I've never observed any such thing -- in nearly
a quarter-century of working in this business.
What I have observed is that those
in power in any company will always act in
their own self-interest, and if that happens
to accidentally benefit those below them,
then this is a happy coincidence. Obviously,
this is rarely the case -- when is that last
time you heard of a manager, who, when ordered
to lay off members of his/her staff, took the
bullet for one of them and resigned in order
to save one of their jobs?
Or when's the last time you heard of a top-level executive, who, upon receiving a
multi-million dollar bonus, shared some of it
with the people who did the hard work that
made it possible? Or better yet, with those
people who were laid off in order to make the
company profitable and thereby earn the bonus
from the board of directors?
You owe them nothing -- beyond what
you may have legally agreed to if you signed
an employment agreement.
Yes, this is cynical. It's also sad. But
the days when you could actually expect some
tiny measure of humanity, compassion, understanding, and loyalty are, unfortunately,
behind us. You can now expect greed,
unbridled self-interest, misinformation,
mismanagement, and more greed.
One way to censor a viewpoint you don't like
is to suppress it.
An equally effective way is to drown it out
with your own message.
And that is precisely the effect of spam.
It overran Usenet years ago, rendering newsgroups
which had functioned nicely for years useless.
It's now overrunning the mail systems of ISPs,
individuals and organizations in the same fashion.
Moreover, some companies/individuals have chosen
to profit from this unethical activity, and in
have in fact lent their active support to it.
These companies/individuals should not be surprised when the community attempts to defend
itself from their actions by barring their traffic.
So let's be clear on who the enemy are:
1. Spammers
2. Those who hire spammers.
3. Those who write spamware.
4. Those who provide hosting, connectivity,
mail, or other services to 1-3.
These are the entities responsible for the floods
of spam that clog mailboxes and mail servers;
it is with them that the problem lies, not with
the valiant attempt by MAPS to address it.
1. On-call support should be voluntary.
No member of the staff should be compelled
to participate.
2. Anyone on-call will be paid an hourly
rate equivalent to their salary rate for
the hours that they're on-call. In other
words, someone whose yearly salary works
out to $45/hour and who is on-call from 6 PM
to 6 AM will be paid 12*$45 = $540 for this period.
3. If the on-call person is required to deal
with an emergency, then the rate for the hours
involved is 2X their salary. Continuing the
example, if that oncall person has to spend 2
hours solving a problem that night, then their
compensation is 10*$45+2*$90 = $630.
Expensive? Yes. That's the point: organizations which request on-call support should be prepared
to pay for it, and if they're not -- which, given this sort of expense, most won't be -- then they
should carefully consider their requirements and their resources and decide how
best to utilize them in order to make on-call
support unnecessary. (It's simply amazing
to me how many organizations I've seen which have
chosen to band-aid their problems through
ill-considered on-call support rather than actually
allowing their staff to configure/upgrade/manage
their systems and networks in such a way that
they don't need on-call support. It's one
of the classic cases of PHB thinking.)
Re:Open Content Usenet initiative
on
Deja For Sale
·
· Score: 1
I joined Usenet in 1981, when the principal method
of propagation was via modem at 300 baud (1200 if
we were lucky). It was an amazing thing to be able to hold conversations with people like Dennis Ritchie -- the community was small enough, quiet
enough, and well-behaved enough that this was
not only possible, but commonplace.
Obviously, those days are long gone -- but if I took time to enumerate the causes and symptoms
of Usenet's simultaneous massive expansion and
massive decline in civility/utility/economy,
this would be a much longer note. However, in
spite of all that, large pockets of useful content
remain and I would be supportive of attempts
to preserve them.
It is probably too much to expect Deja.com to
donate the content back to the community --
their actions over the past few years, including
spamming and insertion of ads into articles,
indicate to me that they have little if any
regard for the people who actually make Usenet
a useful medium. However, I'm sure that there
are folks (such as the person who responded
to this article in another thread, and such
as myself) who have partial archives stashed
away and would happily contribute them to
an open-source based effort to provide a
community service.
Although it's very hard to prove those claims, as people who have brought age discrimination lawsuits have found.
Personally, I've noticed a trend over the last few years; as I've applied for jobs for which I'm truly well-qualified (i.e. many years of relevant
and up-to-date experience in exactly the pertinent
areas) I've found that not only do I not get the
job, my cover letter/resume submission isn't even
ack'd.
I find this puzzling, given how often this submission is done electronically, making the
process of ack'ing it trivial. I would have
expected that as more and more of this interaction
takes place online, that we'd see increased responsiveness from employers, not less.
And in the case of a handful of positions that
I applied for this year, I'm outright baffled:
they listed X buzzwords, I have 90% of them
in theory and practice and a bunch of related
stuff that they didn't bother to list. (I make
a continuous effort to keep my skills current,
and while, for example, I haven't tackled PHP
yet, I do speak perl and Java, run Linux and
BSD, speak fluent sendmail and DNS and Apache,
etc.)
So why didn't I even get called for an interview?
Could it be because I'm in my 40's, because I expect to be well-paid for what I bring to the
table, and don't expect to work 80 hours/week
because my employers are too cheap to hire two
people to do two peoples' work?
I don't know. The lack of interaction with
potential employers means that I'm speculating
and trying to correlate anecdotal evidence
with experience. But I find the trend disturbing,
not only because of how it impacts me, but because
of what it means for those who are entering
the workforce twenty years behind me.
I'm concerned that employers who avoid people
like me -- because we're (relatively) expensive
and won't work ourselves to death -- will try
to take advantage of younger workers, and that
they will succeed. Again, the evidence is mostly
anecdotal, but I'll bet that at least half the
people reading this worked more than 60 hours
this week and were not fairly compensated for it.
I'll further bet that a quarter worked more than
80 while being paid a salary commensurate with 40.
Of course, there's no way for me to know if I'm
right about that or not; maybe I'm way off base
here. (shrug) But my advice is not to buy into
the PHB-propagated myth that you are somehow
obligated to do this for the company you work
for. You're not. And if you do, you may find
that twenty years down the road, you'll discover
that all the sacrifices you made, all the things
you gave up, were never appreciated or paid
for -- but that the people above you, the ones
who have profited handsomely from everything
you gave up, have taken their money and
gone somewhere else to repeat the cycle.
While RMS may not want to take credit for "open
source", per se, there's no doubt that his
announcement of the GNU project (September 27, 1983) was a significant spark to the movement.
The distribution of Unix from Bell Labs in source
code form (albeit requiring a license) was also
a first: prior to that, production-quality operating systems were not available in
source code form. And the follow-on from
the Berkeley CSRG, i.e. their distribution of
BSD Unix in the same form, continued this.
There's no doubt that the tremendous strides
made in the 80's in the specific area of
production-quality Internet-connected systems
were driven by this: consider that Usenet news
(and NNTP), Kerberos, X, DNS, NFS, Perl, PGP,
IRC, SNMP, gopher, MIME, archie, etc.
were all invented on these systems.
Finally, in the days before connection to the
TCP/IP Arpanet was widespread, Usenet served
as the net's primary source distribution vehicle.
The newsgroups comp.sources.* and their archives
were, for the better part of a decade, the way
that developers released code and users got their
hands on it.
Deja's merely copying what Remarq tried (and removed, due to the ensuing outcry). There's nothing "innovative" about this, any more than there is about Deja's tactic of spamming people who register at its site. Deja *could* have been a premier source for Usenet archives and provided a valuable service to the Internet community. But instead, they are clearly attempting to co-opt a long-standing community resource and profit from it -- without returning value to the community, and, as in this case, by corrupting the article and falsely attributing statements to their authors that they did not make. This is unethical behavior and deserves the contempt of the entire Usenet community.
I hardly think it's a "misconception"; I think it's quite clear that Ada is the product of a *long* series of committees charged with defining the standard. And like anything subject to this sort of process, it reflects its origins. This isn't to say that there weren't some talented people involved, or that some of them didn't have cohesive visions for the language. They were. They did. But ANYTHING that gets pushed through a committee process this lengthy, and with as much vested interest (from the US government procurement angle) is bound to come out fairly warped. Could it have been different? Maybe. But it wasn't, and as a result, Ada is well on its way to being a relic -- an interesting relic, but not one of ongoing interest to those on the leading edge.
There are two principles reasons why Ada has failed as a language. (And I say "failed" because it has failed to achieve widespread acceptance; it's used, for the most part, only where it is REQUIRED to be used.) 1. Lack of unified design vision. Most of the successful s/w projects come from a very small team -- often a single individual -- who impose a single world view on their creation. Examples Unix, C, perl, sendmail. Not that these are perfect -- that's not the point. The point *is* that they're hugely successful and part of that is due to reasonable adherence to a relatively tight set of design goals. 2. Creeping featurism. Ada is an incredibly bloated language: it has way too many features, it requires way too much code to perform simple tasks; even its source code is verbose and unwieldy. This is probably a direct consequence of its origins, specifically the design-by-committee approach. ("If anyone wants this, we'll include it.") As a result, it's a huge language in every sense of "huge" -- which makes things more difficult, not easier. I recall having a similar discussion in the mid-80's with someone who insisted that Ada would displace C (and the then-new C++ and objective C). Clearly, the exact opposite has happened -- and will happen again should anyone decide to repeat the Ada design process.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never observed any such thing -- in nearly a quarter-century of working in this business.
What I have observed is that those in power in any company will always act in their own self-interest, and if that happens to accidentally benefit those below them, then this is a happy coincidence. Obviously, this is rarely the case -- when is that last time you heard of a manager, who, when ordered to lay off members of his/her staff, took the bullet for one of them and resigned in order to save one of their jobs?
Or when's the last time you heard of a top-level executive, who, upon receiving a multi-million dollar bonus, shared some of it with the people who did the hard work that made it possible? Or better yet, with those people who were laid off in order to make the company profitable and thereby earn the bonus from the board of directors?
You owe them nothing -- beyond what you may have legally agreed to if you signed an employment agreement.
Yes, this is cynical. It's also sad. But the days when you could actually expect some tiny measure of humanity, compassion, understanding, and loyalty are, unfortunately, behind us. You can now expect greed, unbridled self-interest, misinformation, mismanagement, and more greed.
Plan your career accordingly.
One way to censor a viewpoint you don't like is to suppress it.
An equally effective way is to drown it out with your own message.
And that is precisely the effect of spam. It overran Usenet years ago, rendering newsgroups which had functioned nicely for years useless. It's now overrunning the mail systems of ISPs, individuals and organizations in the same fashion.
Moreover, some companies/individuals have chosen to profit from this unethical activity, and in have in fact lent their active support to it. These companies/individuals should not be surprised when the community attempts to defend itself from their actions by barring their traffic.
So let's be clear on who the enemy are:
1. Spammers
2. Those who hire spammers.
3. Those who write spamware.
4. Those who provide hosting, connectivity, mail, or other services to 1-3.
These are the entities responsible for the floods of spam that clog mailboxes and mail servers; it is with them that the problem lies, not with the valiant attempt by MAPS to address it.
2. Anyone on-call will be paid an hourly rate equivalent to their salary rate for the hours that they're on-call. In other words, someone whose yearly salary works out to $45/hour and who is on-call from 6 PM to 6 AM will be paid 12*$45 = $540 for this period.
3. If the on-call person is required to deal with an emergency, then the rate for the hours involved is 2X their salary. Continuing the example, if that oncall person has to spend 2 hours solving a problem that night, then their compensation is 10*$45+2*$90 = $630.
Expensive? Yes. That's the point: organizations which request on-call support should be prepared to pay for it, and if they're not -- which, given this sort of expense, most won't be -- then they should carefully consider their requirements and their resources and decide how best to utilize them in order to make on-call support unnecessary. (It's simply amazing to me how many organizations I've seen which have chosen to band-aid their problems through ill-considered on-call support rather than actually allowing their staff to configure/upgrade/manage their systems and networks in such a way that they don't need on-call support. It's one of the classic cases of PHB thinking.)
Obviously, those days are long gone -- but if I took time to enumerate the causes and symptoms of Usenet's simultaneous massive expansion and massive decline in civility/utility/economy, this would be a much longer note. However, in spite of all that, large pockets of useful content remain and I would be supportive of attempts to preserve them. It is probably too much to expect Deja.com to donate the content back to the community -- their actions over the past few years, including spamming and insertion of ads into articles, indicate to me that they have little if any regard for the people who actually make Usenet a useful medium. However, I'm sure that there are folks (such as the person who responded to this article in another thread, and such as myself) who have partial archives stashed away and would happily contribute them to an open-source based effort to provide a community service.
Personally, I've noticed a trend over the last few years; as I've applied for jobs for which I'm truly well-qualified (i.e. many years of relevant and up-to-date experience in exactly the pertinent areas) I've found that not only do I not get the job, my cover letter/resume submission isn't even ack'd.
I find this puzzling, given how often this submission is done electronically, making the process of ack'ing it trivial. I would have expected that as more and more of this interaction takes place online, that we'd see increased responsiveness from employers, not less. And in the case of a handful of positions that I applied for this year, I'm outright baffled: they listed X buzzwords, I have 90% of them in theory and practice and a bunch of related stuff that they didn't bother to list. (I make a continuous effort to keep my skills current, and while, for example, I haven't tackled PHP yet, I do speak perl and Java, run Linux and BSD, speak fluent sendmail and DNS and Apache, etc.)
So why didn't I even get called for an interview?
Could it be because I'm in my 40's, because I expect to be well-paid for what I bring to the table, and don't expect to work 80 hours/week because my employers are too cheap to hire two people to do two peoples' work?
I don't know. The lack of interaction with potential employers means that I'm speculating and trying to correlate anecdotal evidence with experience. But I find the trend disturbing, not only because of how it impacts me, but because of what it means for those who are entering the workforce twenty years behind me.
I'm concerned that employers who avoid people like me -- because we're (relatively) expensive and won't work ourselves to death -- will try to take advantage of younger workers, and that they will succeed. Again, the evidence is mostly anecdotal, but I'll bet that at least half the people reading this worked more than 60 hours this week and were not fairly compensated for it. I'll further bet that a quarter worked more than 80 while being paid a salary commensurate with 40.
Of course, there's no way for me to know if I'm right about that or not; maybe I'm way off base here. (shrug) But my advice is not to buy into the PHB-propagated myth that you are somehow obligated to do this for the company you work for. You're not. And if you do, you may find that twenty years down the road, you'll discover that all the sacrifices you made, all the things you gave up, were never appreciated or paid for -- but that the people above you, the ones who have profited handsomely from everything you gave up, have taken their money and gone somewhere else to repeat the cycle.
While RMS may not want to take credit for "open
source", per se, there's no doubt that his
announcement of the GNU project (September 27, 1983) was a significant spark to the movement.
The distribution of Unix from Bell Labs in source
code form (albeit requiring a license) was also
a first: prior to that, production-quality operating systems were not available in
source code form. And the follow-on from
the Berkeley CSRG, i.e. their distribution of
BSD Unix in the same form, continued this.
There's no doubt that the tremendous strides
made in the 80's in the specific area of
production-quality Internet-connected systems
were driven by this: consider that Usenet news
(and NNTP), Kerberos, X, DNS, NFS, Perl, PGP,
IRC, SNMP, gopher, MIME, archie, etc.
were all invented on these systems.
Finally, in the days before connection to the
TCP/IP Arpanet was widespread, Usenet served
as the net's primary source distribution vehicle.
The newsgroups comp.sources.* and their archives
were, for the better part of a decade, the way
that developers released code and users got their
hands on it.
Deja's merely copying what Remarq tried (and removed, due to the ensuing outcry). There's nothing "innovative" about this, any more than there is about Deja's tactic of spamming people who register at its site. Deja *could* have been a premier source for Usenet archives and provided a valuable service to the Internet community. But instead, they are clearly attempting to co-opt a long-standing community resource and profit from it -- without returning value to the community, and, as in this case, by corrupting the article and falsely attributing statements to their authors that they did not make. This is unethical behavior and deserves the contempt of the entire Usenet community.
I hardly think it's a "misconception"; I think it's quite clear that Ada is the product of a *long* series of committees charged with defining the standard. And like anything subject to this sort of process, it reflects its origins. This isn't to say that there weren't some talented people involved, or that some of them didn't have cohesive visions for the language. They were. They did. But ANYTHING that gets pushed through a committee process this lengthy, and with as much vested interest (from the US government procurement angle) is bound to come out fairly warped. Could it have been different? Maybe. But it wasn't, and as a result, Ada is well on its way to being a relic -- an interesting relic, but not one of ongoing interest to those on the leading edge.
There are two principles reasons why Ada has failed as a language. (And I say "failed" because it has failed to achieve widespread acceptance; it's used, for the most part, only where it is REQUIRED to be used.) 1. Lack of unified design vision. Most of the successful s/w projects come from a very small team -- often a single individual -- who impose a single world view on their creation. Examples Unix, C, perl, sendmail. Not that these are perfect -- that's not the point. The point *is* that they're hugely successful and part of that is due to reasonable adherence to a relatively tight set of design goals. 2. Creeping featurism. Ada is an incredibly bloated language: it has way too many features, it requires way too much code to perform simple tasks; even its source code is verbose and unwieldy. This is probably a direct consequence of its origins, specifically the design-by-committee approach. ("If anyone wants this, we'll include it.") As a result, it's a huge language in every sense of "huge" -- which makes things more difficult, not easier. I recall having a similar discussion in the mid-80's with someone who insisted that Ada would displace C (and the then-new C++ and objective C). Clearly, the exact opposite has happened -- and will happen again should anyone decide to repeat the Ada design process.