While I will admit that you probably had a point that was valid, I can't imagine that you endeared yourself to your coworkers and you probably got the reputation as a 'narc'.
In all honesty, most of my coworkers agreed with me. Every few days a different person would come up to me during a smoke or lunch break and express quiet approval. I'm sure that the people who got away with breaking the dress code every day didn't like it, but I didn't really care about them.
I took the "long walk" several times. I was lectured by no less than 3 different members of management because of my "attitude problem". I stuck to the line that the only problem I had was with unfair treatment for those of us not in the "clique".
In the end, you probably alienated both management and the people with whom you worked.
Most members of management couldn't stand me. Many if not most of my coworkers were on my side, even though most of them were too afraid to voice their approval in public.
The scenerio reported in the magazine made everything else the same. They took the exact same resumes and put different names on them. Same skill set, same education, same work history, (all fabricated BTW) and the names that were "black sounding" got a little over half of the responses that the others got.
Anyhow, you can come up with a bazillion scenarios as to why something like that would happen.
The same resume with the name "Jamal Johnson" would tend to get lower responses than if it had "James Johnson" on it.
but even there I would say 'twice as likely' is blowing it was out of proportion.
If memory serves it ended up being 5 to 8. Not quite twice as likely, but almost.
SO true. Many of these kinds of infractions go unreported because it's quite difficult to prove discrimination in the hiring process. Anything short of a 20/20 expose piece likely won't work, or will work only a small percentage of the time.
Jet magazine once reported a story about researchers who sent out a group of identical resumes and gauged the responses from potential employers. They found (not surprisingly) that people who had "black sounding" names were less likely to get responses from a potential employer.
For example "Emily Blake" is nearly twice as likely to get a response to a faxed in resume as "Latisha Johnson" even if everything on their resumes except for the name is the same. I don't believe that they reported the names of any of the companies in question, but it would be nice to hear their corporate officers try to explain it.
Forcing someone to lie is common practice in most companies. They may call it "marketing" but I call it collective creativity.
Also they refused to put it in writing that it was a part of my job description was to provide customers with incorrect information. I knew that they wouldn't, that's why I took such a stand against lying.
Updating our systems... that's a good one. Most systems are updated in parallel, so updates should not cause down-time.
They funniest part is that ALL of our customers knew what was going on anyway. Agents who were willing to lie reported that customers would usually respond with "Oh, your systems are down again. OK. I'll call back tomorrow."
I would just say that I can't access the information that they're requesting at this time. Clients would ask if our systems were down my response was "I can't say that."
I don't know anything about Canadian law, but in my state (PA) here in the US the rules for termination are convoluted in the extreme.
This is what's known as an "at will" employment state, meaning that either the employer or the employee can terminate employment for any reason or even no reason at any time. But you can't be terminated for your race, sex, religion, or any other such reason. In most cases, employers who would fire you for such a reason, would never hire you in the first place. But even if you're terminated legally, you can still get unemployment compensation if you were not fired for willful misconduct.
My last employer used to do things like selective enforcement of the rules. For example a woman's skirt could be no higher than 4 inches above the knee. But, many women wore skirts that short or shorter on a daily basis. If one of the people who were not in the inner circle did such a thing she'd be sent home. Hats are against the dress code, but that rule is never enforced against women. One day I had to remove a head covering, so I spend the next two weeks loudly pointing out every dress code violation that there was in the office. That got me a reputation as a "trouble maker". I got written up more than any employee there. But every write up was more for my attitude than for my actual actions, so I wasn't teminated.
Once, during training, we were instructed as to what we were supposed to tell our clients when our computer systems were down. The script was "our systems are updating", I stated plainly that I would not lie at anyone's request. My employment was threatened. My response was, do you really want me to let everyone know that I was terminated for refusing to lie to our clients? The details of that lie are immaterial, the damage to the company's reputation would be done if it became a matter of public record that I was terminated because you tried to force me to lie.
Eventually our client reduced the size of our account and I was one of the lucky few to get let go. I got unemployment compensation out of the deal.
I will never compromise my personal code of ethics for the sake of a job. They can take away my employment, but they can't take away my ethics and dignity.
In the end, if you get fired for taking a moral stand, there are many employers who would like to have you on board.
I bought BattleCrusier Millennium, you don't want to try to learn to play using a PDF. I suppose that you could just print it out, but the game is so in depth that you need to reference the manual continually while learning to play.
I don't believe he was trying to justify anything. I think he was debunking the notion that he was costing the developers/publishers money by downloading something that he wasn't going to buy anyway.
For example, I'll never buy a Ford, but if I were to win one in a raffle or something I would take it. Is the raffle costing Ford money? No because I wasn't going to buy one of their cars anyway.
If there's something you would be willing to play for free but not be willing to pay $50 for, guess what? You just don't buy it. You move onto something else.
When CEOs say "good for the economy" they don't mean "good for the average Joe" they mean "good for our shareholders"
To be honest, a corporation has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the value of their shareholder's stock. I don't begrudge them for doing that, but it does piss me off when they pretend that they're doing it for "the good of the economy".
Barrett pegs K-12 math and science education as the biggest threat to U.S. employment, but when pressed about U.S. kids who do well in both, attend excellent universities, but have no guarantees of good jobs when they graduate, Barrett remarks 'I don't have a solution to that one.
As unpopular as this notion has become lately, I submit that you should be going to college to get an education, not a job. That's what trade schools are for. Higher education is just that, education. Learning, getting used to assimilating new information. A good job is what we all want, but college isn't supposed to be churning out cogs for the wheels of industry.
Quite frankly I've got better things to do than spell check and grammar check my reply to some dumb post on Slashdot.
If you need to put effort into knowing the difference between "than and then" or "its and it's", then you have no hope.
The point was still clearly understood by the intended recipients.
What point? That you can't spell or properly construct a sentence?
I have succeeded in my goal,
Yep, you successfully trolled me. Don't worry, this'll be my last response to you.
One more thing worth noting, I may have made some grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, but at least I was capable of arguing my point without the inclusion of unnecessary vulgarities.
It was my impression that an ABS in general ensures that a wheel does not lock and skid, therefore maintaining the controllability of the vehicle. I wouldn't think that the state of one wheel has any infulence on any others.
The ABS determines if you're at a complete stop (a situation where you will want all of the wheels to stop) or if you're skidding by comparing the movement of all of the wheels.
For example, when you're at a complete stop, all four wheels have stopped. When you skid, one wheel stops before the others. In the event that a skid happens, the ABS momentarily reduces the pressure to the brake caliper of the wheel that has stopped.
ABS increases the distance required to complete a stop, but it allows the driver to retain control of the vehicle.
You could theoretically push it when the engine is off with this system. A better way to lock the wheel up is by braking (going into a skid) so antilock brakes are a must.
It would be a real bitch to work out an ABS system for a one wheeled vehicle. Current ABS brakes work by determining if one wheel has stopped while other wheels remain in motion.
I guess drum brakes would be a sufficient system because they are far less likely to lock that disc brakes. But they aren't as effective either.
Instead of all of the complicated mechanisms, why not just attach an emergency wheel below the driver? That would solve two problems at once. It would make the driver a bit safer in the event of a rapid decelleration and it would allow this thing to go up steeper hills.
I'm glad you took the time to respond to this. I was not aware of your project until today. I may give it a shot. I had moved away from Red Hat in favor of Mandrake, but I'll look into your project.
No one lost - Fedora continues where RedHat left off(which they should) and RedHat continues in new directions, specifically in directions dominated by Microsoft. Isn't that a good situation? Or am I missing something?
As I see it, Red Hat's actions are conveying the message that the "little people" like me who have suppored their distro for years don't matter to them anymore. Fedora seems to me to be their beta version. The rest of us get to be the lab rats for their important customers. Their "Enterprise" server is simply out of my price range. I had a feeling this would be coming after their IPO so I jumped ship back then. I have been using Mandrake for several years now.
I'm not so sure that it's a good idea to ride a vehicle that, if it fails at high speed, will run the driver over. All it takes is for something to seize up a little bit.
Seriously, did you read the article? The driver is held in place by a counterbalance. Even with no power, the rules of physics do not change.
Oddly enough, I am a faithful Mandrake user because of how stable it is. There have been a few changes that I don't like, for example some options have been taken out of MandrakeUpdate, but all in all it's the best distro overall that I have tried.
But it's cool that Fedora is working for you, that's what's so great about F/OSS. No vendor lock in.
Slashdot Mirror
how about: gmale@gmail.com?
I do not envy the volume of man on man porno spam THAT email address will draw.
LK
I'll sell hacker, h4cker, hack3r, I-I4(k3r and anything else I can think of on my subdomain for that much.
LK
And, thanks to the address being posted on Slashdot, the lucky winner will get a special bonus: 100 spam e-mails a day!
That's going to be a man with one huge fucking johnson.
LK
My favorite musician is retired. I bought and ripped to MP3 all of his existing albums already.
But hey, at least we'll be able to find out who has been distributing Jessica Simpson and Backdoor Boys MP3s and beat the hell out of them.
LK
While I will admit that you probably had a point that was valid, I can't imagine that you endeared yourself to your coworkers and you probably got the reputation as a 'narc'.
In all honesty, most of my coworkers agreed with me. Every few days a different person would come up to me during a smoke or lunch break and express quiet approval. I'm sure that the people who got away with breaking the dress code every day didn't like it, but I didn't really care about them.
I took the "long walk" several times. I was lectured by no less than 3 different members of management because of my "attitude problem". I stuck to the line that the only problem I had was with unfair treatment for those of us not in the "clique".
In the end, you probably alienated both management and the people with whom you worked.
Most members of management couldn't stand me. Many if not most of my coworkers were on my side, even though most of them were too afraid to voice their approval in public.
LK
But everything else is NOT the same.
The scenerio reported in the magazine made everything else the same. They took the exact same resumes and put different names on them. Same skill set, same education, same work history, (all fabricated BTW) and the names that were "black sounding" got a little over half of the responses that the others got.
Anyhow, you can come up with a bazillion scenarios as to why something like that would happen.
The same resume with the name "Jamal Johnson" would tend to get lower responses than if it had "James Johnson" on it.
but even there I would say 'twice as likely' is blowing it was out of proportion.
If memory serves it ended up being 5 to 8. Not quite twice as likely, but almost.
LK
SO true. Many of these kinds of infractions go unreported because it's quite difficult to prove discrimination in the hiring process. Anything short of a 20/20 expose piece likely won't work, or will work only a small percentage of the time.
Jet magazine once reported a story about researchers who sent out a group of identical resumes and gauged the responses from potential employers. They found (not surprisingly) that people who had "black sounding" names were less likely to get responses from a potential employer.
For example "Emily Blake" is nearly twice as likely to get a response to a faxed in resume as "Latisha Johnson" even if everything on their resumes except for the name is the same. I don't believe that they reported the names of any of the companies in question, but it would be nice to hear their corporate officers try to explain it.
Forcing someone to lie is common practice in most companies. They may call it "marketing" but I call it collective creativity.
Also they refused to put it in writing that it was a part of my job description was to provide customers with incorrect information. I knew that they wouldn't, that's why I took such a stand against lying.
Updating our systems... that's a good one. Most systems are updated in parallel, so updates should not cause down-time.
They funniest part is that ALL of our customers knew what was going on anyway. Agents who were willing to lie reported that customers would usually respond with "Oh, your systems are down again. OK. I'll call back tomorrow."
I would just say that I can't access the information that they're requesting at this time. Clients would ask if our systems were down my response was "I can't say that."
LK
I don't know anything about Canadian law, but in my state (PA) here in the US the rules for termination are convoluted in the extreme.
This is what's known as an "at will" employment state, meaning that either the employer or the employee can terminate employment for any reason or even no reason at any time. But you can't be terminated for your race, sex, religion, or any other such reason. In most cases, employers who would fire you for such a reason, would never hire you in the first place. But even if you're terminated legally, you can still get unemployment compensation if you were not fired for willful misconduct.
My last employer used to do things like selective enforcement of the rules. For example a woman's skirt could be no higher than 4 inches above the knee. But, many women wore skirts that short or shorter on a daily basis. If one of the people who were not in the inner circle did such a thing she'd be sent home. Hats are against the dress code, but that rule is never enforced against women. One day I had to remove a head covering, so I spend the next two weeks loudly pointing out every dress code violation that there was in the office. That got me a reputation as a "trouble maker". I got written up more than any employee there. But every write up was more for my attitude than for my actual actions, so I wasn't teminated.
Once, during training, we were instructed as to what we were supposed to tell our clients when our computer systems were down. The script was "our systems are updating", I stated plainly that I would not lie at anyone's request. My employment was threatened. My response was, do you really want me to let everyone know that I was terminated for refusing to lie to our clients? The details of that lie are immaterial, the damage to the company's reputation would be done if it became a matter of public record that I was terminated because you tried to force me to lie.
Eventually our client reduced the size of our account and I was one of the lucky few to get let go. I got unemployment compensation out of the deal.
I will never compromise my personal code of ethics for the sake of a job. They can take away my employment, but they can't take away my ethics and dignity.
In the end, if you get fired for taking a moral stand, there are many employers who would like to have you on board.
LK
I bought BattleCrusier Millennium, you don't want to try to learn to play using a PDF. I suppose that you could just print it out, but the game is so in depth that you need to reference the manual continually while learning to play.
LK
But that doesn't justify anything.
I don't believe he was trying to justify anything. I think he was debunking the notion that he was costing the developers/publishers money by downloading something that he wasn't going to buy anyway.
For example, I'll never buy a Ford, but if I were to win one in a raffle or something I would take it. Is the raffle costing Ford money? No because I wasn't going to buy one of their cars anyway.
If there's something you would be willing to play for free but not be willing to pay $50 for, guess what? You just don't buy it. You move onto something else.
True enough.
LK
by making their games so complicated and in depth that you NEED to have the manual to play it.
Then again, even with the rampant piracy of Doom and the Quake series in their day, I doubt that iD would trade places with 3000AD.
LK
What do we call people who take things of value to them without the permission of the owner - who it also has value to?
Are you talking about TAKING or unauthorized copying?
Contrary to what the RIAA and MPAA would have us believe, there is a difference.
LK
Pussies! I'm whistling into a telephone receiver.
LK
When CEOs say "good for the economy" they don't mean "good for the average Joe" they mean "good for our shareholders"
To be honest, a corporation has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the value of their shareholder's stock. I don't begrudge them for doing that, but it does piss me off when they pretend that they're doing it for "the good of the economy".
LK
Barrett pegs K-12 math and science education as the biggest threat to U.S. employment, but when pressed about U.S. kids who do well in both, attend excellent universities, but have no guarantees of good jobs when they graduate, Barrett remarks 'I don't have a solution to that one.
As unpopular as this notion has become lately, I submit that you should be going to college to get an education, not a job. That's what trade schools are for. Higher education is just that, education. Learning, getting used to assimilating new information. A good job is what we all want, but college isn't supposed to be churning out cogs for the wheels of industry.
LK
Quite frankly I've got better things to do than spell check and grammar check my reply to some dumb post on Slashdot.
If you need to put effort into knowing the difference between "than and then" or "its and it's", then you have no hope.
The point was still clearly understood by the intended recipients.
What point? That you can't spell or properly construct a sentence?
I have succeeded in my goal,
Yep, you successfully trolled me. Don't worry, this'll be my last response to you.
One more thing worth noting, I may have made some grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, but at least I was capable of arguing my point without the inclusion of unnecessary vulgarities.
Like "shitty"?
LK
It was my impression that an ABS in general ensures that a wheel does not lock and skid, therefore maintaining the controllability of the vehicle. I wouldn't think that the state of one wheel has any infulence on any others.
The ABS determines if you're at a complete stop (a situation where you will want all of the wheels to stop) or if you're skidding by comparing the movement of all of the wheels.
For example, when you're at a complete stop, all four wheels have stopped. When you skid, one wheel stops before the others. In the event that a skid happens, the ABS momentarily reduces the pressure to the brake caliper of the wheel that has stopped.
ABS increases the distance required to complete a stop, but it allows the driver to retain control of the vehicle.
LK
One person can make alot of noise, us RH users will just sit back and watch the rest of you make foolsof yourselves.
Like you just did with all of those misspellings and grammatical errors?
Mandrake gives the community it's "shitty"
"it's" is a contraction for "it is", to convey posession, it's "its".
contribute more then anyone
contribute more THAN anyone?
Fedora is better then any
Fedora is better THAN any?
even now I've got two servers running debian stable.
even now, I HAVE two servers running debian stable.
Its just now red hat wants
THIS is where you should have said "It's".
You may here alot
You may HEAR a lot.
One person can make alot of noise
A LOT, A LOT, A LOT! Two words, mother fucker!
make foolsof yourselves.
make fools of.
You can't articulate a single germane point. Your opinion is worthless.
LK
How much traffic are you handling if you really need SMP on a firewall/router?
LK
You could theoretically push it when the engine is off with this system. A better way to lock the wheel up is by braking (going into a skid) so antilock brakes are a must.
It would be a real bitch to work out an ABS system for a one wheeled vehicle. Current ABS brakes work by determining if one wheel has stopped while other wheels remain in motion.
I guess drum brakes would be a sufficient system because they are far less likely to lock that disc brakes. But they aren't as effective either.
Instead of all of the complicated mechanisms, why not just attach an emergency wheel below the driver? That would solve two problems at once. It would make the driver a bit safer in the event of a rapid decelleration and it would allow this thing to go up steeper hills.
LK
The little money it makes will be sucked out by "legal" pirates from its very movement.
There is no such thing as a legal pirate. If what they're doing is legal (and it is BTW), it can't be called piracy.
LK
I'm glad you took the time to respond to this. I was not aware of your project until today. I may give it a shot. I had moved away from Red Hat in favor of Mandrake, but I'll look into your project.
LK
No one lost - Fedora continues where RedHat left off(which they should) and RedHat continues in new directions, specifically in directions dominated by Microsoft. Isn't that a good situation? Or am I missing something?
As I see it, Red Hat's actions are conveying the message that the "little people" like me who have suppored their distro for years don't matter to them anymore. Fedora seems to me to be their beta version. The rest of us get to be the lab rats for their important customers. Their "Enterprise" server is simply out of my price range. I had a feeling this would be coming after their IPO so I jumped ship back then. I have been using Mandrake for several years now.
LK
I'm not so sure that it's a good idea to ride a vehicle that, if it fails at high speed, will run the driver over. All it takes is for something to seize up a little bit.
Seriously, did you read the article? The driver is held in place by a counterbalance. Even with no power, the rules of physics do not change.
LK
Oddly enough, I am a faithful Mandrake user because of how stable it is. There have been a few changes that I don't like, for example some options have been taken out of MandrakeUpdate, but all in all it's the best distro overall that I have tried.
But it's cool that Fedora is working for you, that's what's so great about F/OSS. No vendor lock in.
LK