You haven't silenced anybody. Everyone's just ignoring you. I, for instance, just had a lovely weekend without encountering anybody with overinflated egos from their meager accomplishments.
I briefly considered an actual point-by-point illustration of how ludicrous the "hosts file as security" idea is for modern computers, then I clicked "read more", and remembered why I don't actually even read your posts anymore. Once you start copying every message you can think of, insulting anyone who disagrees with you, and quoting non-sequitur lines from movies, I lose all interest in a discussion based on merits, because I don't expect you to participate meaningfully.
I get it. You think you're an admin god, and everyone whose opinions differ must be stupid, and it is your duty as a deity to point out that they are inferior. When mods delete your post, it must be because they're intimidated, and certainly couldn't be that the offense in your comments outweighed any useful content. That's fine. You're certainly entitled to your own opinions of yourself, regardless of whether I think they're crazy or not. Likewise, everyone else (myself included) is entitled to think that you're insane, if they so choose. I personally respect your obvious knowledge of the deep workings of Windows and video drivers, but I find your comments too stunningly arrogant to actually read.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt: If your next message is under 15em vertically on my display, and free from insults, I'll read it, in the hopes of having a reasonable discussion. Otherwise, I have no desire to speak with you again.
That's what I'm seeing, too, pretty much. Australian government says that American servers are insecure, American government takes offense at that, Slashdot fans the flames of government conspiracy theories...
Grainger said a pre-existing capacity in the brain may allow them to recognize patterns and objects
That reminds me of a column I read a while ago suggesting exactly that, and offering an evolutionary basis for it, along with an explanation for conspiracy theories. I guess this means that literacy begets superstition?
I find it amusing how there's a double standard for quality when it comes to A/V... In a home theater system, marketing a device as "all-digital" implies that it offers uncompromising quality. On the recording side, saying something's digital is seen to imply that it's losing some extra part of the sound that can apparently only be captured in an analog system. This is a debate that's been raging on for all of digital audio's life, and it doesn't look like the madness will stop anytime soon.
I can appreciate that an old audiophile wants things to sound exactly how he expects them, which means keeping his old analog system with all its defects, noise, and nostalgia, but let's not force this analog nonsense on future generations under the guise of "better quality".
But shouldn't it be relatively easy to fire those problem employees for incompetence/failure to perform job duties/failure to meet quota/etc?
It should be, but it isn't. From the law's perspective, they got their assigned work done, in the assigned time. Requiring anything more (like "do the work in the same time someone else could") isn't always legal, and opens the door for nasty litigation if they are fired.
The company was small enough that it was still owned by an actual human being, and not some faceless corporate monstrosity whose only concern is short-term shareholder profits.
I do prefer small companies, but I've had my dealings with faceless places, too. There are still face-bearing humans setting local policy, but they don't (think they) have as much freedom to do whatever they think is decent. I've yet to encounter a workplace where the supervisor really didn't care about their workers, but I've seen plenty where they're stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place, and they have to lean on the workers to meet demands.
That's a huge problem with the immediate supervisors. It does not necessarily apply to the rest of the TSA, and the fallacy weakens the argument against the TSA as a whole.
From a devil's-advocate perspective, I see a disgruntled screener who encountered some problems at her station, and rather than working within the system to solve those problems, she tries for a while then jumps to the scorched-earth strategy of embarrassing the agency. Then, to make sure her managers know that she's trying to embarrass them, she copies the letter to them. Any credibility she has is shot at that point, as it becomes clear that her goal is to blackmail the TSA into changing, rather than persuade.
That leads back to my original point: this interview isn't going to help. It sounds like a muckraker interviewing someone incapable of navigating office politics, who's skirting the system because she got fired, looking to become a martyr for self-justification.
I respect your campaign and certainly hope for the ultimate goal, but I question your methods. Ridding ourselves of the TSA is a political problem, and politics will be necessary - not abridged stories and deductive fallacies.
I'm not so adament about the need for disclosure, as long as the statement made is absolutely honest. While it does explain how you came to know the product, it also undermines the honesty of the message. Rather than being a person of integrity, whose endorsement is a heartfelt approval, you appear to be a sold-out shill who'll say whatever his boss tells him to.
Twice, actually. Once it was actually my project being shilled (I liked the project and thought it was useful - though I did end up getting fired from there, I'll still gladly tout its benefits in the appropriate context), and once I hadn't bothered trying the product. The latter one sucked, and I told the other team exactly why, and how I thought it could be improved. I got called into a meeting with other employees who'd complained, and the project lead took notes while we ran through the demo showing what we didn't like. The project went back for another round of revisions, and eventually came out much better for it. I never talked about the project publicly, and didn't get fired, either.
Dishonest ass-kissing will get you promoted, because you make bosses like you personally. Honest critiquing with respect for politics will get you respect, because you show that you're dedicated to the company goals.
Try the app. See if it's really worth saying good things about. If so, I'd go ahead and praise it as deserved. If not, send a message to the sales/QA/service department as appropriate saying why you can't promote the app. Keep a copy of that message just in case you have to show that you were fired for raising an ethical concern.
Of course, encourage others to do the same, and mention your plan to superiors. They might just admire your behavior, and suggest it to more of the company. Few managers really want to be the guy to let a bad PR situation loose, so they might jump at the chance to prove they're more ethical than that nasty sales department - especially if the app is actually decent, and there's a good chance it'll get astroturfed anyway.
I will bet you that these "bottleneck" employees were being paid an hourly wage and would be sent home early if the day's work were completed early.
I'll take that bet. They were hourly, but on a preset schedule. The company owner believed in not screwing over employees, so all the "regulars" got a 40-hour schedule, mostly regardless of workload. Sending people home early was strongly discouraged. There were many small jobs that could be picked up after an order was underway, like refilling supplies or sorting order-tracking papers. That's what the rest of the production line was doing while waiting for the trickle of orders to pass through the bottlenecks.
Security researchers and customers have been questioning why Apple hasn't yet provided a fix for the malware even though Flashback has been around in one form or another for more than six months now.
Because they're doing the same thing Microsoft does with its slow-as-molasses patches: testing for side effects, on every major application, on every piece of hardware they can get their hands on.
Nope. It was done about three months ago, but it does claim that the firing process started after only one week. Three months to get termination paperwork in order sounds more like government to me.
After Jennifer was repeatedly ignored when she brought these serious issues up with management, she contacted her representatives in Congress for assistance after which the TSA promptly began the process of firing her! A process, by the way, which took the TSA three months, during which Jennifer was forced to sit around on the taxpayer’s dime and do absolutely nothing. Fortunately, Jennifer turns in her uniform today.
...
Jennifer: I sent my letter on Jan. 1, and I came back from sick leave about a week later, and I was immediately removed from screening duties.
Again, the timeline simply doesn't make sense. Only a week for a representative to track down the supervisor to get her removed from screening, but three more months to go through the process?
Maybe she was being fired for insanity... instead of contacting any regional managers or higher-up supervisors, she jumps right to Congress.
I'll second the "not shared" opinion, though perhaps not with such strong language.
At-will cuts both ways. I've been fired without notice, and I've quit without notice. On the one hand, it is unsettling to have absolutely no job security. I know I can be fired at any time. On the other hand, I know that I'm not losing anything if I quit. I can't be contractually obligated to give back anything but company property.
I've also worked under an employment contract, in a state without at-will laws. In that company, there were several employees who would be the bottleneck for the whole production line. They would intentionally work slower, so they'd keep a single job to do for the whole day, instead of having to find another task when they ran out of work. Where running a batch of incoming orders should take about 2 hours, they'd somehow manage to make it last all day.
Personally, I think at-will laws are a reasonable compromise. Employers (and co-workers) aren't stuck with bad employees, and employees can leave bad companies.
Look, I dislike the TSA as much as anybody, and I've complained about it to my representatives, and I hope it dies as quickly as possible, but everything about this story annoys me.
A guy with an obvious bias against an entity interviews a recently-fired employee, and uncovers terrible details about that entity! Oh no! Who could have guessed?
The ex-employee's letter to Congress was the reason she got fired - in a time span of one week. Right. I'm sure the Congressman has their interns sorting mail, looking for disgruntled employees, notifying the appropriate chain of supervisors, and working hard to get people fired - and they can get that done in under a week.
No SOP manual? Hey, at least you know one's been written somewhere. You could ask your supervisor, or move up the chain to their supervisor, and so on, until you find out where you can get one. There's no sign that that was attempted, just an "I don't know where it was" statement.
As much as I want to see the TSA dismantled, this interview isn't going to help. It sounds like a muckraker interviewing someone incapable of navigating office politics, who's skirting the system because she got fired, looking to become a martyr for self-justification. This isn't journalism.
As a great fan of open source and community-based development, I have to sadly hang my head and agree.
I have some investments that, due to their particular details, have stumped multiple tax preparers. The (professional) software I've looked at doesn't even support this particular item, so I have little hope for my beloved open source. Even if there was a community-developed tax program, I personally wouldn't trust its accuracy over time. Yes, I could go through myself and verify that all of the year's changes to the tax laws were made to the code base, but I don't have the time for that. The commercial software often has some kind of guarantee of accuracy, where if they screwed it up, they'll at least help set things right with the IRS afterward.
Now, if there was a community-based organization offering such a guarantee, and asking for donations to support it, and employing the lawyers and accountants to verify it, I'd be all in favor... I simply don't know of any such entity, though.
Demoscene was not always about just making the most impressive output from a given piece of technology. As I recall, demoscene evolved from game pirates marking their cracked games with elaborate intros using only the available space unused by the game. I also recall hearing that some teams would occasionally use routines from the actual game as part of their animations. With that history in mind, how can one object to using libraries now? The original spirit of the art, where your own code had to fit into a small space, is perfectly intact. Today, you can expect DirectX and OpenGL just as much as you could expect a clock in older hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't silenced anybody. Everyone's just ignoring you. I, for instance, just had a lovely weekend without encountering anybody with overinflated egos from their meager accomplishments.
I briefly considered an actual point-by-point illustration of how ludicrous the "hosts file as security" idea is for modern computers, then I clicked "read more", and remembered why I don't actually even read your posts anymore. Once you start copying every message you can think of, insulting anyone who disagrees with you, and quoting non-sequitur lines from movies, I lose all interest in a discussion based on merits, because I don't expect you to participate meaningfully.
I get it. You think you're an admin god, and everyone whose opinions differ must be stupid, and it is your duty as a deity to point out that they are inferior. When mods delete your post, it must be because they're intimidated, and certainly couldn't be that the offense in your comments outweighed any useful content. That's fine. You're certainly entitled to your own opinions of yourself, regardless of whether I think they're crazy or not. Likewise, everyone else (myself included) is entitled to think that you're insane, if they so choose. I personally respect your obvious knowledge of the deep workings of Windows and video drivers, but I find your comments too stunningly arrogant to actually read.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt: If your next message is under 15em vertically on my display, and free from insults, I'll read it, in the hopes of having a reasonable discussion. Otherwise, I have no desire to speak with you again.
Ah, APK... Your comments so often start out decent, then after the slightest bit of criticism, you end up making Gene Ray look sane...
Is that you, AlecStaar?
I'll take that as a "yes, you win, Sarten-X! Good job!"
Woohoo! My very own apk stalker! I win at Slashdot now, right?
That's what I'm seeing, too, pretty much. Australian government says that American servers are insecure, American government takes offense at that, Slashdot fans the flames of government conspiracy theories...
Just a typical Friday morning.
Grainger said a pre-existing capacity in the brain may allow them to recognize patterns and objects
That reminds me of a column I read a while ago suggesting exactly that, and offering an evolutionary basis for it, along with an explanation for conspiracy theories. I guess this means that literacy begets superstition?
Exactly right.
I find it amusing how there's a double standard for quality when it comes to A/V... In a home theater system, marketing a device as "all-digital" implies that it offers uncompromising quality. On the recording side, saying something's digital is seen to imply that it's losing some extra part of the sound that can apparently only be captured in an analog system. This is a debate that's been raging on for all of digital audio's life, and it doesn't look like the madness will stop anytime soon.
I can appreciate that an old audiophile wants things to sound exactly how he expects them, which means keeping his old analog system with all its defects, noise, and nostalgia, but let's not force this analog nonsense on future generations under the guise of "better quality".
I hear you can also drop in a hosts file...
But shouldn't it be relatively easy to fire those problem employees for incompetence/failure to perform job duties/failure to meet quota/etc?
It should be, but it isn't. From the law's perspective, they got their assigned work done, in the assigned time. Requiring anything more (like "do the work in the same time someone else could") isn't always legal, and opens the door for nasty litigation if they are fired.
The company was small enough that it was still owned by an actual human being, and not some faceless corporate monstrosity whose only concern is short-term shareholder profits.
I do prefer small companies, but I've had my dealings with faceless places, too. There are still face-bearing humans setting local policy, but they don't (think they) have as much freedom to do whatever they think is decent. I've yet to encounter a workplace where the supervisor really didn't care about their workers, but I've seen plenty where they're stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place, and they have to lean on the workers to meet demands.
That's a huge problem with the immediate supervisors. It does not necessarily apply to the rest of the TSA, and the fallacy weakens the argument against the TSA as a whole.
From a devil's-advocate perspective, I see a disgruntled screener who encountered some problems at her station, and rather than working within the system to solve those problems, she tries for a while then jumps to the scorched-earth strategy of embarrassing the agency. Then, to make sure her managers know that she's trying to embarrass them, she copies the letter to them. Any credibility she has is shot at that point, as it becomes clear that her goal is to blackmail the TSA into changing, rather than persuade.
That leads back to my original point: this interview isn't going to help. It sounds like a muckraker interviewing someone incapable of navigating office politics, who's skirting the system because she got fired, looking to become a martyr for self-justification.
I respect your campaign and certainly hope for the ultimate goal, but I question your methods. Ridding ourselves of the TSA is a political problem, and politics will be necessary - not abridged stories and deductive fallacies.
I'm not so adament about the need for disclosure, as long as the statement made is absolutely honest. While it does explain how you came to know the product, it also undermines the honesty of the message. Rather than being a person of integrity, whose endorsement is a heartfelt approval, you appear to be a sold-out shill who'll say whatever his boss tells him to.
Twice, actually. Once it was actually my project being shilled (I liked the project and thought it was useful - though I did end up getting fired from there, I'll still gladly tout its benefits in the appropriate context), and once I hadn't bothered trying the product. The latter one sucked, and I told the other team exactly why, and how I thought it could be improved. I got called into a meeting with other employees who'd complained, and the project lead took notes while we ran through the demo showing what we didn't like. The project went back for another round of revisions, and eventually came out much better for it. I never talked about the project publicly, and didn't get fired, either.
Dishonest ass-kissing will get you promoted, because you make bosses like you personally. Honest critiquing with respect for politics will get you respect, because you show that you're dedicated to the company goals.
Try the app. See if it's really worth saying good things about. If so, I'd go ahead and praise it as deserved. If not, send a message to the sales/QA/service department as appropriate saying why you can't promote the app. Keep a copy of that message just in case you have to show that you were fired for raising an ethical concern.
Of course, encourage others to do the same, and mention your plan to superiors. They might just admire your behavior, and suggest it to more of the company. Few managers really want to be the guy to let a bad PR situation loose, so they might jump at the chance to prove they're more ethical than that nasty sales department - especially if the app is actually decent, and there's a good chance it'll get astroturfed anyway.
I will bet you that these "bottleneck" employees were being paid an hourly wage and would be sent home early if the day's work were completed early.
I'll take that bet. They were hourly, but on a preset schedule. The company owner believed in not screwing over employees, so all the "regulars" got a 40-hour schedule, mostly regardless of workload. Sending people home early was strongly discouraged. There were many small jobs that could be picked up after an order was underway, like refilling supplies or sorting order-tracking papers. That's what the rest of the production line was doing while waiting for the trickle of orders to pass through the bottlenecks.
Go figure, the owner was a decent human being.
I bow before your offensive mastery.
Nope. Apple has a range of products, and each has had many iterations of hardware revisions and possible upgrades.
If you're running Linux, you're probably competent to fix things if a patch breaks them.
If you're running OS X, you're probably confused enough by the patch in the first place.
If you're running Windows, you're probably just going to complain to some IT guy when the report looks slightly different.
Disclaimer: I triple-boot, with more VMs. I can make fun of everybody.
"Change", probably not.
"Approve getting an extra copy of the SOP manual", they can probably do.
Security researchers and customers have been questioning why Apple hasn't yet provided a fix for the malware even though Flashback has been around in one form or another for more than six months now.
Because they're doing the same thing Microsoft does with its slow-as-molasses patches: testing for side effects, on every major application, on every piece of hardware they can get their hands on.
Nope. It was done about three months ago, but it does claim that the firing process started after only one week. Three months to get termination paperwork in order sounds more like government to me.
After Jennifer was repeatedly ignored when she brought these serious issues up with management, she contacted her representatives in Congress for assistance after which the TSA promptly began the process of firing her! A process, by the way, which took the TSA three months, during which Jennifer was forced to sit around on the taxpayer’s dime and do absolutely nothing. Fortunately, Jennifer turns in her uniform today.
...
Jennifer: I sent my letter on Jan. 1, and I came back from sick leave about a week later, and I was immediately removed from screening duties.
Again, the timeline simply doesn't make sense. Only a week for a representative to track down the supervisor to get her removed from screening, but three more months to go through the process?
Maybe she was being fired for insanity... instead of contacting any regional managers or higher-up supervisors, she jumps right to Congress.
I'll second the "not shared" opinion, though perhaps not with such strong language.
At-will cuts both ways. I've been fired without notice, and I've quit without notice. On the one hand, it is unsettling to have absolutely no job security. I know I can be fired at any time. On the other hand, I know that I'm not losing anything if I quit. I can't be contractually obligated to give back anything but company property.
I've also worked under an employment contract, in a state without at-will laws. In that company, there were several employees who would be the bottleneck for the whole production line. They would intentionally work slower, so they'd keep a single job to do for the whole day, instead of having to find another task when they ran out of work. Where running a batch of incoming orders should take about 2 hours, they'd somehow manage to make it last all day.
Personally, I think at-will laws are a reasonable compromise. Employers (and co-workers) aren't stuck with bad employees, and employees can leave bad companies.
Look, I dislike the TSA as much as anybody, and I've complained about it to my representatives, and I hope it dies as quickly as possible, but everything about this story annoys me.
A guy with an obvious bias against an entity interviews a recently-fired employee, and uncovers terrible details about that entity! Oh no! Who could have guessed?
The ex-employee's letter to Congress was the reason she got fired - in a time span of one week. Right. I'm sure the Congressman has their interns sorting mail, looking for disgruntled employees, notifying the appropriate chain of supervisors, and working hard to get people fired - and they can get that done in under a week.
No SOP manual? Hey, at least you know one's been written somewhere. You could ask your supervisor, or move up the chain to their supervisor, and so on, until you find out where you can get one. There's no sign that that was attempted, just an "I don't know where it was" statement.
As much as I want to see the TSA dismantled, this interview isn't going to help. It sounds like a muckraker interviewing someone incapable of navigating office politics, who's skirting the system because she got fired, looking to become a martyr for self-justification. This isn't journalism.
As a great fan of open source and community-based development, I have to sadly hang my head and agree.
I have some investments that, due to their particular details, have stumped multiple tax preparers. The (professional) software I've looked at doesn't even support this particular item, so I have little hope for my beloved open source. Even if there was a community-developed tax program, I personally wouldn't trust its accuracy over time. Yes, I could go through myself and verify that all of the year's changes to the tax laws were made to the code base, but I don't have the time for that. The commercial software often has some kind of guarantee of accuracy, where if they screwed it up, they'll at least help set things right with the IRS afterward.
Now, if there was a community-based organization offering such a guarantee, and asking for donations to support it, and employing the lawyers and accountants to verify it, I'd be all in favor... I simply don't know of any such entity, though.
Demoscene was not always about just making the most impressive output from a given piece of technology. As I recall, demoscene evolved from game pirates marking their cracked games with elaborate intros using only the available space unused by the game. I also recall hearing that some teams would occasionally use routines from the actual game as part of their animations. With that history in mind, how can one object to using libraries now? The original spirit of the art, where your own code had to fit into a small space, is perfectly intact. Today, you can expect DirectX and OpenGL just as much as you could expect a clock in older hardware.