Your article is a great reason why big government is not that bad.
Neo-conservatives cheered when Katrina hit Louisiana as they could finally fire the teachers and privitize schools with non union teachers. I never would have thought they would go this far. I would be upset as a parent if a slave with limited English were in charge of teaching my children phonics.
I was listening to the radio a month ago where an activist mentioned the ultra conservative economist Milton Friedman. He had a hand in using Katrina as an excuse to ban the teachers unions in Louisiana and force privatiziation... you know because no qualified teachers were left after the hurricane. He mentioned that good teachers were finally going to get paid for what they are worth and privatization would scare enough teachers and give the tax payers a break and would be a utopia.
Turns out the fired teachers were replaced by slaves. Wow... and privatization is always better? I hate unions but I think having a teachers union is nice if you are a teacher. I find this totally unacceptable when it takes 6 years of school to become a teacher and slave laborers run to come in.
I wonder if these economists and market purists every hear stories like this? Do they think its better as non-teachers will be richer? Or do they think people can all still be happy at$15k a year because that was good back in 1935... bla bla.
The idiots from the IT outsourcing firm should have done it the "dot com" way. Under pay him by the same amount but promise him lots of stock options with absurd vesting requirements. Too bad if the the stock options go under water and then disappear through a corporate buyout.
They can't do this anymore because of changes in accounting laws. Stock options used to be classified as an expense and were used as a tax write off. Today they are counted as owners equity.
My cynicism tells me the changes were made by lobbying efforts from wall street to reduce the amount of shares in order to raise stock prices.
10 years ago if you had a degree and an MCSE you could start at 5k a month and if you had 5 years experience demand 8k a month or walk out the door! Houses were only $170k with 5% down. As long as you could show up you could work anywhere.
Could any of you imagine reading such a story 10 years ago? Shaking head...
I keep hearing how bankers such as Goldman Sachs are betting agaisn't America and Greece are doing everything in their power to have total destruction in order to reduce bargaining power and enslave the world in debt.
I have nothing really to say other than disbelief on how this could happen in such a short short time. I do not think I should peruse I.T. anymore but this globalization is likely going to adversely effect all jobs.
Its not worth the security risks as it will be impossible to detect and delete viruses and malware that hide with in it unless you disable it in the bios and do a format c:.
You have run into the problem that many companies face which love to lock things down. Slashdotters hate this but its nice to have everything the same hardware and software for reasons like this.
Someone mentioned Citrix clients and vmware or virtual box players but they really really suck and consume incredible resources on desktops. Try to standardize on common desktops and create a script to use Windows update for the latest drivers or keep them on a USB flashdrive. A pain yes, but this is what your customers want. Anything else makes the setup look bad which ultimately makes your boss look bad which makes you look bad if you have a buggy slow activity and responsiveness from Citrix clients or virtual machines. Consumers judge responsiveness in quality more than performance. If it takes a few seconds for a menu to pop up they will think they are on 486s.
If the hardware is nearly identical you can setup a profile with Windows Update for drivers disabled.
Screw you. I do not want to use IE and Windows in order to use the internet.
Call me a commie all you want but I have a moral problem with creating a monopoly by abusing standards. Standards exist to prevent monopolies and encourage competition. H.264 is designed to create a monopoly in order to scew users over with drm and fees and lock people in.
How can the web be a free platform when you can't develop media rich websites without proprietary $$$$ non free software due to patents and drm. Flash already killed the opportunity for any serious web developers to learn new skills without paying adobe $$$$. Html 5 is designed to open it back up again... with the exception of h.264.
Didn't the RIAA/MPAA want spyware on every pc sold? A forced plug in will be perfect.
Good job Firefox! Keep up the work and with you refusing to support it the less likely webmasters will use h.264 over alternatives.
if you like h.264 then use it but do not force it on the resut of us.
"Because there's a limited amount of bandwidth and you aren't the only one that wants to use it"
No there is not! That is a lie. Korea and Europe do not have the same problems. The issue is these greedy monopolistic ISPs are keeping 10 year old routers and refusing to upgrade in order to boast their shareholder price for Goldman Sachs and others on wall street.
I read on slashdot that 90% of all fiber is dark on purpose in order to limit availability and raise prices.
If I pay $60 a month for x amount of bits to download a second then why can't I get the service I pay for. It doesn't matter if their business model is on averages. I refuse to sign any contract with capped downloads. Its a shame because I hate cable with a passion and prefer DSL but in rural Alaska I had to agree to caps. My wife plays wow and uses vent so she would exceed the cap in a matter of days.
World of warcraft has constant disconnects from players with Comcast. Gee I wonder why? We are thinking of being a DSL only guild and this is rediculous. 3 players from comcast get disconnected and cause wiped in every and I mean every battle with a raid boss.
... and lets not forget get pissed off at us for wanting a day off when kids are screaming all around us and we are multitasking, cleaning, and having a conversation all at the same time. I really think they do all 3 things subconsciously in a relaxed day off like walking and chewing gum.
"Especially in men, right brains don't talk. So that's exclusively left-brain"
I was thinking the same thing.
Women can add a column of figures in a restaurant bill and have a conversation at the same time.
At least thats what I have observed and can do tasks around the house with continual loud interruptions and its still considered a day off and why they get mad at us for not doing anything.
"I've worked in the Kansas City caves and sat behind a desk on a computer for a while. It's fascinating for the first day but that ends quickly. The lack of sunlight and outdoor exposure really gets to drain on you week after week. Imagine getting up and going outside for some fresh air but when you go outside it's very dark, humid, claustrophobic, and the air is stale. It drives you nuts. Especially when you hear creaks and cracks all day in the dead of silence. I would not want to be an IT admin working in a cave."
Sounds like where I live in Alaska.
The summer it is the opposite and the bright hot sun never goes away.
I wont whine anymore like the other poster mentioned.
Its bad everywhere. I blew $10,000 moving to Alaska from California where everyone there was hurting because the economy is better here.
I can stretch my loans but they will not be federally protected and have prepayment penalties and double digit interest rates which are BS. I would then be paying hundreds of thousands in interest and can not pay more to get ahead when times get better. I am surprised this is legal. A decade from now I will have to be worrying about my kids college debt and I should not be concerned with mine.
My point was that many people do not realize how good they have it at work. I do have a problem with people who are not productive since many like myself want these jobs to support ourselves. The GP has a right to quit his former job but it seems reasonable to expect his former employer to want solid ROI and be upset if he quit without advanced notice. Even in America this kind of environment should be expected regardless of education. In a global workforce many are ready to jump and should be given a chance if they can work harder.
"The best way to appreciate a job is to go without one" -Oscar Wilde
If 2 workers provide what you want by working half the time, then logically one worker who does nothing but work from 8 -5 can do the job for half the price!
If you have the attitude of do whatever it will not be long before an accountant wonders why are we paying you in a recession when we need to cut costs. Sure you have a point but it takes away job security. Someone out of work will be happy not to slack anymore to quit his mcjob he had to take while he tried to get back into the white collar world.
"Fuck that old job and fuck that employer... it wasn't worth it. When I went to leave they offered me another 15k to stay... that's how bad I was being raped all along. Obviously I told them no. I know it wasn't sweatshop labor or anything, I was able to quit and it wasn't particularly hot in there, but reasonably smart people that study and learn a usable skill shouldn't have to live like that. Not in the US."
There are many with masters degrees who would beg to be treated like this and work 2 jobs due to being underemployed thanks to the great recession. I am one of them (ok my wife has the masters). I plan to work 2 jobs to make up for the fact I am underemployed and am very poor due to 60% of my income going to useless student loan payments.
You should be grateful you have a job.
Maybe I sound bitter but the accountants and process engineers take notice to people who do not overload themselves and wonder if one person can do their jobs instead of two. It would be nice to have real working hours but it seems the American workplace worships overachievers.
I know I might be modded down for this, but it has parental access controls that do most of what you need.
Linux has the abilities but lacks many of the tools found in Netware and NT/Windows. One of them is using time usage tools. I could be wrong and maybe there are some free tools for unix that are out there that have a nice gui to set things up which generate the appropriate shells scripts. Maybe someone replying can mention this.
Do not be cheap and just get 3 $450 netbooks for your kids and the problem will be solved.
If you have no script extensions and link firefox you can get rid of most of the security problems. Just make sure you have access to sites like coolmathgames addictingames or where ever kids go to on the net these days.
"The charge what the market will bear. You're just mad that you didn't think of that first."
The market will not bear this. Witness the rise of Linux. 10 years ago slashdot was a different place. If you dare say anything bad about Sun you would be modded into an oblivon similiar to bashing macs today. Solaris was God and linux was nice but a toy. Today bashing Solaris gives you mod karma.
This all changed 10 years ago because Sun charged $10,000 for a sparc 1 workstation and $1,000 more for each 128 meg module. At the same time 10 years ago a Redhat Linux 5.2 box from a generic pentium III could run circles around it for only $1,000. Why pay $25,000 for a SGI or sun workstation when a $1,500 could now outperform it! Gcc started to replace sun studio and java ides like netbeans and eclipse started taking over the $$$ borland Jbuilder and Visual C++. Database software is now finally catching up with postgreSQL. You can argue that mysql is getting better too I suppose. With the database software formally reserved to big iron we have no reason to use Solaris/Oracle except on all but the biggest data warehouses.
Vendors got greedy and monopolies and ogopolies created their own demise with cheap free solutions. Hostage with pricing can only go so far until alternatives become competition and customers will now be happy to jump ship.
I favored things locked down in that circumstance. Whose freedom is it? Yours or your employers? The employer purchased your computer and therefore his freedom to lock it down should be honored. Security and liabilities not to much lower support costs go part into the equation.
At home I switched to Linux because I was tired of companies like IBM and Microsoft crippling their own products and forcing me to pay more up $$$$ for the *better* versions. I just wanted to do c++ without a crippled compilier and the freedom to have more power over my computer.
This is why I tried out Linux. The I-pad reminds of Windows 9.x and VC 5.0 from yesteryears in that regards. Pretty buttons and shinies and a whole utopia... Windows had that at the time while kde was still beta in command line galore. I preferred power and my same reasoning is why I do not like the I-pad nor people crippling their products to sell me subscriptions.
I do sense a shift in slashdot in 10 years. There are more crazy gnu zealots and today people are more like consumers and like the looks. I see the argument in html5 vs h.264. I am surprised any slashdotters favored h.264.
Well you lost songbird and are not getting it for Linux anymore. Thank h.264 and legal costs. You lose
Most servers run Cent OS or RHES for their Linux oses. I am guessing the I.T staff at work and school use fedora because its the closest to what they have at work to train.
Corporate desktops too would probably have RHES or Fedora for the unix admins and programmers. Also universities might use Fedora more as well. My hunch is most of these are run on a vm for those who want to play with Linux to learn but end up not using it much.
"The sooner the "old media" of mega corporations deciding how millions should think passes away, the better. Murdoch has proven to be worse than most in that regard. His misery at the passing away of the bad old days only makes me smile."
Judging by the fanfare of the Ipad by those who think its a great E-reader/Ebooks I wish I could agree. Consumers have proven they love drm and not owning the things they have but maybe I am wrong. I got modded down quite a bit when pointing this out and mentioning hte freedoms of a $299 netbook with Ubuntu. You can actually edit your own iwork or word files on it!... sad day indeed.
Before I become modded down to an oblivion, I would like to point out that on an Asus AEEE or even on a XO I can run abiword or openoffice and have a FULL OS with REAL software that is used by the rest of the world on desktops. Not a DRMed cell phone os with large amounts of resources being used to lock me into a jail with specifically designed office apps that have been made crippled.
I was hoping to run MacOSX when I heard Apple was going to make a sub netbook. Instead it reminds me of WinCE where Microsoft got together to purposedly cripple as much possible.
The tabled is not a computer but a device... a big IPhone with the phone part disabled.
I am waiting for HPs tablet. I hope it runs Windows and I can put any app I want on it.
With adobe its not about its language but its tools.
How long would it have taken you to write and polish the same app in Java? I bet with Adobe flex and flash you could it in about half the time and it will look all nice and pretty. Since Oracle owns it I doubt they will do anything about this as they only care about boring server ERP apps and stuff like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Your article is a great reason why big government is not that bad.
Neo-conservatives cheered when Katrina hit Louisiana as they could finally fire the teachers and privitize schools with non union teachers. I never would have thought they would go this far. I would be upset as a parent if a slave with limited English were in charge of teaching my children phonics.
This makes me sick.
(disclaimer: my wife is a teacher)
I was listening to the radio a month ago where an activist mentioned the ultra conservative economist Milton Friedman. He had a hand in using Katrina as an excuse to ban the teachers unions in Louisiana and force privatiziation ... you know because no qualified teachers were left after the hurricane. He mentioned that good teachers were finally going to get paid for what they are worth and privatization would scare enough teachers and give the tax payers a break and would be a utopia.
Turns out the fired teachers were replaced by slaves. Wow ... and privatization is always better? I hate unions but I think having a teachers union is nice if you are a teacher. I find this totally unacceptable when it takes 6 years of school to become a teacher and slave laborers run to come in.
I wonder if these economists and market purists every hear stories like this? Do they think its better as non-teachers will be richer? Or do they think people can all still be happy at$15k a year because that was good back in 1935 ... bla bla.
The idiots from the IT outsourcing firm should have done it the "dot com" way. Under pay him by the same amount but promise him lots of stock options with absurd vesting requirements. Too bad if the the stock options go under water and then disappear through a corporate buyout.
They can't do this anymore because of changes in accounting laws. Stock options used to be classified as an expense and were used as a tax write off. Today they are counted as owners equity.
My cynicism tells me the changes were made by lobbying efforts from wall street to reduce the amount of shares in order to raise stock prices.
10 years ago if you had a degree and an MCSE you could start at 5k a month and if you had 5 years experience demand 8k a month or walk out the door! Houses were only $170k with 5% down. As long as you could show up you could work anywhere.
Could any of you imagine reading such a story 10 years ago? Shaking head ...
I keep hearing how bankers such as Goldman Sachs are betting agaisn't America and Greece are doing everything in their power to have total destruction in order to reduce bargaining power and enslave the world in debt.
I have nothing really to say other than disbelief on how this could happen in such a short short time. I do not think I should peruse I.T. anymore but this globalization is likely going to adversely effect all jobs.
Its not worth the security risks as it will be impossible to detect and delete viruses and malware that hide with in it unless you disable it in the bios and do a format c:.
You have run into the problem that many companies face which love to lock things down. Slashdotters hate this but its nice to have everything the same hardware and software for reasons like this.
Someone mentioned Citrix clients and vmware or virtual box players but they really really suck and consume incredible resources on desktops. Try to standardize on common desktops and create a script to use Windows update for the latest drivers or keep them on a USB flashdrive. A pain yes, but this is what your customers want. Anything else makes the setup look bad which ultimately makes your boss look bad which makes you look bad if you have a buggy slow activity and responsiveness from Citrix clients or virtual machines. Consumers judge responsiveness in quality more than performance. If it takes a few seconds for a menu to pop up they will think they are on 486s.
If the hardware is nearly identical you can setup a profile with Windows Update for drivers disabled.
Screw you. I do not want to use IE and Windows in order to use the internet.
Call me a commie all you want but I have a moral problem with creating a monopoly by abusing standards. Standards exist to prevent monopolies and encourage competition. H.264 is designed to create a monopoly in order to scew users over with drm and fees and lock people in.
How can the web be a free platform when you can't develop media rich websites without proprietary $$$$ non free software due to patents and drm. Flash already killed the opportunity for any serious web developers to learn new skills without paying adobe $$$$. Html 5 is designed to open it back up again ... with the exception of h.264.
Didn't the RIAA/MPAA want spyware on every pc sold? A forced plug in will be perfect.
Good job Firefox! Keep up the work and with you refusing to support it the less likely webmasters will use h.264 over alternatives.
if you like h.264 then use it but do not force it on the resut of us.
"Because there's a limited amount of bandwidth and you aren't the only one that wants to use it"
No there is not! That is a lie. Korea and Europe do not have the same problems. The issue is these greedy monopolistic ISPs are keeping 10 year old routers and refusing to upgrade in order to boast their shareholder price for Goldman Sachs and others on wall street.
I read on slashdot that 90% of all fiber is dark on purpose in order to limit availability and raise prices.
If I pay $60 a month for x amount of bits to download a second then why can't I get the service I pay for. It doesn't matter if their business model is on averages. I refuse to sign any contract with capped downloads. Its a shame because I hate cable with a passion and prefer DSL but in rural Alaska I had to agree to caps. My wife plays wow and uses vent so she would exceed the cap in a matter of days.
World of warcraft has constant disconnects from players with Comcast. Gee I wonder why? We are thinking of being a DSL only guild and this is rediculous. 3 players from comcast get disconnected and cause wiped in every and I mean every battle with a raid boss.
... and lets not forget get pissed off at us for wanting a day off when kids are screaming all around us and we are multitasking, cleaning, and having a conversation all at the same time. I really think they do all 3 things subconsciously in a relaxed day off like walking and chewing gum.
"Especially in men, right brains don't talk. So that's exclusively left-brain"
I was thinking the same thing.
Women can add a column of figures in a restaurant bill and have a conversation at the same time.
At least thats what I have observed and can do tasks around the house with continual loud interruptions and its still considered a day off and why they get mad at us for not doing anything.
"I've worked in the Kansas City caves and sat behind a desk on a computer for a while. It's fascinating for the first day but that ends quickly. The lack of sunlight and outdoor exposure really gets to drain on you week after week. Imagine getting up and going outside for some fresh air but when you go outside it's very dark, humid, claustrophobic, and the air is stale. It drives you nuts. Especially when you hear creaks and cracks all day in the dead of silence. I would not want to be an IT admin working in a cave."
Sounds like where I live in Alaska.
The summer it is the opposite and the bright hot sun never goes away.
Many women who are sex craved get vibrators after being sick of men. They do just fine being single this way.
... well I can hope
Thank you for your encouragement.
I wont whine anymore like the other poster mentioned.
Its bad everywhere. I blew $10,000 moving to Alaska from California where everyone there was hurting because the economy is better here.
I can stretch my loans but they will not be federally protected and have prepayment penalties and double digit interest rates which are BS. I would then be paying hundreds of thousands in interest and can not pay more to get ahead when times get better. I am surprised this is legal. A decade from now I will have to be worrying about my kids college debt and I should not be concerned with mine.
My point was that many people do not realize how good they have it at work. I do have a problem with people who are not productive since many like myself want these jobs to support ourselves. The GP has a right to quit his former job but it seems reasonable to expect his former employer to want solid ROI and be upset if he quit without advanced notice. Even in America this kind of environment should be expected regardless of education. In a global workforce many are ready to jump and should be given a chance if they can work harder.
"The best way to appreciate a job is to go without one" -Oscar Wilde
If 2 workers provide what you want by working half the time, then logically one worker who does nothing but work from 8 -5 can do the job for half the price!
If you have the attitude of do whatever it will not be long before an accountant wonders why are we paying you in a recession when we need to cut costs. Sure you have a point but it takes away job security. Someone out of work will be happy not to slack anymore to quit his mcjob he had to take while he tried to get back into the white collar world.
"Fuck that old job and fuck that employer... it wasn't worth it. When I went to leave they offered me another 15k to stay... that's how bad I was being raped all along. Obviously I told them no. I know it wasn't sweatshop labor or anything, I was able to quit and it wasn't particularly hot in there, but reasonably smart people that study and learn a usable skill shouldn't have to live like that. Not in the US."
There are many with masters degrees who would beg to be treated like this and work 2 jobs due to being underemployed thanks to the great recession. I am one of them (ok my wife has the masters). I plan to work 2 jobs to make up for the fact I am underemployed and am very poor due to 60% of my income going to useless student loan payments.
You should be grateful you have a job.
Maybe I sound bitter but the accountants and process engineers take notice to people who do not overload themselves and wonder if one person can do their jobs instead of two. It would be nice to have real working hours but it seems the American workplace worships overachievers.
I know I might be modded down for this, but it has parental access controls that do most of what you need.
Linux has the abilities but lacks many of the tools found in Netware and NT/Windows. One of them is using time usage tools. I could be wrong and maybe there are some free tools for unix that are out there that have a nice gui to set things up which generate the appropriate shells scripts. Maybe someone replying can mention this.
Do not be cheap and just get 3 $450 netbooks for your kids and the problem will be solved.
If you have no script extensions and link firefox you can get rid of most of the security problems. Just make sure you have access to sites like coolmathgames addictingames or where ever kids go to on the net these days.
"The charge what the market will bear. You're just mad that you didn't think of that first."
The market will not bear this. Witness the rise of Linux. 10 years ago slashdot was a different place. If you dare say anything bad about Sun you would be modded into an oblivon similiar to bashing macs today. Solaris was God and linux was nice but a toy. Today bashing Solaris gives you mod karma.
This all changed 10 years ago because Sun charged $10,000 for a sparc 1 workstation and $1,000 more for each 128 meg module. At the same time 10 years ago a Redhat Linux 5.2 box from a generic pentium III could run circles around it for only $1,000. Why pay $25,000 for a SGI or sun workstation when a $1,500 could now outperform it! Gcc started to replace sun studio and java ides like netbeans and eclipse started taking over the $$$ borland Jbuilder and Visual C++. Database software is now finally catching up with postgreSQL. You can argue that mysql is getting better too I suppose. With the database software formally reserved to big iron we have no reason to use Solaris/Oracle except on all but the biggest data warehouses.
Vendors got greedy and monopolies and ogopolies created their own demise with cheap free solutions. Hostage with pricing can only go so far until alternatives become competition and customers will now be happy to jump ship.
I favored things locked down in that circumstance. Whose freedom is it? Yours or your employers? The employer purchased your computer and therefore his freedom to lock it down should be honored. Security and liabilities not to much lower support costs go part into the equation.
At home I switched to Linux because I was tired of companies like IBM and Microsoft crippling their own products and forcing me to pay more up $$$$ for the *better* versions. I just wanted to do c++ without a crippled compilier and the freedom to have more power over my computer.
This is why I tried out Linux. The I-pad reminds of Windows 9.x and VC 5.0 from yesteryears in that regards. Pretty buttons and shinies and a whole utopia ... Windows had that at the time while kde was still beta in command line galore. I preferred power and my same reasoning is why I do not like the I-pad nor people crippling their products to sell me subscriptions.
I do sense a shift in slashdot in 10 years. There are more crazy gnu zealots and today people are more like consumers and like the looks. I see the argument in html5 vs h.264. I am surprised any slashdotters favored h.264.
Well you lost songbird and are not getting it for Linux anymore. Thank h.264 and legal costs. You lose
Most servers run Cent OS or RHES for their Linux oses. I am guessing the I.T staff at work and school use fedora because its the closest to what they have at work to train.
Corporate desktops too would probably have RHES or Fedora for the unix admins and programmers. Also universities might use Fedora more as well. My hunch is most of these are run on a vm for those who want to play with Linux to learn but end up not using it much.
"The sooner the "old media" of mega corporations deciding how millions should think passes away, the better. Murdoch has proven to be worse than most in that regard. His misery at the passing away of the bad old days only makes me smile."
Judging by the fanfare of the Ipad by those who think its a great E-reader/Ebooks I wish I could agree. Consumers have proven they love drm and not owning the things they have but maybe I am wrong. I got modded down quite a bit when pointing this out and mentioning hte freedoms of a $299 netbook with Ubuntu. You can actually edit your own iwork or word files on it! ... sad day indeed.
Before I become modded down to an oblivion, I would like to point out that on an Asus AEEE or even on a XO I can run abiword or openoffice and have a FULL OS with REAL software that is used by the rest of the world on desktops. Not a DRMed cell phone os with large amounts of resources being used to lock me into a jail with specifically designed office apps that have been made crippled.
I was hoping to run MacOSX when I heard Apple was going to make a sub netbook. Instead it reminds me of WinCE where Microsoft got together to purposedly cripple as much possible.
The tabled is not a computer but a device ... a big IPhone with the phone part disabled.
I am waiting for HPs tablet. I hope it runs Windows and I can put any app I want on it.
They would never do anything like this.
I mean I love that I can still use my old memory sticks
I use this site from the University of Alaska because it has forecasts and I live in Alaska.
I have been here 9 months and still have not seen any lights. I am unlucky or need to move farther away from city.
With adobe its not about its language but its tools.
How long would it have taken you to write and polish the same app in Java? I bet with Adobe flex and flash you could it in about half the time and it will look all nice and pretty. Since Oracle owns it I doubt they will do anything about this as they only care about boring server ERP apps and stuff like that.