? My landline still works with no power.
As long as your teleco still has power. In my area (Maine), when I lose power so does my teleco (after a while).
However, now that I have VoIP, a cheap UPS means I have several hours worth of backup. In the future I can see various VoIP devices having built in battery backups.. that's hardly cost anythng.
Microsoft has a history of funding "independant researchers" itself, which coincidentally always come out in favour for Microsoft.
This isn't exactly true. Let's say you funded 50 studies of yourself, to find out all kinds of interesting things. 25 come back positive, 25 come back negative.
Which ones will you tell women about when hitting on them at the bars?
but that's because, if you use the default installation, it preloads half of itself into memory upon startup
That's incorrect. It does no such thing. On Office 2000 the This is what it does:
Initializes some of the common fonts installed by Office 2000
Handles certain commands (New Office Document, Find Fast, Open Office Document, Help, and Screen Saver) on the Start menu and on the Office Shortcut Bar
Displays Microsoft Outlook notifications when the Office Assistant is available
I just looked at two machines running it, and memory usuage was 576 kb and 710 kb depending on the service pack. Task manager shows Word 2000 taking 11Mb on startup.
That's hardly loading half.
Now, as a test. Turn off the option (link). Try again. Still very fast. Why?
The real reason alot of MS apps run quickly is that they are frequently used on a PC. When an application becomes frequently used newer versions of Windows use the "pre-fetch" mechanism. This caches commonly used shared libraries in a common location, and prepares them to be loaded into memory by tracking free memory that will fit the whole library.
Personally, I'd rather have the system memory available because then the overall speed of my PC should be better, rather than just the load-up time of Word.
This is incorrect. In 99.9% of cases, if you have 10MB of free physical RAM or 200MB of free physical RAM your system and other applications will have the exact same performance. Performance degredation will occur only when tasks *must* swap to disk.
there's a whole heap of memory other programs cannot use as a result.
That's simply untrue for several technical reasons. Memory management in Windows is suprisingly robust. You have this picture that Word is running in the background, just waiting to be executed and show itself. What is actually going on is far more advanced than that. The system is ready to load the application It knows the locations of fonts. Shared libraries are ready to be loaded into pre-mapped memory locations.
The good thing about MS's mechanism is that it benefits all applications that use shared libraries. The problem is that for many open source projects the program is an "island" - using everything that is statically linked and with large monolithic binaries. This is just a fundamentally slow mechanism.
And there may be more to it than that. Ever notice how MS documents are recognized as such by the OS even if YOU'VE NEVER LOADED OFFICE on that computer??!
I just tried this on fresh VMWare images of Win98, Win2k, and WinXP. I find no such evidence to support your assertion. Can you provide any proof of your claim? Has it been documenteted anywhere?
That's more likely it.. MS lost a big time patent case for hundreds and hundres of millions of dollars. I am sure someone at MS went "but.. I thought of that first!" (side note: it's probably true, I mean, with 40,000 employees chances are someone in the company did have the thought before the other company [not necessarly first in the world, mind you]).
The patent system is so messed up that, really, if you create any amount of software you need patent protection of somesort. Something to fight back with.
ZAP packages are inferior to MSI's in so many ways.. basically all they are is a thin-wrapper around an EXE installer.. if anything goes wrong in terms of the automated UI installation then it goes tits-up.
Basically with the ZAP package you get the worst of all worlds. It's a much bigger hassle than MSI.
With a nice MSI, you get:
1. Installation when you want it: either when the client starts the application or when the machine boots. Having applications install only when first attempted to run is great. Why install software on 2500 PCs when only 125 need the package?
2. Self-repairing. Some dork-ass client starts mucking about with FireFox? No worries, it is automatically fixed.
3. Easy to update. When the next version of FireFox comes out 15-minutes after rolling-out the current one, you can easily chain them together in a logical way.
There are many, many, many conservatives for whom religion plays no part.
One problem is that the american conservative party has been ransacked by a fairly strong but very minority stake of fundamentalist evangelical Christians. That's okay, they can join whatever party they like. And it's okay for their voice to be heard.
But there are many, many, many conservatives who agree with the large part of the platform without subscribing to the religious reasons fellow party-members tout.
For example. There is a large libertarian contingent who believes that abortion (especially late term/near term) is a violation of the unborn persons right to life. The reasoning is that the government has a duty to protect the innocent and weak: if you call the cops because two big armed intruders are bearing down on you it is the responsibility of the government to rescue you (or try). Likewise for the unborn.
Another example. There is a large libertarian contingent who belives that marriage is a civil institution that does not deserve legal recognition, let alone expansion to include non-traditional relationships.
Another example. There exisits a large libertarian contingent that believes that for the most part the government is incompetent. The same red-tape strangled pencil pushers who have caused my paperwork to be lost a dozen times has no business moralizing to my children regarding sexual practices and mores. Yes, they have a responsibility to explain the biology (the plubming, so to speak), but not the associated social values.
P.S. when did "family" values start to mean "christian" values?
Family values has almost always meant "judeo-christian" values. The notions that you should respect your wedding vows, not lie, not covet your neighbors possesions, not curse people, not treat others poorly, that children should respect their parents, and so on go back to the founding of this country. The ideas behind the "ten commandments" are really a big part of the social foundation of the country. The "family values" kick is a recognition that if everyone were to follow the non-religious ten-commandments things would be a lot more civil in this country.
It's not that developers aren't to blame, but rather, it's how you'd expect developers to be. What FOSS needs is a free, open-source equivalent of the QA/Validation/UI Design department.
This is one of the things that I've always said FOSS isn't good at doing - QA/Validation/UI design.
Most FOSS programmers work on projects for the love of coding. A break from boring work projects, home life, and to show thier geek pride. A mental workout.
QA, UI design, etc are often the ultimate in repetitive drudgery. Designing and coding test frameworks for larger apps is often more challenging than coding the application to be tested. It's slow, tedious, detail orientated work. The payoff is small, measured, and non-glamorous.
The big FOSS projects - I call them the "name brand" ones - get some of this just by sheer number of volunteers. The Linux kernel. Firefox. OpenOffice to a lesser degree.
But the thousands of other projects - they get a programmer who just programs 100% of the time. A seperate volunteer to write up some minimal docs and a man page. That's it. Refactoring code to be more user-effective? Eliminating ambiguity from documentation? Producing high-quality production level software packages for many platforms? Nope. Rarely done. Why? It's the crap work that FOSS programmers are trying to avoid in the first place!
Many of the Microsoft developer bloggers have reported that they spend less than 50% of their time coding. The rest is designing and documentating, refining, refactoring. After that, it's off to a team of testers and documentators.
The point? Who wants to volunteer to work that you normally have to pay people very well to get done in the first place?
These aren't private meetings - the agenda is already set
These are private meetings - campaigning is not public policy making
The Cheney incident you mentioned was in direct response to a publicized, well co-ordinated attempt to disrupt a private campaign fundraiser. This wasn't a public debate. This wasn't a come one/come all type of public event. This was a fundraising campaign stop.
The right to seek a redress of grievances does not mean you get to have civil disorder and break hundreds, perhaps thousands, of laws a day.
Protesting is subject to the same laws and regulations as other speech. Can I stand in the road on any day of the week and hold up traffic and yell and hold a sign and whatnot? No. Of course not.
My point is that unions are not the solution to your problems if you are a white collar worker. If you are white collar, a union is going to hurt you, not help you.
The tech world keeps thinking a union will save them. It won't. It will help the blue collar "human machines" of IT who are at risking to losing thier jobs to outsourcing.
I explained it very clearly. White collar workers gain security and pay through what they add to the company.
I clearly did not say I was irreplaceable. I said specifically that I was replaceable, but at a cost.
Just because someone works with marble and granite doesn't make them blue collar. It sounds to be me that your friend is actually an artisan - someone whose skill is both physical and aesthically based. If he is good, and his work is expensive to replicate he has very good bargaining position to go the company with.
Let me put it this way. A white collar person adding $150,000 to the bottom line of the company while his co-workers with similiar jobs are adding $100,000 is in a good position to ask for additional compensation of, say, $10,000 a year. All things being equal replacing him with an equally skilled worker is unlikely. The company would rather have that $50,000 in extra income minus the $10,000 extra than just have the same $100,000 as everyone else averages. The problem is that if these workers unionized, and say there were 10 of them, the person who had been there the longest would be getting the highest pay, on down the ladder. It's not a good productive situation, and the most productive are paid the best.
The bottom line is that unions are good at what they are good at: helping blue collar workers. White collar workers do not benefit in the same way that blue collar workers will.
Sounds like you are very happy in your job.
Who said anything about that?
is that managements that treat technical employees like commodities are more common than those that don't.
Every person is a commodity. People forget that everyone - everyone - is replaceable - for a cost. If you want a surefire way to make yourself hard to replace and create job security, I will fill you in:
Create value that sets you apart from the others in your field.
That's it. Now. For the bad news. Not everyone in every job can do that. If you are blue collar, you can't do that. That's the whole point of your job. Even if you are the best ever, all the job requires is average to slightly better than average. If you are truly white collar, you can create value a few ways. First, you can be crufty. You can do stupid, proprietary, unethical things to lock yourself into a job - meaning, you actively make your work sloppy, hard to maintain, and unwieldy. For me, try to make my work pristine, well documented, transparent, easily transferred to other workers. Why? Because it enhances my value. If I want an extra week of vacation I can ask for it and not hear "we can't afford to not have you here next week, in case that X thing you did needs attention".
manager who is technically clueless yet insists on micromanaging you anyway
What makes you think I am not there now?
who turns vague estimates into hard deadlines
Again, that's real life. Everyone deals with that, me included.
who insists that you work 60 hrs/week to solve the latest crisis caused by his/her own ill-considered decisions
This is most likely a co-op, but I've been in similiar situations. The key here is to document, illustrate, and repudiate. I've had bosses who tried that "you gotta fix this before my boss finds out" attitude. A few minutes of printing out e-mails, collating a few notes from meetings, and a well expressed one paragraph is all the defense you need. Present them to your boss in time-order. When presented with this factual, non-emotional case 100% of bosses will admit fault, ask for you help, and be flexibile with your reward.
. Then come back and preach the joys of your world.
You are just bitter, and chances are you have a bad attitude towards work. You think you are smarter than others where you work, and that you deserve to be in charge. This is typical. Chances are you underemployed. Am I right? Are you seriously underemployed?
Look, unions are great for what they are. They are a tool to keep corporate interests in check, line the pockets of corrupt politicans, and help out blue collar workers. If you are a true white-collar worker than you are not going to benefit from a union. That's it. In a white-collar world you advance and succeed based on what value you add to the company's interests. That's it. No union, no government, no person is going to change that. Ever.
Or to summarise...
I'm white collar and costly to replace, therefore these blue collar issues are beneath me.
I am saying that blue collar issues are best addressed as such. Programmers and tech people pretending to be blue collar when they are not, or pretending to be white collar when they are not is not helping anyone.
Blue collar workers are essentially human machines. That's the purpose of the work. Sorry to be the one to break the news to you.
Eventually "white collar" workers will realize that unions are the only way to resist. Until then "take stuff from work"--read Guy Debord and the situationalists--and work as hard as **you** think you are being paid to work.
You are wrong, and I tell you why.
Blue collar workers, are in essence, human machines. They do a thing or a limited set of things, and that's about it. If they aren't at work that particular day, a different person needs to do the same thing in the same way.
White collar workers do not do a limited set of things. If a white collar worker is not at work on a given day, it is likely that the things he or she needed to do are delayed until he or she returns.
A lot of tech people wrongly believed they were white collar due to either (1) their pay or (2) a false sense of pride. The jobs that have been shipped off to India and the rest of the world have been by and large blue collar jobs.
White collar workers in the realest sense have a much bigger chip to bargin with than the true-blue collar workers. Their skill.
For example, I am skilled programmer, writing on average two to three useful programs a week. Replacing me is expensive due to the learning curve to get up to speed in our specific tailored circumstance. A person in a foreign country/timezone would have trouble with doing my job because it requires close heavy interaction with customers and other workers on site.
When you sum the value I add to the cost of replacing me you have a rather high business penalty to me leaving.
This isn't to say I am unique or irreplaceable. There are probably 100-200 programmers who could do my job - with 3-6 months training - in my area (population: 60,000).
I can generally get what I want, because the management has learned from past experiences that I am (1) the best qualified and most productive person to hold this job in the 5 person history of the position, (2) I am key in keeping the division profitable, and (3) that replacing me would cost between $15k and $30k in training costs as well as anothe $10k-20k in lost revenues while my replacement comes up to speed.
The bottom line? My only way to resist is not stealing stuff from works or unionizing. Unionizing would hurt myself and others like me who are well above average in skill, productivity, and value-added to the company.
There are specific and clear reasons for why these people commit acts of terrorism.
OF course there are.
Why are the real reasons behind terrorism so rarely discussed?
Because it can only lead to one thing: lame appeasement attempts.
We have known from day #1 that the Arab terrorists attempting to attack America hate us for specific reasons: kicking Sadaam Hussein out of Kuwait; propping up and supporting financially and militarily the country of Israel.
Make no mistake about it. If we hadn't been supporting Israel for the last two generations the neighboring Muslims would have killed every single Jew there. That's their goal. Elimination of the jews. Period. So okay, we acknowledge it. Now what? Are we going to stand by and watch the billion Muslims destroy the sixty million Jews?
It is common knowledge why the terrorists hate us. They hate Israel, we support Israel. We believe that individuals should be able to select their own religion, and live their lives according to chosen precepts. Bin Laden et all do not believe this. They do not recognize Christianity, or Judiasm. They do not recognize the right of existenence of non-Muslims.
The only road this line of questioning can lead to is "well then, if we just leave them alone, they won't hurt us". Which is, of course, false. Look at Spain. They were bombed a few days before elections. New government, pullout from Iraq, and then two weeks after that a second bombing plot was foiled. Spain met al-Qaeda's demands and yet they were still targeted.
His congregation in Lynchburg, Virgina has 28,000 regular attendees. He founded and is chancellor of Liberty University, a growing (something like 12,000 students now?) university for religious types (not just ministers in training, it's a liberbal ed. type of place).
Falwell may be obnoxious, but as far as ministers go, he's pretty much the real deal. You might be thinking of Pat Robertson or Jimmy Swaggart or some of those people.
Generally true. There is, however, a growing degree of consistency in where apps look for those files; in the case of a service it's usually/etc/nameofservice.conf or/etc/nameofservice/section.conf, in the case of an application it usually goes/usr/share/appname/appname.conf; ~/.appname.conf (or ~/.appname/section.conf). Systems like KDE have extended this to a tree of ~/.kde/share/apps/conf/appnamerc for KDE-aware services, and have internally done a lot of the homogenisation which you seek.
The problem is that is just for KDE. What about all the people who use a mis-mash of KDE app, GNOME apps, and other apps? Back to the same old mess.
I am familiar with the packaging of both Linux and Windows apps. The bottom line for Windows is that 99% of users can download a self-installing.EXE, run it, and install the app. That's why when you go to the Firefox download page there is "Windows", one.EXE, one link, and a tar.gz. for Linux that has never once worked for me. I know its because I dont have all the stuff I need, but I *always* have to build from source.
I am not sure.. it's not my job to find out what the marekt wants.. I know what I want:
1. Common install profiles against multiple distros. Meaning, some people get together and figure out what common things people want to do, and define them in a list. Each distro can use whatever packages they want to get the job done (no need to flame qmail/sendmail/postfix, etc).
2. Binaries. More and better binary package support. RPM isn't cutting it anymore. In the Windows world, you can distribute a product in a single self-installing executable for many versions of Windows. Most of the time it's 95/NT/ME/2K/XP "or newer". I like the idea MS and other has regarding meta installers. How about a nice standard service for Unix that performs installation and uninstallation of binaries? Get some people together and write a standard format. Each distro can choose which implementation of the installer to use. Make it work people. In the Windows world you can see each package installed, and install/change/uninstall them from a single location. In Linux, it's not there yet.
3. Easier configuration. Right now 99% of applications and services have proprietary config files. Not proprietary in the "closed" sense, but in the "different from each other one" sense. Let's get together and create a better way to configure applications. Maybe someone could whip-up some common XML configuration files and some standardized libraries for working with them.. is there any good reason why each editor, each shell, each browser, each media player, etc must have its own unique format for config files? It's own parameters? It's own custom way of doing something? In the Windows world dozens of applications use the Windows "Favorites" scheme. This works good. Samething with Mac. Why can't we do that with Linux? And NO I am not talking about one time converters, I am talking about interoperability.
Slashdot Mirror
? My landline still works with no power.
As long as your teleco still has power. In my area (Maine), when I lose power so does my teleco (after a while).
However, now that I have VoIP, a cheap UPS means I have several hours worth of backup. In the future I can see various VoIP devices having built in battery backups.. that's hardly cost anythng.
"Studies indicate that 74% of women find my equipment to reliable, durable, and ultimately worth the investment of time, energy, and booze."
Microsoft has a history of funding "independant researchers" itself, which coincidentally always come out in favour for Microsoft.
This isn't exactly true. Let's say you funded 50 studies of yourself, to find out all kinds of interesting things. 25 come back positive, 25 come back negative.
Which ones will you tell women about when hitting on them at the bars?
That's incorrect. It does no such thing. On Office 2000 the This is what it does:
Initializes some of the common fonts installed by Office 2000
Handles certain commands (New Office Document, Find Fast, Open Office Document, Help, and Screen Saver) on the Start menu and on the Office Shortcut Bar Displays Microsoft Outlook notifications when the Office Assistant is available
.
I just looked at two machines running it, and memory usuage was 576 kb and 710 kb depending on the service pack. Task manager shows Word 2000 taking 11Mb on startup.
That's hardly loading half.
Now, as a test. Turn off the option (link). Try again. Still very fast. Why?
The real reason alot of MS apps run quickly is that they are frequently used on a PC. When an application becomes frequently used newer versions of Windows use the "pre-fetch" mechanism. This caches commonly used shared libraries in a common location, and prepares them to be loaded into memory by tracking free memory that will fit the whole library.
Personally, I'd rather have the system memory available because then the overall speed of my PC should be better, rather than just the load-up time of Word.
This is incorrect. In 99.9% of cases, if you have 10MB of free physical RAM or 200MB of free physical RAM your system and other applications will have the exact same performance. Performance degredation will occur only when tasks *must* swap to disk
there's a whole heap of memory other programs cannot use as a result.
That's simply untrue for several technical reasons. Memory management in Windows is suprisingly robust. You have this picture that Word is running in the background, just waiting to be executed and show itself. What is actually going on is far more advanced than that. The system is ready to load the application It knows the locations of fonts. Shared libraries are ready to be loaded into pre-mapped memory locations.
The good thing about MS's mechanism is that it benefits all applications that use shared libraries. The problem is that for many open source projects the program is an "island" - using everything that is statically linked and with large monolithic binaries. This is just a fundamentally slow mechanism.
And there may be more to it than that. Ever notice how MS documents are recognized as such by the OS even if YOU'VE NEVER LOADED OFFICE on that computer??!
I just tried this on fresh VMWare images of Win98, Win2k, and WinXP. I find no such evidence to support your assertion. Can you provide any proof of your claim? Has it been documenteted anywhere?
That's more likely it.. MS lost a big time patent case for hundreds and hundres of millions of dollars. I am sure someone at MS went "but.. I thought of that first!" (side note: it's probably true, I mean, with 40,000 employees chances are someone in the company did have the thought before the other company [not necessarly first in the world, mind you]).
The patent system is so messed up that, really, if you create any amount of software you need patent protection of somesort. Something to fight back with.
What OS are you dealing with, and what JRE? I have Sun's offical XP friendly JRE here, and it's 28,501,412 bytes - pretty close to 30MB.
Except that Flash 6 is like ~500kb and a decent JRE is like 30MB.
Flash 6 can install on accident even on a dial-up modem. You won't be accidentally downloading a huge runtime to get Java installed.
ZAP packages are inferior to MSI's in so many ways.. basically all they are is a thin-wrapper around an EXE installer.. if anything goes wrong in terms of the automated UI installation then it goes tits-up.
Basically with the ZAP package you get the worst of all worlds. It's a much bigger hassle than MSI.
With a nice MSI, you get:
1. Installation when you want it: either when the client starts the application or when the machine boots. Having applications install only when first attempted to run is great. Why install software on 2500 PCs when only 125 need the package?
2. Self-repairing. Some dork-ass client starts mucking about with FireFox? No worries, it is automatically fixed.
3. Easy to update. When the next version of FireFox comes out 15-minutes after rolling-out the current one, you can easily chain them together in a logical way.
ZAP is just a minimally effective workaround.
Chicken or egg problem redux, if you ask me.
There are many, many, many conservatives for whom religion plays no part.
One problem is that the american conservative party has been ransacked by a fairly strong but very minority stake of fundamentalist evangelical Christians. That's okay, they can join whatever party they like. And it's okay for their voice to be heard.
But there are many, many, many conservatives who agree with the large part of the platform without subscribing to the religious reasons fellow party-members tout.
For example. There is a large libertarian contingent who believes that abortion (especially late term/near term) is a violation of the unborn persons right to life. The reasoning is that the government has a duty to protect the innocent and weak: if you call the cops because two big armed intruders are bearing down on you it is the responsibility of the government to rescue you (or try). Likewise for the unborn.
Another example. There is a large libertarian contingent who belives that marriage is a civil institution that does not deserve legal recognition, let alone expansion to include non-traditional relationships.
Another example. There exisits a large libertarian contingent that believes that for the most part the government is incompetent. The same red-tape strangled pencil pushers who have caused my paperwork to be lost a dozen times has no business moralizing to my children regarding sexual practices and mores. Yes, they have a responsibility to explain the biology (the plubming, so to speak), but not the associated social values.
P.S. when did "family" values start to mean "christian" values?
Family values has almost always meant "judeo-christian" values. The notions that you should respect your wedding vows, not lie, not covet your neighbors possesions, not curse people, not treat others poorly, that children should respect their parents, and so on go back to the founding of this country. The ideas behind the "ten commandments" are really a big part of the social foundation of the country. The "family values" kick is a recognition that if everyone were to follow the non-religious ten-commandments things would be a lot more civil in this country.
It's not that developers aren't to blame, but rather, it's how you'd expect developers to be. What FOSS needs is a free, open-source equivalent of the QA/Validation/UI Design department.
This is one of the things that I've always said FOSS isn't good at doing - QA/Validation/UI design.
Most FOSS programmers work on projects for the love of coding. A break from boring work projects, home life, and to show thier geek pride. A mental workout.
QA, UI design, etc are often the ultimate in repetitive drudgery. Designing and coding test frameworks for larger apps is often more challenging than coding the application to be tested. It's slow, tedious, detail orientated work. The payoff is small, measured, and non-glamorous.
The big FOSS projects - I call them the "name brand" ones - get some of this just by sheer number of volunteers. The Linux kernel. Firefox. OpenOffice to a lesser degree.
But the thousands of other projects - they get a programmer who just programs 100% of the time. A seperate volunteer to write up some minimal docs and a man page. That's it. Refactoring code to be more user-effective? Eliminating ambiguity from documentation? Producing high-quality production level software packages for many platforms? Nope. Rarely done. Why? It's the crap work that FOSS programmers are trying to avoid in the first place!
Many of the Microsoft developer bloggers have reported that they spend less than 50% of their time coding. The rest is designing and documentating, refining, refactoring. After that, it's off to a team of testers and documentators.
The point? Who wants to volunteer to work that you normally have to pay people very well to get done in the first place?
These aren't private meetings - the agenda is already set
These are private meetings - campaigning is not public policy making
The Cheney incident you mentioned was in direct response to a publicized, well co-ordinated attempt to disrupt a private campaign fundraiser. This wasn't a public debate. This wasn't a come one/come all type of public event. This was a fundraising campaign stop.
NOT a public policy workshop.
I am not allowed to select the participants
I am not allowed to set the agenda
I ought to let hecklers and people who openely want to disrupt the proceedings in through the door
Is that the case? In order to preserve free speech for dissenters we must squelch it for people who agree with the status quo?
The right to seek a redress of grievances does not mean you get to have civil disorder and break hundreds, perhaps thousands, of laws a day.
Protesting is subject to the same laws and regulations as other speech. Can I stand in the road on any day of the week and hold up traffic and yell and hold a sign and whatnot? No. Of course not.
My point is that unions are not the solution to your problems if you are a white collar worker. If you are white collar, a union is going to hurt you, not help you.
The tech world keeps thinking a union will save them. It won't. It will help the blue collar "human machines" of IT who are at risking to losing thier jobs to outsourcing.
I explained it very clearly. White collar workers gain security and pay through what they add to the company.
I clearly did not say I was irreplaceable. I said specifically that I was replaceable, but at a cost.
Just because someone works with marble and granite doesn't make them blue collar. It sounds to be me that your friend is actually an artisan - someone whose skill is both physical and aesthically based. If he is good, and his work is expensive to replicate he has very good bargaining position to go the company with.
Let me put it this way. A white collar person adding $150,000 to the bottom line of the company while his co-workers with similiar jobs are adding $100,000 is in a good position to ask for additional compensation of, say, $10,000 a year. All things being equal replacing him with an equally skilled worker is unlikely. The company would rather have that $50,000 in extra income minus the $10,000 extra than just have the same $100,000 as everyone else averages. The problem is that if these workers unionized, and say there were 10 of them, the person who had been there the longest would be getting the highest pay, on down the ladder. It's not a good productive situation, and the most productive are paid the best.
The bottom line is that unions are good at what they are good at: helping blue collar workers. White collar workers do not benefit in the same way that blue collar workers will.
Sounds like you are very happy in your job.
Who said anything about that?
is that managements that treat technical employees like commodities are more common than those that don't.
Every person is a commodity. People forget that everyone - everyone - is replaceable - for a cost. If you want a surefire way to make yourself hard to replace and create job security, I will fill you in:
Create value that sets you apart from the others in your field.
That's it. Now. For the bad news. Not everyone in every job can do that. If you are blue collar, you can't do that. That's the whole point of your job. Even if you are the best ever, all the job requires is average to slightly better than average. If you are truly white collar, you can create value a few ways. First, you can be crufty. You can do stupid, proprietary, unethical things to lock yourself into a job - meaning, you actively make your work sloppy, hard to maintain, and unwieldy. For me, try to make my work pristine, well documented, transparent, easily transferred to other workers. Why? Because it enhances my value. If I want an extra week of vacation I can ask for it and not hear "we can't afford to not have you here next week, in case that X thing you did needs attention".
manager who is technically clueless yet insists on micromanaging you anyway
What makes you think I am not there now?
who turns vague estimates into hard deadlines
Again, that's real life. Everyone deals with that, me included.
who insists that you work 60 hrs/week to solve the latest crisis caused by his/her own ill-considered decisions
This is most likely a co-op, but I've been in similiar situations. The key here is to document, illustrate, and repudiate. I've had bosses who tried that "you gotta fix this before my boss finds out" attitude. A few minutes of printing out e-mails, collating a few notes from meetings, and a well expressed one paragraph is all the defense you need. Present them to your boss in time-order. When presented with this factual, non-emotional case 100% of bosses will admit fault, ask for you help, and be flexibile with your reward.
. Then come back and preach the joys of your world.
You are just bitter, and chances are you have a bad attitude towards work. You think you are smarter than others where you work, and that you deserve to be in charge. This is typical. Chances are you underemployed. Am I right? Are you seriously underemployed?
Look, unions are great for what they are. They are a tool to keep corporate interests in check, line the pockets of corrupt politicans, and help out blue collar workers. If you are a true white-collar worker than you are not going to benefit from a union. That's it. In a white-collar world you advance and succeed based on what value you add to the company's interests. That's it. No union, no government, no person is going to change that. Ever.
Or to summarise... I'm white collar and costly to replace, therefore these blue collar issues are beneath me.
I am saying that blue collar issues are best addressed as such. Programmers and tech people pretending to be blue collar when they are not, or pretending to be white collar when they are not is not helping anyone.
Blue collar workers are essentially human machines. That's the purpose of the work. Sorry to be the one to break the news to you.
Eventually "white collar" workers will realize that unions are the only way to resist. Until then "take stuff from work"--read Guy Debord and the situationalists--and work as hard as **you** think you are being paid to work.
You are wrong, and I tell you why.
Blue collar workers, are in essence, human machines. They do a thing or a limited set of things, and that's about it. If they aren't at work that particular day, a different person needs to do the same thing in the same way.
White collar workers do not do a limited set of things. If a white collar worker is not at work on a given day, it is likely that the things he or she needed to do are delayed until he or she returns.
A lot of tech people wrongly believed they were white collar due to either (1) their pay or (2) a false sense of pride. The jobs that have been shipped off to India and the rest of the world have been by and large blue collar jobs.
White collar workers in the realest sense have a much bigger chip to bargin with than the true-blue collar workers. Their skill.
For example, I am skilled programmer, writing on average two to three useful programs a week. Replacing me is expensive due to the learning curve to get up to speed in our specific tailored circumstance. A person in a foreign country/timezone would have trouble with doing my job because it requires close heavy interaction with customers and other workers on site.
When you sum the value I add to the cost of replacing me you have a rather high business penalty to me leaving.
This isn't to say I am unique or irreplaceable. There are probably 100-200 programmers who could do my job - with 3-6 months training - in my area (population: 60,000).
I can generally get what I want, because the management has learned from past experiences that I am (1) the best qualified and most productive person to hold this job in the 5 person history of the position, (2) I am key in keeping the division profitable, and (3) that replacing me would cost between $15k and $30k in training costs as well as anothe $10k-20k in lost revenues while my replacement comes up to speed.
The bottom line? My only way to resist is not stealing stuff from works or unionizing. Unionizing would hurt myself and others like me who are well above average in skill, productivity, and value-added to the company.
It was a thriving city with a booming economy in the 60's
In the 60's people actually bought stuff made in America, like for example cars.
Then automakers became even more corpulent, and people took their cash elsewhere, and American auto has never recovered.
There are whole generations of people who will only drive Toyota, Honda, or Nissan cars.
Especially since now many of those companies assemble these cars domestically with foreign made parts.
There are specific and clear reasons for why these people commit acts of terrorism.
OF course there are.
Why are the real reasons behind terrorism so rarely discussed?
Because it can only lead to one thing: lame appeasement attempts.
We have known from day #1 that the Arab terrorists attempting to attack America hate us for specific reasons: kicking Sadaam Hussein out of Kuwait; propping up and supporting financially and militarily the country of Israel.
Make no mistake about it. If we hadn't been supporting Israel for the last two generations the neighboring Muslims would have killed every single Jew there. That's their goal. Elimination of the jews. Period. So okay, we acknowledge it. Now what? Are we going to stand by and watch the billion Muslims destroy the sixty million Jews?
It is common knowledge why the terrorists hate us. They hate Israel, we support Israel. We believe that individuals should be able to select their own religion, and live their lives according to chosen precepts. Bin Laden et all do not believe this. They do not recognize Christianity, or Judiasm. They do not recognize the right of existenence of non-Muslims.
The only road this line of questioning can lead to is "well then, if we just leave them alone, they won't hurt us". Which is, of course, false. Look at Spain. They were bombed a few days before elections. New government, pullout from Iraq, and then two weeks after that a second bombing plot was foiled. Spain met al-Qaeda's demands and yet they were still targeted.
Plus safer than most small aircraft.. if designed as such and if possible, a human power helicoper could auto-rotate down on failure.. that'd be handy
His congregation in Lynchburg, Virgina has 28,000 regular attendees. He founded and is chancellor of Liberty University, a growing (something like 12,000 students now?) university for religious types (not just ministers in training, it's a liberbal ed. type of place).
Falwell may be obnoxious, but as far as ministers go, he's pretty much the real deal. You might be thinking of Pat Robertson or Jimmy Swaggart or some of those people.
Generally true. There is, however, a growing degree of consistency in where apps look for those files; in the case of a service it's usually /etc/nameofservice.conf or /etc/nameofservice/section.conf, in the case of an application it usually goes /usr/share/appname/appname.conf; ~/.appname.conf (or ~/.appname/section.conf). Systems like KDE have extended this to a tree of ~/.kde/share/apps/conf/appnamerc for KDE-aware services, and have internally done a lot of the homogenisation which you seek.
.EXE, run it, and install the app. That's why when you go to the Firefox download page there is "Windows", one .EXE, one link, and a tar.gz. for Linux that has never once worked for me. I know its because I dont have all the stuff I need, but I *always* have to build from source.
The problem is that is just for KDE. What about all the people who use a mis-mash of KDE app, GNOME apps, and other apps? Back to the same old mess.
I am familiar with the packaging of both Linux and Windows apps. The bottom line for Windows is that 99% of users can download a self-installing
I am not sure.. it's not my job to find out what the marekt wants.. I know what I want:
1. Common install profiles against multiple distros. Meaning, some people get together and figure out what common things people want to do, and define them in a list. Each distro can use whatever packages they want to get the job done (no need to flame qmail/sendmail/postfix, etc).
2. Binaries. More and better binary package support. RPM isn't cutting it anymore. In the Windows world, you can distribute a product in a single self-installing executable for many versions of Windows. Most of the time it's 95/NT/ME/2K/XP "or newer". I like the idea MS and other has regarding meta installers. How about a nice standard service for Unix that performs installation and uninstallation of binaries? Get some people together and write a standard format. Each distro can choose which implementation of the installer to use. Make it work people. In the Windows world you can see each package installed, and install/change/uninstall them from a single location. In Linux, it's not there yet.
3. Easier configuration. Right now 99% of applications and services have proprietary config files. Not proprietary in the "closed" sense, but in the "different from each other one" sense. Let's get together and create a better way to configure applications. Maybe someone could whip-up some common XML configuration files and some standardized libraries for working with them.. is there any good reason why each editor, each shell, each browser, each media player, etc must have its own unique format for config files? It's own parameters? It's own custom way of doing something? In the Windows world dozens of applications use the Windows "Favorites" scheme. This works good. Samething with Mac. Why can't we do that with Linux? And NO I am not talking about one time converters, I am talking about interoperability.