Apple charges the consumer more. Big surprise. Apple has always cost more. Back when MacOS was a big improvement over DOS, they used to charge 2 and three times as much.
Anyone who doesn't think Apple isn't vastly more "evil" than Miscrosoft when it comes to bending the public over and taking their money is a fool.
We're coming out of an Ice Age! Just a few thousand years ago the planet was blanketed in ice!
Take Lake Okochobee in Florida. It was formed when the oceans receeded from a level some 30 feet higher than they are today, as the Ice Age set in, dramatically lowering the levels of the ocean to closer to their current state.
There weren't any SUV's around to cause THAT warmer climate, nor were they all parked to then cause massive Global Cooling and an Ice Age.
This is just part of natural, inevitable cycle that's been going on for a lot longer than Man has been around, much less downloading pr0n off the internet.
TiVo very quietly rolled out a service change to monthly users that says 'if your lifetime service box has not been active (that is, dialed in) in 6 months, then it will nor longer count for qualifying for the multi-TiVo discount.'
In short, for folks like me, who purchased a TiVo with lifetime back in 2001, and then had their Series 1 die, my replacement TiVo no longer gets the monthly discount.
That said, I called TiVo and made a stink (threatened to cancel) and they gave me the $6.95 rate anyway.
But like others I have concerns about the ever-cheapening hardware. If the Comcast-tivo's are anywhere near decent feature-wise (specifically, allow transfers), I will move to them when my current tivos die, specifically because I'd rather pay an extra 4-5 bucks a month and not own the hardware.
And what's important is not to take it personally. It's just business -- and this particular company has decided that their security policy is to accept the resignation directly, and pay the two weeks salary.
The trouble with a small group is that the standard deviation is too large.
In other words, to paraphrase an earlier poster, you can use "Cost per square foot" for building a home, and the larger the home, the more accurate the average.
But if you are specifically building, say, a bathroom, you can't use that metric accurately.
The best way to do it is, as others have suggested, "lay out what you need to get" and factor in your assumptions (replacement machines for old desktops, replacement printers, etc.).
Don't forget sales tax, and put at least another 20% in to cover situations where you won't be able to use the cheapest vendor for some reason ("needed the toner NOW") etc...
Music piracy (or whatever you'd like to call the rampant copying of music) is unrelated to the numbers. It's wrong. It's always been wrong and sitting here trying to come up with excuses is hypocritical from a group that zealously defends Open Source.
After all:
* No one loses the use of the original source when someone like Linksys modifies the source and doesn't release it.
* No one loses money because a company doesn't release its changes back to the community.
In short, if copying music is okay, then taking open source projects, modifying them, and selling them commercially without releasing the source can't possibly be bad.
Either intellectual property means something, or it doesn't. But make sure you appreciate the ramifications before espousing the "anyone should be able to do anything" argument.
Given the classic assumptions on "mail-in rebates" that only 10% of the people actually bother if the amount is less than $100...5% is actually amazingly high for something that has a very narrow audience given the number of people who by Pepsi (i.e., lots of people that bought winners didn't care about iTunes).
I'm a technical PHB. I started working as a System Admin back on SCO (the original) Xenix in the late 80's. I'm still fairly technical and hands on, but now, at 36, I manage a team and make purchasing decisions, etc., as well.
This is simply WAY WAY WAY too early to talk about stagnating the 2.4 kernel. It feeds directly into the "open source is really a bunch of geeks who are far more interested in shiny new baubles than core business requirements!"
2.6 isn't out yet. And it's not known when it will stabilize (my definition of stable is when revs "live" for more than 30 days).
It's quite possible that a 'stable' 2.6 won't be out for a year. Then it needs to be tested, and a migration plan (since this is NOT a 'build and drop in' kernel) put into place, and that tested.
Easily 18 months or more -- and that's assuming that as soon as the kernel stabilizes, it becomes a company priority to migrate.
Again, MS loves to tout "with open source, you have to build your business around your solution, rather than building your solution around your business."
Big companies don't want to be on this treadmill, they don't want to develop and maintain their own kernel team and kernel tree -- they want stuff that WORKS. And having your own dev organization is a fast way to spend more money than buying someone else's solution.
Hopefully this won't come to pass. But sadly, the fuel's been added to the fire.
While I like Linux, I would never converting the 500+ machines in my data center to the 2.6.0 kernel.
I don't consider any new kernel series to qualify for production until you see at least 30 days between kernel revs. I think that scored on 2.4 at about 2.4.9 or so......especially given that this isn't a pure 'drop and drag' kernel in my extant environment. I can't just compile it, boot it, and have everything work.
I doubt I'll consider 2.6 kernels until June/July 2004.
Sadly, once you become a public company, "ethics" other than not breaking the law are immaterial. You would be personally liable for the $1 billion you effectively "stole" from the stockholders, and SHOULD go to jail.
If you want to play the game by your rules (which is fine), do NOT become a public company.
For a low-end, simple, ticketing system, PT is ideal. Primarily because, unlike RT, it's geared as a ticketing system rather than a form of bug-tracking. Thus, it automatically generates the types of reports that you'll want -- everything from
"what tickets are still open" "what's our MTTR for the month" "How many tickets are going into each queue?"
For 30-50 tickets a day, you can just run it against the local database and back up that flat file...
But yeah, I know, it's windows, so it'll be the wrong answer.
This is actually one of the things that concerns me the most. We can talk about minor details all we want, but the fact that they are selling stock is a big thing.
If they are found to be "pumping and dumping" these guys will go to jail. We know that, and they know that. I don't know too many folks who enjoy going to jail.
These guys are in fact betting their personal freedom that this is not a baseless claim. That's why I don't rule SCO's claim out at this time.
Actually, you've hit part but not the true reason for the big wings.
The big wings were for launching from Vandenberg, yes, but not because of the "one orbit return" but rather because of geography -- the downrange abort site (because the Americas are actually a diagonal line from Alaska to Argentina) was Easter Island, and thus a 1500nm glide range was needed.
Launching from the Cape in non-Polar orbits gives you lots of sites from the Azores to Morocco and stuff.
1) Pricing: Mac's are significantly more money. And if you thought the Microsoft OS costs were bad, looks at Apple's. OS X launched in 2001, and, if you were a 10.0 buyer, while 10.1 was a free upgrade, 10.2 wasn't, and 10.3 is coming fast! And from the end user perspective, these have all been largely mandatory upgrades -- many apps now won't work unless you are running 10.2, for example.
2) Usability. While there are a lot of things that work smoothly under OS X, there are still some issues, ESPECIALLY with Windows interoperability -- and any company of size is going to have a significant overlap. So you'd have to train IT folks (or hire new ones), and still have some userland issues.
Another serious concern for IT has been how quickly Apple has outdated machines. Didn't we just see today that a number of machines aren't going to have proper functionality? Again, this is on fairly new machinery! Concerns have to be that Apple is quickly going to invalidate the G3 and G4 (over the next 24-30 months).
Those are my thoughts as a fairly PHB who started using OS X on a TiBook back in 2001.
My wife works from home and we had a Minolta 2200 last year (before she changed employers).
We put 1600 pages through it, never did run out of toner (although, as others have mentioned, toner is EXPENSIVE, almost as much as the printer!).
But it worked well, didn't jam, and provided decent color -- not photo-printer quality, but good for just about anything else. My wife produced SKU charts with product images on it and got numerous prases on the quality.
There's a significant difference between the two products.
With VNC, you must have access to your machine. If it's behind a corporate firewall that doesn't allow inbound connections (i.e., virtually all firewalls unless you personally control them), VNC isn't going to work in this scenario.
GoToMyPC, though, utilizes a type of push technology. You run a 'client' on the PC you want to remote control. Said 'client' establishes a connection to the central servers at GoToMyPC.com via HTTP (since many corporate firewalls allow outbound HTTP access without issue).
Then you, from the remote machine, go to the GTMPC(had to give up typing the whole thing) servers with YOUR web browser, and they do a form of proxy that, voila, allows you to communicate with a machine inside the coorporate firewall.
It's also a serious security breach that I suspect many companies would frown on if they found you using it -- ultimately, everything passes though GTMPC -- do you trust them with all your data?
As an Operations guy, man, I have wanted something like this for years. Full featured enough to handle remotely connecting in for sudden downtime events, yet not nearly as large as a laptop. With 1xRTT, it means you can take it into a restaurant and, if you pager goes off, be able to check system status without having to clear off the entire top of the table.
Not to mention that it makes checking Moviefone.com a lot slicker than the current PDA browsers are.
It's not going to be for everyone, but for those who need it, doggone, it's the cat's meow!
The language of the contract doesn't surprise me. At least MS allows transferrability. There are a number of companies (BEA, for example) that don't allow transfers at all!
But they aren't ruling out "let's talk about it." Clearly MS knows that the harder they push, the harder it will be to deal with an ongoing customer. But let's say we get a customer who doesn't want to pay one thin cent to MS for a new deal on what they purchase. Perhaps the "new" buyer says "forget about upgrades, we'll move to Linux in the next 18 months, so we don't care!"
In that case, MS is stating that the original purchaser must fulfill the terms of the deal they signed. In other words, they are protecting themselves from a scenario where a company negotiates a big, massive, volume deal. Then they sell or close down half the company and say "hey, we are only going to pay (Contract cost * percentage of remaining systems) dollars now."
That is, getting the big volume discount on a smaller number of systems.
Virtually every contract out there states that you are obligated to fulfill its terms. This is no different.
You're right in that you CAN do many, if not most of these things now.
But my 60 year old parents will never figure it out. And honestly, they're not really interested in doing so. They just want to sit down, log in (if even that's not disabled, since their computer is at home), and USE their computer.
A computer that becomes more stable without them having to learn more about their computer is a good computer:) It's like CPUs. They are n ewer, and faster, making the computing process better. But they don't really care about the details of why the new CPU is faster.
Re:I don't think it's just being considered
on
CIOs Looking At OSS
·
· Score: 1
The theory of OSS is very attractiuve right now. The reality, however, is a little more dissapointing in many places.
Let me differentiate servers where you have a group actively developing a platform (for example, you have an entire team writing Java code and want to run it) as comapred to the massive internal IT infrastructure which composes most of the IT at a large company.
In those areas, where you don't have developers, rescources (people) are few and changes happen slowly, because of the impact to many people, tons of which don't really know that much about computers except what they do to get their job done.
Here, people don't use beta versions of software. They wait for final releases to come out. Then they start testing and figuring out how to deploy a final release. Pretty soon, it's 18 months later when the deployment is reasonably complete.
Then they expect not to have to redeploy for at least a couple of years -- and three is better! (This is the REAL reason there are places just coming off of Win98 and Office 98...)
There are few Open Source projects that are giving much, if any support to 2 and 3 year old versions of the software. Many bugs are simply fixed in later versions which require upgrading. Upgrades that often require a whole slew of changes and planning to deploy.
This is where the theory/reality interface does poorly. While CIOs would love to roll out Open Source software, when presented with a realisitc budget for increased IT staffing to support the shoter life of the software, they typically choke.
Don't forget that from an accounting standpoint, software is viewed as the purchase of an asset. Salaries are considered a pure operating loss. Ask a CIO if he would rather buy a million dollars of software or spent a million dollars on salary, and believe me, he'll buy the software.
2) They typically spend 8-10 years before making $75,000/year. My buddy is 32 years old, has flown for a 'regional' since 1997, and is still only making $50,000/year. And with the downturn since 9/11, it could easily be 7-10 years before he moves up the ladder (and he'll have to take a pay cut when moving to a 'major' airline the first few years).
3) Any number of health conditions can end your career without warning, or just leave you unpaid. Have a heart attack at 55? Forget it, you're done.
4) These guys have to be tested in a full-motion simulator every 6 months. Blow more something here, you could find yourself out of a job.
5) No ability to "laterally" change jobs. If you fly for an airline (such as Braniff) and have 15 years seniority and are a 747 captain, and Braniff goes out of business, you're new job will have you sitting in the co-pilots seat of a DC-9 or 737, making 36 grand a year again.
6) Oh yeah, you're in charge of the lives of hundreds of people each day. Your mistakes don't cause downtime, they cause DEATH.
While we all chatter about "monopoly" and "abuse" and so forth from Microsoft, the truth is that Sun, Apple, and Netscape were, until the emergence of Microsoft and Windows, the three great RAPISTS of the common consumer.
Remember how brutally expensive Sun workstations were? And how Macs were three and four times the cost of a PC?
And what about Netscape charging 10 THOUSAND dollars for their HTTPS-capable server?
All three of these companies want to hurt Microsoft, not to compete, but to get their HUGE, MASSIVE PROFIT MARGINS back!
While we chatter about Microsoft, the TRUTH is, they've never bent over and drilled nearly has hard as the 'injured' parties.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation:
Apple charges the consumer more. Big surprise. Apple has always cost more. Back when MacOS was a big improvement over DOS, they used to charge 2 and three times as much.
Anyone who doesn't think Apple isn't vastly more "evil" than Miscrosoft when it comes to bending the public over and taking their money is a fool.
We're coming out of an Ice Age! Just a few thousand years ago the planet was blanketed in ice!
Take Lake Okochobee in Florida. It was formed when the oceans receeded from a level some 30 feet higher than they are today, as the Ice Age set in, dramatically lowering the levels of the ocean to closer to their current state.
There weren't any SUV's around to cause THAT warmer climate, nor were they all parked to then cause massive Global Cooling and an Ice Age.
This is just part of natural, inevitable cycle that's been going on for a lot longer than Man has been around, much less downloading pr0n off the internet.
Steve
TiVo very quietly rolled out a service change to monthly users that says 'if your lifetime service box has not been active (that is, dialed in) in 6 months, then it will nor longer count for qualifying for the multi-TiVo discount.'
In short, for folks like me, who purchased a TiVo with lifetime back in 2001, and then had their Series 1 die, my replacement TiVo no longer gets the monthly discount.
That said, I called TiVo and made a stink (threatened to cancel) and they gave me the $6.95 rate anyway.
But like others I have concerns about the ever-cheapening hardware. If the Comcast-tivo's are anywhere near decent feature-wise (specifically, allow transfers), I will move to them when my current tivos die, specifically because I'd rather pay an extra 4-5 bucks a month and not own the hardware.
And what's important is not to take it personally. It's just business -- and this particular company has decided that their security policy is to accept the resignation directly, and pay the two weeks salary.
If you go with the model of "you can only patent what you can build" -- you will squeeze out all the "little guys" with limited resources.
For example, you couldn't patent a better way to do 3D graphic chipsets unless you could actually BUILD that chipset?
Effectively, you've narrowed the market down to a small cadre of companies.
I think this is a great example of "the little guy" being able to fight back against being crushed by the large corporations.
Steve
The trouble with a small group is that the standard deviation is too large.
In other words, to paraphrase an earlier poster, you can use "Cost per square foot" for building a home, and the larger the home, the more accurate the average.
But if you are specifically building, say, a bathroom, you can't use that metric accurately.
The best way to do it is, as others have suggested, "lay out what you need to get" and factor in your assumptions (replacement machines for old desktops, replacement printers, etc.).
Don't forget sales tax, and put at least another 20% in to cover situations where you won't be able to use the cheapest vendor for some reason ("needed the toner NOW") etc...
Copyright 2004 Richard Stallman.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted worldwide without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
Gotta how RMS makes his own information free, but only with the conditions HE agrees to.
Either it's free, or it's not.
Steve
Music piracy (or whatever you'd like to call the rampant copying of music) is unrelated to the numbers. It's wrong. It's always been wrong and sitting here trying to come up with excuses is hypocritical from a group that zealously defends Open Source.
After all:
* No one loses the use of the original source when someone like Linksys modifies the source and doesn't release it.
* No one loses money because a company doesn't release its changes back to the community.
In short, if copying music is okay, then taking open source projects, modifying them, and selling them commercially without releasing the source can't possibly be bad.
Either intellectual property means something, or it doesn't. But make sure you appreciate the ramifications before espousing the "anyone should be able to do anything" argument.
Steve
Given the classic assumptions on "mail-in rebates" that only 10% of the people actually bother if the amount is less than $100...5% is actually amazingly high for something that has a very narrow audience given the number of people who by Pepsi (i.e., lots of people that bought winners didn't care about iTunes).
Regardless of what it does or doesn't do, copying music isn't right. The concept of "it's good for them, so it should be okay" is total baloney.
Businesses are allowed to make mistakes that lead them into bankruptcy.
Here's the fact. Copying music is wrong. Anything else is a lie.
I'm a technical PHB. I started working as a System Admin back on SCO (the original) Xenix in the late 80's. I'm still fairly technical and hands on, but now, at 36, I manage a team and make purchasing decisions, etc., as well.
This is simply WAY WAY WAY too early to talk about stagnating the 2.4 kernel. It feeds directly into the "open source is really a bunch of geeks who are far more interested in shiny new baubles than core business requirements!"
2.6 isn't out yet. And it's not known when it will stabilize (my definition of stable is when revs "live" for more than 30 days).
It's quite possible that a 'stable' 2.6 won't be out for a year. Then it needs to be tested, and a migration plan (since this is NOT a 'build and drop in' kernel) put into place, and that tested.
Easily 18 months or more -- and that's assuming that as soon as the kernel stabilizes, it becomes a company priority to migrate.
Again, MS loves to tout "with open source, you have to build your business around your solution, rather than building your solution around your business."
Big companies don't want to be on this treadmill, they don't want to develop and maintain their own kernel team and kernel tree -- they want stuff that WORKS. And having your own dev organization is a fast way to spend more money than buying someone else's solution.
Hopefully this won't come to pass. But sadly, the fuel's been added to the fire.
Steve
While I like Linux, I would never converting the 500+ machines in my data center to the 2.6.0 kernel.
...especially given that this isn't a pure 'drop and drag' kernel in my extant environment. I can't just compile it, boot it, and have everything work.
I don't consider any new kernel series to qualify for production until you see at least 30 days between kernel revs. I think that scored on 2.4 at about 2.4.9 or so...
I doubt I'll consider 2.6 kernels until June/July 2004.
Steve
Sadly, once you become a public company, "ethics" other than not breaking the law are immaterial. You would be personally liable for the $1 billion you effectively "stole" from the stockholders, and SHOULD go to jail.
If you want to play the game by your rules (which is fine), do NOT become a public company.
For a low-end, simple, ticketing system, PT is ideal. Primarily because, unlike RT, it's geared as a ticketing system rather than a form of bug-tracking. Thus, it automatically generates the types of reports that you'll want -- everything from
"what tickets are still open"
"what's our MTTR for the month"
"How many tickets are going into each queue?"
For 30-50 tickets a day, you can just run it against the local database and back up that flat file...
But yeah, I know, it's windows, so it'll be the wrong answer.
Steve
This is actually one of the things that concerns me the most. We can talk about minor details all we want, but the fact that they are selling stock is a big thing.
If they are found to be "pumping and dumping" these guys will go to jail. We know that, and they know that. I don't know too many folks who enjoy going to jail.
These guys are in fact betting their personal freedom that this is not a baseless claim. That's why I don't rule SCO's claim out at this time.
Actually, you've hit part but not the true reason for the big wings.
The big wings were for launching from Vandenberg, yes, but not because of the "one orbit return" but rather because of geography -- the downrange abort site (because the Americas are actually a diagonal line from Alaska to Argentina) was Easter Island, and thus a 1500nm glide range was needed.
Launching from the Cape in non-Polar orbits gives you lots of sites from the Azores to Morocco and stuff.
Steve
Cringely's close, but off the mark.
1) Pricing: Mac's are significantly more money. And if you thought the Microsoft OS costs were bad, looks at Apple's. OS X launched in 2001, and, if you were a 10.0 buyer, while 10.1 was a free upgrade, 10.2 wasn't, and 10.3 is coming fast! And from the end user perspective, these have all been largely mandatory upgrades -- many apps now won't work unless you are running 10.2, for example.
2) Usability. While there are a lot of things that work smoothly under OS X, there are still some issues, ESPECIALLY with Windows interoperability -- and any company of size is going to have a significant overlap. So you'd have to train IT folks (or hire new ones), and still have some userland issues.
Another serious concern for IT has been how quickly Apple has outdated machines. Didn't we just see today that a number of machines aren't going to have proper functionality? Again, this is on fairly new machinery! Concerns have to be that Apple is quickly going to invalidate the G3 and G4 (over the next 24-30 months).
Those are my thoughts as a fairly PHB who started using OS X on a TiBook back in 2001.
Steve
My wife works from home and we had a Minolta 2200 last year (before she changed employers).
We put 1600 pages through it, never did run out of toner (although, as others have mentioned, toner is EXPENSIVE, almost as much as the printer!).
But it worked well, didn't jam, and provided decent color -- not photo-printer quality, but good for just about anything else. My wife produced SKU charts with product images on it and got numerous prases on the quality.
I'd recommend it in a flash.
Steve
There's a significant difference between the two products.
With VNC, you must have access to your machine. If it's behind a corporate firewall that doesn't allow inbound connections (i.e., virtually all firewalls unless you personally control them), VNC isn't going to work in this scenario.
GoToMyPC, though, utilizes a type of push technology. You run a 'client' on the PC you want to remote control. Said 'client' establishes a connection to the central servers at GoToMyPC.com via HTTP (since many corporate firewalls allow outbound HTTP access without issue).
Then you, from the remote machine, go to the GTMPC(had to give up typing the whole thing) servers with YOUR web browser, and they do a form of proxy that, voila, allows you to communicate with a machine inside the coorporate firewall.
It's also a serious security breach that I suspect many companies would frown on if they found you using it -- ultimately, everything passes though GTMPC -- do you trust them with all your data?
Steve
As an Operations guy, man, I have wanted something like this for years. Full featured enough to handle remotely connecting in for sudden downtime events, yet not nearly as large as a laptop. With 1xRTT, it means you can take it into a restaurant and, if you pager goes off, be able to check system status without having to clear off the entire top of the table.
:)
Not to mention that it makes checking Moviefone.com a lot slicker than the current PDA browsers are.
It's not going to be for everyone, but for those who need it, doggone, it's the cat's meow!
And it'll impress the babes
Stev
The language of the contract doesn't surprise me. At least MS allows transferrability. There are a number of companies (BEA, for example) that don't allow transfers at all!
But they aren't ruling out "let's talk about it." Clearly MS knows that the harder they push, the harder it will be to deal with an ongoing customer. But let's say we get a customer who doesn't want to pay one thin cent to MS for a new deal on what they purchase. Perhaps the "new" buyer says "forget about upgrades, we'll move to Linux in the next 18 months, so we don't care!"
In that case, MS is stating that the original purchaser must fulfill the terms of the deal they signed. In other words, they are protecting themselves from a scenario where a company negotiates a big, massive, volume deal. Then they sell or close down half the company and say "hey, we are only going to pay (Contract cost * percentage of remaining systems) dollars now."
That is, getting the big volume discount on a smaller number of systems.
Virtually every contract out there states that you are obligated to fulfill its terms. This is no different.
Steve
You're right in that you CAN do many, if not most of these things now.
:) It's like CPUs. They are n ewer, and faster, making the computing process better. But they don't really care about the details of why the new CPU is faster.
But my 60 year old parents will never figure it out. And honestly, they're not really interested in doing so. They just want to sit down, log in (if even that's not disabled, since their computer is at home), and USE their computer.
A computer that becomes more stable without them having to learn more about their computer is a good computer
The theory of OSS is very attractiuve right now. The reality, however, is a little more dissapointing in many places.
Let me differentiate servers where you have a group actively developing a platform (for example, you have an entire team writing Java code and want to run it) as comapred to the massive internal IT infrastructure which composes most of the IT at a large company.
In those areas, where you don't have developers, rescources (people) are few and changes happen slowly, because of the impact to many people, tons of which don't really know that much about computers except what they do to get their job done.
Here, people don't use beta versions of software. They wait for final releases to come out. Then they start testing and figuring out how to deploy a final release. Pretty soon, it's 18 months later when the deployment is reasonably complete.
Then they expect not to have to redeploy for at least a couple of years -- and three is better! (This is the REAL reason there are places just coming off of Win98 and Office 98...)
There are few Open Source projects that are giving much, if any support to 2 and 3 year old versions of the software. Many bugs are simply fixed in later versions which require upgrading. Upgrades that often require a whole slew of changes and planning to deploy.
This is where the theory/reality interface does poorly. While CIOs would love to roll out Open Source software, when presented with a realisitc budget for increased IT staffing to support the shoter life of the software, they typically choke.
Don't forget that from an accounting standpoint, software is viewed as the purchase of an asset. Salaries are considered a pure operating loss. Ask a CIO if he would rather buy a million dollars of software or spent a million dollars on salary, and believe me, he'll buy the software.
Steve
Some things to remember about pilot salaries:
1) They can only work until age 60. FAA rule.
2) They typically spend 8-10 years before making $75,000/year. My buddy is 32 years old, has flown for a 'regional' since 1997, and is still only making $50,000/year. And with the downturn since 9/11, it could easily be 7-10 years before he moves up the ladder (and he'll have to take a pay cut when moving to a 'major' airline the first few years).
3) Any number of health conditions can end your career without warning, or just leave you unpaid. Have a heart attack at 55? Forget it, you're done.
4) These guys have to be tested in a full-motion simulator every 6 months. Blow more something here, you could find yourself out of a job.
5) No ability to "laterally" change jobs. If you fly for an airline (such as Braniff) and have 15 years seniority and are a 747 captain, and Braniff goes out of business, you're new job will have you sitting in the co-pilots seat of a DC-9 or 737, making 36 grand a year again.
6) Oh yeah, you're in charge of the lives of hundreds of people each day. Your mistakes don't cause downtime, they cause DEATH.
Now tell me again why pilots are overpaid?
Steve
You should be concerned.
While we all chatter about "monopoly" and "abuse" and so forth from Microsoft, the truth is that Sun, Apple, and Netscape were, until the emergence of Microsoft and Windows, the three great RAPISTS of the common consumer.
Remember how brutally expensive Sun workstations were? And how Macs were three and four times the cost of a PC?
And what about Netscape charging 10 THOUSAND dollars for their HTTPS-capable server?
All three of these companies want to hurt Microsoft, not to compete, but to get their HUGE, MASSIVE PROFIT MARGINS back!
While we chatter about Microsoft, the TRUTH is, they've never bent over and drilled nearly has hard as the 'injured' parties.
All I can say is, with judges like this, LUBE UP!
Steve