The whole damn point of java was to avoid this problem in the first place. The most portable language ever made uses runtimes that check versions and refuse to run or developers abuse RMI to integrate with Windows for those crappy enterprise apps which probably also still require IE 6.
Java was fucking awesome when it was new and mismanagement pissed into the whole thing and ruined it it looks like. There should not be issues where Java 1.4.1 wont work 1.4.2 will... oh but not 1.4.3.
Add to the security holes in ancient java versions and you have a nightmare. Time to get rid of it as a failure
Win 8 haters insist that Win 8 is nothing more than Win 7 + Metro.
That's simply false. What do you want from an OS upgrade?
Faster? Check. Uses less power? Check. Better security and encryption options? Check. Write once, run on any Win 8 desktop or tablet (and possibly phone)? Check.
I could go on and on. There are so many improvements to Win 8. Why do you ignore all of them? Honestly, posts like yours are pure FUD.
You are right... but it has METRO. Aero is gone which was one of the coolest things about Vista/7 and is crippled as is instant search over using the mouse in all programs and other things.
It is dead to me until Windows 9 fixes it.... we hope
I think XP all of the sudden being the best thing that ever happened was the result of Vista. Worse slashdotters kept repeating that Windows 7 = VISTA SP 2!
Say it enough and the brain now thinks XP is ROCK SOLID and best OS EVER. These same users are whinning they have to leave Xp in 2014. Good brother and by then you can't buy Windows 7 at the local retailer anymore at that point and will be stuck with Windows 8.
Aero peak, instant search, saved searches, GPU acceleration, and an actual modern version of IE that understands HTML 5 and standards taht were written after 1998.
XP at this point is holding the whole web back because of IE 8. Only this past year have we finally been able to ignore IE 6 & 7. Good God.
Hell, I've only recently got IE8, and that was an improvement.
Shit. Your post reads like the one with the old man saying he had to walk butt naked uphill both ways to school in -40 and that was an improvement of what your dad did.
Lets hope your intranet app is standards complaint enough to actually run in a real up to date browser. Yes IE is a real one... in 2012 not in 2009 when IE 8 came out. IE 10 is almost ready for crying out loud.
It is funny they want lockin until companies like MS stop XP support or when Oracle keeps upping its requirements and costs. Then its holy shit how did this happen!!
Free software like FOSS offers alternatives and noSQL is new and open alternatives like PostgreSQL and mysql greatly reduce this. I do no understand people who think average Joes should run Linux on the desktop but for the server this makes sense.
No lock in and vendors and users encourage compatibility. The fact that browser vendors finally agreed to W3C standards means we can finally bury nightmares like IE 6 behind. I think managers afraid of change want it frozen only at that moment when it is new. Good managers want standards so they are not tied later on
that every business in the entire world would have enough sense to know that the corporate environment is not a place to be using the bleeding edge of software versions, no matter how much wooing they get.
Want to know what is weird?
What if you could go back in time 10 years and show your past self that post? Corporations had deployment plans for XP and Windows 95 when it was still in beta in the good old days. It was the norm to recycle everyone's PC every 3 years and 5 if you are very very cheap and stingy etc. Never this we will keep this browser and OS for 10 years while everyone else updates theirs every 6 weeks etc.
I almost have to ask wtf happened? The great recession and Vista changed the world. IN all seriousness no one should be running XP anymore. If you told me back in 2001 that we would still be running XP for the majority of business computers I would have looked at you funny and laughed.
2006 era hardware can't fun Vista well at all. Security holes galore, no thunderport/USB 3 support, no trim in SSDs mean life ends in weeks to month on XP, crappy wifi support and so on exist if you stay with XP.
If you are tied to IE then you have a very outdated and crappy browser too in the office that is not even HTML 5 compatiable! No you can't manage FF or Chrome from the Microsoft Management Console with full Active Directory Support so they do not exist.
Worse if you have McCrappy on 2006 era hardware then your workers will sit around running 1 app at a time or taking extended lunch hours as their pcs will be unusable. There is some very crappy security software and IE 6 addons that will slow a computer with less than 4 gigs of ram down easily.
What has changed is not computers being fast enough. It is the bad economic environment taught accountants not to upgrade and view computers as costs rather than investments. It is now cool to run outdated hardware/software to save money.
XP will mean that this nightmare will never happen. Hell my PC from 2009 has VESA options in it! I mean it doesn't even have that bus yet that and OS/2 Pallete snooping option is there too.
People will be running XP for decades to come with old VB 5 apps and legacy software taht can't be ported. OEMs would be crucified if they did not have an option to disable it.
Also UEFI secureboot is supported under Windows 7 and is a great security measure if you run Windows. No more rootkits. All the UEFI PCs have both a BIOS and EFI together for this reason. Even if MS hates IE 6 and Xp as much as we do the OEMs can't ignore it.
You can run Linux and even use Windows 7 with that secure boot enabled if you wish fine and are not forced to run Windows 8.
HP would have made A HELL OF ALOT MORE money than offering support and cheap lintel servers running a free database. Yes HP has been mismanaged for years but Oracle screwed them and violated their contract and should pay HP up.
$20,000 per server is what HP probably would have made as these systems are big iron and HP would sell their OS VMS, HP UX, and Nonstop in addition to enterprise software like openview. A $999 HP lintel x86 server doesn't offer that much. Even their more enterprise higher end lintel and wintel servers do not have the margins with the extra software.
It also would cost billions to port their operating systems to x86 and it might not even be worth it now as their customers decided or are starting to replace their platforms with lintel and wintel solutions from competitors and in house. Could HP-UX survive on x86 now? I don't know.
I hope Oracle pays them back big as they did this to screw HP over to increase their Solaris systems with their database stack.
It is amazing Oracle is still in business. If it were not for the billions of lines of code specifically for crapware enterprise software it would be dead. Was it always this much or did Larry jerk up the prices this high after customers were hooked?
To me Oracle DBMS is the IE 6 of databases. It is out of date, its sql is proprietary, has proprietary tools, and the only reason people use it like IE 6 is because code depends on it and these saps can't leave.
Maybe when NoSQL matures it will eat it for lunch. There are places that use PIC still which is supperior to SQL that has been popular for 40 years.
The metrics probably include the price of the server as well as lost HP management software it could have sold. Yes the latter part is always inflated but Itanium was never made for desktops but really expensive 8 - 128 cpu servers.
Blades came out later and helped kill the Itanium as they were old fashioned big boxen but still this is what HP probably used to estimate the damages of lost sales.
Alaska is almost a continent in its own right and huge is an understatement. It is remote and very mountainous in spots. The road from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay is one lane in spots in a side of a mountain with several feet of ice in several spots. Most dangerous road in the world. Truckers have to call in on the radio to make sure no one is on these certain stretches and then drive and pray you survive. What happens if it crashes and falls off the side of the mountain.
I was told it was 600,000 barrels a day and that was just in 2010. If it is deterioting that rapidly it is a very bad thing as it wont matter if they hit big. It will shutdown in a year or two. 10 years ago it used to provide 1 million barrels a day. It is possible it is in slow mode right now to preserve it.
If it shuts down a depression in Alaska will surely follow as will 1/5th the population of Anchorage and 90% of housing prices in the area as they have went up 200% in 10 years. They should have drilled for this 5 years ago. Sigh
Or we can just not drill and have you pay more at the pump?
Or let Canada get the money instead and really pollute the environment with its tar sands?
Why is it evil to help poor native Americans living in these villages get free education and money for groceries and a better life for their kids? No matter where you spend your money you subsidize people regardless through standard economics. Alaska pays to use its resources because most of the population is native and they own a majority stake in the pipeline. It is their land so why can't they keep it?
So where I used to live has resources and a large part of the economy is more dependent on that than any other source. Natives fish around the oil well in Prudhoe Bay all the time and the water is prestine and clean. They have a stake in making sure it is.
I am not an ulta conservative nutcase or work in the oil industry. I am just giving slashdotters another perspective.
This is not flamebait, and is a simply fact that the Beaufort Sea is on the Alaskan coast and Alaska benefits more from this differently than any other state. It might not sound kosher to those living in the lower 48 but that is the perspective from folks who live there as I never met a single person from there who opposes it.
Well for one if I am an American I have a right to live here. If you don't then I have to say you are an invader too if you are American or a Canadian for that matter. Me live comfortably? Did you read my post.
The natives OWN the oil pipeline. Aleyska corporation is owned by the native corporation (one of them) and BP does have a major interest in it but it goes to the native people to pay for things like education, milk, gas, groceries, etc. The dividend fund pays for it and I think it is a great reverse tax idea. If you take something you don't get too rape it at others expense.
The profit from this ensures whites and natives work and live side by side and I think it is a great alternative than to pillaging and raping resources. FYI that will happen by somebody else if we do not grab it. I would rather see it used to preserve wilderness and give to others who live up there.
If you have a problem with this then go all green, walk to work or get a horse and do not use electricity. People complain and want to support the environment until it is there lifestyle you ask to change then its GOVERNMENT GET OFF MY BACK etc.
Oil and using the existing pipeline is VERY environmentally safe compared to the tar sands in Alberta. I would prefer drilling and giving to natives vs fracking any day.
Living in Alaska gave me a different perspective. The oilpipeline is Alaska. What I mean by that is it funds natives(indians) to survive, pays for education, gives research money to conservation and global warming researching indirectorly by funding the U of Alaska system, brings in 20% of the population in Anchorage and so on.
By 2016 the oil pipeline will be done! The state and its people will be devestated. Any oil they find needs to quickly be pipped to the oil pipeline. The oil industry is not this evil thing up there and people depend on it. It has done amazing things with a great education system in the state and funding for many poor native Americans in rural areas who survive by hunting and fishing. With milk $7 a gallon the dividend fund can really help as every man,woman, and child is paid by it.... just giving slashdotters another perspective.
The arctic in Alaska is not negatively effected at all by the drilling. It enables more of us to enjoy its wilderness by creating jobs for those who want to move even if they are not paid directly by the big oil companies.
This is really great news. For the record I lived in Alaska and just moved back last year to the lower 48 and miss it greatly. Everyone is terrified of the oil pipeline shutting down completely by 2015. Besides the military there are no other employers in Alaska! The dividend fund where you get paid to live in Alaska is based off the oil pipeline, teachers including my exwife are paid by the oil pipeline. Even the universities get their money from the pipeline and are the next major employer over there.
By 2015 if the pressure is too low the pipeline will no longer be able to pump itself and it is game over. 40,000 would leave Anchorage overnight and devestate the housing market. The rest of the fallout would happen as I outlined above.
This is a great thing for the Indians who live up there who need jobs and get funds even and free education even if they are not employed by the oil industry directorly. Prudhoe buy in the arctic is perfectly clean and wildlife flourishes. The environmental record is fine and conservation and funding for researching into the arctic environments and protections of wildlife by the universities up in Alaska are all indirectly funded by big oil. It would be a loss.
What on earth makes you think that any American financial firm has the clout to get OPEC, Russia and the other petroleum exporting countries to change prices at whim?
They cannot of course. The price drops have much more to do with demand destruction - less money, less gas. No speculator conspiracy, no Wall Street conspiracy, no oil company conspiracy.
Turns out the petroleum price is pretty elastic, at least in the short term.
Well for one Oil is traded in dollars.
Second why is it traded in dollars? The answer is because the worlds wealth is almost all based in the US. CHina is rapidly catching up to change this but the US has the most money and buys and sells oil in thousandths of a second with HFT supercomputers and day traders. They set the price.
Because it is speculated and not truly economical and supply and demand it became elastic. Speculators got greedy a month or two ago feeling their is a full recover back to the good old days. Meanwhile Peter Schiff, and others have been saying the crises never went away as Europe did not get hit yet and now traders who stock piled on oil bought too much. US bonds are going up record number because it is a safe heaven and investors are dumping oil. This is all wall street.
Yes OPEC is a small ant compared to Wall street and they can change prices on a whim because every wealthy American has more money than Russia to counter it. At least currently.
I want to better myself but not have to pay $1000 a month in student loans afterwards and work at McDonalds at night to pay for that luxury.
I am stuck. But regardless if money is a scarce resource like it is for most employers you simply need to push for maximum efficiency to raise the share price quarter after quarter which is the goal of any company leader. There just is not time for self development in that environment.
I am the last to defend Apple but have any of you slashdotters worked retail before?
Apple wanted to hire me at $16 an hour and fly me down to Cupertino for training as a tech. BestBuy pays $9 an hour and prefers to hire their minimal wage teenagers instead.
$12 an hour is awesome for retail! Sure the pay is about $20,000 a year and you can't live off that but it is 25% more than the competiton. Tiffany's? Well you have to have many years of experience and be great with selling credit cards and be a good saleswomen or man for that job. They do not hire teenagers.
WHat I do not understand is if you are great at sales you can sell cars for ALOT MORE money or work in corporate sales? I guess you get broken and fear based employees for that price but Apple does pay above market wages as they do not want a geeksquad representing their products.
Welcome to my world. I used to automatically get a +2 even though my karma is still excellent. I got into a flamewar with Timothy and I have my suspicions after that.
I got modded too for saying Do you damn job and stop wasting company time. I thought more would be on my side on this sadly as this is how 90% of the rest of the population is subjected too at work.
Say MS sucks +1. Say Linux has a tiny shortcoming in some area -1 troll. Say Apple sucks and you get +1 or a -1 depending on who is moderating as that is 50/50 here but once you get 0 no one can read your comment anymore and it usually gets -1 after that point even if it is factually true.
I tend to trust comments at ars technical for being more non biased.
He is not automating such tasks but is learning while taking money from his employer and shareholders to do it. Unless he wants to expand his role to do things like help out debugging the website I see this as theft and dishonest like the original grandposter. True he put in a way to make him flamebait but I am shocked I am the only one mentioning the ethical issues involved besides that AC.
It would be paradise if it were like college and we could sit around and learn and do neat things that occasionally help out the big boss. But that is not the real world. The real world where people get fired for being 3 minutes late for work 3 times if you only have a HS diploma. THe real world where if the place doesn't fall apart if you go on vacation then you are truly not needed and provide no shareholder value etc.
Not all places are that bad to work at but I would discipline such an employee if I caught him doing this and coding, breaking policy, and doing non job related things on my watch. It is not that I am a dick, but it is just business and what a competent manager would do. If he wants to automate something like what you did I would say knock yourself off if it wont be too much of a hassle.
If you are a developer or do IT support there are always things to do. The good workers fix the infrastructure, call customers up, do QA, and refactor when times are light. THat way when things get hectic the chance of shit hitting the fan lessons. I am just the messenger here and stating the goals of business. That is life.
My first thought was holy crap! You are being paid to work what are you thinking? I am shocked no one hear besides myself (modded down to 1) brought this up.
Unless you are hired to learn new things to expand job responsibilities then you are stealing. 90% of the real world would be fired or would be laid off as it shows his boss over hired. I find this practice unethical.
Do that at home where it belongs and if things die down at work there is always something to do so you do not need to put out fired later at the worst possible time when things are busy. QA, testing, code refactoring, etc. The owners and customers need to find value in what you do and if you do not like it quit and go back to school to learn or start your own company.
Maybe I am just old fashioned but from where I have worked and what I have seen just asking this is astounding as who pays the bills?
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh
The whole damn point of java was to avoid this problem in the first place. The most portable language ever made uses runtimes that check versions and refuse to run or developers abuse RMI to integrate with Windows for those crappy enterprise apps which probably also still require IE 6.
Java was fucking awesome when it was new and mismanagement pissed into the whole thing and ruined it it looks like. There should not be issues where Java 1.4.1 wont work 1.4.2 will ... oh but not 1.4.3.
Add to the security holes in ancient java versions and you have a nightmare. Time to get rid of it as a failure
Win 8 haters insist that Win 8 is nothing more than Win 7 + Metro.
That's simply false. What do you want from an OS upgrade?
Faster? Check.
Uses less power? Check.
Better security and encryption options? Check.
Write once, run on any Win 8 desktop or tablet (and possibly phone)? Check.
I could go on and on. There are so many improvements to Win 8. Why do you ignore all of them? Honestly, posts like yours are pure FUD.
You are right ... but it has METRO. Aero is gone which was one of the coolest things about Vista/7 and is crippled as is instant search over using the mouse in all programs and other things.
It is dead to me until Windows 9 fixes it. ... we hope
I think XP all of the sudden being the best thing that ever happened was the result of Vista. Worse slashdotters kept repeating that Windows 7 = VISTA SP 2!
Say it enough and the brain now thinks XP is ROCK SOLID and best OS EVER. These same users are whinning they have to leave Xp in 2014. Good brother and by then you can't buy Windows 7 at the local retailer anymore at that point and will be stuck with Windows 8.
Aero peak, instant search, saved searches, GPU acceleration, and an actual modern version of IE that understands HTML 5 and standards taht were written after 1998.
XP at this point is holding the whole web back because of IE 8. Only this past year have we finally been able to ignore IE 6 & 7. Good God.
Its time to let things go and move on.
We're running XP SP3 here.
Hell, I've only recently got IE8, and that was an improvement.
Shit. Your post reads like the one with the old man saying he had to walk butt naked uphill both ways to school in -40 and that was an improvement of what your dad did.
Lets hope your intranet app is standards complaint enough to actually run in a real up to date browser. Yes IE is a real one ... in 2012 not in 2009 when IE 8 came out. IE 10 is almost ready for crying out loud.
It is funny they want lockin until companies like MS stop XP support or when Oracle keeps upping its requirements and costs. Then its holy shit how did this happen!!
Free software like FOSS offers alternatives and noSQL is new and open alternatives like PostgreSQL and mysql greatly reduce this. I do no understand people who think average Joes should run Linux on the desktop but for the server this makes sense.
No lock in and vendors and users encourage compatibility. The fact that browser vendors finally agreed to W3C standards means we can finally bury nightmares like IE 6 behind. I think managers afraid of change want it frozen only at that moment when it is new. Good managers want standards so they are not tied later on
that every business in the entire world would have enough sense to know that the corporate environment is not a place to be using the bleeding edge of software versions, no matter how much wooing they get.
Want to know what is weird?
What if you could go back in time 10 years and show your past self that post? Corporations had deployment plans for XP and Windows 95 when it was still in beta in the good old days. It was the norm to recycle everyone's PC every 3 years and 5 if you are very very cheap and stingy etc. Never this we will keep this browser and OS for 10 years while everyone else updates theirs every 6 weeks etc.
I almost have to ask wtf happened? The great recession and Vista changed the world. IN all seriousness no one should be running XP anymore. If you told me back in 2001 that we would still be running XP for the majority of business computers I would have looked at you funny and laughed.
2006 era hardware can't fun Vista well at all. Security holes galore, no thunderport/USB 3 support, no trim in SSDs mean life ends in weeks to month on XP, crappy wifi support and so on exist if you stay with XP.
If you are tied to IE then you have a very outdated and crappy browser too in the office that is not even HTML 5 compatiable! No you can't manage FF or Chrome from the Microsoft Management Console with full Active Directory Support so they do not exist.
Worse if you have McCrappy on 2006 era hardware then your workers will sit around running 1 app at a time or taking extended lunch hours as their pcs will be unusable. There is some very crappy security software and IE 6 addons that will slow a computer with less than 4 gigs of ram down easily.
What has changed is not computers being fast enough. It is the bad economic environment taught accountants not to upgrade and view computers as costs rather than investments. It is now cool to run outdated hardware/software to save money.
XP will mean that this nightmare will never happen. Hell my PC from 2009 has VESA options in it! I mean it doesn't even have that bus yet that and OS/2 Pallete snooping option is there too.
People will be running XP for decades to come with old VB 5 apps and legacy software taht can't be ported. OEMs would be crucified if they did not have an option to disable it.
Also UEFI secureboot is supported under Windows 7 and is a great security measure if you run Windows. No more rootkits. All the UEFI PCs have both a BIOS and EFI together for this reason. Even if MS hates IE 6 and Xp as much as we do the OEMs can't ignore it.
You can run Linux and even use Windows 7 with that secure boot enabled if you wish fine and are not forced to run Windows 8.
HP would have made A HELL OF ALOT MORE money than offering support and cheap lintel servers running a free database. Yes HP has been mismanaged for years but Oracle screwed them and violated their contract and should pay HP up.
$20,000 per server is what HP probably would have made as these systems are big iron and HP would sell their OS VMS, HP UX, and Nonstop in addition to enterprise software like openview. A $999 HP lintel x86 server doesn't offer that much. Even their more enterprise higher end lintel and wintel servers do not have the margins with the extra software.
It also would cost billions to port their operating systems to x86 and it might not even be worth it now as their customers decided or are starting to replace their platforms with lintel and wintel solutions from competitors and in house. Could HP-UX survive on x86 now? I don't know.
I hope Oracle pays them back big as they did this to screw HP over to increase their Solaris systems with their database stack.
It is amazing Oracle is still in business. If it were not for the billions of lines of code specifically for crapware enterprise software it would be dead. Was it always this much or did Larry jerk up the prices this high after customers were hooked?
To me Oracle DBMS is the IE 6 of databases. It is out of date, its sql is proprietary, has proprietary tools, and the only reason people use it like IE 6 is because code depends on it and these saps can't leave.
Maybe when NoSQL matures it will eat it for lunch. There are places that use PIC still which is supperior to SQL that has been popular for 40 years.
The metrics probably include the price of the server as well as lost HP management software it could have sold. Yes the latter part is always inflated but Itanium was never made for desktops but really expensive 8 - 128 cpu servers.
Blades came out later and helped kill the Itanium as they were old fashioned big boxen but still this is what HP probably used to estimate the damages of lost sales.
Well for one had do you get it up there?
Alaska is almost a continent in its own right and huge is an understatement. It is remote and very mountainous in spots. The road from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay is one lane in spots in a side of a mountain with several feet of ice in several spots. Most dangerous road in the world. Truckers have to call in on the radio to make sure no one is on these certain stretches and then drive and pray you survive. What happens if it crashes and falls off the side of the mountain.
I was told it was 600,000 barrels a day and that was just in 2010. If it is deterioting that rapidly it is a very bad thing as it wont matter if they hit big. It will shutdown in a year or two. 10 years ago it used to provide 1 million barrels a day. It is possible it is in slow mode right now to preserve it.
If it shuts down a depression in Alaska will surely follow as will 1/5th the population of Anchorage and 90% of housing prices in the area as they have went up 200% in 10 years. They should have drilled for this 5 years ago. Sigh
Or we can just not drill and have you pay more at the pump?
Or let Canada get the money instead and really pollute the environment with its tar sands?
Why is it evil to help poor native Americans living in these villages get free education and money for groceries and a better life for their kids? No matter where you spend your money you subsidize people regardless through standard economics. Alaska pays to use its resources because most of the population is native and they own a majority stake in the pipeline. It is their land so why can't they keep it?
So where I used to live has resources and a large part of the economy is more dependent on that than any other source. Natives fish around the oil well in Prudhoe Bay all the time and the water is prestine and clean. They have a stake in making sure it is.
I am not an ulta conservative nutcase or work in the oil industry. I am just giving slashdotters another perspective.
Why was this modded down?
This is not flamebait, and is a simply fact that the Beaufort Sea is on the Alaskan coast and Alaska benefits more from this differently than any other state. It might not sound kosher to those living in the lower 48 but that is the perspective from folks who live there as I never met a single person from there who opposes it.
Well for one if I am an American I have a right to live here. If you don't then I have to say you are an invader too if you are American or a Canadian for that matter. Me live comfortably? Did you read my post.
The natives OWN the oil pipeline. Aleyska corporation is owned by the native corporation (one of them) and BP does have a major interest in it but it goes to the native people to pay for things like education, milk, gas, groceries, etc. The dividend fund pays for it and I think it is a great reverse tax idea. If you take something you don't get too rape it at others expense.
The profit from this ensures whites and natives work and live side by side and I think it is a great alternative than to pillaging and raping resources. FYI that will happen by somebody else if we do not grab it. I would rather see it used to preserve wilderness and give to others who live up there.
If you have a problem with this then go all green, walk to work or get a horse and do not use electricity. People complain and want to support the environment until it is there lifestyle you ask to change then its GOVERNMENT GET OFF MY BACK etc.
Oil and using the existing pipeline is VERY environmentally safe compared to the tar sands in Alberta. I would prefer drilling and giving to natives vs fracking any day.
Not good great!
Living in Alaska gave me a different perspective. The oilpipeline is Alaska. What I mean by that is it funds natives(indians) to survive, pays for education, gives research money to conservation and global warming researching indirectorly by funding the U of Alaska system, brings in 20% of the population in Anchorage and so on.
By 2016 the oil pipeline will be done! The state and its people will be devestated. Any oil they find needs to quickly be pipped to the oil pipeline. The oil industry is not this evil thing up there and people depend on it. It has done amazing things with a great education system in the state and funding for many poor native Americans in rural areas who survive by hunting and fishing. With milk $7 a gallon the dividend fund can really help as every man,woman, and child is paid by it. ... just giving slashdotters another perspective.
The arctic in Alaska is not negatively effected at all by the drilling. It enables more of us to enjoy its wilderness by creating jobs for those who want to move even if they are not paid directly by the big oil companies.
Last time I checked it was owned by the US.
This is really great news. For the record I lived in Alaska and just moved back last year to the lower 48 and miss it greatly. Everyone is terrified of the oil pipeline shutting down completely by 2015. Besides the military there are no other employers in Alaska! The dividend fund where you get paid to live in Alaska is based off the oil pipeline, teachers including my exwife are paid by the oil pipeline. Even the universities get their money from the pipeline and are the next major employer over there.
By 2015 if the pressure is too low the pipeline will no longer be able to pump itself and it is game over. 40,000 would leave Anchorage overnight and devestate the housing market. The rest of the fallout would happen as I outlined above.
This is a great thing for the Indians who live up there who need jobs and get funds even and free education even if they are not employed by the oil industry directorly. Prudhoe buy in the arctic is perfectly clean and wildlife flourishes. The environmental record is fine and conservation and funding for researching into the arctic environments and protections of wildlife by the universities up in Alaska are all indirectly funded by big oil. It would be a loss.
What on earth makes you think that any American financial firm has the clout to get OPEC, Russia and the other petroleum exporting countries to change prices at whim?
They cannot of course. The price drops have much more to do with demand destruction - less money, less gas. No speculator conspiracy, no Wall Street conspiracy, no oil company conspiracy.
Turns out the petroleum price is pretty elastic, at least in the short term.
Well for one Oil is traded in dollars.
Second why is it traded in dollars? The answer is because the worlds wealth is almost all based in the US. CHina is rapidly catching up to change this but the US has the most money and buys and sells oil in thousandths of a second with HFT supercomputers and day traders. They set the price.
Because it is speculated and not truly economical and supply and demand it became elastic. Speculators got greedy a month or two ago feeling their is a full recover back to the good old days. Meanwhile Peter Schiff, and others have been saying the crises never went away as Europe did not get hit yet and now traders who stock piled on oil bought too much. US bonds are going up record number because it is a safe heaven and investors are dumping oil. This is all wall street.
Yes OPEC is a small ant compared to Wall street and they can change prices on a whim because every wealthy American has more money than Russia to counter it. At least currently.
How about you tinker on your own time before IT finds out and your ass gets fired?
Besides myself the only one stating the obvious. Who is paying the bills? Whose time is it? You are being paid to work.
Lucky you.
I want to better myself but not have to pay $1000 a month in student loans afterwards and work at McDonalds at night to pay for that luxury.
I am stuck. But regardless if money is a scarce resource like it is for most employers you simply need to push for maximum efficiency to raise the share price quarter after quarter which is the goal of any company leader. There just is not time for self development in that environment.
I am the last to defend Apple but have any of you slashdotters worked retail before?
Apple wanted to hire me at $16 an hour and fly me down to Cupertino for training as a tech. BestBuy pays $9 an hour and prefers to hire their minimal wage teenagers instead.
$12 an hour is awesome for retail! Sure the pay is about $20,000 a year and you can't live off that but it is 25% more than the competiton. Tiffany's? Well you have to have many years of experience and be great with selling credit cards and be a good saleswomen or man for that job. They do not hire teenagers.
WHat I do not understand is if you are great at sales you can sell cars for ALOT MORE money or work in corporate sales? I guess you get broken and fear based employees for that price but Apple does pay above market wages as they do not want a geeksquad representing their products.
Welcome to my world. I used to automatically get a +2 even though my karma is still excellent. I got into a flamewar with Timothy and I have my suspicions after that.
I got modded too for saying Do you damn job and stop wasting company time. I thought more would be on my side on this sadly as this is how 90% of the rest of the population is subjected too at work.
Say MS sucks +1. Say Linux has a tiny shortcoming in some area -1 troll. Say Apple sucks and you get +1 or a -1 depending on who is moderating as that is 50/50 here but once you get 0 no one can read your comment anymore and it usually gets -1 after that point even if it is factually true.
I tend to trust comments at ars technical for being more non biased.
He is not automating such tasks but is learning while taking money from his employer and shareholders to do it. Unless he wants to expand his role to do things like help out debugging the website I see this as theft and dishonest like the original grandposter. True he put in a way to make him flamebait but I am shocked I am the only one mentioning the ethical issues involved besides that AC.
It would be paradise if it were like college and we could sit around and learn and do neat things that occasionally help out the big boss. But that is not the real world. The real world where people get fired for being 3 minutes late for work 3 times if you only have a HS diploma. THe real world where if the place doesn't fall apart if you go on vacation then you are truly not needed and provide no shareholder value etc.
Not all places are that bad to work at but I would discipline such an employee if I caught him doing this and coding, breaking policy, and doing non job related things on my watch. It is not that I am a dick, but it is just business and what a competent manager would do. If he wants to automate something like what you did I would say knock yourself off if it wont be too much of a hassle.
If you are a developer or do IT support there are always things to do. The good workers fix the infrastructure, call customers up, do QA, and refactor when times are light. THat way when things get hectic the chance of shit hitting the fan lessons. I am just the messenger here and stating the goals of business. That is life.
I agree.
My first thought was holy crap! You are being paid to work what are you thinking? I am shocked no one hear besides myself (modded down to 1) brought this up.
Unless you are hired to learn new things to expand job responsibilities then you are stealing. 90% of the real world would be fired or would be laid off as it shows his boss over hired. I find this practice unethical.
Do that at home where it belongs and if things die down at work there is always something to do so you do not need to put out fired later at the worst possible time when things are busy. QA, testing, code refactoring, etc. The owners and customers need to find value in what you do and if you do not like it quit and go back to school to learn or start your own company.
Maybe I am just old fashioned but from where I have worked and what I have seen just asking this is astounding as who pays the bills?