a "ZunePhone." That would just hurt their Windows CE business because other manufacturers would be less inclined to use the OS on their devices. You don't want to pay software license fees to your direct competitor. A ZunePhone would be just as stupid as trying to sell PC:s a la Dell, and for the exact same reason.
Name and shame, man. If this company is just as bad as you described you should have no qualms mentioning their name. Lest anyone else of us will have to deal with that same company again.
Mod parent up! That is exactly right and the full scope can be found on Steve Gibson's ClearType pages. What they have patented is simple filtering of sub-pixel rendering. That is just a simple combination of two very old techniques, color filtering is used in everything from blur filters to fire effects to texture mapping. Sub-pixel rendering too, has been used for ages to increase the apparent screen resolution.
Agreed. Lets assume that each of those 200,000 on average earn $20,000/year. Lets also assume that each of them spend all their earnings because poor people can not save money. Then the 0.25% sales tax increase means that the county collects an extra 10 million dollars each year. That money is hardly enough to build and run a normal airport, let alone a highly experimental space airport. There is no way that their projected earnings can make up for those costs.
What else could you do with ten million? You could employ a few hundred teachers, nurses or other public service personnel. Such a project would have much higher chance of being profitable. Not only does it raise the quality of your county's public services, which attracts high income tax payers, it also contributes to your local economy. A few hundred new jobs means a few hundred more that pays income and sales tax all without the risks involved in building a commercial space port.
Any reason you are posting anonymously and without mentioning the project name? I suspect that you would be able to solicit better advice if you did not withhold those crucial details. I also believe that the very reason for why you are posting anonymously has to do with your problems in that project.
A union just gives us the ability to say "if you fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of us". Do you have a problem with workers doing that?
I do when you don't have a choice about joining the union or not, which is generally what happens with unions - and they turn that same attitude back on fellow workers they do not like.
Sorry, that is bull. There is no workplace neither in the US, nor in any other country where a union can force you to join. If you don't want to partake in collective bargaining, don't complain when your colleagues get a raise while you get nada.
A workers union is a slippery slope to a whole other parallel layer of management above you, and that honestly does not do the company or you any good in the long run.
... And that is why wages and standards of living is higher and fewer people live below the poverty line in highly unionized countries? Hopefully soon, all you American union haters taunting France will realize, that maybe, just maybe they understand something you don't.
No, that is not the truth. That is the bullshit propaganda the Capitalists want you to believe. Without any salesmen, the company can not sell anything and the whole Circuit City collapses. Same thing with the strawberry pickers, without them the strawberry sellers can't sell any strawberries and so goes out of business. Therefore, these people are, for their respective employers, invaluable. The only reasons companies can treat the like shit is.... because they can!
I'm a developer at my company and I make quite a lot of money. Without me, they wouldn't be able to sell any products, so I'm valuable. There are also janitors at my company. They clean stuff and pick up the trash that we, the developers, leave behind. They make much less money. Why? It can't be because we work harder (each of us spends at least one hour/day surfing), it can't be because what we do is more valuable (without the janitors this place would be so disgusting no one would be able to work). The only reason they get paid less is because the company can get away with it. And if the US is any example, they will try to force down the developers wages too.
There is really nothing immoral with that. All companies want to lower their costs to stay "competitive" (read: more money to the owners). But what is despicable is that the employees just lays downs and takes it. The solution is so simple. Just strike dammit. Unionize. If just a few thousand of Circuit City's employees decided to strike for a week or two, they would lose so much profit from lost business that it wouldn't be economical to fire them.
As has been pointed out many times previously on Slashdot, it is the Last Mile that counts. Putting down a few thousand kilometers of fibre in rural areas isn't that expensive. What costs is connecting each and every user of the network to the hubs.
This is where European cities have a big advantage. Most people live in apartments with sometimes hundreds of families living in the same block of flats. The cable companies can just connect the whole building to a hub and draw the cables inside the house. In the US, where most people live in their own houses they have to draw the last mile outdoors. That means digging up roads and doing a separate installation for each household they want to connect. Of course that is going to be much more expensive.
That and subsidies. The Nordic countries try very hard to bring high speed access to everyone.
No, sorry, you got it all backwards. Genes are the driver behind the
evolution. Genes have no concept of morality, the only thing they do
is to control the fitness of the individual. It is the
individual that allows his or her genes to duplicate by being
fit enough to have lots of sex and make lots of children. Individuals
in a specie compete for limited resources, and what is best for the
individual is almost never best for the population.
In other words, the sin itself is the punishment. Murder harms the
species' ability to propagate. Theft harms the species' ability to
care for its children. Incest harms the species' viability.
An individual that manages to get rid of its competitors could very
well gain an advantage. Many female spiders kill their male partner
after they have mated. Would it not have been much better for their
specie if instead she would have let him live so that he could have
mated with other females? Maybe, but genes do not work that way. Her
genes only care about procreating themselves, other genes are just
competitors. Therefore, it makes sense for her to kill and eat him.
That is why claiming that morality is rooted in genetics is very
problematical. There is no evolutionary advantage for the
individual to be moral. If everyone else steals, it would be a
severe biological handicap to have a genetic moral that told you not
to steal. Such a gene would certainly be sifted out very quickly.
On the other hand, in a world full of stealers, it would definitely be
a great idea to try and convince everyone else not to steal. Then there would be more left for you
to steal! I think that is where morality comes from. Humans does not
have a hard coded moral, but a hard coded desire to convince others to
be moral.
Re:Everybody IT needs these skills, not just bosse
on
IT Manager's Handbook
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Wait a minute.. so someone in upper-management decided that spending a few thousand bucks on a shiny new tool would be a good idea. Without asking about the opinion of those that should use this new tool? And you were tasked with executing the plan? It actually seems like you are the one who needs to change strategy. Try asking the devs that are supposed to use the new SCM system about what they think. Conversation is the first step in "handling people."
Plus, you didn't say what SCM it was, so it probably was ClearCase. In which case the developers definitely has the right to be very grumpy.:)
The only important part of the story is that some big-egos felt that they deserved monetary recognition more than people who were receiving it, so they got upset.
Maybe they did? If some of my colleagues where I work got a big payraise and I did not, despite me performing just as well or maybe even better than them, of course I am going to be immature and petulant. Such are the traits of humanity and I am sure most other would feel the same way. Every manager at every company could tell you that. Money really is the root of all evil. And with an unequal distribution of it only compounds the problem.
How the hell did your company take the time to learn Linux to such a degree to be able to "modify the kernel code to fit your needs" and NOT know that it had to be shared...
You'd be suprised, you'd be very suprised. In the embedded industry, it is very common for companies to distribute products with modified Linux versions without releasing the source. Ofcourse it is all rumors at this point, unless a law suit comes up where someone is payed millions, employees have very little incentive in outing their employers.
Exactly! It is all about the money. The IT workforce mostly consists of guys loving what they do. Guys loving what they do aren't so picky about what they earn, they just want to do the stuff they love to do. Couple that with a almost total disdain for unions from the younger generation and you get the situation you have now. In the corporate world, what matters is the money. If you earn 10$/hour then you are only worth 10$/hour, if you earn 50$, then you are worth 50$, good for you. But more importantly, the amount of respect and employment benefits you receive is linearly proportional to the amount of money you earn.
The corporate world knows this, executies knows this, unions knows this, young programmers DO NOT know this. Therefore, while their skills may in fact be the company's most valuable asset, they are treated like just a bunch of resources that you can swap in and out, whichever way you please. Everyone should know that that is complete BS. There is a world-wide SHORTAGE of skilled IT professionals.
I wish techies all over the world would ask themself "Why am I not getting a larger slice of the cake?" because that is what the question is all about.
Do you think an organisation like the EU cares about consumer rights? What they want is not for Apple to stop using DRM, it is for Apple to license their DRM file format so that other manufacturers can produce compatible devices. This is why the EU is going after Apple and not Microsoft. Microsoft readily licenses their DRM technology FairPlay to other companies. Apple is not. They are using iTunes Music Store to leverage their commercial advantage (monopoly?) in the music distribution business to create a monopoly in the MP3 player manufacturing business. That is a tactic which certainly is very shady, if not illegal.
Microsoft has done exactly the same thing and was convicted for it. So it only makes sense for the EU to prevent Apple from doing the same thing.
Education only goes so far.:) Against it you have all the advertising proclaiming the glorious lifestyle that drinking Coca Cola will give you, complete with multiple hot babes. I think the Nordic countries is a good example of how to get people to change their habits. Education together with taxation. In Norway, cigarettes are taxated so hard that people basically have no other choice than to quit. And it works too, Norway is one of the most smoke free countries in the world.
In Denmark and Norway they have also introduced a special tax on candy and soft drinks. Since taxes does reduce smoking, it could reduce obesity too. But as you say, in most places the food lobby is to strong so governments dare not to upset them. Plus more taxes don't mix to well with the Liberal taxes-is-bad ideas that has taken over the world.
Linux is a kernel! Talking about it in the context of mobile devices as an Operating System makes no sense whatsoever. Just as it makes no sense in a desktop context either. What distro? Ubuntu? RedHat? Suse? What desktop environment? KDE? GNOME? XFCE? Mobile devices work exactly the same way. Closest to the hardware you have the kernel. On top of that you have different low-level API:s, such as the telephony API, memory API, solid state memory API, bluetooth API etc. On top of that you have the more userlandish API:s such as PIM, addressbook file system and (*shiver*) DRM. But for application programmers all these details are hidden away behind a more or less standards compliant implementation of J2ME with a Java Virtual Machine.
That is what carriers are whining about. The huge fragmentation in J2ME makes it very, very hard for them to distribute and support multi-platform Java applications.
Linux is just one piece of a gigantic puzzle. It is definitely not the most important piece. Mobile manufacturers, for obvious reasons, do not have to support gazillions of different pieces hardware like a normal PC does so the kernel can be kept relatively simple. Rumors has it that some manufacturers are already planning on using Linux. But do not expect that to make any difference whatsoever. Your phone will continue to be the carrier-frozen, locked-down DRM beast it is today.
You got it all wrong. Most people tend to be stupid, so they are not socialists. Most engineers and mathematicians tend to not be stupid or even be smart. So they are socialists. As we all know, Americans are the only people that think liberal is to the left while it in reality is very much to the right. This is why stupid people do not use Linux but smart socialists do.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that "The USA" is not really equivalent to the US nation and its people. The foreign and domestic politics of "The USA" are designed to maximize the wealth of a few dozen families that controls Congress and most big business in the US. At the expense of millions of Americans that has to do with living on minimum wage. The USA as the World Police is a construction created to serve these families interests, not the American people. The American people are just as much the victim of it as everyone else.
Ok, Second Life may or may not be pretty cool, but why is there one Slashdot article about it every two or three days? World of Warcraft is at least ten times as popular but does not get anywhere near the same coverage as Second Life does. It smells fishy.
:)
For example, there was this article about a woman offering sex for 5000 World of Warcraft gold. It did not reach Slashdot. That ten times as funny and definitely more "interesting" than some kind of psychological experiment.
I guess you're writing from an American viewpoint. In the rest of the industrialised world the social security system is not collapsing. The reason it is collapsing in the US, is because the wealth is getting more and more unevenly distributed. No shit it's hard to provide welfare to everyone when a few dozen billionares takes it all and the rest has to get by with chump change. Productivity is increasing and we are all several times more efficient workers today than what we were only a decade ago. But we don't get the fruits of our labour -- it all ends up in Bill Gates and the rest of the super rich peoples pockets.
There is no reason that the richest nation in the world should not be able to offer the best welfare functions to its people... Other than greed, that is.
So, Obama has $19 million on hand from fund raising and donations and he can't drop a year's salary to this guy for the work he's done maintaining a MySpace site? And if the guy invested $10k of his own money on good faith that it would help the campaign ... I'm shocked that he's not asking for more. I mean, isn't that chump change to Obama? And doesn't Obama have to dispose of that money before the election otherwise it's gotta go to charity (I'm not a politician, I forget the rules of soft money).
It is about principles. I have done alot of grunt work for a political party in Sweden, maybe it is different for the Democrats in the US, but in general, you don't get paid. You do it on your own free will because you want your party to succeed. A select few functionaries get paid, usually the minimum salary for their competence level possible and are still expected to do lots of volunteer work. I would be surprised if any of all the telemarketers that do the real work in Obama's fundraising campaign are paid anything above the minimum wage.
Only when you get higher up in the party hiearchy can you expect to earn a decent living doing political work. But even then you are severly underpaid compared to what you can earn in other sectors. Even Bush and his appointed staff could probably earn a much higher salary working for a private company than working for the US.
From that point of view, it really does not make sense that this person should be able to cash in on his volunteer work while thousands of other volunteer worker gets nothing. Sure, give him back his 10 grand he invested, but he really can not and should not expect to be able to earn money doing volunteer work.
1. It's obvious that you do not have much experience of the mobile industry. The fragmentation of the market has nothing to do with tech support, it has to do with development costs. For example, imagine a ringtone downloading service. A fairly basic service that most operators provide. That service has to work with 50+ incompatible phones and developing for that is no easy feat. And of course, it only gets worse the more complicated the application is. This leads to operators ditching the least profitable platforms because it is to costly to support. They want to consolidate the market and Apple, which in that environment is a small player, does not fit in.
:). It is still stupid and will make manufacturers shun away from Windows CE, which BTW, isn't that bad compared to other mobile platforms. And no, MSNTV:s are not PC:s, Microsoft does not compete with Dell. Make better analogy.
2. Vodafone can declare and does declare what they want. And when they do, be sure that the manufacturers are listening. Your comparison with IPX/SPX is very much off base. I work for a mobile phone manufacturer and I can tell you that getting on Vodafone's coveted list of supported platforms is very much priority uno right now.
3. Ok, so they made the ZunePhone
As usual when it comes to the mobile phone market, it is all about the OPERATORS. If the OPERATORS doesn't like your phone, you can go home. Mobile phone manufacturers are dependent upon operators to sell their phones at a subsidized price which they recoup on expensive pricing plans. That is how the "buy a new phone for $1" scheme works. Only a small percentage of all phones are not sold through an operator.
So, if you want your phone to succeed, you must get the operators to like it. But what operators hate is fragmentation. They hate incompatible phones. Incompatibility means that it is harder for them to create value-added services for the devices, such as on-line stores and add-on applications. The more incompatible the phone is, the more effort it will take for them to create these kind of services.
Vodafone, the worlds largest operator, has declared that their three supported platforms for the future will be Linux, Windows CE and Symbian Series 60. Other operators are likely to follow suit. That leaves iPhone with its bastardized version of Mac OS X out. Additionally, if the device is as closed to third party apps as it has been speculated, it means that operators will like it even less. They want the platform to be open (for them) to create add-ons.
And Microsoft wont make a "ZunePhone." That would just hurt their Windows CE business because other manufacturers would be less inclined to use the OS on their devices. You don't want to pay software license fees to your direct competitor. A ZunePhone would be just as stupid as trying to sell PC:s a la Dell, and for the exact same reason.
Name and shame, man. If this company is just as bad as you described you should have no qualms mentioning their name. Lest anyone else of us will have to deal with that same company again.
Mod parent up! That is exactly right and the full scope can be found on Steve Gibson's ClearType pages. What they have patented is simple filtering of sub-pixel rendering. That is just a simple combination of two very old techniques, color filtering is used in everything from blur filters to fire effects to texture mapping. Sub-pixel rendering too, has been used for ages to increase the apparent screen resolution.
Agreed. Lets assume that each of those 200,000 on average earn $20,000/year. Lets also assume that each of them spend all their earnings because poor people can not save money. Then the 0.25% sales tax increase means that the county collects an extra 10 million dollars each year. That money is hardly enough to build and run a normal airport, let alone a highly experimental space airport. There is no way that their projected earnings can make up for those costs.
What else could you do with ten million? You could employ a few hundred teachers, nurses or other public service personnel. Such a project would have much higher chance of being profitable. Not only does it raise the quality of your county's public services, which attracts high income tax payers, it also contributes to your local economy. A few hundred new jobs means a few hundred more that pays income and sales tax all without the risks involved in building a commercial space port.
Any reason you are posting anonymously and without mentioning the project name? I suspect that you would be able to solicit better advice if you did not withhold those crucial details. I also believe that the very reason for why you are posting anonymously has to do with your problems in that project.
Stupid list, they forgot C64. How many programmers haven't learnt programming using C64 BASIC?
A union just gives us the ability to say "if you fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of us". Do you have a problem with workers doing that? I do when you don't have a choice about joining the union or not, which is generally what happens with unions - and they turn that same attitude back on fellow workers they do not like.
... And that is why wages and standards of living is higher and fewer people live below the poverty line in highly unionized countries? Hopefully soon, all you American union haters taunting France will realize, that maybe, just maybe they understand something you don't.
Sorry, that is bull. There is no workplace neither in the US, nor in any other country where a union can force you to join. If you don't want to partake in collective bargaining, don't complain when your colleagues get a raise while you get nada.
A workers union is a slippery slope to a whole other parallel layer of management above you, and that honestly does not do the company or you any good in the long run.
No, that is not the truth. That is the bullshit propaganda the Capitalists want you to believe. Without any salesmen, the company can not sell anything and the whole Circuit City collapses. Same thing with the strawberry pickers, without them the strawberry sellers can't sell any strawberries and so goes out of business. Therefore, these people are, for their respective employers, invaluable. The only reasons companies can treat the like shit is.... because they can!
I'm a developer at my company and I make quite a lot of money. Without me, they wouldn't be able to sell any products, so I'm valuable. There are also janitors at my company. They clean stuff and pick up the trash that we, the developers, leave behind. They make much less money. Why? It can't be because we work harder (each of us spends at least one hour/day surfing), it can't be because what we do is more valuable (without the janitors this place would be so disgusting no one would be able to work). The only reason they get paid less is because the company can get away with it. And if the US is any example, they will try to force down the developers wages too.
There is really nothing immoral with that. All companies want to lower their costs to stay "competitive" (read: more money to the owners). But what is despicable is that the employees just lays downs and takes it. The solution is so simple. Just strike dammit. Unionize. If just a few thousand of Circuit City's employees decided to strike for a week or two, they would lose so much profit from lost business that it wouldn't be economical to fire them.
As has been pointed out many times previously on Slashdot, it is the Last Mile that counts. Putting down a few thousand kilometers of fibre in rural areas isn't that expensive. What costs is connecting each and every user of the network to the hubs.
This is where European cities have a big advantage. Most people live in apartments with sometimes hundreds of families living in the same block of flats. The cable companies can just connect the whole building to a hub and draw the cables inside the house. In the US, where most people live in their own houses they have to draw the last mile outdoors. That means digging up roads and doing a separate installation for each household they want to connect. Of course that is going to be much more expensive.
That and subsidies. The Nordic countries try very hard to bring high speed access to everyone.
No, sorry, you got it all backwards. Genes are the driver behind the evolution. Genes have no concept of morality, the only thing they do is to control the fitness of the individual. It is the individual that allows his or her genes to duplicate by being fit enough to have lots of sex and make lots of children. Individuals in a specie compete for limited resources, and what is best for the individual is almost never best for the population.
In other words, the sin itself is the punishment. Murder harms the species' ability to propagate. Theft harms the species' ability to care for its children. Incest harms the species' viability.
An individual that manages to get rid of its competitors could very well gain an advantage. Many female spiders kill their male partner after they have mated. Would it not have been much better for their specie if instead she would have let him live so that he could have mated with other females? Maybe, but genes do not work that way. Her genes only care about procreating themselves, other genes are just competitors. Therefore, it makes sense for her to kill and eat him.
That is why claiming that morality is rooted in genetics is very problematical. There is no evolutionary advantage for the individual to be moral. If everyone else steals, it would be a severe biological handicap to have a genetic moral that told you not to steal. Such a gene would certainly be sifted out very quickly.
On the other hand, in a world full of stealers, it would definitely be a great idea to try and convince everyone else not to steal. Then there would be more left for you to steal! I think that is where morality comes from. Humans does not have a hard coded moral, but a hard coded desire to convince others to be moral.
Wait a minute.. so someone in upper-management decided that spending a few thousand bucks on a shiny new tool would be a good idea. Without asking about the opinion of those that should use this new tool? And you were tasked with executing the plan? It actually seems like you are the one who needs to change strategy. Try asking the devs that are supposed to use the new SCM system about what they think. Conversation is the first step in "handling people."
:)
Plus, you didn't say what SCM it was, so it probably was ClearCase. In which case the developers definitely has the right to be very grumpy.
The only important part of the story is that some big-egos felt that they deserved monetary recognition more than people who were receiving it, so they got upset.
Maybe they did? If some of my colleagues where I work got a big payraise and I did not, despite me performing just as well or maybe even better than them, of course I am going to be immature and petulant. Such are the traits of humanity and I am sure most other would feel the same way. Every manager at every company could tell you that. Money really is the root of all evil. And with an unequal distribution of it only compounds the problem.
How the hell did your company take the time to learn Linux to such a degree to be able to "modify the kernel code to fit your needs" and NOT know that it had to be shared...
You'd be suprised, you'd be very suprised. In the embedded industry, it is very common for companies to distribute products with modified Linux versions without releasing the source. Ofcourse it is all rumors at this point, unless a law suit comes up where someone is payed millions, employees have very little incentive in outing their employers.
Exactly! It is all about the money. The IT workforce mostly consists of guys loving what they do. Guys loving what they do aren't so picky about what they earn, they just want to do the stuff they love to do. Couple that with a almost total disdain for unions from the younger generation and you get the situation you have now. In the corporate world, what matters is the money. If you earn 10$/hour then you are only worth 10$/hour, if you earn 50$, then you are worth 50$, good for you. But more importantly, the amount of respect and employment benefits you receive is linearly proportional to the amount of money you earn.
The corporate world knows this, executies knows this, unions knows this, young programmers DO NOT know this. Therefore, while their skills may in fact be the company's most valuable asset, they are treated like just a bunch of resources that you can swap in and out, whichever way you please. Everyone should know that that is complete BS. There is a world-wide SHORTAGE of skilled IT professionals.
I wish techies all over the world would ask themself "Why am I not getting a larger slice of the cake?" because that is what the question is all about.
Easy for you to say. If the allies had done enough to stop the file-sharers the Holocaust might have never happened. Think about it.
Do you think an organisation like the EU cares about consumer rights? What they want is not for Apple to stop using DRM, it is for Apple to license their DRM file format so that other manufacturers can produce compatible devices. This is why the EU is going after Apple and not Microsoft. Microsoft readily licenses their DRM technology FairPlay to other companies. Apple is not. They are using iTunes Music Store to leverage their commercial advantage (monopoly?) in the music distribution business to create a monopoly in the MP3 player manufacturing business. That is a tactic which certainly is very shady, if not illegal.
Microsoft has done exactly the same thing and was convicted for it. So it only makes sense for the EU to prevent Apple from doing the same thing.
Education only goes so far. :) Against it you have all the advertising proclaiming the glorious lifestyle that drinking Coca Cola will give you, complete with multiple hot babes. I think the Nordic countries is a good example of how to get people to change their habits. Education together with taxation. In Norway, cigarettes are taxated so hard that people basically have no other choice than to quit. And it works too, Norway is one of the most smoke free countries in the world.
In Denmark and Norway they have also introduced a special tax on candy and soft drinks. Since taxes does reduce smoking, it could reduce obesity too. But as you say, in most places the food lobby is to strong so governments dare not to upset them. Plus more taxes don't mix to well with the Liberal taxes-is-bad ideas that has taken over the world.
Err... Do you realize that M3G and JSR-184 is the same API? And that CDC is an extension of CLDC?
Linux is a kernel! Talking about it in the context of mobile devices as an Operating System makes no sense whatsoever. Just as it makes no sense in a desktop context either. What distro? Ubuntu? RedHat? Suse? What desktop environment? KDE? GNOME? XFCE? Mobile devices work exactly the same way. Closest to the hardware you have the kernel. On top of that you have different low-level API:s, such as the telephony API, memory API, solid state memory API, bluetooth API etc. On top of that you have the more userlandish API:s such as PIM, addressbook file system and (*shiver*) DRM. But for application programmers all these details are hidden away behind a more or less standards compliant implementation of J2ME with a Java Virtual Machine.
That is what carriers are whining about. The huge fragmentation in J2ME makes it very, very hard for them to distribute and support multi-platform Java applications.
Linux is just one piece of a gigantic puzzle. It is definitely not the most important piece. Mobile manufacturers, for obvious reasons, do not have to support gazillions of different pieces hardware like a normal PC does so the kernel can be kept relatively simple. Rumors has it that some manufacturers are already planning on using Linux. But do not expect that to make any difference whatsoever. Your phone will continue to be the carrier-frozen, locked-down DRM beast it is today.
You got it all wrong. Most people tend to be stupid, so they are not socialists. Most engineers and mathematicians tend to not be stupid or even be smart. So they are socialists. As we all know, Americans are the only people that think liberal is to the left while it in reality is very much to the right. This is why stupid people do not use Linux but smart socialists do.
/the truth