I was active in a very minor way with Linux when I worked at Sun. The management just didn't get Linux at the time. It is moves like this that will be necessary to get numbers for Desktop Linux. This is also the sort of thing that is going to be necessary to make the $100 PC happen-and the $50 PC happen. For all of their flaws, Sun and Walmart may be getting that they are companies that benefit by emergence of really low cost personal computing--because sale of really cheap pc's means more sale of servers and software.
I would like to write a letter in support of you. The people that should be legally hassled here is the software vendor whose fraud you exposed-not you.
IMHO a pile of letters coming from all parts of the world in your support might send a signal. I also think that Amnesty International should be contacted here. This is even more sleezy than most of the stuff they take on--in this case you appear to be hassled not because of your political opinions, but because French officials are using their offices on the behest of corrupt corporate interests.
The thing is: Shuttleworth wasn't selected because he was the "right" person to do those experiments-we was selected because he had the checkbook to buy that job. In this case, the pretense really does sound different-the company needed someone to go up and do some experiments-and the CEO decided he wanted to do that job himself-and is properly qualified.
I don't see anything much on there that is uplifting or even entertaining. As a 45 year old male, I see a lot more on TV that is either distasteful, insulting or annoying. IMHO it is good thing that young men are getting away from corporate controlled media.
This company sounds like they have highly legitimate business reasons to have a guy in space. The CEO might not be the ideal person for that job-but he signs the checks. Shuttleworth and Tito may have been essentially tourists-but this marks the first time legitimate private business has sent an individual in space. I wonder if this trip will be seen as a corporate junket or as having good Return On Investment?
"Riscorp was the Sarasota insurance company whose principals were indicted and convicted for election fraud for illegally donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to candidates. Riscorp asked its employees to make donations, and then reimbursed them". From an article about Ms. Harris-the sleezebag that helped appoint George Bush president-and had earlier in her career helped out Riscorp's management.
I do suggest you seek legal counsel. Your management may have made you an accomplice to a felony. At the same time, if you report this crime and it doesn't get picked up for investigation(and most reports don't), you would most likely loose this job--so I'd consider your options here very carefully. The above is not legal advice-but I suggestion that you get such advice.
I would look for an attorney with experience handling high level whistle blowing cases and lawsuits associated with such cases. You may have grounds for a lawsuit against your employers management since it appears plausible that your employer is making clear that commission of a felony will play an important role in your future at that company.
This really does happen. I worked on an investigation of insurance fraud(Bill Griffin at Riscorp). The CEO was convicted and incarerated based on illegal campaign donations-basically giving bonuses in _exactly_ the amount of campaign donations after taxes. Now, in that case, the donations were to state candidates that handled Riscorp's regulatory environment.
Where are mass market data gloves?
on
Two-Fisted Computing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It shouldn't be that hard to digitize every possible movement of the human hand is capable of -and provide reasonable tactile feedback(say vibration). That would open a lot of gaming and teleoperation potential if it were mass marketed.
Communications Act of 1934 helped create the Bell System monopoly and ensured that broadcasting would be dominated by large corporations. Now, there is considerable debate on the constitutionality of important aspects of that law. It is understandable that the Federal government has jurisdiction to regulate use of radio transmissions that cross state lines, but it is more questionable whether the federal government should have anything much to say about companies or local governments that do little outside their own jurisdiction.
The area that I'm concerned about here: will this regulation retard development of free wireless services like The Personal Telco Project.
When you add in the time that 1) folks spend watching movies 2) the time folks listen to radio (especially
while driving)
There is also the time folks spend reading newspapers or magazines-which aren't quite as passive a media--or the mass market websites/wire services.
Now, granted, a lot of folks turn the TV or radio on as background noise while they do something else. Still, we are really looking at a culture that is completely immersed in mass media--the overwhelming majority of which is sponsored by various corporate organizations with their own agendas.
The decline of US IT is serious. US job growth isn't even keeping up with immigration. There has been substantial skills based immigration in IT even with declining overall employment-this was supported by huge political donations.
The brother of a friend of mine fits this description fairly well. He graduated from the University of North Dakota with a degree in Computer Science. Spent a year looking for time for a job in his field, couldn't find one and is now back at Walmart in his home town.
I hate to think about how someone like that must feel when they read lies like those in the Wired Magazine article.
Yes, but Bushs's Guestworker program will bring the joys of H-1b to the entire population. It is really very simple, the jobs left for Americans are equal to existing jobs, plus jobs growth minus immigration and outsourcing. Now, Bush wants to claim that his wonderful trade policies are going to create lots of jobs any day now-never mind the $500 Billion/year trade deficits. Still even if there were not deficits and outsourcing ceased, a bad immigration policy (i.e. skills based visas in job areas with flat job growth) will reduce wages markedly over time. Outsourcing is really minor by comparison in its effect compared to immigration policy(or lack thereof).
Java from the start was _way_ overhyped IMHO. The big thing that Java was supposed to do early on: provide a development platform by which developers could do applications applications that would run either on the client or the server. The big problem is that Java never really delivered on the client end. Applets run, but they are so poorly engineered, in the words of Marc Andreeson "client side java is dead'--and Javascript has take much of the role it was anticipated that Java would take on the client.
I previous poster made legitimate points that Java brought garbage collection, reflection and runtime safety into the popular eye. However, there are other widely used, well-standardized languages with those same features, namely Javascript.
C# may be better in key respects than Java, but I have trouble conceiving of C# as a really open standard. The ECMA standard for Javascript is already supported by a variety of companies(i.e. IBM, Lotus, Microsoft, AOL/Time/Warner/Netscape) in a variety of products.
I'm a DBA and Perl/Python programmer. I've used Java for class projects at CMU. Java and C# both strike me as overly complicate for most of the work I do on a day by day basis. Javscript isn't there yet-but I can see that it might get there. There is a real niche for a well standardized, universally available scripting language that just hasn't been filled yet. If a small fraction of the engineering effort applied to Java were applied in this direction, I'd expect big benefits.
My brother and father are both Union pipefitters(same union there as plumbers) in Missouri. Last I checked, there counterparts in the pay area were getting upwards of $45/hour(with nice benefits I might add).
Now, that occupation _is_ much more cyclic than IT has been until the effects of the H-1b/L-1 expansion set in 4 years ago.
Now for non-union guys, rates vary considerably with business skills and technical skills in the occupation. For union guys, what varies isn't just rate, but how much folks get to work when work is scarce(folks with high demand skills work more regularly).
What I'm surprised wasn't mentioned here is the role of anti-corporate sentiment in promoting Open Source. Any company, big or small can support Open Source products. No company can really control the direction of Open Source development. According to the polls I've seen, 60-70% of Americans think larger corporations have too much power-Open Source has the potential to break some of the major strongholds of corporate influence in America and the world.
Whether you agree or disagree with anti-corporate sentiment, this may be a bigger issue than anti-American sentiment. I think Andreeson missed it because he's too close to the corporate world.
Netflix has a search feature that suggests movies based on your previous ratings of films. This is the type of thing that really ought to be applied to search engines and web logs. What I'd really like is the ability to say search for eateries near where I am that folks with tastes like mine liked--or posts on a weblog that folks with tastes like mine liked.
IMHO one big thing that was missed here is the real potential behind technologies like Firefox/Mozilla and Javascript.
Those technologies offer a standards based means of doing UI's. The web isn't going away, and gradually browsers are getting closer to what we can do on the desktop. There are folks having some luck extending Javascript with Smalltalk features. There already exist well supported compilers for Javascript-and those could be highly optimized with the right effort.
Javscript is _already_ well supported by Microsoft(they are supporting it as one of the major languages for the Windows Scripting Host). IMHO VBScript is just plain too buggy and ugly.
IMHO languages like Python/Perl/Ruby the best mainstream tools for Server Side Development(though Mozart-Oz has some interesting features). Client side? The browser appears to be the client of the future--and folks doing desktop stuff had best figure out how to deal with that.
I have worked in environments in which criminal gangs were quite active-specifically banks that process credit cards(www.outlander.com for my background).
The claim that Open Source Projects are especially vulnerable to infiltration by folks with malicious intent strikes me as strange.
We have large companies like Oracle and Microsoft extremely dependent upon technical help from politically volatile parts of the world(i.e. India/Pakistan where there was serious threat of nuclear war not long ago)--places where criminal terrorist organizations can operations they can't in a developed country. In India, there are for example tens of thousands of people that have been declared legally dead so someone can seize their property-and the victims can't clear up the issue years later.
It isn't an issue of intent. Some overseas criminal organizations have a reputation for blackmailing their countrymen that don't want to participate in criminal activity-holding relatives as hostage.
Can the average US company really do an effective background check in this kind of environment?
With an open source project, at least I have a reasonable chance of understanding who the actually engineers of project are-and I can judge the security based on the reputations of the people involved. I _can_ get independent examination of the code involved if I'm willing to pay for the service.
Large "US" companies have this habit of substituting the cheapest possible resources with no consideration of long term consequences. How much is the word of a Larry Ellison or Bill Gates really worth on the subject of security? Would you bet your life on their judgement?
I work with Windows Server every day. It walks, it talks--but its terminally ill. Maybe they'll find a way to save it, but they've spent a _lot_ of money trying to beat a free product. I just don't see that they have much.
When I got into the computer biz over 20 years ago, the first PC's were coming out. An older engineer said to me:
"I don't know what the Personal Computer of the future will be like, but I do know what it will be called: the phone".
Looks to me like Microsoft is caught in a squeeze play here: They have pretty much lost the server business--and now they are looking the market in smaller devices. I suspect Microsoft will be around for a while, but the hegenomy of Microsoft is already doomed(unless they do something like they did in the last presidential election and buy a lot of politicians).
If H-1b/L-1 are so great, how come US tech employment has decreased since those programs were expanded? I see little evidence those programs were really about bringing top flight talent to the US(O-1, or outstanding Scientist visas could do that), but more about providing multi-national corporations with a work force that can't change jobs and can be gotten out of the country quickly when investigations start. For example, much of Enron's IT staff were H-1b workers.
What I find most curious is the incredibly rapid turnaround in opinion seen on Slashdot. During the dot-com boom, everyone was happy to see Open Source, a truly global phenomenon, bloooming. But now I see this strange bifurcation of views. Open Source software created by people from all over the globe is still good. On the other hand global commerce, in which the lowest-cost providers of goods and services win, is being villified.
I can easily imagine how someone might be in favor of free trade(free movement of goods accross international borders) but oppose open borders(and stuff like H-1b). I like Open Source. I don't approve of an the H-1b expansion(I think it was way too much and has been greatly abused). I also don't like the huge trade deficits and government borrowing facilitated by dropping of tariffs. Those may be symptomatic that the US tax structure is _seriously_ out of wack. What I'd really like to see personally is imposition of tariffs just sufficient to close the trade gap, a balancing of the US budget and a move to revamp the US tax system so US export products would be moer competitive and tariffs-particularly with countries like Japan and the EU could gradually be lowered. The only reason IMHO for running a big trade deficit is stuff like rebuilding a country after a war. This current trade deficit is just propping up bad government policies.
Slashdot Mirror
I was active in a very minor way with Linux when I worked at Sun. The management just didn't get Linux at the time. It is moves like this that will be necessary to get numbers for Desktop Linux. This is also the sort of thing that is going to be necessary to make the $100 PC happen-and the $50 PC happen. For all of their flaws, Sun and Walmart may be getting that they are companies that benefit by emergence of really low cost personal computing--because sale of really cheap pc's means more sale of servers and software.
I would like to write a letter in support of you. The people that should be legally hassled here is the software vendor whose fraud you exposed-not
you.
IMHO a pile of letters coming from all parts of the world in your support might send a signal. I also think that Amnesty International should be contacted here. This is even more sleezy than most of the stuff they take on--in this case you appear to be hassled not because of your political opinions, but because French officials are using their offices on the behest of corrupt corporate interests.
The thing is: Shuttleworth wasn't selected because he was the "right" person to do those experiments-we was selected because he had the checkbook to buy that job. In this case, the pretense really does sound different-the company needed someone to go up and do some experiments-and the CEO decided he wanted to do that job himself-and is properly qualified.
I don't see anything much on there that is uplifting or even entertaining. As a 45 year old male, I see a lot more on TV that is either distasteful, insulting or annoying. IMHO it is good thing that young men are getting away from corporate controlled media.
This company sounds like they have highly legitimate business reasons to have a guy in space. The CEO might not be the ideal person for that job-but he signs the checks. Shuttleworth and Tito may have been essentially tourists-but this marks the first time legitimate private business has sent an individual in space. I wonder if this trip will be seen as a corporate junket or as having good Return On Investment?
I do suggest you seek legal counsel. Your management may have made you an accomplice to a felony. At the same time, if you report this crime and it doesn't get picked up for investigation(and most reports don't), you would most likely loose this job--so I'd consider your options here very carefully. The above is not legal advice-but I suggestion that you get such advice.
I would look for an attorney with experience handling high level whistle blowing cases and lawsuits associated with such cases. You may have grounds for a lawsuit against your employers management since it appears plausible that your employer is making clear that commission of a felony will play an important role in your future at that company.
This really does happen. I worked on an investigation of insurance fraud(Bill Griffin at Riscorp). The CEO was convicted and incarerated based on illegal campaign donations-basically giving bonuses in _exactly_ the amount of campaign donations after taxes. Now, in that case, the donations were to state candidates that handled Riscorp's regulatory environment.
It shouldn't be that hard to digitize every possible movement of the human hand is capable of -and provide reasonable tactile feedback(say vibration). That would open a lot of gaming and teleoperation potential if it were mass marketed.
I'm amazed it is taking so long to get there.
The area that I'm concerned about here: will this regulation retard development of free wireless services like The Personal Telco Project.
Isn't that up to the people of that local government? I don't see any constitutional authority here for the feds to regulate this area.
When you add in the time that
1) folks spend watching movies
2) the time folks listen to radio (especially
while driving)
There is also the time folks spend reading newspapers or magazines-which aren't quite as passive a media--or the mass market websites/wire services.
Now, granted, a lot of folks turn the TV or radio on as background noise while they do something else. Still, we are really looking at a culture that is completely immersed in mass media--the overwhelming majority of which is sponsored by various corporate organizations with their own agendas.
He did a national search and also an extensive local search on the west coast.
The decline of US IT is serious. US job growth isn't even keeping up with immigration. There has been substantial skills based immigration in IT even with declining overall employment-this was supported by huge political donations.
The brother of a friend of mine fits this description fairly well. He graduated from the University of North Dakota with a degree in Computer Science. Spent a year looking for time for a job in his field, couldn't find one and is now back at Walmart in his home town.
I hate to think about how someone like that must feel when they read lies like those in the Wired Magazine article.
Yes, but Bushs's Guestworker program will bring the joys of H-1b to the entire population. It is really very simple, the jobs left for Americans are equal to existing jobs, plus jobs growth minus immigration and outsourcing. Now, Bush wants to claim that his wonderful trade policies are going to create lots of jobs any day now-never mind the $500 Billion/year trade deficits. Still even if there were not deficits and outsourcing ceased, a bad immigration policy (i.e. skills based visas in job areas with flat job growth) will reduce wages markedly over time. Outsourcing is really minor by comparison in its effect compared to immigration policy(or lack thereof).
provide a development platform by which developers could do applications applications that would run either on the client or the server. The big problem is that Java never really delivered on the client end. Applets run, but they are so poorly engineered, in the words of Marc Andreeson "client side java is dead'--and Javascript has take much of the role it was anticipated that Java would take on the client.
I previous poster made legitimate points that Java brought garbage collection, reflection and runtime safety into the popular eye. However, there are other widely used, well-standardized languages with those same features, namely Javascript.
C# may be better in key respects than Java, but I have trouble conceiving of C# as a really open standard. The ECMA standard for Javascript is already supported by a variety of companies(i.e. IBM, Lotus, Microsoft, AOL/Time/Warner/Netscape) in a variety of products.
The folks at have shown that they can extend Javascript quite a bit-even in browser implementations.For all of the talk of C#, one thing that is interesting about
I'm a DBA and Perl/Python programmer. I've used Java for class projects at CMU. Java and C# both strike me as overly complicate for most of the work I do on a day by day basis. Javscript isn't there yet-but I can see that it might get there. There is a real niche for a well standardized, universally available scripting language that just hasn't been filled yet. If a small fraction of the engineering effort applied to Java were applied in this direction, I'd expect big benefits.
My brother and father are both Union pipefitters(same union there as plumbers) in Missouri. Last I checked, there counterparts in the pay area were getting upwards of $45/hour(with nice benefits I might add).
Now, that occupation _is_ much more cyclic than IT has been until the effects of the H-1b/L-1 expansion set in 4 years ago.
Now for non-union guys, rates vary considerably with business skills and technical skills in the occupation. For union guys, what varies isn't just rate, but how much folks get to work when work is scarce(folks with high demand skills work more regularly).
What I'm surprised wasn't mentioned here is the role of anti-corporate sentiment in promoting Open Source. Any company, big or small can support Open Source products. No company can really control the direction of Open Source development. According to the polls I've seen, 60-70% of Americans think larger corporations have too much power-Open Source has the potential to break some of the major strongholds of corporate influence in America and the world.
Whether you agree or disagree with anti-corporate sentiment, this may be a bigger issue than anti-American sentiment. I think Andreeson missed it because he's too close to the corporate world.
Netflix has a search feature that suggests movies based on your previous ratings of films. This is the type of thing that really ought to be applied to search engines and web logs. What I'd really like is the ability to say search for eateries near where I am that folks with tastes like mine liked--or posts on a weblog that folks with tastes like mine liked.
Those technologies offer a standards based means of doing UI's. The web isn't going away, and gradually browsers are getting closer to what we can do on the desktop. There are folks having some luck extending Javascript with Smalltalk features.
There already exist well supported compilers for Javascript-and those could be highly optimized with the right effort.
Javscript is _already_ well supported by Microsoft(they are supporting it as one of the major languages for the Windows Scripting Host). IMHO VBScript is just plain too buggy and ugly.
IMHO languages like Python/Perl/Ruby the best mainstream tools for Server Side Development(though Mozart-Oz has some interesting features). Client side? The browser appears to be the client of the future--and folks doing desktop stuff had best figure out how to deal with that.
I have worked in environments in which criminal gangs were quite active-specifically banks that process credit cards(www.outlander.com for my background).
The claim that Open Source Projects are especially vulnerable to infiltration by folks with malicious intent strikes me as strange.
We have large companies like Oracle and Microsoft extremely dependent upon technical help from politically volatile parts of the world(i.e. India/Pakistan where there was serious threat of nuclear war not long ago)--places where criminal terrorist organizations can operations they can't in a developed country. In India, there are for example tens of thousands of people that have been declared legally dead so someone can seize their property-and the victims can't clear up the issue years later.
It isn't an issue of intent. Some overseas criminal organizations have a reputation for blackmailing their countrymen that don't want to participate in criminal activity-holding relatives as hostage.
Can the average US company really do an effective background check in this kind of environment?
With an open source project, at least I have a reasonable chance of understanding who the actually engineers of project are-and I can judge the security based on the reputations of the people involved. I _can_ get independent examination of the code involved if I'm willing to pay for the service.
Large "US" companies have this habit of substituting the cheapest possible resources with no consideration of long term consequences. How much is the word of a Larry Ellison or Bill Gates really worth on the subject of security? Would you bet your life on their judgement?
I work with Windows Server every day. It walks, it talks--but its terminally ill. Maybe they'll find a way to save it, but they've spent a _lot_ of money trying to beat a free product. I just don't see that they have much.
"I don't know what the Personal Computer of the future will be like, but I do know what it will be called: the phone".
Looks to me like Microsoft is caught in a squeeze play here: They have pretty much lost the server business--and now they are looking the market in smaller devices. I suspect Microsoft will be around for a while, but the hegenomy of Microsoft is already doomed(unless they do something like they did in the last presidential election and buy a lot of politicians).
If H-1b/L-1 are so great, how come US tech employment has decreased since those programs were expanded? I see little evidence those programs were really about bringing top flight talent to the US(O-1, or outstanding Scientist visas could do that), but more about providing multi-national corporations with a work force that can't change jobs and can be gotten out of the country quickly when investigations start. For example, much of Enron's IT staff were H-1b workers.
I can easily imagine how someone might be in favor of free trade(free movement of goods accross international borders) but oppose open borders(and stuff like H-1b). I like Open Source. I don't approve of an the H-1b expansion(I think it was way too much and has been greatly abused). I also don't like the huge trade deficits and government borrowing facilitated by dropping of tariffs. Those may be symptomatic that the US tax structure is _seriously_ out of wack. What I'd really like to see personally is imposition of tariffs just sufficient to close the trade gap, a balancing of the US budget and a move to revamp the US tax system so US export products would be moer competitive and tariffs-particularly with countries like Japan and the EU could gradually be lowered. The only reason IMHO for running a big trade deficit is stuff like rebuilding a country after a war. This current trade deficit is just propping up bad government policies.