Foreigners should stick to their own wikipedias?
That's funny. Even the Wikipedia article on xenophobia has non-english characters in it. I would hardly call my suggestion xenophobic. It's affirmative action. The English Wikipedia has plenty of editors that can only contribute to that one. Other languages probably have less articles. Jimbo and friends would be doing a disservice to not encourage you to contribute in Japanese. That being said, the method employed is terrible as it just pissed you off and stopped all contributions from you. Others that have replied to me have pointed out that the problem was improperly enforcement of an overly complex user name policy.
Now, saying "you absolutely can not contribute to the english wikipedia" would be discriminating and xenophobic. However what we have here is a trigger happy admin who is to quick to ban a person.
So instead of asking you politely, they just forcibly ban you when they see you trying contribute? Gee, that's welcoming.
FWIW, I was contributing in English, not moonspeak. It was my username that was in Japanese (and nothing impolite, either).
I'm not defending their methods. They went about the issue the wrong way. I'm just kind of curious for the reasons behind this.
If you want to force people to have usernames in English, TELL THEM instead of banning them and then forbidding logins from that IP like a common vandal. IMO, no website so hostile to the outside world can be considered a "Great Library" of any sort.
Is it possible that these rouge admins want you contributing to wikipedia in your language? Granted, they have a funny way of going about it. I do remember the good Captain Wales has addressed concern of there being wikipedia articles in other languages.
In New York City, blacks commit the lions share of crime, far disproportionate to their population. You know what trend is always unnoticeable? January and February have the lowest crime rates. They are tropical animals. They don't like the cold.
Here are my issue's I see with your agrument. Civil servants move out of the city and keep their residency there due to requirements for their job. A NYPD cop is not allowed to live in New Jersey. The poor on the other hand, tend to migrate. When they come to the city they tend not to get a state ID because why pay for something with no benifit. My point is that NYC is blacker than most people think.
Also could you show me these crime rate numbers and population numbers? Are you using census data. Are you adjusting census data for any assumed corrections like the fact that illegeals tend to not fill out census forms? How does the drop in crime in January and Febuary break down by race? Maybe even the smart white people get to a point where the temperature is too cold.
Look, plenty of people have made the race and climate arguments before you. However, unless your going to cite and defend or attach things like Flynn Effect, you're going to sound like a bigot.
My question to you would be, what do these outsourcing firms typically charge a company, vs. hiring a person (or multiple people) to do those roles themselves?
As a general rule, with every extra layer "in the middle", you add cost. (EG. A given firm performing H.R. duties will still have to pay market-rate salaries to their employees performing those duties. That means, to turn a profit, they have to charge YOU over and above that salary they're paying out.)
I can see the advantages of scale, in that one firm providing outsourced H.R. for many smaller businesses can get insurance and other benefits usually only attainable by a large company. But if the the yearly expenses a small firm puts out for this are too high, it doesn't add enough value to justify outsourcing them.
I don't think Alcott took any jobs away from my old company. Being our HR director also did purchasing, it quite possible delayed the hiring of our current purchasing staff. I think they are quite competative.
Yes, it comes down to money, but there is efficiency in specializing. I worked for a company that specialized in IT outsourcing. We could do things more efficiently because all we did was it. Also, its easier to "ramp up" for large projects. If you needed to deploy a hundred workstations, 5 of us would show up at your office. Being the 5 of us would be 3 guys from the help desk, an exchange admin and a unix admin looking to get out of the office, all of which have dealt with either your employees calling with questions or fixing your servers, we were all "up to speed".
That's why you don't see many HR types or IT types as CEOs. Their main function is viewed as peripheral. Look at the military. The majority of the generals are either from the combat arms or from logistics, same deal.
Except heres the difference. Armies invade, and defend against invasion. Being in a combat division means you do the invading and repeling invading. Companies make products and sell solutions. That means that the COO should be first in line to be CEO. CTO/CIO second if its a tech company. Yes business is about money, but its about getting money by solving a need.
Why should every company have an HR department? Why should every company have a payroll department? Why should every company have to maintain an accounting department? Why should every company have to maintain upper management? Why should every company need people to work in them, or janitorial staff, or mail rooms, or anything?
Lets start with payroll. You can, and probably should hire someone else to do that. A company like PayChex wiill figure all that out. All you need is a bookkeeper to compile everyones time sheets and record time off. Payroll companies figure out the tax withholdings. As far as all the other administrative functions of HR like benifits, seek out a company like http://www.alcottgroup.com/. My last job used them and as a result were able to offer multiple health care plans, multiple credit union memberships, and the oddball benifits of cruise discounts and cheap gym memberships that one expects from a large company. Yet they had only 100 employees.
Now lets look at janitorial staff. The only job I ever had without an outside cleaning staff was in a factory with a large supply of low paid unskilled employees. Generally a part time handyman on payroll will handle the odd jobs and a cleaning company empties the trash cans and vacuums each night.
As far as accounting, in a large company you need a CFO and the full hierachry of accounting people. In a smaller company you need a book keeper or two, and the owner can be the comptroller. Hire an outside accounting firm to act as your CFO.
The point of your company is to do something that other people need or want. You then get them to gtive you money in exchange for fufilling these wants and needs. Accountants and janitors are means to an end unless you're a CPA or a cleaninhg service.
All that being said, it might be advantageous to insource some things. For example if your dealing with complex cash flows and large amounts of money, you probably need an accounting department. If you have alot of office and plant space, you might benifit from internal facilities people. If your a very web centric business you might want inhouse IT, development or both. Quite frankly, that is becoming less and less of an issue.
so executives no longer have to be tied to the office: they can just make three decisions per day, then head off to play golf.
If there in sales I sure hope their playing golf with clients. If you can get your business down to three decisions a day, that great. Start another business, create more jobs.
Day trading is gambling; therefore it should be illegal everywhere gambling is illegal. Even worse: You know all those penny stock spam mails you get? They won't stop until day trading becomes illegal.
Ok so I can't sell a stock I bought the same day? What if I honestly intended to hold onto it, but its value happened to collapse later that day due to some scandal coming to light. I can't profit by predicting human behavior accurately? How is day trading any more or less like gambling than long term investing or starting a business?
Daytrading involves guessing at the future market value of a stock based on predicted announcements, well established patterns of human behavior in regards to the stock market and the ability to be able to buy and sell large amounts of stock quickly. Long term trading places more emphasis on auctual financials, but is still dealing with the same fiat value of part of a company.
Like gambling, the stock market involves guessing at a system where you have imperfect information and limited control of the outcome. However, this is no different for day trading or long term investing.
Now there are many stupid investors out there, as there are many bad programmers. However, they must be granted self determination and be allowed to cause harm to themselves. When they realize there stupidity, they can then educatre themselves.
Is this going to use the same modules as FUSE for linux? This sounds interesting. I'm willing to test when you feel reasonable it won't make my machine particularly unstable for windows.
Do you use incandescent light bulbs? Then YOU are part of the problem.
Some people aver very photosensetive. Thankfully I am not.
Do you leave your PC on 24/7? Then YOU are part of the problem. Do you leave your laser printer on all day? Then YOU are part of the problem (laser printers suck more juice than all other computer components combined; they're mini space heaters).
I access my PC 24/7. Don't laser printers go to sleep?
Do you Drive an SUV? Then YOU are even more of the problem and a sociopath as well. Do you race to the next red light instead of taking your foot off the gas? Not only are you part of the problem, then you are an idiot to boot.
SUV drivers might be sociopaths, but eventually gas will get so expensive that there ways will change.
I don't race to the red light but I defend all those that do, especially taxi drivers in Manhattan (New York City). If you are making a right on a corner, race to the red light. There are parking lots on the side streets and someone pulling out might get ahead of you. If your behaviour gets too aggressive, a pedestrian will kick your fenders. Eventually you will almost hit someone in combat boots and a trench coat. That person will hopefully have the good sense to drop kick the hood. You will then re-evaluate your driving methods.
The true sociopaths are the double parkers and those that park in bus lanes. That is truly antisocial behaviour. If I were Mayor of a town I would make those people all spend a night in jail. Repeat offenders would eventually spend a year in jail.
One day I found out that his secretary was moving to a different department, so I stopped sending them, to see what would happen.No one ever asked me about those reports again.
The question is, was he not reading them or did he have someone else prepare them because he had no idea how his old secretary got them.
Not to mention Indiana Jones is a much more physically demanding role, assuming the movie isn't just about Dr. Jones becoming a crotchety, washed up academic.
No its about an older Jones who has risen to be dean of the school of archeology at his university. He now has become an M like character and sends his grad student Shortround on missions. Think Bruce Wayne in Batman Beyond.
I'm glad someone mentioned BSD because with BSD a company can just take *your* hard work and say screw you. At least with Linux you have the GPL that legally forces people to be mutualistic. So now the answer to why the free-desktop developers are wedded to Linux: we got screwed before that's why. Come join us when you feel the sting.
Maybe its not about being screwed. You obviously feel you or others have been "screwed" by people using you BSD licensed code in ways that the license clearly intended. Maybe sometimes people want to grant others the freedom to create closed source derivatives. Sometimes I want that people to have that freedom with my code. Sometimes I don't.
For me, it depends on the project. For example, I have written a frontend to Access and SQLite files. On a side not I released a new version today. See the link in my signature. It is GPLed. I wrote this originally to teach myself C#. I then began to use it to deal with access databases and someone pays me to deal with such things. It is a tool that makes my job easier. I give it away in the hopes that it will benefit others. This costs me nothing and if I can get other to try it, I can better improve it with there feedback. Perhaps I will get a patch from someone with improvements.
Now I have other things I would not mind under a closed source license. Most of these things are incomplete programs. For example, I have written some project and file templates for SharpDevelop, an Open Source IDE for.NET. I would very much like to know that people have used those templates in closed source code. I'd like to see my templates used to make classes that were Open Source as well, but its nice to be useful in general. I have other snippets that I will soon release on SourceForge under a BSD license. They demonstrate patterns and are personally researched and developed best practices. I hope to avoid others the trouble I have gone through.
The BSD license was specifically developed to allow code to be used in a closed source application. Anyone that contributes to a BSD project should know this.
This is Peace Corps Syndrome. Rich people trying to 'help make the world a better place' and only making it worse because the changes that they made unbalanced the political ecology that held the undeveloped society together. This is why all the rich foundations that want to spend so much ill-gotten money to 'help humanity' will eventually fail. If Gates were serious about making world a better place then he would give $100 to all the people who bought his companie's operating system and then lost hours or weeks of work when the OS crashed and destroyed all their work. I know that this has happened to everyone at some time.
So we have a college educated poor young adult instead of a poor dead baby. Well unless your advocating killing the poor, I say we did some good there. Now the next generation of peace corps members should go and build a factory or irrigate the farmland to get these people money.
As far as one of these people growing up to become a suicide bomber, well they would have gotten someone else to do the task if he died as an infant.
Now, personally I don't think that building wells and factories is the answer. However, I think the problem is people need to work hard for and earn everything they have. If stuff is given to you you will expect it to be given to you.
Now charities do things that have unexpected consequences. However, so do for profit companies, governments and individuals. There is a need to better understand these things via sociology, economic forecasting, etc, but that doesn't mean we should stop doing everything until we know everything.
The crusty fridge that came with the house is responsible for about 50% of our non-winter electricity consumption. How old is crusty old? I would think anything pre-1990 would be worth replacing just because the new one would pay for itself in electricity costs.
Sounds to me like the managers suck. They should be seeing these things happening, and creating better coding guidelines and working with the developers to improve their practices. No guidance from management means no improvement ever.
Well its a two way street. The developers and IT personnel should point out flaws in the process to management and suggestions for improving them. Management should also be looking for ways to improve the process on their own.
Find a quick win proposal that can produce results management and all other parties can see. Get them to implement that successfully and they will listen to your crasy ideas of making an installer program. BTW, once you get your installer working, it usually needs very little maintance, unless you are making large changes to your system whereby the installed file names change. In that case any deployment senario will be time consumning and risky. However, a deployment script and a proper testing/staging/deployment setup will mean that it will work in the first place.
The developers are fine at making improvements to the application interface and providing new features, but completely and utterly clueless when it comes to system architecture, security, using hardcoded hostnames, etc. etc. The more we close the developers out of the production deployment, the better this runs. We also have to increasingly review their work to make sure they aren't doing things like hardcoding hostnames, or writing data to local disk instead of the rdbms (writing data to the disk kills horizontal scalability, high availability, etc)
It sounds like your developers suck. Did you try educating them? Suggesting better ptactices?
And if these guys were real CSS gurus, they would have written their book in XML and CSS and used Prince to convert it and then open sourced the book code.
I can't tell if you're being facetious, or you're just a prat. I fail to see why after having writen a book the author should be expected to give away that work.
Auctually there may be some merit to his point. I don't think he should give the whole book away. However, Knuth did write his own document processing system to deal with all the math in his books. Perhaps he should give away a chapter or appendix and the index in xml with his own CSS fomatting. He can put it on a cdrom in the back of the book as an alternative. Then the author could say, "I wrote the book on CSS and used CSS to layout the book!!!"
This improves the overall design of the software and allows better code reuse, but more importantly reduces maintainance issues by allowing developers to upgrade components with relative ease.
I disagree. Sometimes it happens as you describes. Other times eg: Blat someone simply renames main(), exports it with name decorations properly stripped, and calls it a DLL for use in vb 6. Except it takes one parameter, the command line arguments.
Really, will they pay this 'crowd' anything?
If they will do it for free why pay them? If that mean the news gets worse, don't buy that paper. Newspapers these days rely on wire services like AP. However, there are some news papers like the Christian Science Monitor that do their own reporting. People that appreciate that use their services.
Is anyone forcing you to read these papers or work for them for free? Whats your problem?
The only problem I can see will be if MS adds features to the language that Linux version doesn't have, and lots of developers start writing MS-PHP code in Visual Studio targetting IIS. However, all that will do is make people ensure that there is a clear distinction of the version of PHP that their code is written for - something that happens already with PHP4 and PHP5.
While I do fear PHP extensions, I would actually like to see more PHP development on IIS. If there are more PHP windows developers, there are more people to help port PHP applications to run on IIS. Also, I've personally discovered that coding C# in an IDE (SharpDevelop), has encouraged me to learn about things like code documentation since the IDE holds my hand. When the time came to wrote PHP in VIM again, it was much easier to teach myself the slightly more free form PHP documenter, because I was able to format my DocBlocks in a manner similar to what an IDE did for me. In other words I took off the train wheels.
We have a strong local economy (despite the reports you may happen to read in Ontario and Alberta) and relaxed attitudes about work and "sins" (quickest declining religious affiliation in North America).
Ok I'll give the religious/sin argument some merit. However, what is wrong with wanting to work. I want to be found dead in my cubicle (hopefully office by then) at 80. Now, a 40 hour work day is a good idea because it allows you time to start your own business and do non traditional work (charity and open source projects). However, anything less than that is just damn lazy IMHO.
Now, if you don't want to work, and can do so without costing me money, its your right as a human being. If you can find a company that gives you 6 weeks of vacation, and can stand being away from the office for more than a week, by all means go do it.
I'm not saying don't enjoy your leisure time. I can get piss drunk like the best of them and just got back from 12 days in the Phillipines. It would have been 5 days, but the g/f put her foot down. She gave up 2 weeks of pay to stay down there a whole month herself. Thats her choice and she paid for it, rightfully so.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, I was contributing in English, not moonspeak. It was my username that was in Japanese (and nothing impolite, either).
I'm not defending their methods. They went about the issue the wrong way. I'm just kind of curious for the reasons behind this.
Is it possible that these rouge admins want you contributing to wikipedia in your language? Granted, they have a funny way of going about it. I do remember the good Captain Wales has addressed concern of there being wikipedia articles in other languages.
Here are my issue's I see with your agrument. Civil servants move out of the city and keep their residency there due to requirements for their job. A NYPD cop is not allowed to live in New Jersey. The poor on the other hand, tend to migrate. When they come to the city they tend not to get a state ID because why pay for something with no benifit. My point is that NYC is blacker than most people think.
Also could you show me these crime rate numbers and population numbers? Are you using census data. Are you adjusting census data for any assumed corrections like the fact that illegeals tend to not fill out census forms? How does the drop in crime in January and Febuary break down by race? Maybe even the smart white people get to a point where the temperature is too cold.
Look, plenty of people have made the race and climate arguments before you. However, unless your going to cite and defend or attach things like Flynn Effect, you're going to sound like a bigot.
As a general rule, with every extra layer "in the middle", you add cost. (EG. A given firm performing H.R. duties will still have to pay market-rate salaries to their employees performing those duties. That means, to turn a profit, they have to charge YOU over and above that salary they're paying out.)
I can see the advantages of scale, in that one firm providing outsourced H.R. for many smaller businesses can get insurance and other benefits usually only attainable by a large company. But if the the yearly expenses a small firm puts out for this are too high, it doesn't add enough value to justify outsourcing them.
I don't think Alcott took any jobs away from my old company. Being our HR director also did purchasing, it quite possible delayed the hiring of our current purchasing staff. I think they are quite competative.
Yes, it comes down to money, but there is efficiency in specializing. I worked for a company that specialized in IT outsourcing. We could do things more efficiently because all we did was it. Also, its easier to "ramp up" for large projects. If you needed to deploy a hundred workstations, 5 of us would show up at your office. Being the 5 of us would be 3 guys from the help desk, an exchange admin and a unix admin looking to get out of the office, all of which have dealt with either your employees calling with questions or fixing your servers, we were all "up to speed".
Except heres the difference. Armies invade, and defend against invasion. Being in a combat division means you do the invading and repeling invading. Companies make products and sell solutions. That means that the COO should be first in line to be CEO. CTO/CIO second if its a tech company. Yes business is about money, but its about getting money by solving a need.
Why should every company have an HR department? Why should every company have a payroll department? Why should every company have to maintain an accounting department? Why should every company have to maintain upper management? Why should every company need people to work in them, or janitorial staff, or mail rooms, or anything?
Lets start with payroll. You can, and probably should hire someone else to do that. A company like PayChex wiill figure all that out. All you need is a bookkeeper to compile everyones time sheets and record time off. Payroll companies figure out the tax withholdings. As far as all the other administrative functions of HR like benifits, seek out a company like http://www.alcottgroup.com/. My last job used them and as a result were able to offer multiple health care plans, multiple credit union memberships, and the oddball benifits of cruise discounts and cheap gym memberships that one expects from a large company. Yet they had only 100 employees.
Now lets look at janitorial staff. The only job I ever had without an outside cleaning staff was in a factory with a large supply of low paid unskilled employees. Generally a part time handyman on payroll will handle the odd jobs and a cleaning company empties the trash cans and vacuums each night.
As far as accounting, in a large company you need a CFO and the full hierachry of accounting people. In a smaller company you need a book keeper or two, and the owner can be the comptroller. Hire an outside accounting firm to act as your CFO.
The point of your company is to do something that other people need or want. You then get them to gtive you money in exchange for fufilling these wants and needs. Accountants and janitors are means to an end unless you're a CPA or a cleaninhg service.
All that being said, it might be advantageous to insource some things. For example if your dealing with complex cash flows and large amounts of money, you probably need an accounting department. If you have alot of office and plant space, you might benifit from internal facilities people. If your a very web centric business you might want inhouse IT, development or both. Quite frankly, that is becoming less and less of an issue.
so executives no longer have to be tied to the office: they can just make three decisions per day, then head off to play golf.If there in sales I sure hope their playing golf with clients. If you can get your business down to three decisions a day, that great. Start another business, create more jobs.
Ok so I can't sell a stock I bought the same day? What if I honestly intended to hold onto it, but its value happened to collapse later that day due to some scandal coming to light. I can't profit by predicting human behavior accurately? How is day trading any more or less like gambling than long term investing or starting a business?
Daytrading involves guessing at the future market value of a stock based on predicted announcements, well established patterns of human behavior in regards to the stock market and the ability to be able to buy and sell large amounts of stock quickly. Long term trading places more emphasis on auctual financials, but is still dealing with the same fiat value of part of a company.
Like gambling, the stock market involves guessing at a system where you have imperfect information and limited control of the outcome. However, this is no different for day trading or long term investing.
Now there are many stupid investors out there, as there are many bad programmers. However, they must be granted self determination and be allowed to cause harm to themselves. When they realize there stupidity, they can then educatre themselves.
Is this going to use the same modules as FUSE for linux? This sounds interesting. I'm willing to test when you feel reasonable it won't make my machine particularly unstable for windows.
And he didn't invent the internet either!
Some people aver very photosensetive. Thankfully I am not.
Do you leave your PC on 24/7? Then YOU are part of the problem. Do you leave your laser printer on all day? Then YOU are part of the problem (laser printers suck more juice than all other computer components combined; they're mini space heaters).I access my PC 24/7. Don't laser printers go to sleep?
Do you Drive an SUV? Then YOU are even more of the problem and a sociopath as well. Do you race to the next red light instead of taking your foot off the gas? Not only are you part of the problem, then you are an idiot to boot.SUV drivers might be sociopaths, but eventually gas will get so expensive that there ways will change.
I don't race to the red light but I defend all those that do, especially taxi drivers in Manhattan (New York City). If you are making a right on a corner, race to the red light. There are parking lots on the side streets and someone pulling out might get ahead of you. If your behaviour gets too aggressive, a pedestrian will kick your fenders. Eventually you will almost hit someone in combat boots and a trench coat. That person will hopefully have the good sense to drop kick the hood. You will then re-evaluate your driving methods.
The true sociopaths are the double parkers and those that park in bus lanes. That is truly antisocial behaviour. If I were Mayor of a town I would make those people all spend a night in jail. Repeat offenders would eventually spend a year in jail.
The question is, was he not reading them or did he have someone else prepare them because he had no idea how his old secretary got them.
No its about an older Jones who has risen to be dean of the school of archeology at his university. He now has become an M like character and sends his grad student Shortround on missions. Think Bruce Wayne in Batman Beyond.
Maybe its not about being screwed. You obviously feel you or others have been "screwed" by people using you BSD licensed code in ways that the license clearly intended. Maybe sometimes people want to grant others the freedom to create closed source derivatives. Sometimes I want that people to have that freedom with my code. Sometimes I don't.
For me, it depends on the project. For example, I have written a frontend to Access and SQLite files. On a side not I released a new version today. See the link in my signature. It is GPLed. I wrote this originally to teach myself C#. I then began to use it to deal with access databases and someone pays me to deal with such things. It is a tool that makes my job easier. I give it away in the hopes that it will benefit others. This costs me nothing and if I can get other to try it, I can better improve it with there feedback. Perhaps I will get a patch from someone with improvements.
Now I have other things I would not mind under a closed source license. Most of these things are incomplete programs. For example, I have written some project and file templates for SharpDevelop, an Open Source IDE for .NET. I would very much like to know that people have used those templates in closed source code. I'd like to see my templates used to make classes that were Open Source as well, but its nice to be useful in general. I have other snippets that I will soon release on SourceForge under a BSD license. They demonstrate patterns and are personally researched and developed best practices. I hope to avoid others the trouble I have gone through.
The BSD license was specifically developed to allow code to be used in a closed source application. Anyone that contributes to a BSD project should know this.
So we have a college educated poor young adult instead of a poor dead baby. Well unless your advocating killing the poor, I say we did some good there. Now the next generation of peace corps members should go and build a factory or irrigate the farmland to get these people money.
As far as one of these people growing up to become a suicide bomber, well they would have gotten someone else to do the task if he died as an infant.
Now, personally I don't think that building wells and factories is the answer. However, I think the problem is people need to work hard for and earn everything they have. If stuff is given to you you will expect it to be given to you.
Now charities do things that have unexpected consequences. However, so do for profit companies, governments and individuals. There is a need to better understand these things via sociology, economic forecasting, etc, but that doesn't mean we should stop doing everything until we know everything.
Well its a two way street. The developers and IT personnel should point out flaws in the process to management and suggestions for improving them. Management should also be looking for ways to improve the process on their own.
Find a quick win proposal that can produce results management and all other parties can see. Get them to implement that successfully and they will listen to your crasy ideas of making an installer program. BTW, once you get your installer working, it usually needs very little maintance, unless you are making large changes to your system whereby the installed file names change. In that case any deployment senario will be time consumning and risky. However, a deployment script and a proper testing/staging/deployment setup will mean that it will work in the first place.
It sounds like your developers suck. Did you try educating them? Suggesting better ptactices?
I disagree. Sometimes it happens as you describes. Other times eg: Blat someone simply renames main(), exports it with name decorations properly stripped, and calls it a DLL for use in vb 6. Except it takes one parameter, the command line arguments.
Really, will they pay this 'crowd' anything?
If they will do it for free why pay them? If that mean the news gets worse, don't buy that paper. Newspapers these days rely on wire services like AP. However, there are some news papers like the Christian Science Monitor that do their own reporting. People that appreciate that use their services. Is anyone forcing you to read these papers or work for them for free? Whats your problem?
The only problem I can see will be if MS adds features to the language that Linux version doesn't have, and lots of developers start writing MS-PHP code in Visual Studio targetting IIS. However, all that will do is make people ensure that there is a clear distinction of the version of PHP that their code is written for - something that happens already with PHP4 and PHP5.
While I do fear PHP extensions, I would actually like to see more PHP development on IIS. If there are more PHP windows developers, there are more people to help port PHP applications to run on IIS. Also, I've personally discovered that coding C# in an IDE (SharpDevelop), has encouraged me to learn about things like code documentation since the IDE holds my hand. When the time came to wrote PHP in VIM again, it was much easier to teach myself the slightly more free form PHP documenter, because I was able to format my DocBlocks in a manner similar to what an IDE did for me. In other words I took off the train wheels.
That cartoon sums up my core belief system perfectly.
Ok I'll give the religious/sin argument some merit. However, what is wrong with wanting to work. I want to be found dead in my cubicle (hopefully office by then) at 80. Now, a 40 hour work day is a good idea because it allows you time to start your own business and do non traditional work (charity and open source projects). However, anything less than that is just damn lazy IMHO.
Now, if you don't want to work, and can do so without costing me money, its your right as a human being. If you can find a company that gives you 6 weeks of vacation, and can stand being away from the office for more than a week, by all means go do it.
I'm not saying don't enjoy your leisure time. I can get piss drunk like the best of them and just got back from 12 days in the Phillipines. It would have been 5 days, but the g/f put her foot down. She gave up 2 weeks of pay to stay down there a whole month herself. Thats her choice and she paid for it, rightfully so.