I just checked computerjobs.com and found there are currently 1991 jobs in Texas. I remember when that number was as high as 23,000 before the economy nose dived. Whether it is, or is not, back in other areas, it most definitely is nowhere near back in IT hiring.
Let me ask you this, since you posted a specific tool you use. Are you willing to hire someone who does NOT yet know that tool, but is willing and eager to learn it, AND has a track record of learning other things to show that they can?
If you are NOT interested in hiring such a person, then you are an example of part of the problem. Here's how the logic works:
These various technologies never last long enough for someone to practice that technology for their entire expected career (42 years typical, from graduation at 23 to retirement at 65). Do you expect to be using J2EE only for the next 42 years? I highly doubt it. Something new (and supposedly better) will come along in a few years.
The problem is, everyone who learned J2EE or any other current modern technology will then be SOL. Why? Because you and other employers will switch to the new technology a couple years or so after it has emerged, and you won't be interested in hiring anyone who would be learning it for the very first time.
The problem is, there's no long term career opportunity in any field which is changing in a way that employers won't LET people keep up with by hiring-to-learn. College (and pre-college) kids are learning that getting a degree in CS and/or learning some current modern technology such as Java and J2EE means a career of perhaps at most 10 years, and in many cases even less. As technology changes, employers are just disposing of employees who could learn new stuff in a couple months, and instead trying to hire new people who already know what's new (either college grads who just learned it in a class, or someone lucky enough to fall into that technology just as it emerged). The kids see this practice and instead look to other careers fields which pay well and will last well into retirement, such as being a lawyer or doctor.
If all employers were to make at least 25% of their hires from experienced and/or educated people who don't really match some, most, or even all of the technology in use, but can learn it, then maybe this "problem" of kids not pursuing the path will go away. Think about it. Put yourself in the place of one of these kids seeing that both new college grads that just happened to pick the wrong technology to learn, as well as decades experienced people that want to move on to new things, just aren't getting jobs (they aren't because employers like you won't hire them).
True smart hiring should be based on hiring people that are smart, regardless of the specific technology they happen to know or be experienced with. If they are smart people, they can make it happen with any technology. Hiring programmers shouldn't be about what language you know or what toolkit you've used. It should be about understanding the development process, and even about improving on it. Past programming experience always helps, but even in other languages, it's still mostly what you need.
Then post your high paying job openings right here and now and let's just see if your money is where your mouth is. The fact is, talented and experienced people actually are plentiful. You just have to look around better. And you may even be misreading the resumes for all I know (I've met a few managers who couldn't do that... which is needed since techie/geek type people can't write good ones). The local grown talent is here. You're just not making the effort. And the big corporations that also don't make the effort can easily fall back on the body shop sales people that come in carrying a few CDs full of resumes from the workers they are selling. So it's certainly a lot easier to sign an outsourcing contract than to take the proper steps to find someone as specific as you want.
Keep in mind that the more specific you want to be about finding the person to fill the job, the more work you have to do.
How many online job web sites do your jobs get posted in? Do you post in at least 10 of them? Or are you expecting the candidates to spend 100 hours a week hunting through all the repeats of the really stupid underpaying jobs on dozens of these sites. Now it isn't your fault that the online job hunting methods are so fragmented (because of way too many job sites, and too much clutter and noise on the big ones). Unfortunately, it's what you're stuck with just as much as those of us hunting for work are.
And by all means absolutely do not dismiss any candidate because they are currently unemployed. If you think unemployed people can't do the job, then all you are doing is making worse the very problem you seem to claim does not exist.
BTW, please include salaries in those job opening listings you post here. Let's see if your pay level really does indicate your belief in this shortage.
And why are you hiding behind "Anonymous Coward"? Afraid someone will be able to track you to your company and find that you aren't really hiring at all?
They won't even hire older people with even more experience than you have. Your experience is what is holding you back. Experience == higher pay expectations and less ass kissing. They want someone that has learned only the specific things they need and absolutely nothing else (because someone who knows a lot more would go to a better paying job if one is found). They really don't want people that can learn because that means they'll end up with people that can do more things and that gets back to the higher pay expectation. What they really want are disposable drones (and that seems to be what they get with outsourcing and H-1Bs).
First, the government gathers statistics in a number of ways. The reports from the states on unemployment benefits are the most significant figures they use because the sample size is so large. Obviously they use other kinds of statistics as well. But even in this case the data will not be very good. Just how do you think they get this data? The typical survey method is by telephone. So now if your phone service is cut off, you're no longer counted. I even know people with jobs that can't afford telephone service. This method of gathering information is going to be at least equally slanted towards looking only at the employed.
Statistics are also gathered at the various state job assistance agencies. But they are mostly worthless for anything above low end jobs. All those high-tech development jobs IBM claims they want to fill are not listed there at all. Nor are any others. So why would anyone even bother to go there?
And still, none of this even evaluates underemployment at all.
There are a couple of reasons: one is a myth, believed by parents, students, and high school guidance counselors, that computer science and engineering jobs are all being outsourced to China and India. This is not true. The percentage of the total number of jobs in this space is quite small -- less than 5%.
Notice how the wording of this is meant to distort and twist perceptions. Hardly anyone thinks that all science and engineering jobs are being outsourced to China and India. By saying it that way, however, they are hoping to recruit people to argue with those who do believe (and rightly so) that many jobs are being outsourced there.
Also notice how they leave out "insourcing" of workers on H-1B non-resident visas. The latter is actually more of an issue for a few reasons. Among them is that many jobs simply cannot be moved to a remote location. Another reason is that this makes for an effective slave labor force right here because such a worker cannot easily move to a new job, and if they complain about the working conditions and hours, and get fired, they can't just go get another job, they usually have to return to their home country.
All of this, including the industry push to flood the market with even more CS, engineering, and science graduates, is all part of the scheme to drive pay levels down, cut benefits, and limit career paths to just 10 or so years. If you think business has any other motive besides the acquisition of profits, then you absolutely do not understand how business functions.
And I'm not so sure about this 5% figure. I've heard a number of figures from a number of sources, ranging from 3% to 25%. I'm more inclined to believe it is somewhere around 8% to 10% based on empirical observations of numbers of people out of work. More likely they conveniently include lots of lesser-tech jobs when they work up those figures, while sending the higher-tech jobs overseas.
According to a government study, the voluntary attrition in the U.S. has outpaced the number of outsourced jobs to emerging nations. Further, for every job outsourced from the U.S., nine new jobs are actually created in the U.S.
The government studies lots of things and tends to get things wrong a lot. The only voluntary attrition that exists here is due to declining working conditions, such as bad working environments, fewer benefits, and lower pay. And of course, PHBs.
For every high-tech job outsourced, some number of low-tech jobs probably are created. I doubt it is nine; probably closer to three. These would be low-tech jobs like sales, marketing, and secretarial. If any of those jobs created in US really are high-tech, they will be trying to hire H-1B's in them.
The government also has incomplete figures on people out of work. When someone who had a high-tech job loses it, and applies for unemployment benefits, then they get counted. But when the benefits run out, they aren't counted anymore. And if they had a substantial savings, they might not apply for unemployment benefits, or might not even qualify in some cases... and won't be counted. Those that do find work doing something else like delivering pizza will then no longer be counted as unemployed (the government has no classification of underemployed).
While it is true that there are untapped resources of smart people who can do high-tech work all over the world, and it is a good thing to get them working for you, it is clear that US businesses are using this combined with other practices more for driving down pay and benefits while still having a base of smart people.
All that said, I do need to point out that US business, as well as European businesses and probably even Japanese businesses, are at a competitive disadvantage in the emerging world market due to the higher living costs at home. Costs have to be cut to survive. And even if we stopped all foreign companies from selling in
It's also a little weird to completely lose your browser functions, like the back button, when you go to the ajaxWrite url.
If this AJAX app can do all that to the browser, imagine what could be done in the hands of a spammer. I totally worry about Firefox security, now.
I decided to give it a shot in a totally separate instance of Firefox. But just as a test, I opened a 2nd window in that Firefox process, and a 2nd tab as well. Would they go away? When I click on the button to run ajaxWrite, it fails and says Javascript is not enabled. But in fact it is enabled. When I open it in its own window, with no tabs, then it seems to be OK. I presume it must be some Javascript function that failed (like steal.all.the.browser.button.space() or such). So it might not be as bad as I first feared.
D-Link must be run by Osama Bin Laden. That's why no one can be reached (hiding in the mountains of the Afghanistan and Pakistan border). Obviously, this attack has something to do with that cartoon thing.
1. All that dbc001 (541033) wanted to do was disconnect his service with AT&T/SBC to send an economic message to the company. He can't because of his rental obligation to keep his security system connected. There's relatively little concern about the security system callups being tapped. It sounds like he already uses his cell phone for all conversations (hopefully digital). All he needs is enough to get the security system connected.
2. Using a facilities based CLEC voiceline provider means his twisted pair is going to a new switch. While AT&T/SBC could still physically tap that line, I'm very confident that the internet traffic forwarding is not using that method. Bulk tapping would not, either; it would be done in the switch. So even if he were using that line for communications, it would be the CLEC's privacy policy of most concern. His individual line could still be tapped physically by AT&T/SBC, but that isn't practical unless there's a specific reason.
There has to be some room to deal with those issues. I certainly would not just knee-jerk when someone claims the mail they got fit the UBE definition. OTOH, I have hundreds of spamtraps running, getting tons of spam, none of which have ever solicited anything. Many get the same things in duplication. That's UBE right there. I did seed a few of these spamtraps by appending email addresses in various public postings I've made. In one case, the quickest was a spamtrap that was hit with spam within 20 minutes of the post. But most of these spamtraps are actually of spammer creation. They originated as non-existant email addresses that were at first giving the spammer's "no such user" responses. So I simply created the mailboxes and started collecting. There clearly was no valid solicitation. Perhaps likely someone entered fake addresses in places they submit information to, or postings they make online. Out of curiosity for one rather odd username, I actually tracked down where that email address was included in a post, and even tracked down who did it and their real email address. But I don't blame them (and never even contacted them); I blame whoever scraped the address from the web site it was posted on, and hundreds plus spammers who have since sent spam to it.
An ISP should verify that the customer running a mailing list is in fact using a proper verification mechanism. There are many steps to that. And yes, a spammer could well get to do some spamming for a while as a result. But there are ways to deal with that. One is to ask the customer exactly what they are doing, and if they are sending bulk email. If they say no to bulk email, then they should be willing to have a rate limit applied during the investigation period. If they say yes to bulk email, they should be able to describe the steps they take to get verification. Then they should be willing to produce details about any given subscriber, including the IP address the verification request was delivered to (the peer in the SMTP connection), and where the verification response came from (again, SMTP peer), with dates and times. Another way to deal with this is those people and businesses that are eventually shown to be spammers would be more swiftly disconnected at other ISPs if they even get in at all.
Remember, this 2nd "clean" network would only consist of those willing to put up with these restrictions. The 1st network, the "dirty" one, the original one, would remain unchanged. All the rules of the 2nd one would not apply in the 1st one. If you don't like the way things are done on the 2nd one, then don't participate. Or at your option, you can use both.
What are the legitimate mailing lists going to do when email becomes so trashed that people stop using it? Actually, they could fall back to either distributing via private IMAP servers (e.g. you add an additional email account to your mail agent program so it also picks up mail there), private NNTP servers (not peered with the big Usenet), or a web based forum... or all of the above.
It's not censorship because it's not based on content. It's based on action. Abuse is the taking of resources from others. We don't let people just steal printing presses and defend such theft by claiming that the enforcement would be censorship. Why should we let them steal network bandwidth and server process memory time? I'm not proposing the blocking of commercial marketing email. I'm only proposing that that abusive practices be limited to a network used by those who don't really care about such practices. It's a property rights issue. People with a message can get that message out to those who want to hear it without abuse.
BTW, I've found that content based anti-spam software was blocking the commercial marketing email that I actually do subscribe to (yes, I really do solicit some mailings from a few retailers of music CDs and financial info). Those that conduct their email marketing campaigns correctly generally won't get listed on places like SPEWS, but they will likely continue to be intercepted by content based detection of marketing. Sure, they can be whitelisted. But the method of basing blocking on action I believe does a more accurate job than that based on message content.
... but the suit and tie will cost you extra. Businessmen speak of "money motivated people". Offer enough money to motivate me.
Hey, you can get Linux from companies like IBM, with suit and tie on the sales people and even the consultants that come in to play sysadmin for you. So what's the issue?
Re:Backwards compatibile does not imply slowness
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Why Windows is Slow
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This still does not compare to Microsoft and Windows. There are 2 aspects of backwards compatibility. One is to make sure old programs still run OK. The other is to make sure old hardware is supported. Solaris has an advantage over Microsoft in both.
The hardware area is where the biggest advantage is. Solaris mostly supported Sun's own hardware, and that would a limited range of possibilities, all of which they have their own engineering data on. Solaris support for x86 has always been limited to only major manufacturer components. Until only recently, lots of hardware just wasn't supported on Solaris.
But Solaris has an advantage even in legacy software support. To begin with, customers of Unix (and thus SunOS and Solaris) tended to be using more internally developed software, or software that could be downloaded in source code. Those could be recompiled to the newer systems, when needed, taking some of the pressure off compatibility issues. And the market of binary-only software to run on Solaris has always been smaller than that of Windows, and generally only from larger companies that tended to be more stable (e.g. they can recompile and tweak and send updates for new OS versions). Software for Windows, which is almost entirely binary only, comes from a full range of software maker sizes, from large companies on down to one-man shops. A lot of that software was shareware, too.
In all, Microsoft has a MUCH larger chore keeping Windows compatible with a MUCH larger base of obscure hardware and software, than Solaris would ever have. It's not backwards compatibility, per se, but rather, the size and scale of it Microsoft has.
"decently priced" = real cheap for the masses. The first year or so won't see any of that. The issue is whether or not they can get there, and do so just as quickly, if the early adopters choose to not buy into this. All the wise ones with analog displays won't because they know they won't get HD video that way; so why buy something that won't do any more than what you have now. OTOH, those who buy all new displays with HDMI and HDCP are probably going to be able to see the HD resolution (though the compression quality may still be an issue... what I've seen on HD satellite so far has been some combination of fuzzy and blocky). I suspect it will be a slow uptake.
I plan to get go with Blu-Ray for storing computer data, and I might try to do some video creation myself (I haven't even jumped into DVD, yet). But this is still going to be at least a year after release.
I'd rather split the internet on the basis of ISPs that allow, or do not allow, spammers to be hosted. There would then be 2 internets, of which one (the clean one) would have rules against spam and any other forms of abuse (but not any rules against any particular content, per se, though local jurisdiction rules would still apply). Any ISPs that allows spammers and other abuses would then be forced to move their connection to the other one (the dirty one), which would, of course, affect all their customers.
Which net would you want to connect to if it turns out all the big ISPs won't or can't connect to the clean net? Suppose there were tunneling gateways where those whose physical layer connection is through a big ISP can still reach the clean net?
The way you phrased that got me thinking. If the decisions by (potential) clients to use or not use a particular contracting vendor tend to be made on the basis of how well the salespeople socialize, I think this will be known, perhaps even if just subconciously, by the people doing the actual work, and they will be less proud of it (and less interested in committing their heart and soul into the work), than they would if the people who make those decisions are making them based on the quality of their (or their team's) work.
One problem in contracting is that when the client might next have new work, the team could very well be off on a different project at a different client. The client wanting them back has to decide to delay the project to get the good team, or find another team and move on.
It's not really a matter of whether it's inside staff or outside contractors doing the work that effects the quality. It's more a case of size. The larger the corporation, regardless of which side of the contract they are on, the worse the results are. In the case of a 7000 person company hiring a 3 person company to do the job, that's likely to produce much better results. It wouldn't be so if the 7000 person company hired out to a 20000 person company that sent 3 people over to do it. The 3 person company isn't scraping people off the job boards. The 20000 person company has to.
But this doesn't usually take into account that the people brought in by the contractor to do the job are usually less competent, and almost certainly less motivated to do a job they would be proud of. The working conditions lots of these contractors, especially the big ones, create, generate a lot of turnover... mostly over.
You're far better off finding better ways to schedule and manage projects so you don't find yourself in a pinch one day with work for 6 people when you only have enough continuing work to keep 3 on staff. Of course you can't always control this. But at a 50% project failure rate, I wouldn't want to take the risk. I'd rather bit the bullet and hire a 4th person and try to spread the workload out, and not worry if one job is posting on Slashdot 9 months down the road.
Maybe you shouldn't try to redesign it. With a good roadmap plan of where you want to get to, incremental changes can you there. maybe you're trying to bite off too much in one go? I've seen many a company website turn into a disaster because of that. In one case the webmaster of the site got all angry and blamed it on my browser, on Linux, on my ISP, etc. When I talked on the phone to a sales guy, he agreed that the web site sucked and he had to use the paper catalog for everything (and he used Windows, IE, just like the webmaster told me I should use).
Just don't try to overdo it. Markets change. Business changes direction. Be agile. Don't hop into the latest web coding craze. Just stick to standards that are at least 5 years old, as that's probably the largest base of users that it can work with and still give you some reasonable feature set. And for gawd's sake, no goddamn Flash! (unless you're product is media itself)
Slashdot Mirror
I just checked computerjobs.com and found there are currently 1991 jobs in Texas. I remember when that number was as high as 23,000 before the economy nose dived. Whether it is, or is not, back in other areas, it most definitely is nowhere near back in IT hiring.
Let me ask you this, since you posted a specific tool you use. Are you willing to hire someone who does NOT yet know that tool, but is willing and eager to learn it, AND has a track record of learning other things to show that they can?
If you are NOT interested in hiring such a person, then you are an example of part of the problem. Here's how the logic works:
These various technologies never last long enough for someone to practice that technology for their entire expected career (42 years typical, from graduation at 23 to retirement at 65). Do you expect to be using J2EE only for the next 42 years? I highly doubt it. Something new (and supposedly better) will come along in a few years.
The problem is, everyone who learned J2EE or any other current modern technology will then be SOL. Why? Because you and other employers will switch to the new technology a couple years or so after it has emerged, and you won't be interested in hiring anyone who would be learning it for the very first time.
The problem is, there's no long term career opportunity in any field which is changing in a way that employers won't LET people keep up with by hiring-to-learn. College (and pre-college) kids are learning that getting a degree in CS and/or learning some current modern technology such as Java and J2EE means a career of perhaps at most 10 years, and in many cases even less. As technology changes, employers are just disposing of employees who could learn new stuff in a couple months, and instead trying to hire new people who already know what's new (either college grads who just learned it in a class, or someone lucky enough to fall into that technology just as it emerged). The kids see this practice and instead look to other careers fields which pay well and will last well into retirement, such as being a lawyer or doctor.
If all employers were to make at least 25% of their hires from experienced and/or educated people who don't really match some, most, or even all of the technology in use, but can learn it, then maybe this "problem" of kids not pursuing the path will go away. Think about it. Put yourself in the place of one of these kids seeing that both new college grads that just happened to pick the wrong technology to learn, as well as decades experienced people that want to move on to new things, just aren't getting jobs (they aren't because employers like you won't hire them).
True smart hiring should be based on hiring people that are smart, regardless of the specific technology they happen to know or be experienced with. If they are smart people, they can make it happen with any technology. Hiring programmers shouldn't be about what language you know or what toolkit you've used. It should be about understanding the development process, and even about improving on it. Past programming experience always helps, but even in other languages, it's still mostly what you need.
Then post your high paying job openings right here and now and let's just see if your money is where your mouth is. The fact is, talented and experienced people actually are plentiful. You just have to look around better. And you may even be misreading the resumes for all I know (I've met a few managers who couldn't do that ... which is needed since techie/geek type people can't write good ones). The local grown talent is here. You're just not making the effort. And the big corporations that also don't make the effort can easily fall back on the body shop sales people that come in carrying a few CDs full of resumes from the workers they are selling. So it's certainly a lot easier to sign an outsourcing contract than to take the proper steps to find someone as specific as you want.
Keep in mind that the more specific you want to be about finding the person to fill the job, the more work you have to do.
How many online job web sites do your jobs get posted in? Do you post in at least 10 of them? Or are you expecting the candidates to spend 100 hours a week hunting through all the repeats of the really stupid underpaying jobs on dozens of these sites. Now it isn't your fault that the online job hunting methods are so fragmented (because of way too many job sites, and too much clutter and noise on the big ones). Unfortunately, it's what you're stuck with just as much as those of us hunting for work are.
And by all means absolutely do not dismiss any candidate because they are currently unemployed. If you think unemployed people can't do the job, then all you are doing is making worse the very problem you seem to claim does not exist.
BTW, please include salaries in those job opening listings you post here. Let's see if your pay level really does indicate your belief in this shortage.
And why are you hiding behind "Anonymous Coward"? Afraid someone will be able to track you to your company and find that you aren't really hiring at all?
They won't even hire older people with even more experience than you have. Your experience is what is holding you back. Experience == higher pay expectations and less ass kissing. They want someone that has learned only the specific things they need and absolutely nothing else (because someone who knows a lot more would go to a better paying job if one is found). They really don't want people that can learn because that means they'll end up with people that can do more things and that gets back to the higher pay expectation. What they really want are disposable drones (and that seems to be what they get with outsourcing and H-1Bs).
First, the government gathers statistics in a number of ways. The reports from the states on unemployment benefits are the most significant figures they use because the sample size is so large. Obviously they use other kinds of statistics as well. But even in this case the data will not be very good. Just how do you think they get this data? The typical survey method is by telephone. So now if your phone service is cut off, you're no longer counted. I even know people with jobs that can't afford telephone service. This method of gathering information is going to be at least equally slanted towards looking only at the employed.
Statistics are also gathered at the various state job assistance agencies. But they are mostly worthless for anything above low end jobs. All those high-tech development jobs IBM claims they want to fill are not listed there at all. Nor are any others. So why would anyone even bother to go there?
And still, none of this even evaluates underemployment at all.
Notice how the wording of this is meant to distort and twist perceptions. Hardly anyone thinks that all science and engineering jobs are being outsourced to China and India. By saying it that way, however, they are hoping to recruit people to argue with those who do believe (and rightly so) that many jobs are being outsourced there.
Also notice how they leave out "insourcing" of workers on H-1B non-resident visas. The latter is actually more of an issue for a few reasons. Among them is that many jobs simply cannot be moved to a remote location. Another reason is that this makes for an effective slave labor force right here because such a worker cannot easily move to a new job, and if they complain about the working conditions and hours, and get fired, they can't just go get another job, they usually have to return to their home country.
All of this, including the industry push to flood the market with even more CS, engineering, and science graduates, is all part of the scheme to drive pay levels down, cut benefits, and limit career paths to just 10 or so years. If you think business has any other motive besides the acquisition of profits, then you absolutely do not understand how business functions.
And I'm not so sure about this 5% figure. I've heard a number of figures from a number of sources, ranging from 3% to 25%. I'm more inclined to believe it is somewhere around 8% to 10% based on empirical observations of numbers of people out of work. More likely they conveniently include lots of lesser-tech jobs when they work up those figures, while sending the higher-tech jobs overseas.
The government studies lots of things and tends to get things wrong a lot. The only voluntary attrition that exists here is due to declining working conditions, such as bad working environments, fewer benefits, and lower pay. And of course, PHBs.
For every high-tech job outsourced, some number of low-tech jobs probably are created. I doubt it is nine; probably closer to three. These would be low-tech jobs like sales, marketing, and secretarial. If any of those jobs created in US really are high-tech, they will be trying to hire H-1B's in them.
The government also has incomplete figures on people out of work. When someone who had a high-tech job loses it, and applies for unemployment benefits, then they get counted. But when the benefits run out, they aren't counted anymore. And if they had a substantial savings, they might not apply for unemployment benefits, or might not even qualify in some cases ... and won't be counted. Those that do find work doing something else like delivering pizza will then no longer be counted as unemployed (the government has no classification of underemployed).
While it is true that there are untapped resources of smart people who can do high-tech work all over the world, and it is a good thing to get them working for you, it is clear that US businesses are using this combined with other practices more for driving down pay and benefits while still having a base of smart people.
All that said, I do need to point out that US business, as well as European businesses and probably even Japanese businesses, are at a competitive disadvantage in the emerging world market due to the higher living costs at home. Costs have to be cut to survive. And even if we stopped all foreign companies from selling in
If this AJAX app can do all that to the browser, imagine what could be done in the hands of a spammer. I totally worry about Firefox security, now.
I decided to give it a shot in a totally separate instance of Firefox. But just as a test, I opened a 2nd window in that Firefox process, and a 2nd tab as well. Would they go away? When I click on the button to run ajaxWrite, it fails and says Javascript is not enabled. But in fact it is enabled. When I open it in its own window, with no tabs, then it seems to be OK. I presume it must be some Javascript function that failed (like steal.all.the.browser.button.space() or such). So it might not be as bad as I first feared.
Please don't moderate my subject line redundant.
D-Link must be run by Osama Bin Laden. That's why no one can be reached (hiding in the mountains of the Afghanistan and Pakistan border). Obviously, this attack has something to do with that cartoon thing.
1. All that dbc001 (541033) wanted to do was disconnect his service with AT&T/SBC to send an economic message to the company. He can't because of his rental obligation to keep his security system connected. There's relatively little concern about the security system callups being tapped. It sounds like he already uses his cell phone for all conversations (hopefully digital). All he needs is enough to get the security system connected.
2. Using a facilities based CLEC voiceline provider means his twisted pair is going to a new switch. While AT&T/SBC could still physically tap that line, I'm very confident that the internet traffic forwarding is not using that method. Bulk tapping would not, either; it would be done in the switch. So even if he were using that line for communications, it would be the CLEC's privacy policy of most concern. His individual line could still be tapped physically by AT&T/SBC, but that isn't practical unless there's a specific reason.
There are different phone companies. Most areas have a lot of choices. There's about a dozen choices where I live, and it's no metropolis.
42.001%
It's getting a little high so the government needs to knock it down a tad bit.
There has to be some room to deal with those issues. I certainly would not just knee-jerk when someone claims the mail they got fit the UBE definition. OTOH, I have hundreds of spamtraps running, getting tons of spam, none of which have ever solicited anything. Many get the same things in duplication. That's UBE right there. I did seed a few of these spamtraps by appending email addresses in various public postings I've made. In one case, the quickest was a spamtrap that was hit with spam within 20 minutes of the post. But most of these spamtraps are actually of spammer creation. They originated as non-existant email addresses that were at first giving the spammer's "no such user" responses. So I simply created the mailboxes and started collecting. There clearly was no valid solicitation. Perhaps likely someone entered fake addresses in places they submit information to, or postings they make online. Out of curiosity for one rather odd username, I actually tracked down where that email address was included in a post, and even tracked down who did it and their real email address. But I don't blame them (and never even contacted them); I blame whoever scraped the address from the web site it was posted on, and hundreds plus spammers who have since sent spam to it.
An ISP should verify that the customer running a mailing list is in fact using a proper verification mechanism. There are many steps to that. And yes, a spammer could well get to do some spamming for a while as a result. But there are ways to deal with that. One is to ask the customer exactly what they are doing, and if they are sending bulk email. If they say no to bulk email, then they should be willing to have a rate limit applied during the investigation period. If they say yes to bulk email, they should be able to describe the steps they take to get verification. Then they should be willing to produce details about any given subscriber, including the IP address the verification request was delivered to (the peer in the SMTP connection), and where the verification response came from (again, SMTP peer), with dates and times. Another way to deal with this is those people and businesses that are eventually shown to be spammers would be more swiftly disconnected at other ISPs if they even get in at all.
Remember, this 2nd "clean" network would only consist of those willing to put up with these restrictions. The 1st network, the "dirty" one, the original one, would remain unchanged. All the rules of the 2nd one would not apply in the 1st one. If you don't like the way things are done on the 2nd one, then don't participate. Or at your option, you can use both.
What are the legitimate mailing lists going to do when email becomes so trashed that people stop using it? Actually, they could fall back to either distributing via private IMAP servers (e.g. you add an additional email account to your mail agent program so it also picks up mail there), private NNTP servers (not peered with the big Usenet), or a web based forum ... or all of the above.
It's not censorship because it's not based on content. It's based on action. Abuse is the taking of resources from others. We don't let people just steal printing presses and defend such theft by claiming that the enforcement would be censorship. Why should we let them steal network bandwidth and server process memory time? I'm not proposing the blocking of commercial marketing email. I'm only proposing that that abusive practices be limited to a network used by those who don't really care about such practices. It's a property rights issue. People with a message can get that message out to those who want to hear it without abuse.
BTW, I've found that content based anti-spam software was blocking the commercial marketing email that I actually do subscribe to (yes, I really do solicit some mailings from a few retailers of music CDs and financial info). Those that conduct their email marketing campaigns correctly generally won't get listed on places like SPEWS, but they will likely continue to be intercepted by content based detection of marketing. Sure, they can be whitelisted. But the method of basing blocking on action I believe does a more accurate job than that based on message content.
Unfortunately for me, I was going to need at least 22,000 accounts to move a domain over there. I tried. No answer. Oh well.
... but the suit and tie will cost you extra. Businessmen speak of "money motivated people". Offer enough money to motivate me.
Hey, you can get Linux from companies like IBM, with suit and tie on the sales people and even the consultants that come in to play sysadmin for you. So what's the issue?
This still does not compare to Microsoft and Windows. There are 2 aspects of backwards compatibility. One is to make sure old programs still run OK. The other is to make sure old hardware is supported. Solaris has an advantage over Microsoft in both.
The hardware area is where the biggest advantage is. Solaris mostly supported Sun's own hardware, and that would a limited range of possibilities, all of which they have their own engineering data on. Solaris support for x86 has always been limited to only major manufacturer components. Until only recently, lots of hardware just wasn't supported on Solaris.
But Solaris has an advantage even in legacy software support. To begin with, customers of Unix (and thus SunOS and Solaris) tended to be using more internally developed software, or software that could be downloaded in source code. Those could be recompiled to the newer systems, when needed, taking some of the pressure off compatibility issues. And the market of binary-only software to run on Solaris has always been smaller than that of Windows, and generally only from larger companies that tended to be more stable (e.g. they can recompile and tweak and send updates for new OS versions). Software for Windows, which is almost entirely binary only, comes from a full range of software maker sizes, from large companies on down to one-man shops. A lot of that software was shareware, too.
In all, Microsoft has a MUCH larger chore keeping Windows compatible with a MUCH larger base of obscure hardware and software, than Solaris would ever have. It's not backwards compatibility, per se, but rather, the size and scale of it Microsoft has.
"decently priced" = real cheap for the masses. The first year or so won't see any of that. The issue is whether or not they can get there, and do so just as quickly, if the early adopters choose to not buy into this. All the wise ones with analog displays won't because they know they won't get HD video that way; so why buy something that won't do any more than what you have now. OTOH, those who buy all new displays with HDMI and HDCP are probably going to be able to see the HD resolution (though the compression quality may still be an issue ... what I've seen on HD satellite so far has been some combination of fuzzy and blocky). I suspect it will be a slow uptake.
I plan to get go with Blu-Ray for storing computer data, and I might try to do some video creation myself (I haven't even jumped into DVD, yet). But this is still going to be at least a year after release.
I'd rather split the internet on the basis of ISPs that allow, or do not allow, spammers to be hosted. There would then be 2 internets, of which one (the clean one) would have rules against spam and any other forms of abuse (but not any rules against any particular content, per se, though local jurisdiction rules would still apply). Any ISPs that allows spammers and other abuses would then be forced to move their connection to the other one (the dirty one), which would, of course, affect all their customers.
Which net would you want to connect to if it turns out all the big ISPs won't or can't connect to the clean net? Suppose there were tunneling gateways where those whose physical layer connection is through a big ISP can still reach the clean net?
Here's an article with a better picture.
... in management.
The way you phrased that got me thinking. If the decisions by (potential) clients to use or not use a particular contracting vendor tend to be made on the basis of how well the salespeople socialize, I think this will be known, perhaps even if just subconciously, by the people doing the actual work, and they will be less proud of it (and less interested in committing their heart and soul into the work), than they would if the people who make those decisions are making them based on the quality of their (or their team's) work.
One problem in contracting is that when the client might next have new work, the team could very well be off on a different project at a different client. The client wanting them back has to decide to delay the project to get the good team, or find another team and move on.
It's not really a matter of whether it's inside staff or outside contractors doing the work that effects the quality. It's more a case of size. The larger the corporation, regardless of which side of the contract they are on, the worse the results are. In the case of a 7000 person company hiring a 3 person company to do the job, that's likely to produce much better results. It wouldn't be so if the 7000 person company hired out to a 20000 person company that sent 3 people over to do it. The 3 person company isn't scraping people off the job boards. The 20000 person company has to.
But this doesn't usually take into account that the people brought in by the contractor to do the job are usually less competent, and almost certainly less motivated to do a job they would be proud of. The working conditions lots of these contractors, especially the big ones, create, generate a lot of turnover ... mostly over.
You're far better off finding better ways to schedule and manage projects so you don't find yourself in a pinch one day with work for 6 people when you only have enough continuing work to keep 3 on staff. Of course you can't always control this. But at a 50% project failure rate, I wouldn't want to take the risk. I'd rather bit the bullet and hire a 4th person and try to spread the workload out, and not worry if one job is posting on Slashdot 9 months down the road.
Maybe you shouldn't try to redesign it. With a good roadmap plan of where you want to get to, incremental changes can you there. maybe you're trying to bite off too much in one go? I've seen many a company website turn into a disaster because of that. In one case the webmaster of the site got all angry and blamed it on my browser, on Linux, on my ISP, etc. When I talked on the phone to a sales guy, he agreed that the web site sucked and he had to use the paper catalog for everything (and he used Windows, IE, just like the webmaster told me I should use).
Just don't try to overdo it. Markets change. Business changes direction. Be agile. Don't hop into the latest web coding craze. Just stick to standards that are at least 5 years old, as that's probably the largest base of users that it can work with and still give you some reasonable feature set. And for gawd's sake, no goddamn Flash! (unless you're product is media itself)