Thinking about this some more I think there are two reasons you don't see it as much anymore. First, and most obviously, you're not seeing anything like the kinds of casualty rates you saw in WWII and Korea. Units are not losing have or more of their junior officers, and being reduced to ineffectiveness thereby. Second though, they just don't need junior officer like they used. Don't get me wrong, junior officers are important part of unit function as a group, and you wouldn't want to eliminate them or anything; but in a short to medium term "hey the Captain/Lieutenant is gone, what are we gonna do" situation units can function without some. Lots of things that only officers could do in the past can now be delegated to senior NCOs when absolutely necessary. Command absolutely has to reside with an officer, but other than that you can assign an E-7 or E-8 to most officer functions in a pinch.
Wow. You totally didn't even look at the article before venting did you? It's people like you that it so Bloody hard to make an intelligent argument against any government policy. Someone will inevitably dig up something like this little rant to show how ignorant and reactionary the other side is.
First of all this is not the Pentagon (yet), it's the Marine Corps. While the Corps is a part of the Pentagon, the article (Hell, the summary) specifically states that the DoD is still working to formulate a coherent policy across the board. The Corps has done this in the mean time. The Army (again this is in the summary), which constitutes the bulk of the fighters in both Iraq and Afghanistan specifically ALLOWS social networking sites on its bases (including overseas bases). While the Pentagon may, or may not, decide in the end to limit this stuff on all DoD networks. They haven't yet.
Second, this is on Marine Corps networks, not on Marines. Marines on their own Internet connections can post whatever they want (well, within reason, obviously they can't post classified information). Marines are perfectly allowed to get their own Internet connections, even overseas. While we were in Baghdad we had a Satellite connection to the Internet that we split the cost of. It was no more expensive than the monthly fee for an ISP provided service States side. If, for some reason you couldn't afford that, there were also Internet kiosks (some provided by the government for R&R, some run by local national companies) on base which all had unfettered civilian Internet. My Battalion provided about 10 computers with civilian Internet access for our soldiers for FREE out of our Morale and Welfare funds. So if you couldn't even afford the cafe fees, and could wait for ten minutes for a computer, you could use them.
Now after two completely pointless and poorly argued paragraphs, you make some decent points. I agree that a war on terrorism is silly, and I agree that the rhetoric surrounding these conflicts (especially in the beginning, less so now. Even Bush in his later years in office toned things down considerably) is, or was, unhelpful. Unfortunately these points follow after your first two paragraphs. I have a much harder time taking a person seriously when it is clear that they didn't even read the summary, let alone the article before posting a poorly argued screed. I suspect anyone else that might have agreed with you feels the same. I don't even want to click your link, since I can only assume it's just as poorly researched.
1) They are blocking these sites on GOVERNMENT NETWORKS. This is no different than your company blocking Twitter. These Marines remain perfectly free to use personal Internet connections however they see fit, assuming they don't pass on classified information. You do not rely upon government networks to provide you Internet access in barracks or housing. Even in Baghdad we had civilian Internet connections available to us.
2) Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen do have rights, but not quite the same rights as you and I. When you join the military you contractually exchange your Constitutional rights for the rights granted by a code called the "Uniform Code of Military Justice" or UCMJ. You have most of the same rights as any civilian, but some are modified or taken away based on the realities of military operations. Upon leaving the service or existing active duty, you revert to the normal rights of citizens. The UCMJ is generally fair, and grants MOST Constitutional rights to service people, but one area where it is more restrictive than usual is Free Speech. You simply have more limited speech rights in the military than you do as a civilian. You agree to this as part of signing up.
It's blocked on their network. Let me just tell you the kind of Hell you'd get if you plugged your personal laptop into a DoD network. Twitter will be the least of your worries. Since most DoD networks port lock all access (if no computer is currently authorized for that port, it's turned off. When a computer is authorized for that port, its MAC is registered at the switch and no other machines will work) it wouldn't much matter any way. You couldn't go anywhere even if you did plug in your laptop, but it would still get you in trouble if they found out you did it.
Internet in barrack, apartments, and base housing is normal ISP provided Internet with no funky DoD stuff involved. That is not blocked in any way (unless, you know, your ISP is blocking p2p or something). We even had satellite service set up in our housing in Baghdad to give us unfettered civilian access to the 'Net during downtime. We paid for it from a local company and split it among enough people to make it reasonable. I would not have wanted to play WoW across it, but it did fine for IM, web browsing, and e-mail.
Such Battlefield promotions are very rare outside of major theater combat wars. They generally occur when a unit has lost so many officers that it cannot function well. Usually the men (or women now I suppose, though that hasn't happened to my knowledge. No women have been allowed close enough to combat in any of the wars where such things occurred) are expected to complete all the schooling and training that would normally be required for their rank after things settle down. My wife's grandfather had to go to college after WWII in order to be allowed to keep the field commission he'd been given while fighting in France (He was Army, but I'm pretty sure the concept is the same).
That's a nice system. Like the above poster, my overall college GPA was severely hurt by a few eh... indiscretions in my first year of school. My situation wasn't as bad as his, just a few "C" and two "D" grades, but it still pulled me down. Not counting my first year my GPA was around 3.8, with my first year it was 3.45 which kept me out of "Cum Laude" by.05. Given the adjustments most first year university students have to make, at least one year of "by" would be reasonable.
70k for a BBA from a gloried community college? She should sue over the fraud they commited charging her that much, not because she can't find a job. That's on par with private 4 year college tuition. I checked several sites and agreement seems to be that average private school tuition is $24K a year, with 4 year public shools coming around 6K and public 2 years schools at around $2.5K. She paid $17.5k a year, which is a tuch below the average for a private 4 year school, but nearly 7x what an average CC costs. She couldn't have gone to Harvard for what she paid of course, but New York is loaded with small respected liberal arts schools she could have gone to for less.
Except no one actually wants that job. This is his point. This is a job that offers the minimum possilbe salary for fairly awful work; a job that no one who could get anything better (read as nearly any job which does not actively involve picking fruit on a pay by the pound basis) would want. Yet there were 500 applicants. Implying that somewhere in the nighborhood of 480-490 people who would not normally have considered such crummy work for such awful pay applied anyway (I'm basing that number on the fact that when I worked in fast food in high school we usually got between 10 and 20 applications for open positions, perhaps we were unusual in our small applicant numbers, but I doubt it). You're obsfrucating the issue. GGP implied that people are too picky about jobs, and they could get a job if they only lowered their standards. GP presented a job which is pretty nearly at the bottom of "standards" and showed that it was still difficult to get. You then came along and acted like the huge applicant pool for this piss poor job was a sign of how really desirable it was, as opposed to a sign of how bad the situation is that it could possibly seem desirable.
You don't?!?! Where do you work, I wanna be there. I'll start combing through their positions now looking for my new dream job. Seriously, I have NEVER in my 15 years of working had a job where I got five weeks of vacation with anything less than 10 year of seniority, and I've had exactly one job with a 37.5 hour full time work week. The majority of places have expected more than 40 hour work weeks, and only two have ever paid overtime (since sys admins are "knowledge workers", and thus exempt from overtime requirements). Your job is highly unusual, at least in my experience. One place I worked for when I was just starting out gave us a week of leave per year (combined sick and vacation). One semi-serious illness and that was it for your leave that year. I've never worked for anywhere that stingy since, but I've never had anything like what you're talking about either.
You have five weeks of vacation "built up", he gets five weeks annually (and is expected actually take them, not save them so that someday in the future he can take a decent length vacation). I'm not certain of course (there are exceptions to every rule), but most likely you have gotten your five weeks by NOT taking all of your 2-3 weeks annual leave accumulation for some number of years, or by working somewhere for a VERY long time.
I've held about nine jobs since graduating college, and only in one of them did I start with a decent amount of annual leave (ironically, this was while I was in the Army, which gives thirty days a year). In all the others I started with one, two or three weeks a year. Sometimes that was inclusive of, other times in addition to, sick leave. Currently I get three weeks a year, but that's sick and vacation combined. The most generous I've ever had was SGI (which gave sick leave plus three weeks vacation to start); the worst was some little computer company that gave us, no kidding, one week a year of sick leave and vacation combined. One good bout of flu and that was it for your time off that year. In only two jobs I have ever held was five weeks a year of vacation even a possibility, and in both cases it required a minimum of 10 years of seniority. Again, SGI was the best on this front, we started with three weeks a year and got an extra day every year we worked there. So, after five years you got four weeks, and after ten years you got five weeks, but the days accumulated as you went, which was nice. I worked for a University once that gave five weeks after fifteen years, but it went up in one week jumps (started with two weeks, got to three after two years, four after ten years, and five after fifteen years).
In Europe, four to five weeks of vacation a year is standard, and some companies are even more generous. You are expected to actually take your leave (and why wouldn't you, since you get a decent amount), not save it in case of a rainy day(s). This is why you always hear about Europeans actually going places on their vacations. They can, they have enough time.
You're also pretty lucky to be able to work a prescribed (roughly) 40 hour week. Though I can too, at the moment, in most jobs I've held you were expected to stay until the job is done, or 50-55 hours a week which ever was less. SGI gave us overtime (which was nice), but since I was the only SSE for all of Louisiana few weeks went by that I didn't have some accrual. My last job just assumed that everyone worked ten hour days minimum. They called it a "startup mentality"... I called it mental. I'm all for working late to meet a deadline, but staying a ten hours a day, just cause everyone else does and it's expected is just stupid. That was part of the reason I'm not with them anymore.
There is an unfortunate side to this. A lot of teens and their parents are still duped into believing that a degree will still lead to a guaranteed "good" job. There's plenty of material out there to counter-act this view and show that in many (possibly even now a majority) of cases, it's a waste of time and money.
I don't in general disagree with your post (I'm pretty left leaning myself, and what you say makes sense to me), but I do disagree with this statement. Certainly a college degree (especially with middling grades in a "gimme" subject from a "where's that?" schools) is no longer a guarantee of a good job, but it remains the "ticket to ride". In other words, while you may or may not be able to get many jobs with a degree, without one you aren't even in the running. These days secretarial jobs want degrees. I can't remember the last time I even applied for a job that was not "bachelor's degree required, master's degree preferred". My wife (who has a degree from a very respected school, with good grades, though granted in a "gimme subject") has not either, and she primarily works "office manager, light accounting" type jobs, that really don't challenge her at all.
I understand that this is less the case in the Midwest (where far fewer people actually have degrees, so the deflation of their value is not as pronouced), but even here in the South a college degree is listed as a requirement on virtually any office or technical job. You can still get jobs in fast food, retail, and the service industry without them, and of course "craftsman" type jobs like auto mechanics, plumbers, and electricians are still more certification based; but even in any of these fields if you hope to reach management you really need a degree. Do you really need a degree to manage a McDonalds? I don't know, but you're not likely to get the chance to find out around here.
Huh? In what world does the customer care what email client I use?
In the world that the company Exchange server manages everybody's calendars, a corporate address book, shared task lists, and isn't configured to serve people's e-mail in anything other than MAPI. There are precious few groupware clients that work with all of that as served up by Exchange. Assuming that you find one (and they do exist, they just tend to be nearly as costly as Outlook, and IMHO not much better) that you like better than Outlook, you then have to assume that you actually have the privileges to install the client on your workstation (not many people do in corporate environments), and you're not breaking any IT regulations by doing so.
Once you've overcome those hurdles, no one cares what e-mail client you use. In most large companies and many medium sized ones however, those hurdles are pretty much insurmountable. Unless you happen to be the director of IT or something. Even then, you better be prepared to defend your choice to your boss. Even as a systems admin with some seniority, I was pretty much unable to use anything other than Outlook at my last job. I was the Unix systems guy for the lab, but my day to day workstation was completely Microsoft, because that's what day to day IT support dictated. Looks like they're going to let me have a Linux box at my desk for testing and experimentation at my new place thankfully.
It's a possibly flawed analogy. He means when you buy and drink beer, it goes through you so you don't keep it. It ignores the possibility that you might buy it and keep it in the bottle forever. I can't imagine why you'd want to do that (I can rarely keep it in the bottle for more than a few days), but I feel like nitpicking.
In fact if you can afford the time and expense of continuing the lawsuit until the company runs out of appeals, people quite frequently DO win lawsuits against large companies/organizations. It's the affording the time and expense bit that gets tricky.
That might indeed be true if the company is bankrupt and going out of business, but so far as I know the only large scale failure of a DRM music supplier thus far has been Walmart's music service. They essentially got out of the business of online music and took their DRM servers with them. Given the way digital music is going it seems likely that any future failures will be along the same line... a large company will try and and fail with an online distribution model. In that case there is clearly someone to sue.
On the other hand, as is pointed out above, none of the major players in online music sales has DRM on their tunes anymore, so the issue may well be moot from an audio standpoint. Video remains DRMed in virtually every form that it get's released though, so take the Walmart music lesson and apply it to video maybe.
Yeah, but.... I knew when Solaris 8, Irix, MacOS9, and Windows 2000 were going out of support and could plan accordingly. If my plan was: "Keep using it and hope for the best", then it's my fault when/if it all falls apart. Where ever this guy is, he just up and left for there without even a week's warning, let alone the months or even years companies give for products going out of support. Now he may turn up next week and everything is fine, or he may turn up long enough to turn over the reins (and everything's probably a bit rocky, but otherwise fine), or they may find his body (hopefully not, but it's possible) and nothing can be done with CentOS' resources till everything goes through probate. Or he may never resurface in any meaningful way (maybe he joined a monastery and took a vow of "no computers"), and the project will be left hanging.
With commercial vendors, even when they go completely bankrupt, there's usually some sort of continued support, or at least some reasonable announcement of when such support will cease. Now the flip side is that if CentOS IS defunct for whatever reason, someone can just fork the project and "DollarOS" can take over where CentOS left off... but that still isn't the same as good ongoing support from a reliable vendor. Maybe the people who run DollarOS won't be as dedicated, or as competent, or maybe no one will fork it at all.
Don't get me wrong, I've used and liked CentOS; I'm not arguing against using it, just against using it in mission critical apps where long term support might be needed. In that case you should really use RHEL, or even (if you really don't like commercial companies) something like Debian. Debian doesn't have a company behind it, but it does have a large incorporated organization that can survive the loss of any one or even several members.
Corporate firewall/VPN system only worked on machines imaged by corporate IT. They didn't had out the keys, for obvious reasons. I had 5 other machines lying around that I could've used, but I couldn't use them for "work".
Currently I work in closed lab with no Internet access, so obviously no work from home option exists. I spent a year doing field system support for SGI though, and I didn't even have an office. I was the only SSE for most of Louisiana and part of Mississippi, and there was no point spending cash renting out space for an office of one. I worked from home anytime I wasn't on site fixing people computers or out doing some kind of training. It's not all it's cracked up to be frankly. Sure I could work in my bed clothes, and my "commute" involved a walk to the other bedroom, but there was no one to talk to except my dogs (my wife worked in an office), I was dead in the water for three days when my laptop hard drive went out, and everything had to be done via e-mail, fax, or Fed-Ex.
It wasn't awful, but it wasn't much better than working in an office. The pluses and the minuses balanced each other pretty well.
I think $15-20 an hour is reasonable. You can't even hopefully expect that customer volume, non-billable work, the tendency of humans to socialize, and any other factors I'm not thinking of will keep someone working more than 1/2 to 3/4 of any given hour on billable tasks, and the shop has to make a profit. Your theoretical tech is using the shops space (rent), often their tools, their electricity, their Internet for finding patches and fixes... If there were an infinite queue of billable work, and the techs worked at near perfect efficiency, then $40 an hour techs might be reasonable. I do however agree that $8-10 an hour is robbery.
And since it took him five minutes to do, he actually made $0.70 to replace your DIMM. Though probably closer to three or four bucks when you include talking to you about the problem, ringing you up, inquiring about your satisfaction, etc. Still, your fifty dollar repair probably cost three dollars.
I don't much about licensing for Moodle, but the last MS contribution was to the Linux kernel which is GPLv2, I don't think they could have used v3 if they'd wanted to. Not defending or attacking their choice, just saying that if they wanted their drivers in the official kernel, I think they pretty much had to release GPLv2.
This is an excellent couple of points, and to add to them, vendors that want to use FOSS AND want to have government business need to make more careful choices about their software selection. Case in point:
I work for a government contractor, and we recently took delivery of a network analysis device that shall remain nameless. This device came with Fedora Core 4 on it. I was tasked with doing the security initialization of the device, and I noted that several things needed to be updated on it in order to comply with our security standards (in addition to having oldish versions of lots of software with one minor hole or another, it had an old version of the audit daemon which could do the level of fine grained auditing we need). Of course, because we took delivery of this device from another contractor, I had no support contract (and no idea what level of OS the vendor provided anyway) and FC4 has been out of support for nearly three years. Oh, look, no security updates. In the end we had to get the other contractor to fly in and update the OS to a vendor supported version of FC6 (also out of official support, don't know what'll happen next time we need to update something). The whole thing took months, and I'm still not convinced that we'll be able to use the thing for long before someone decides that it needs some other update I can't get.
All it would have taken would have been for the original vendor to use RHEL, LTS Ubuntu, LTS Debian, or any of half a dozen other distros with a company or large stable organization providing long term support and we could have used the thing in days instead of months. Seriously, why would you use Fedora Core for the OS on your products, knowing that it won't be supported a year later?
This is only an opinion, but I think the FSF isn't involved because RMS is largely incapable of compromise. While the overall goals of the organization may mesh well with the overall goals of the FSF, if there is even one pillar of the organizations mission statement that fails to meet an FSF standard, or one commercial company involved who has done something "non-free" that RMS disagrees with, chances are the FSF won't play. Strategic compromises with others who share your larger goals, but may agree with you on the details are not in the FSF's makeup. If it's not all free, all the time, by the FSF definition of free, it's not good enough.
Don't get me wrong, fanaticism can move mountains, and the FSF has done a lot over the year to advance their cause simply by pure determination. On the other hand, now that their ideas are starting to squirm toward mainstream acceptance, they might try finding ways to work with others. Ironically the very fanaticism and determination that has gotten them as far as they've come, and may yet see some portion of their platform become a mainstream idea, may very well leave them irrelevant in the world they helped to create.
The term "friend" is a misnomer here. It's a Facebook term, but obviously the budding musician with a thousand+ friends doesn't really have a thousand+ friends... he does however have a thousand+ fans or people interested in his music. That's the thing about social networks, many people use them for job networking, keeping a fan base informed, organizing political movements, or any number of other things that require you to:
a) Have a lot of friends, followers, or whatever the service's "link" technology is called b) Be a part of a service with a significant enough market share to make people likely to be members, or at least willing to join in order to link with you c) Ideally, to be able to keep your "friends" with you when you change services.
Like a salesman wants to keep his "book" when he changes companies, a person who uses social networks "professionally" would like to able to keep his friends list portable. Even though it would be insane for Myspace (which seems to be mostly dying) to make its friends lists portable to Facebook, it would be a useful thing to many people. If there were a relief from possible indemnity, it might be a great project for some recent college grad to make a services that took your Myspace account and moved your profile, including friends where there is an overlap, to Facebook. As it is, Myspace would probably sue, which is going to prevent that from happening. This is a pretty trivial example of course, and it may not even be the case that Myspace could sue, but I think this is along the lines of what the article is talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Thinking about this some more I think there are two reasons you don't see it as much anymore. First, and most obviously, you're not seeing anything like the kinds of casualty rates you saw in WWII and Korea. Units are not losing have or more of their junior officers, and being reduced to ineffectiveness thereby. Second though, they just don't need junior officer like they used. Don't get me wrong, junior officers are important part of unit function as a group, and you wouldn't want to eliminate them or anything; but in a short to medium term "hey the Captain/Lieutenant is gone, what are we gonna do" situation units can function without some. Lots of things that only officers could do in the past can now be delegated to senior NCOs when absolutely necessary. Command absolutely has to reside with an officer, but other than that you can assign an E-7 or E-8 to most officer functions in a pinch.
Wow. You totally didn't even look at the article before venting did you? It's people like you that it so Bloody hard to make an intelligent argument against any government policy. Someone will inevitably dig up something like this little rant to show how ignorant and reactionary the other side is.
First of all this is not the Pentagon (yet), it's the Marine Corps. While the Corps is a part of the Pentagon, the article (Hell, the summary) specifically states that the DoD is still working to formulate a coherent policy across the board. The Corps has done this in the mean time. The Army (again this is in the summary), which constitutes the bulk of the fighters in both Iraq and Afghanistan specifically ALLOWS social networking sites on its bases (including overseas bases). While the Pentagon may, or may not, decide in the end to limit this stuff on all DoD networks. They haven't yet.
Second, this is on Marine Corps networks, not on Marines. Marines on their own Internet connections can post whatever they want (well, within reason, obviously they can't post classified information). Marines are perfectly allowed to get their own Internet connections, even overseas. While we were in Baghdad we had a Satellite connection to the Internet that we split the cost of. It was no more expensive than the monthly fee for an ISP provided service States side. If, for some reason you couldn't afford that, there were also Internet kiosks (some provided by the government for R&R, some run by local national companies) on base which all had unfettered civilian Internet. My Battalion provided about 10 computers with civilian Internet access for our soldiers for FREE out of our Morale and Welfare funds. So if you couldn't even afford the cafe fees, and could wait for ten minutes for a computer, you could use them.
Now after two completely pointless and poorly argued paragraphs, you make some decent points. I agree that a war on terrorism is silly, and I agree that the rhetoric surrounding these conflicts (especially in the beginning, less so now. Even Bush in his later years in office toned things down considerably) is, or was, unhelpful. Unfortunately these points follow after your first two paragraphs. I have a much harder time taking a person seriously when it is clear that they didn't even read the summary, let alone the article before posting a poorly argued screed. I suspect anyone else that might have agreed with you feels the same. I don't even want to click your link, since I can only assume it's just as poorly researched.
Two things:
1) They are blocking these sites on GOVERNMENT NETWORKS. This is no different than your company blocking Twitter. These Marines remain perfectly free to use personal Internet connections however they see fit, assuming they don't pass on classified information. You do not rely upon government networks to provide you Internet access in barracks or housing. Even in Baghdad we had civilian Internet connections available to us.
2) Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen do have rights, but not quite the same rights as you and I. When you join the military you contractually exchange your Constitutional rights for the rights granted by a code called the "Uniform Code of Military Justice" or UCMJ. You have most of the same rights as any civilian, but some are modified or taken away based on the realities of military operations. Upon leaving the service or existing active duty, you revert to the normal rights of citizens. The UCMJ is generally fair, and grants MOST Constitutional rights to service people, but one area where it is more restrictive than usual is Free Speech. You simply have more limited speech rights in the military than you do as a civilian. You agree to this as part of signing up.
It's blocked on their network. Let me just tell you the kind of Hell you'd get if you plugged your personal laptop into a DoD network. Twitter will be the least of your worries. Since most DoD networks port lock all access (if no computer is currently authorized for that port, it's turned off. When a computer is authorized for that port, its MAC is registered at the switch and no other machines will work) it wouldn't much matter any way. You couldn't go anywhere even if you did plug in your laptop, but it would still get you in trouble if they found out you did it.
Internet in barrack, apartments, and base housing is normal ISP provided Internet with no funky DoD stuff involved. That is not blocked in any way (unless, you know, your ISP is blocking p2p or something). We even had satellite service set up in our housing in Baghdad to give us unfettered civilian access to the 'Net during downtime. We paid for it from a local company and split it among enough people to make it reasonable. I would not have wanted to play WoW across it, but it did fine for IM, web browsing, and e-mail.
Such Battlefield promotions are very rare outside of major theater combat wars. They generally occur when a unit has lost so many officers that it cannot function well. Usually the men (or women now I suppose, though that hasn't happened to my knowledge. No women have been allowed close enough to combat in any of the wars where such things occurred) are expected to complete all the schooling and training that would normally be required for their rank after things settle down. My wife's grandfather had to go to college after WWII in order to be allowed to keep the field commission he'd been given while fighting in France (He was Army, but I'm pretty sure the concept is the same).
That's a nice system. Like the above poster, my overall college GPA was severely hurt by a few eh... indiscretions in my first year of school. My situation wasn't as bad as his, just a few "C" and two "D" grades, but it still pulled me down. Not counting my first year my GPA was around 3.8, with my first year it was 3.45 which kept me out of "Cum Laude" by .05. Given the adjustments most first year university students have to make, at least one year of "by" would be reasonable.
70k for a BBA from a gloried community college? She should sue over the fraud they commited charging her that much, not because she can't find a job. That's on par with private 4 year college tuition. I checked several sites and agreement seems to be that average private school tuition is $24K a year, with 4 year public shools coming around 6K and public 2 years schools at around $2.5K. She paid $17.5k a year, which is a tuch below the average for a private 4 year school, but nearly 7x what an average CC costs. She couldn't have gone to Harvard for what she paid of course, but New York is loaded with small respected liberal arts schools she could have gone to for less.
Except no one actually wants that job. This is his point. This is a job that offers the minimum possilbe salary for fairly awful work; a job that no one who could get anything better (read as nearly any job which does not actively involve picking fruit on a pay by the pound basis) would want. Yet there were 500 applicants. Implying that somewhere in the nighborhood of 480-490 people who would not normally have considered such crummy work for such awful pay applied anyway (I'm basing that number on the fact that when I worked in fast food in high school we usually got between 10 and 20 applications for open positions, perhaps we were unusual in our small applicant numbers, but I doubt it). You're obsfrucating the issue. GGP implied that people are too picky about jobs, and they could get a job if they only lowered their standards. GP presented a job which is pretty nearly at the bottom of "standards" and showed that it was still difficult to get. You then came along and acted like the huge applicant pool for this piss poor job was a sign of how really desirable it was, as opposed to a sign of how bad the situation is that it could possibly seem desirable.
You don't?!?! Where do you work, I wanna be there. I'll start combing through their positions now looking for my new dream job. Seriously, I have NEVER in my 15 years of working had a job where I got five weeks of vacation with anything less than 10 year of seniority, and I've had exactly one job with a 37.5 hour full time work week. The majority of places have expected more than 40 hour work weeks, and only two have ever paid overtime (since sys admins are "knowledge workers", and thus exempt from overtime requirements). Your job is highly unusual, at least in my experience. One place I worked for when I was just starting out gave us a week of leave per year (combined sick and vacation). One semi-serious illness and that was it for your leave that year. I've never worked for anywhere that stingy since, but I've never had anything like what you're talking about either.
You have five weeks of vacation "built up", he gets five weeks annually (and is expected actually take them, not save them so that someday in the future he can take a decent length vacation). I'm not certain of course (there are exceptions to every rule), but most likely you have gotten your five weeks by NOT taking all of your 2-3 weeks annual leave accumulation for some number of years, or by working somewhere for a VERY long time.
I've held about nine jobs since graduating college, and only in one of them did I start with a decent amount of annual leave (ironically, this was while I was in the Army, which gives thirty days a year). In all the others I started with one, two or three weeks a year. Sometimes that was inclusive of, other times in addition to, sick leave. Currently I get three weeks a year, but that's sick and vacation combined. The most generous I've ever had was SGI (which gave sick leave plus three weeks vacation to start); the worst was some little computer company that gave us, no kidding, one week a year of sick leave and vacation combined. One good bout of flu and that was it for your time off that year. In only two jobs I have ever held was five weeks a year of vacation even a possibility, and in both cases it required a minimum of 10 years of seniority. Again, SGI was the best on this front, we started with three weeks a year and got an extra day every year we worked there. So, after five years you got four weeks, and after ten years you got five weeks, but the days accumulated as you went, which was nice. I worked for a University once that gave five weeks after fifteen years, but it went up in one week jumps (started with two weeks, got to three after two years, four after ten years, and five after fifteen years).
In Europe, four to five weeks of vacation a year is standard, and some companies are even more generous. You are expected to actually take your leave (and why wouldn't you, since you get a decent amount), not save it in case of a rainy day(s). This is why you always hear about Europeans actually going places on their vacations. They can, they have enough time.
You're also pretty lucky to be able to work a prescribed (roughly) 40 hour week. Though I can too, at the moment, in most jobs I've held you were expected to stay until the job is done, or 50-55 hours a week which ever was less. SGI gave us overtime (which was nice), but since I was the only SSE for all of Louisiana few weeks went by that I didn't have some accrual. My last job just assumed that everyone worked ten hour days minimum. They called it a "startup mentality"... I called it mental. I'm all for working late to meet a deadline, but staying a ten hours a day, just cause everyone else does and it's expected is just stupid. That was part of the reason I'm not with them anymore.
There is an unfortunate side to this. A lot of teens and their parents are still duped into believing that a degree will still lead to a guaranteed "good" job. There's plenty of material out there to counter-act this view and show that in many (possibly even now a majority) of cases, it's a waste of time and money.
I don't in general disagree with your post (I'm pretty left leaning myself, and what you say makes sense to me), but I do disagree with this statement. Certainly a college degree (especially with middling grades in a "gimme" subject from a "where's that?" schools) is no longer a guarantee of a good job, but it remains the "ticket to ride". In other words, while you may or may not be able to get many jobs with a degree, without one you aren't even in the running. These days secretarial jobs want degrees. I can't remember the last time I even applied for a job that was not "bachelor's degree required, master's degree preferred". My wife (who has a degree from a very respected school, with good grades, though granted in a "gimme subject") has not either, and she primarily works "office manager, light accounting" type jobs, that really don't challenge her at all.
I understand that this is less the case in the Midwest (where far fewer people actually have degrees, so the deflation of their value is not as pronouced), but even here in the South a college degree is listed as a requirement on virtually any office or technical job. You can still get jobs in fast food, retail, and the service industry without them, and of course "craftsman" type jobs like auto mechanics, plumbers, and electricians are still more certification based; but even in any of these fields if you hope to reach management you really need a degree. Do you really need a degree to manage a McDonalds? I don't know, but you're not likely to get the chance to find out around here.
Huh? In what world does the customer care what email client I use?
In the world that the company Exchange server manages everybody's calendars, a corporate address book, shared task lists, and isn't configured to serve people's e-mail in anything other than MAPI. There are precious few groupware clients that work with all of that as served up by Exchange. Assuming that you find one (and they do exist, they just tend to be nearly as costly as Outlook, and IMHO not much better) that you like better than Outlook, you then have to assume that you actually have the privileges to install the client on your workstation (not many people do in corporate environments), and you're not breaking any IT regulations by doing so.
Once you've overcome those hurdles, no one cares what e-mail client you use. In most large companies and many medium sized ones however, those hurdles are pretty much insurmountable. Unless you happen to be the director of IT or something. Even then, you better be prepared to defend your choice to your boss. Even as a systems admin with some seniority, I was pretty much unable to use anything other than Outlook at my last job. I was the Unix systems guy for the lab, but my day to day workstation was completely Microsoft, because that's what day to day IT support dictated. Looks like they're going to let me have a Linux box at my desk for testing and experimentation at my new place thankfully.
It's a possibly flawed analogy. He means when you buy and drink beer, it goes through you so you don't keep it. It ignores the possibility that you might buy it and keep it in the bottle forever. I can't imagine why you'd want to do that (I can rarely keep it in the bottle for more than a few days), but I feel like nitpicking.
In fact if you can afford the time and expense of continuing the lawsuit until the company runs out of appeals, people quite frequently DO win lawsuits against large companies/organizations. It's the affording the time and expense bit that gets tricky.
That might indeed be true if the company is bankrupt and going out of business, but so far as I know the only large scale failure of a DRM music supplier thus far has been Walmart's music service. They essentially got out of the business of online music and took their DRM servers with them. Given the way digital music is going it seems likely that any future failures will be along the same line... a large company will try and and fail with an online distribution model. In that case there is clearly someone to sue.
On the other hand, as is pointed out above, none of the major players in online music sales has DRM on their tunes anymore, so the issue may well be moot from an audio standpoint. Video remains DRMed in virtually every form that it get's released though, so take the Walmart music lesson and apply it to video maybe.
Yeah, but.... I knew when Solaris 8, Irix, MacOS9, and Windows 2000 were going out of support and could plan accordingly. If my plan was: "Keep using it and hope for the best", then it's my fault when/if it all falls apart. Where ever this guy is, he just up and left for there without even a week's warning, let alone the months or even years companies give for products going out of support. Now he may turn up next week and everything is fine, or he may turn up long enough to turn over the reins (and everything's probably a bit rocky, but otherwise fine), or they may find his body (hopefully not, but it's possible) and nothing can be done with CentOS' resources till everything goes through probate. Or he may never resurface in any meaningful way (maybe he joined a monastery and took a vow of "no computers"), and the project will be left hanging.
With commercial vendors, even when they go completely bankrupt, there's usually some sort of continued support, or at least some reasonable announcement of when such support will cease. Now the flip side is that if CentOS IS defunct for whatever reason, someone can just fork the project and "DollarOS" can take over where CentOS left off... but that still isn't the same as good ongoing support from a reliable vendor. Maybe the people who run DollarOS won't be as dedicated, or as competent, or maybe no one will fork it at all.
Don't get me wrong, I've used and liked CentOS; I'm not arguing against using it, just against using it in mission critical apps where long term support might be needed. In that case you should really use RHEL, or even (if you really don't like commercial companies) something like Debian. Debian doesn't have a company behind it, but it does have a large incorporated organization that can survive the loss of any one or even several members.
Eh... that's his point. The cars are safer than his and still feel the need to slow down far more than he does to make the turn.
Corporate firewall/VPN system only worked on machines imaged by corporate IT. They didn't had out the keys, for obvious reasons. I had 5 other machines lying around that I could've used, but I couldn't use them for "work".
Currently I work in closed lab with no Internet access, so obviously no work from home option exists. I spent a year doing field system support for SGI though, and I didn't even have an office. I was the only SSE for most of Louisiana and part of Mississippi, and there was no point spending cash renting out space for an office of one. I worked from home anytime I wasn't on site fixing people computers or out doing some kind of training. It's not all it's cracked up to be frankly. Sure I could work in my bed clothes, and my "commute" involved a walk to the other bedroom, but there was no one to talk to except my dogs (my wife worked in an office), I was dead in the water for three days when my laptop hard drive went out, and everything had to be done via e-mail, fax, or Fed-Ex.
It wasn't awful, but it wasn't much better than working in an office. The pluses and the minuses balanced each other pretty well.
I think $15-20 an hour is reasonable. You can't even hopefully expect that customer volume, non-billable work, the tendency of humans to socialize, and any other factors I'm not thinking of will keep someone working more than 1/2 to 3/4 of any given hour on billable tasks, and the shop has to make a profit. Your theoretical tech is using the shops space (rent), often their tools, their electricity, their Internet for finding patches and fixes... If there were an infinite queue of billable work, and the techs worked at near perfect efficiency, then $40 an hour techs might be reasonable. I do however agree that $8-10 an hour is robbery.
And since it took him five minutes to do, he actually made $0.70 to replace your DIMM. Though probably closer to three or four bucks when you include talking to you about the problem, ringing you up, inquiring about your satisfaction, etc. Still, your fifty dollar repair probably cost three dollars.
I don't much about licensing for Moodle, but the last MS contribution was to the Linux kernel which is GPLv2, I don't think they could have used v3 if they'd wanted to. Not defending or attacking their choice, just saying that if they wanted their drivers in the official kernel, I think they pretty much had to release GPLv2.
This is an excellent couple of points, and to add to them, vendors that want to use FOSS AND want to have government business need to make more careful choices about their software selection. Case in point:
I work for a government contractor, and we recently took delivery of a network analysis device that shall remain nameless. This device came with Fedora Core 4 on it. I was tasked with doing the security initialization of the device, and I noted that several things needed to be updated on it in order to comply with our security standards (in addition to having oldish versions of lots of software with one minor hole or another, it had an old version of the audit daemon which could do the level of fine grained auditing we need). Of course, because we took delivery of this device from another contractor, I had no support contract (and no idea what level of OS the vendor provided anyway) and FC4 has been out of support for nearly three years. Oh, look, no security updates. In the end we had to get the other contractor to fly in and update the OS to a vendor supported version of FC6 (also out of official support, don't know what'll happen next time we need to update something). The whole thing took months, and I'm still not convinced that we'll be able to use the thing for long before someone decides that it needs some other update I can't get.
All it would have taken would have been for the original vendor to use RHEL, LTS Ubuntu, LTS Debian, or any of half a dozen other distros with a company or large stable organization providing long term support and we could have used the thing in days instead of months. Seriously, why would you use Fedora Core for the OS on your products, knowing that it won't be supported a year later?
This is only an opinion, but I think the FSF isn't involved because RMS is largely incapable of compromise. While the overall goals of the organization may mesh well with the overall goals of the FSF, if there is even one pillar of the organizations mission statement that fails to meet an FSF standard, or one commercial company involved who has done something "non-free" that RMS disagrees with, chances are the FSF won't play. Strategic compromises with others who share your larger goals, but may agree with you on the details are not in the FSF's makeup. If it's not all free, all the time, by the FSF definition of free, it's not good enough.
Don't get me wrong, fanaticism can move mountains, and the FSF has done a lot over the year to advance their cause simply by pure determination. On the other hand, now that their ideas are starting to squirm toward mainstream acceptance, they might try finding ways to work with others. Ironically the very fanaticism and determination that has gotten them as far as they've come, and may yet see some portion of their platform become a mainstream idea, may very well leave them irrelevant in the world they helped to create.
The term "friend" is a misnomer here. It's a Facebook term, but obviously the budding musician with a thousand+ friends doesn't really have a thousand+ friends... he does however have a thousand+ fans or people interested in his music. That's the thing about social networks, many people use them for job networking, keeping a fan base informed, organizing political movements, or any number of other things that require you to:
a) Have a lot of friends, followers, or whatever the service's "link" technology is called
b) Be a part of a service with a significant enough market share to make people likely to be members, or at least willing to join in order to link with you
c) Ideally, to be able to keep your "friends" with you when you change services.
Like a salesman wants to keep his "book" when he changes companies, a person who uses social networks "professionally" would like to able to keep his friends list portable. Even though it would be insane for Myspace (which seems to be mostly dying) to make its friends lists portable to Facebook, it would be a useful thing to many people. If there were a relief from possible indemnity, it might be a great project for some recent college grad to make a services that took your Myspace account and moved your profile, including friends where there is an overlap, to Facebook. As it is, Myspace would probably sue, which is going to prevent that from happening. This is a pretty trivial example of course, and it may not even be the case that Myspace could sue, but I think this is along the lines of what the article is talking about.