So society has at least _some_ responsibility to fulfill here - see foster homes, boot camps, guidelines for schools, even jails. IMHO, if there is to be any unity, violent games/TV should be censored/limited to the same degree or more than pr0n/nudity. This is not to say that I think pr0n/nudity isn't overcensored. Just that there is no balance on either side.
Violent games _do_ have an effect, which has to be recognised. There are intelligent folk, I'm sure most posters here qualify, who can distinguish between fiction and reality.
But for our benefit, we should take a little responsibility out of the hands of the stupid. Put the violence in an 18 and up section along with the pr0n. Actually, I would tone down the pr0n to a 16 and up section, and keep the violence in the 18+.
In this scenario the smart parent will make the choice to *actively* make a violent game available to the kid. This will not limit rights, but would limit reckless parenting in its bad side effects.
Yes, it does... The article does not talk about censorship only. One of the applications of the monitoring is persecution of people who seek freedom. The hairs on my neck stood on end when I read this.. this is _exactly_ the kind of application that IBM was helping with, when the Germans were using IBMs to count Jews. Whether it's by race or by belief, in both instances innocent people are persecuted. The Chinese don't outright kill the dissidents, but I am confident this is happening - the world for a long time was in denial of the use of western counting machines by the Germans. Nobody believed they were actually used to label people for extermination. The Chinese application is horrifyingly close if not exactly the same!
I used to live in a commie country. In such a regime, the government uses propaganda to spread some positive.. and beatiful message. This is invariably a sophism. In the Chinese case, the message is, "we are all for peaceful change." Killing and persecuting dissidents is NOT peaceful (as some earlier post pointed out). This message is an outright lie; it is easy to believe though..
Many Chinese believe it. What's even more dangerous is that people in the Western world believe it too. They are often idealists and really like to hear declarations of peaceful change and gradual way to freedom. And that they can help those poor people in China by helping with that change.
An example of similar such behaviour is how scientists on the Manhattan project during WWII helped the Russians obtain info on how to make the bomb. They believed no single country shoud have the bomb. They gave this secret to Stalin on account of his "socialism"... That was a mistake - as history now tells us, Stalin was a worse murderer than Hitler - if they gave the bomb to Hitler, fewer innocent people would have died (maybe I'm exaggerating, but my point is that it is possible).
Further, these intelligent people who like the "Chinese way" are placed very high in Western businesses. The guy from Cisco in the article no doubt wants the good of the Chinese people, but this is a fatal mistake on his part. On a large scale (as it is, unfortunately, happening) this behaviour will lead to a China ready to go to war with the west and win.
Few want to believe this. It is easy to put it out of your mind too. This is not the Chinese way.. right? Wrong. We are talking about China with a legacy of imperialism here - just look at the way they deal with internal problems.
Forget national ID card, most free countries in the world have them; forget about big evil Microsoft, their crimes are petty. The real threat is collecting its billion people strength on the other side of the globe. This is not too far to consider.
It is every free person's duty to help the Chinese people and NOT the Chinese government. By supplying the country (and thereby the ruling government) with money, the West is not helping the people. This way, the Chinese government has more and more reasources to continue being the way it is... And this is definitely not good, because as much as they talk about it, these guys do not want to change the balance of power over there.
So wake the @#$% up!
Damn, I never thought I would sound like a doomsayer or be one, but with stuff like this goig on, it's difficult not to be.
for western companies to be helping a state to violate human rights is sick... Whoever's responsible should answer for these crimes.
Re:The freedom to swing your fist
on
Freedom or Power?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What you are describing is what communist militia did after it got power in Russia and any other states.
Communism (what this essay is really about) is beautiful, but it cannot be legislated, because that DOES limit the freedom of the developer.
Free Software is gaining momentum right now.. I think it will reach a nice balance some day - and I say, let the best man win. Microsoft is a monopoly, but they will not be one forever.. they would be the first such case if it did happen. They cannot protect their monopoly against Free Software, because it's the perfect weapon. Have patience. The Free Software lobby must only fight for its right to exist. Lobbying for the destruction of copyright law can only work to their detriment, and is not a good solution in the first place.
Aiaiai! Less support among the users for the administration? What?! I China democratic or something? There is very little popular support for the administration in China - they have ways of dealing with people who voice their lack of support, so a majority not liking the admin will not change it.
I'm skeptical of letting freedom take over China through giving them money, as is the general US opinion. USSR failed out of poverty, and not some crazy idea of an adminstration falling because of a lack of support from the masses.
I definitely heard from RedHat people that they did the original PS2 emulator for Sony, which was to be released Open Source (I don't know about free, but I think it may be so). Sony needed this emulator to develop games for the PS before the hardware was working.
I know this is faar down the line in replies, but I hope someone reads this:)
If M$ or anyone else thinks that a "secure" PC will fly with consumers, it means they will bundle it with some advantages not possible on the not "secure" conunterparts.
It is vital that these "advantages" be made avaliable in Linux and regular Windows for free, so this project doesn't sell a single unit.
I am not who you're looking for, but I definitely am in close contact with these types of people. You are looking for Computer Engineers of a very specific flavour.. namely, the ones who should've taken math:)
In my school, there is a program in the Engineering Department that is called Engineering Science... These guys have the math background of a math minor, with an engineering specialty. Some inevitably specialise in Software Eng, but they are _expensive_ and are hotly contended for in the job market.
There is one guy - recent graduate - I know who is a math wiz and writes solver programs for one of my engineering professors when he finishes work in the evening. He works for some consulting firm.
My advice is, look for Computer Engineering or Applied Physics or CS graduates with a background in Digital Signal Processing (math) who have scored some extracurricular lab time hacking. There is a club of these guys which meets on Friday nights with the said professor to put together some really cool software and hardware while mixing in a pleasant (though not extreme) dose of math. We mostly try to get new multimedia hardware to work with Linux - few have the background to advance the math aspect, because it requires function estimation modelling on a graduate level.
Perhaps raising a child better would prevent any problem, but if the child does not get properly raised, the importance of those video games comes to the foreground all of a sudden.
Don't underestimate the power of subliminal (this includes obvious) messages and how prone kids are to their influence. I've never heard of kids shooting up their schools before... did parenting get worse all of a sudden? No, it's always been pretty bad in general.
Just lately lack of good parenting has much worse consequences... violent films and games are part of it..... arguing that they're not is like arguing that pollution isn't making us sick because the evidence is inconclusive.... who cares that we don't know 100%.. the point is that we have good reason to believe that violent games/films have a strong influence on young people.. That should be enough to do something.. If you wanted conclusive evidence on every parenting practice, I don't think you'd ever get to actually doing any parenting... it's a heuristic.:)
This is by no means a pay update.. you just pay to make it easy. But I have another point.
This announcement reminds me to donate to the good cause. I'll pay for something by RH just to support them. Right now I'm piss poor - I just upgraded my hardware - but as soon as I'm out of school I'll donate.:) Thanks for the reminder.
if you wire the asynchronous machine well. I'm taking undergrad Computer Engineering at U of T, and we have a course which introduces asynchronous finite state machine design.
Although it's much harder to design such a machine, it is not impossible, and it acts the same way as a clocked machine, except there is no clock to interface you with it, so you would have to have it output a simulated "clock" that would give you the information on when it's ready for the next instruction.
This clock wouldn't really be a clock, as you might expect. It would give you an edge when the AFSM is ready, so the period would vary from instruction to instruction.. This isn't such a problem though, since it's the clock that dictates the pace anyway..
If any of you are interested in more on this, check out our text, "Fundamentals of Digital Logic with VHDL Design" by S. Brown. Chapter 9 introduces the concepts.
After a support call, the customer wants to know how the problem was fixed, so (s)he can do it on their own next time. With remote admin, the customer remains oblivious to the problem even if you say what was done. They learn by doing.
There is a better solution that combines the technologies. The tech person should see what is being done, but not control it. The procedure should be walking the customer through somethig with better knowledge of what (s)he is seeing in fronto of their face.
Telephone-only support is definitely crippled. Remote admin is far worse, because it allows for abuses, which are much more detrimental to any company than an extra hour spent to get things right.
I helped the prof with the chair a bit... and I mean LITTE bit. The program just looks for an alphanumeric code on the card.. any will do for this model:)
Janimal
They don't need to unionise, but unioins are neces
on
The Jungle
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· Score: 1
sary still.
Unions aren't generally good, or generally bad; neither are corporations. So the argument over whether we need unions or not is pointless. We need them just as much as we need corporations and as much as we need computers, or any other product of our civilization.
I think that unions do the best job when they are not part of a company. A company is then free to organise working conditions so that workers do not need or want to unionise.
I'm fairly far along getting my Computer Engineering degree now, but I have worked as a cashier in the past. I worked for Zellers Inc in Ontario, Canada, which was a fine example of what a company does to productively fend off a union. This is a discount department store of the "old economy", and they're not as backward as you may think.
The employees had monthly meetings with management where their opinions were heard and addressed. The atmosphere was relaxed, yet schedules were made by management so that all the shift time would be appropriately covered. The store offered health coverage plans rivaling that of unionised establishments (in Canada this entails a dental plan and a drug puchase reimbursement plan - basic health coverage is "free"). They organised employee social events, and generally were nice to the employees.
This courteous and professional way of dealing with employees paid off when a union approached the employees. In Ontario it is illegal for management to attack a union even by rhetoric. All the manager could say was, "In the next few weeks you are going to see a lot of flyers and you are going to be approached by union recruiters who are going to try to unionise this store, we are not allowed to interfere with that or to discourage you from listening to them. Obviously we think that a union is not necessary, but you choose to unionise we can do nothing about it."
And so the recruiters went to work. The employees were told that they are getting paid less than their peers in unionised stores. And seniority would count more. But that's as far as the argument seemed to go.. The health benefits were great, the work environment was pleasant. The full time employees voted against unionizing in the poll.
The fact that there was a threat of a union was enough for the management of the department store to adapt appropriate workplace conditions to make a polarized union-management ensemble unnecessary. Without this threat, management would be much less inclined to compete with unionized (read diseased) companies.
The UAW, for example, does offer enormous pay to the employees. A friend of mine got $21 CAD an hour for a summer job at Toyota with no experience on the job.. But this kind of windfall is only possible because somehow the UAW became a monopoly. No car manufacturer may exist without its labour being in the UAW. Parts suppliers are also forced to belong to the UAW or else the employer may not buy parts. The only reason that the American auto makers are still in business is because somehow it is unlawful to compete with a UAW member plant.
The situation is no better - and possibly worse - than the M$ monopoly. This is because the UAW monopoly is legislated.
So unions can be just as bad, or worse, than bad corporations.
It seems that throughout history Russia has repeateldy f*cked the masses for the benefit of the ruling class. The Tsars did it, the communist government did it, the current government is doing it.
Russia has always had a rich and cultured upper class, and an impoverished lower class.
Because this is not a recent phenomenon, you cannot ascribe it to an effect of the poor economic state. Although the economics inevitable are somewhere in the feedback loop that keeps the system there as it is, no matter what kind of political face is prevalent.
Misleading is more like it. Ethics are very important.
I know that it's easy sometimes to think that so many people do not behave ethically, but to succumb to this is just helping it along. People usually think before they do something they know is unethical (at least at the beginning), and they'll usually look at their peers to see how they behave. If the peers post messages like the one above, the person on the verge of making an unethical decision will likely think, "oh what the hell, everybody's doing it! If I stay out, I'll be left behind."
This is not what you want. Ethics do matter, and as long as you can set a right example, or make the right comment on an issue, DO IT.. because the idiots listen.
It is sad that this kind of "whatever" mentality is prevelant even among the non-teenage highschool dropout group.
This is bad news not only for the industry, but for the whole country.
To see responsible professional attitude, just look at Germany. Their engineering is the envy of the world.
To see Mr. Schumin's attitude in widespread use, visit Russia. The world's most expensive dump; all because the prevailing mentality there is "screw your neighbour if you can get away with it."
"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets? - Dick Cavett"
You have no idea:)
Being an immigrant and coming from a different comic culture.. comedy differs from region to region.. I can tell you, that American (and Canadian) comedy is very much like the comedy that I see on local television.
The comedy on television is not reflective of the comedy in the real world, as some may want to argue. I think Kramer is not a public trend follower, but a trend-setter, when he yells, "giddyup!" And we've all heard ourselves or our friends yell that one.
when it was still Corel's and I was appalled at how unfocused they were.
At the time, we (Comp Eng @ U of Toronto) were visiting Corel on a career exploration field trip to Ottawa (this was 2 years ago). We visited Corel Corp. and were very unexcited - nobody there could give us a cute motivational speach on why it's so great to work for Corel. The best point seemed to be "we get free cola."
Then we went to Corel Computer. Nobody was excited after what we saw in the software division. But I was just amazed at what I saw in this office. At the time, they were finishing work on the NetWinder. This was the first I had heard of it and the idea of it was fascinating. The technical team was inspired. Our jaws dropped to the floor. Here were these people showing us a 15W computer that was powerful and extensible enough to be a web server, a development workstation, a tv set top box, a gaming machine, and pretty much anything else you wanted to push it to.. like a cluster on a common fibre backbone in one box (10 of these babies). This seemed like the future's primordial soup. Anything seemed possible.
The marketing people showed us all this and then I popped the question, "what are you guys going to sell this as?" They didn't know.. they had all these ideas and couldn't tell us what this was going to be sold as first. No marketing plan whatsoever. The box ran Corel Linux and KDE, I believe. The web server version could boot the system from memory for instant reboots. The web server cluster was supposed to be hot swappable soon (8 server and 2 controller motherboards in one box).
The whole place was wholly behind open source and linux. This machine caused some commotion at Microsoft from what I heard - it was that neat! (or at least this is the impression I got)
So what happened next? Nothing... I was stupefied, but I didn't hear about this thing until the division was sold to these rebel.com people who aren't really doing anything with it either and the technology is aging. They should've ipo'ed long ago and financed a marketing campaign for this thing.
This seems to be the trend in the entire company. They just don't know how to market their stuff. I remember looking at the pathetic ads they had for Corel Draw on taxi cabs. The image given by the company is poor. With a better marketing team (one with any skill whatsoever) these guys could be big again, their internal morale would increase, and they could put some cool stuff out. The way things are now, they are toast. And giving up Linux is bad move #2 after selling Corel Computer, which was a gem.
Agreed. App installation is probably the biggest hurdle Linux has to overcome. There is simply no beating Windows until this is done, and done well. As of now, if one of my friends installs Linx for the first time, I have to go and teach them how to install software. Even though it's easy for a computer nerd, this is not the goal for Linux now. Linux HAS the computer nerd market.
In order for Linux to be easy to use (Netscape should definitely help out in this) I have to be able to go to download.com, click on an app I want and have a window pop up asking me if I want to install the program. Then it should cutely install the thing witha a nice progress bar and put the damn icons on my desktop, my panel, in KDE or Gnome, whichever I happen to run (if I have both installed, cause I had no clue what to click during the Linux installation) then both desktop managers should receive it on their desktops or in their panels).
I started using Linux a little under a year ago and I like it, but I was a bit annoyed when running Gnome, an app installation (i.e. StarOffice) would happily tell me that all the icons are installed in my KDE menu... I just wanted to cry. You can't use KDE or Gnome exclusively without giving up ease of use (that should be standard) for some applications. This should not happen.
And the user permissions thing.. That needs to be masked with a wizard and an idiot's guide for parents or something.
I know how it works, but my grandfather - who is emailing me every once in a while and sending me digital camera pictures from Windows - couldn't learn to use Linux if his life depended on it.
MS is deteriorating, but Linux is not a replacement yet, and won't be until all the apps authors come to a concensus about app installation (or are given a standard) and something is done about the inherent complexity of user permissions.
Enough said. Feel free to reply, but I have to get my DBMS assignment done and it's late, so I won't read them.
Janimal
p.s. Yay Linux! But I'm not the average user, and neither are you.
Not really... it's just like fiber.. the thing can support pretty fast traffic, but noone has the capacity to feed it fast enough. Suddenly we have a fiber interface (this..thing...) that can go at fiber speeds... Now nobody can feed the interface fast enough:)
Slashdot Mirror
So society has at least _some_ responsibility to fulfill here - see foster homes, boot camps, guidelines for schools, even jails. IMHO, if there is to be any unity, violent games/TV should be censored/limited to the same degree or more than pr0n/nudity. This is not to say that I think pr0n/nudity isn't overcensored. Just that there is no balance on either side.
Violent games _do_ have an effect, which has to be recognised. There are intelligent folk, I'm sure most posters here qualify, who can distinguish between fiction and reality.
But for our benefit, we should take a little responsibility out of the hands of the stupid. Put the violence in an 18 and up section along with the pr0n. Actually, I would tone down the pr0n to a 16 and up section, and keep the violence in the 18+.
In this scenario the smart parent will make the choice to *actively* make a violent game available to the kid. This will not limit rights, but would limit reckless parenting in its bad side effects.
Yes, it does... The article does not talk about censorship only. One of the applications of the monitoring is persecution of people who seek freedom. The hairs on my neck stood on end when I read this.. this is _exactly_ the kind of application that IBM was helping with, when the Germans were using IBMs to count Jews. Whether it's by race or by belief, in both instances innocent people are persecuted. The Chinese don't outright kill the dissidents, but I am confident this is happening - the world for a long time was in denial of the use of western counting machines by the Germans. Nobody believed they were actually used to label people for extermination. The Chinese application is horrifyingly close if not exactly the same!
I used to live in a commie country. In such a regime, the government uses propaganda to spread some positive.. and beatiful message. This is invariably a sophism. In the Chinese case, the message is, "we are all for peaceful change." Killing and persecuting dissidents is NOT peaceful (as some earlier post pointed out). This message is an outright lie; it is easy to believe though..
Many Chinese believe it. What's even more dangerous is that people in the Western world believe it too. They are often idealists and really like to hear declarations of peaceful change and gradual way to freedom. And that they can help those poor people in China by helping with that change.
An example of similar such behaviour is how scientists on the Manhattan project during WWII helped the Russians obtain info on how to make the bomb. They believed no single country shoud have the bomb. They gave this secret to Stalin on account of his "socialism"... That was a mistake - as history now tells us, Stalin was a worse murderer than Hitler - if they gave the bomb to Hitler, fewer innocent people would have died (maybe I'm exaggerating, but my point is that it is possible).
Further, these intelligent people who like the "Chinese way" are placed very high in Western businesses. The guy from Cisco in the article no doubt wants the good of the Chinese people, but this is a fatal mistake on his part. On a large scale (as it is, unfortunately, happening) this behaviour will lead to a China ready to go to war with the west and win.
Few want to believe this. It is easy to put it out of your mind too. This is not the Chinese way.. right? Wrong. We are talking about China with a legacy of imperialism here - just look at the way they deal with internal problems.
Forget national ID card, most free countries in the world have them; forget about big evil Microsoft, their crimes are petty. The real threat is collecting its billion people strength on the other side of the globe. This is not too far to consider.
It is every free person's duty to help the Chinese people and NOT the Chinese government. By supplying the country (and thereby the ruling government) with money, the West is not helping the people. This way, the Chinese government has more and more reasources to continue being the way it is... And this is definitely not good, because as much as they talk about it, these guys do not want to change the balance of power over there.
So wake the @#$% up!
Damn, I never thought I would sound like a doomsayer or be one, but with stuff like this goig on, it's difficult not to be.
for western companies to be helping a state to violate human rights is sick... Whoever's responsible should answer for these crimes.
What you are describing is what communist militia did after it got power in Russia and any other states.
Communism (what this essay is really about) is beautiful, but it cannot be legislated, because that DOES limit the freedom of the developer.
Free Software is gaining momentum right now.. I think it will reach a nice balance some day - and I say, let the best man win. Microsoft is a monopoly, but they will not be one forever.. they would be the first such case if it did happen. They cannot protect their monopoly against Free Software, because it's the perfect weapon. Have patience. The Free Software lobby must only fight for its right to exist. Lobbying for the destruction of copyright law can only work to their detriment, and is not a good solution in the first place.
janimal
Aiaiai! Less support among the users for the administration? What?! I China democratic or something? There is very little popular support for the administration in China - they have ways of dealing with people who voice their lack of support, so a majority not liking the admin will not change it.
I'm skeptical of letting freedom take over China through giving them money, as is the general US opinion. USSR failed out of poverty, and not some crazy idea of an adminstration falling because of a lack of support from the masses.
Janimal
I definitely heard from RedHat people that they did the original PS2 emulator for Sony, which was to be released Open Source (I don't know about free, but I think it may be so). Sony needed this emulator to develop games for the PS before the hardware was working.
cheers!
I know this is faar down the line in replies, but I hope someone reads this :)
If M$ or anyone else thinks that a "secure" PC will fly with consumers, it means they will bundle it with some advantages not possible on the not "secure" conunterparts.
It is vital that these "advantages" be made avaliable in Linux and regular Windows for free, so this project doesn't sell a single unit.
Janimal
I am not who you're looking for, but I definitely am in close contact with these types of people. You are looking for Computer Engineers of a very specific flavour.. namely, the ones who should've taken math :)
In my school, there is a program in the Engineering Department that is called Engineering Science... These guys have the math background of a math minor, with an engineering specialty. Some inevitably specialise in Software Eng, but they are _expensive_ and are hotly contended for in the job market.
There is one guy - recent graduate - I know who is a math wiz and writes solver programs for one of my engineering professors when he finishes work in the evening. He works for some consulting firm.
My advice is, look for Computer Engineering or Applied Physics or CS graduates with a background in Digital Signal Processing (math) who have scored some extracurricular lab time hacking. There is a club of these guys which meets on Friday nights with the said professor to put together some really cool software and hardware while mixing in a pleasant (though not extreme) dose of math. We mostly try to get new multimedia hardware to work with Linux - few have the background to advance the math aspect, because it requires function estimation modelling on a graduate level.
This is the page you might want to look at to see where these guys hang out
Janimal
Perhaps raising a child better would prevent any problem, but if the child does not get properly raised, the importance of those video games comes to the foreground all of a sudden.
:)
Don't underestimate the power of subliminal (this includes obvious) messages and how prone kids are to their influence. I've never heard of kids shooting up their schools before... did parenting get worse all of a sudden? No, it's always been pretty bad in general.
Just lately lack of good parenting has much worse consequences... violent films and games are part of it..... arguing that they're not is like arguing that pollution isn't making us sick because the evidence is inconclusive.... who cares that we don't know 100%.. the point is that we have good reason to believe that violent games/films have a strong influence on young people.. That should be enough to do something.. If you wanted conclusive evidence on every parenting practice, I don't think you'd ever get to actually doing any parenting... it's a heuristic.
Janimal
This is by no means a pay update.. you just pay to make it easy. But I have another point.
:) Thanks for the reminder.
This announcement reminds me to donate to the good cause. I'll pay for something by RH just to support them. Right now I'm piss poor - I just upgraded my hardware - but as soon as I'm out of school I'll donate.
Janimal
I'm not sure what's getting filtered. I'm still registering a lot of hits when I search for copyright stuff.
Janimal
if you wire the asynchronous machine well. I'm taking undergrad Computer Engineering at U of T, and we have a course which introduces asynchronous finite state machine design.
Although it's much harder to design such a machine, it is not impossible, and it acts the same way as a clocked machine, except there is no clock to interface you with it, so you would have to have it output a simulated "clock" that would give you the information on when it's ready for the next instruction.
This clock wouldn't really be a clock, as you might expect. It would give you an edge when the AFSM is ready, so the period would vary from instruction to instruction.. This isn't such a problem though, since it's the clock that dictates the pace anyway..
If any of you are interested in more on this, check out our text, "Fundamentals of Digital Logic with VHDL Design" by S. Brown. Chapter 9 introduces the concepts.
Janimal
After a support call, the customer wants to know how the problem was fixed, so (s)he can do it on their own next time. With remote admin, the customer remains oblivious to the problem even if you say what was done. They learn by doing.
There is a better solution that combines the technologies. The tech person should see what is being done, but not control it. The procedure should be walking the customer through somethig with better knowledge of what (s)he is seeing in fronto of their face.
Telephone-only support is definitely crippled. Remote admin is far worse, because it allows for abuses, which are much more detrimental to any company than an extra hour spent to get things right.
Janimal
I helped the prof with the chair a bit... and I mean LITTE bit. The program just looks for an alphanumeric code on the card.. any will do for this model :)
Janimal
sary still.
Unions aren't generally good, or generally bad; neither are corporations. So the argument over whether we need unions or not is pointless. We need them just as much as we need corporations and as much as we need computers, or any other product of our civilization.
I think that unions do the best job when they are not part of a company. A company is then free to organise working conditions so that workers do not need or want to unionise.
I'm fairly far along getting my Computer Engineering degree now, but I have worked as a cashier in the past. I worked for Zellers Inc in Ontario, Canada, which was a fine example of what a company does to productively fend off a union. This is a discount department store of the "old economy", and they're not as backward as you may think.
The employees had monthly meetings with management where their opinions were heard and addressed. The atmosphere was relaxed, yet schedules were made by management so that all the shift time would be appropriately covered. The store offered health coverage plans rivaling that of unionised establishments (in Canada this entails a dental plan and a drug puchase reimbursement plan - basic health coverage is "free"). They organised employee social events, and generally were nice to the employees.
This courteous and professional way of dealing with employees paid off when a union approached the employees. In Ontario it is illegal for management to attack a union even by rhetoric. All the manager could say was, "In the next few weeks you are going to see a lot of flyers and you are going to be approached by union recruiters who are going to try to unionise this store, we are not allowed to interfere with that or to discourage you from listening to them. Obviously we think that a union is not necessary, but you choose to unionise we can do nothing about it."
And so the recruiters went to work. The employees were told that they are getting paid less than their peers in unionised stores. And seniority would count more. But that's as far as the argument seemed to go.. The health benefits were great, the work environment was pleasant. The full time employees voted against unionizing in the poll.
The fact that there was a threat of a union was enough for the management of the department store to adapt appropriate workplace conditions to make a polarized union-management ensemble unnecessary. Without this threat, management would be much less inclined to compete with unionized (read diseased) companies.
The UAW, for example, does offer enormous pay to the employees. A friend of mine got $21 CAD an hour for a summer job at Toyota with no experience on the job.. But this kind of windfall is only possible because somehow the UAW became a monopoly. No car manufacturer may exist without its labour being in the UAW. Parts suppliers are also forced to belong to the UAW or else the employer may not buy parts. The only reason that the American auto makers are still in business is because somehow it is unlawful to compete with a UAW member plant.
The situation is no better - and possibly worse - than the M$ monopoly. This is because the UAW monopoly is legislated.
So unions can be just as bad, or worse, than bad corporations.
Janimal
People have been writing stuff down in case they forget for ages... why does the PDA all of a sudden cause amnesia?
I don't get it.
Janimal
It seems that throughout history Russia has repeateldy f*cked the masses for the benefit of the ruling class. The Tsars did it, the communist government did it, the current government is doing it.
Russia has always had a rich and cultured upper class, and an impoverished lower class.
Because this is not a recent phenomenon, you cannot ascribe it to an effect of the poor economic state. Although the economics inevitable are somewhere in the feedback loop that keeps the system there as it is, no matter what kind of political face is prevalent.
Janimal
Misleading is more like it. Ethics are very important.
I know that it's easy sometimes to think that so many people do not behave ethically, but to succumb to this is just helping it along. People usually think before they do something they know is unethical (at least at the beginning), and they'll usually look at their peers to see how they behave. If the peers post messages like the one above, the person on the verge of making an unethical decision will likely think, "oh what the hell, everybody's doing it! If I stay out, I'll be left behind."
This is not what you want. Ethics do matter, and as long as you can set a right example, or make the right comment on an issue, DO IT.. because the idiots listen.
Janimal
It is sad that this kind of "whatever" mentality is prevelant even among the non-teenage highschool dropout group.
This is bad news not only for the industry, but for the whole country.
To see responsible professional attitude, just look at Germany. Their engineering is the envy of the world.
To see Mr. Schumin's attitude in widespread use, visit Russia. The world's most expensive dump; all because the prevailing mentality there is "screw your neighbour if you can get away with it."
Over and out.
Janimal
"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets? - Dick Cavett"
:)
You have no idea
Being an immigrant and coming from a different comic culture.. comedy differs from region to region.. I can tell you, that American (and Canadian) comedy is very much like the comedy that I see on local television.
The comedy on television is not reflective of the comedy in the real world, as some may want to argue. I think Kramer is not a public trend follower, but a trend-setter, when he yells, "giddyup!" And we've all heard ourselves or our friends yell that one.
That would be all.
Janimal
when it was still Corel's and I was appalled at how unfocused they were.
At the time, we (Comp Eng @ U of Toronto) were visiting Corel on a career exploration field trip to Ottawa (this was 2 years ago). We visited Corel Corp. and were very unexcited - nobody there could give us a cute motivational speach on why it's so great to work for Corel. The best point seemed to be "we get free cola."
Then we went to Corel Computer. Nobody was excited after what we saw in the software division. But I was just amazed at what I saw in this office. At the time, they were finishing work on the NetWinder. This was the first I had heard of it and the idea of it was fascinating. The technical team was inspired. Our jaws dropped to the floor. Here were these people showing us a 15W computer that was powerful and extensible enough to be a web server, a development workstation, a tv set top box, a gaming machine, and pretty much anything else you wanted to push it to.. like a cluster on a common fibre backbone in one box (10 of these babies). This seemed like the future's primordial soup. Anything seemed possible.
The marketing people showed us all this and then I popped the question, "what are you guys going to sell this as?" They didn't know.. they had all these ideas and couldn't tell us what this was going to be sold as first. No marketing plan whatsoever. The box ran Corel Linux and KDE, I believe. The web server version could boot the system from memory for instant reboots. The web server cluster was supposed to be hot swappable soon (8 server and 2 controller motherboards in one box).
The whole place was wholly behind open source and linux. This machine caused some commotion at Microsoft from what I heard - it was that neat! (or at least this is the impression I got)
So what happened next? Nothing... I was stupefied, but I didn't hear about this thing until the division was sold to these rebel.com people who aren't really doing anything with it either and the technology is aging. They should've ipo'ed long ago and financed a marketing campaign for this thing.
This seems to be the trend in the entire company. They just don't know how to market their stuff. I remember looking at the pathetic ads they had for Corel Draw on taxi cabs. The image given by the company is poor. With a better marketing team (one with any skill whatsoever) these guys could be big again, their internal morale would increase, and they could put some cool stuff out. The way things are now, they are toast. And giving up Linux is bad move #2 after selling Corel Computer, which was a gem.
Janimal
Yep. I don't post often. Insert
's where you think they fit.
Janimal
Agreed. App installation is probably the biggest hurdle Linux has to overcome. There is simply no beating Windows until this is done, and done well. As of now, if one of my friends installs Linx for the first time, I have to go and teach them how to install software. Even though it's easy for a computer nerd, this is not the goal for Linux now. Linux HAS the computer nerd market. In order for Linux to be easy to use (Netscape should definitely help out in this) I have to be able to go to download.com, click on an app I want and have a window pop up asking me if I want to install the program. Then it should cutely install the thing witha a nice progress bar and put the damn icons on my desktop, my panel, in KDE or Gnome, whichever I happen to run (if I have both installed, cause I had no clue what to click during the Linux installation) then both desktop managers should receive it on their desktops or in their panels). I started using Linux a little under a year ago and I like it, but I was a bit annoyed when running Gnome, an app installation (i.e. StarOffice) would happily tell me that all the icons are installed in my KDE menu... I just wanted to cry. You can't use KDE or Gnome exclusively without giving up ease of use (that should be standard) for some applications. This should not happen. And the user permissions thing.. That needs to be masked with a wizard and an idiot's guide for parents or something. I know how it works, but my grandfather - who is emailing me every once in a while and sending me digital camera pictures from Windows - couldn't learn to use Linux if his life depended on it. MS is deteriorating, but Linux is not a replacement yet, and won't be until all the apps authors come to a concensus about app installation (or are given a standard) and something is done about the inherent complexity of user permissions. Enough said. Feel free to reply, but I have to get my DBMS assignment done and it's late, so I won't read them. Janimal p.s. Yay Linux! But I'm not the average user, and neither are you.
Not really... it's just like fiber.. the thing can support pretty fast traffic, but noone has the capacity to feed it fast enough. Suddenly we have a fiber interface (this..thing...) that can go at fiber speeds... Now nobody can feed the interface fast enough :)