Wow, I see a whole lot of angry posts here - usually dropping he F bomb at the author, bullies in general, etc. I realize most of you were probably beat up a lot as a kid (I was occasionally as well, until about age 8 or 10 when I got to be a hell of a lot taller than anyone else), but ease up off the emotional overdose. The whole nerdrage thing isn't exactly contributing to the discussion here (insert comment about insta-flamebait modding from raging nerds here).
While I'm not a big fan of blame-the-victim, there's at least some truth to what he says. The people who I knew getting bullied, myself including, were often missing some essential social skills. Think of them as "street smarts" - you don't necessarily make eye contact with a small group of people in a dark alley in a big city, do you? Why do you keep your head down and walk away instead? Because you know at some level there are nonverbal signals that trigger aggressive responses (in this case, "hey, that $#%#% thinks he's bad! let's go set him straight - we're badder!"). So I can easily see that there are some nonverbal cues given off by nerds that trigger bully responses.
Of course, that lack of social competence could be a result of the fact that the kid was excluded from earlier social circles and never learned what he needed to learn, but it still seems likely to me.
But that fits with the GP's concept of "saving the company money". I'm going to fall back into MBA mode here, but it's an important concept: net present value. Calculate the value of doing things now versus the value of doing other things with those resources; does it better serve the business to do some of those things later in the long run?
So you're right - but I think that's what was intended by the GP.;)
But I guess if you can keep the myth alive, then it becomes that much easier to keep support going for spending money on the current military action in Afghanistan.
If the FBI has reason to believe he's dead and is still "keeping the myth alive", I'd guess the reason is much simpler. They're covering their own collective asses - if it turns out that he's not dead, and he pops up again, someone's going to get fired, at best. So it's better to keep going through the motions.
So many people here forget basic human nature when it comes to large organizations.
Any employer that chooses to judge an employee by good or bad stuff they did 10 years ago, is stark raving insane.
Let's say that 10 years ago, you got upset at your boss and wiped out all the financial data on his system.
I'm not going to hire you for anything to do with IT now if I find that out, that's a fact. Sorry, but while some people do change, others don't.
People need to wake up and realize that actions have consequences, and I personally think that we "nerds", with our less enhanced social abilities, are very poor at understanding that. It's crap sometimes, but it's life.
That said, I personally agree with your example about the Facebook photos, and would take it a step further saying that I'd actually prefer to hire someone who has a little fun in his or her life.
MS is extremely greedy and THAT is one reason that people who can even afford to buy their sw, simply just copy it instead.
Or it could just be that at whatever price they sell their OS, people like you will try to justify not paying for it through some imaginary moral high ground.
There's a pretty big flaw with the firefighter analogy - firefighters rarely get called in to put out blazes they started.
I've done my share of time on the on-call rotation, and while many times you get called in for things that you couldn't have prevented, often you get rung for things you should have seen and prevented. Or that your coworkers should have - but they experience the same with things you should have seen.
I'm not going to go so far as to say it's the majority of times, but everyone demanding that they need to be paid for on-call service should stop and give that little thought some consideration; does your employer mandate that you pay him/her for the time when you've brought systems offline? Because that might cost a fair bit more than him/her paying you for the time you lost due to things that were nobody's fault.
There's a happy medium somewhere, and I don't know exactly where it is... but stop and think for a while.
It's pretty sad though that you're so boring you can't even think of interesting things to do.
Or it's pretty sad that you're so unhappy with your work, something you spend probably 25% of your life on, that you wouldn't want to keep doing it if you didn't have to. Different strokes for different folks.
Oh yes, as long as we're doing quid pro quo, let's send everyone who talks about the horrors of living in China and such actually live there themselves - while I admit there are problems there, my Chinese friends have never thought it's as bad as you seem to believe. Oh, and let's make everyone who complains about "idiot CEOs" pay the same tax rate as upper management too.
Why do you people somehow think that "corporations" (by which I assume you mean upper management, as corporations don't think) want robots? Sure, there are some jobs where you just need someone to go through the motions; but there are plenty of other jobs where you need someone who's capable of improvising, someone who's capable of making intelligent decisions, and the kinds of "slaves" you describe above don't meet that criteria. So some jobs get shipped out, but new jobs get created; if our workforce is capable (which your post seems to imply, by highlighting how much worse the workforce is in other countries) then they'll be hired for those sorts of jobs instead.
As someone who works with multiple large corporations, I can tell you that's (partially) incorrect. Corporations may have sociopathic appearances (keeping in mind that as non-living, non-feeling entities, human characteristics can't really be applied to them), but the welfare of employees does matter insofar as it affects profits, and treating your people worse than the other guy means you get less productive people.
Also, I can't think of any large company that doesn't have a 3-5 year strategy in place; in fact, the development of that is one of the key jobs of upper management. However, the guys who make the decisions have very different information than people on the front line, to whom short-term actions might seem completely unreasonable when in fact they are necessary or just a good idea.
That's about right though - America has a long history of demanding that other countries eliminate their protectionist laws so that we can take advantage of them; if we attempt to do the same, other countries will (rightfully) take us to task for it, and we'll find ourselves in an even worse economic situation than we currently are.
If it was a bunch of lies, then the bank officials would have pointed that out. That they are scrambling to censor is proof this is absolutly 100% legit. kind of nice of them to remove any doubt eh?
Just like someone deleting his hard drive is proof that he's guilty of some kind of computer crime or copyright infringement, eh?
Innocent till proven guilty, people - while it certainly looks suspicious, it isn't any kind of proof of anything.
Slashdot Mirror
This means that AI experts have to upsell the possibility of this happening to keep getting grant money from people who don't understand what they do.
If you have to lie to justify what you do, then what you do probably isn't worth very much.
Wow, I see a whole lot of angry posts here - usually dropping he F bomb at the author, bullies in general, etc. I realize most of you were probably beat up a lot as a kid (I was occasionally as well, until about age 8 or 10 when I got to be a hell of a lot taller than anyone else), but ease up off the emotional overdose. The whole nerdrage thing isn't exactly contributing to the discussion here (insert comment about insta-flamebait modding from raging nerds here).
While I'm not a big fan of blame-the-victim, there's at least some truth to what he says. The people who I knew getting bullied, myself including, were often missing some essential social skills. Think of them as "street smarts" - you don't necessarily make eye contact with a small group of people in a dark alley in a big city, do you? Why do you keep your head down and walk away instead? Because you know at some level there are nonverbal signals that trigger aggressive responses (in this case, "hey, that $#%#% thinks he's bad! let's go set him straight - we're badder!"). So I can easily see that there are some nonverbal cues given off by nerds that trigger bully responses.
Of course, that lack of social competence could be a result of the fact that the kid was excluded from earlier social circles and never learned what he needed to learn, but it still seems likely to me.
But that fits with the GP's concept of "saving the company money". I'm going to fall back into MBA mode here, but it's an important concept: net present value. Calculate the value of doing things now versus the value of doing other things with those resources; does it better serve the business to do some of those things later in the long run?
So you're right - but I think that's what was intended by the GP. ;)
But I guess if you can keep the myth alive, then it becomes that much easier to keep support going for spending money on the current military action in Afghanistan.
If the FBI has reason to believe he's dead and is still "keeping the myth alive", I'd guess the reason is much simpler. They're covering their own collective asses - if it turns out that he's not dead, and he pops up again, someone's going to get fired, at best. So it's better to keep going through the motions.
So many people here forget basic human nature when it comes to large organizations.
No pure ideology works on the scale of a modern country (pop > ~1,000,000)
Pure democracy doesn't work for anything larger than Ancient Athens.
I dunno, it works pretty well over here in Switzerland, population somewhere between 7 and 8 million.
Virgins? No, most engineers would need somebody with a little more experience to explain which doohickey goes where.
Well, after reading this article, I can see why porn films might be a sensitive issue in India... ;-)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6161691.stm
Any employer that chooses to judge an employee by good or bad stuff they did 10 years ago, is stark raving insane.
Let's say that 10 years ago, you got upset at your boss and wiped out all the financial data on his system.
I'm not going to hire you for anything to do with IT now if I find that out, that's a fact. Sorry, but while some people do change, others don't.
People need to wake up and realize that actions have consequences, and I personally think that we "nerds", with our less enhanced social abilities, are very poor at understanding that. It's crap sometimes, but it's life.
That said, I personally agree with your example about the Facebook photos, and would take it a step further saying that I'd actually prefer to hire someone who has a little fun in his or her life.
Hackintosh? Is that a Blizzard-supported hardware-OS combination?
The TSA is to security what Micheal Vick is to Pet Care
Slashdot should have a facility to nominate quotes like this for a Slashdot Hall of Fame.
I'd be highly surprised if most of Slashdot was clued-in enough to the real world to understand that reference.
Tinfoil may work, but radar-disrupting radio waves would work better. Dollars to donuts it'll be illegal.
That expression might not be the best idea anymore. Bought a donut lately? I haven't seen a good one under a buck in a long time!
MS is extremely greedy and THAT is one reason that people who can even afford to buy their sw, simply just copy it instead.
Or it could just be that at whatever price they sell their OS, people like you will try to justify not paying for it through some imaginary moral high ground.
There's a pretty big flaw with the firefighter analogy - firefighters rarely get called in to put out blazes they started.
I've done my share of time on the on-call rotation, and while many times you get called in for things that you couldn't have prevented, often you get rung for things you should have seen and prevented. Or that your coworkers should have - but they experience the same with things you should have seen.
I'm not going to go so far as to say it's the majority of times, but everyone demanding that they need to be paid for on-call service should stop and give that little thought some consideration; does your employer mandate that you pay him/her for the time when you've brought systems offline? Because that might cost a fair bit more than him/her paying you for the time you lost due to things that were nobody's fault.
There's a happy medium somewhere, and I don't know exactly where it is... but stop and think for a while.
Just out of curiosity: how do you know it's a legit copy if you paid a discount price from an unauthorized reseller? Sounds kinda shady to me.
The ACID conformance is still at a dismal 30% compared to 90% of chrome, Safari and Opera.
The internet willstill be divided into 2 - the Microsoft world and the Real, Normal world.
Shame, really. So many years, and the leopard has yet to change its spots.
So buy a snow leopard instead....
That was a very well thought-out post, thank you.
I cannot understand why Apple seems to get a free pass from their user community when this sort of thing happens to them.
Because it hasn't happened to me or anyone I know?
How many of the really valuable employees moved to rainy dreary Seattle just to work for Microsoft in the first place?
It's pretty sad though that you're so boring you can't even think of interesting things to do.
Or it's pretty sad that you're so unhappy with your work, something you spend probably 25% of your life on, that you wouldn't want to keep doing it if you didn't have to. Different strokes for different folks.
The first attack can be countered by using Gmail with things set up to always use https for connections (near the bottom of the "settings" page).
Gmail always encrypts your password; that setting only applies to the rest of the connection (i.e. transferring the body of your email and such).
Oh yes, as long as we're doing quid pro quo, let's send everyone who talks about the horrors of living in China and such actually live there themselves - while I admit there are problems there, my Chinese friends have never thought it's as bad as you seem to believe. Oh, and let's make everyone who complains about "idiot CEOs" pay the same tax rate as upper management too.
Why do you people somehow think that "corporations" (by which I assume you mean upper management, as corporations don't think) want robots? Sure, there are some jobs where you just need someone to go through the motions; but there are plenty of other jobs where you need someone who's capable of improvising, someone who's capable of making intelligent decisions, and the kinds of "slaves" you describe above don't meet that criteria. So some jobs get shipped out, but new jobs get created; if our workforce is capable (which your post seems to imply, by highlighting how much worse the workforce is in other countries) then they'll be hired for those sorts of jobs instead.
As someone who works with multiple large corporations, I can tell you that's (partially) incorrect. Corporations may have sociopathic appearances (keeping in mind that as non-living, non-feeling entities, human characteristics can't really be applied to them), but the welfare of employees does matter insofar as it affects profits, and treating your people worse than the other guy means you get less productive people.
Also, I can't think of any large company that doesn't have a 3-5 year strategy in place; in fact, the development of that is one of the key jobs of upper management. However, the guys who make the decisions have very different information than people on the front line, to whom short-term actions might seem completely unreasonable when in fact they are necessary or just a good idea.
That's about right though - America has a long history of demanding that other countries eliminate their protectionist laws so that we can take advantage of them; if we attempt to do the same, other countries will (rightfully) take us to task for it, and we'll find ourselves in an even worse economic situation than we currently are.
If it was a bunch of lies, then the bank officials would have pointed that out. That they are scrambling to censor is proof this is absolutly 100% legit. kind of nice of them to remove any doubt eh?
Just like someone deleting his hard drive is proof that he's guilty of some kind of computer crime or copyright infringement, eh?
Innocent till proven guilty, people - while it certainly looks suspicious, it isn't any kind of proof of anything.
The fact that without the servers being up and available, most other professions do not continue to run.
Yet without other professions to do the actual work of your company, there's not even a need for you and your servers.