"Now, how many people get into IT through "non standard" channels? How many self-taught pros are there out there? How many people have a non-IT educational background? How many people from other countries?
Do you really want a bunch of senior people telling you what qualifications you need to have? This is a young industry, and it's changing all the time. What you need to know changes all the time. And they think setting up a professional organization is a good thing? Instead of clueless PHBs, we'll have 30 year vets telling us that our modern methods are crap compared to the work they did, back in the day, with punchcards."
Its already like that today. How many reading this with no college degree could find another programming or system administration job tomorrow? My guess would be a no for the majority. Yes there are few jobs for local pc repair techs and maybe a lan admin job for a few small consulting companies if you have years and years of experience but your choices are limited.
Fortune 1,000 companies want 4 year cs degrees, MCSE, A+, Cisco, NCE(this maybe outdated as Novell is used less and less. I haven't in IT for awhile), and 5 to 6 years experience for any jr entry level job. Its quite competitive without any magical piece of paper called a degree and a few certifications thrown into the mix.
Oh and to be even a supervisor an MBA is part of the job requirements in most fortunate 1,000 companies.
The result has been a shift in outsourcing as not many people have these abilities who want to work for 40k a year. There is a shortage of labor for those who keep high barriers of entry.
I am going back to school because no employer will take my technical skills seriously since I am not obsolete (haven't done real computer work since the.bomb besides pc repair) and have no college degree. I am smart enough this time not to major in computer science but the certification and educational requirements do put a hamper on hiring as computer science is hard and will no longer make a geek the money he wants compared to an MBA or business degree.
We already have the programmer guild which lobbies on behalf of I.T. professionals and making more requirements will do to computer professionals what the CPA did to accountants which is only to inflate their salaries and make outsourcing look more attractive.
I was thinking of star trek when I was a kid wondering if we could just get rid of money as well.
In places such as post soviet union Russia and Columbia people began bartering with cocaine or vodka as a form of currency when a weak governmental currency was widely in use.
People are greedy, lazy and wont work and a farmer probably would not bust his butt from 5am to 6pm in the fields to feed all of us if he didn't have too.
I hate farm subsidies which is why the farmers destroy milk and purposely not grow wheat. FDR did this because the price of milk went low as farmers overproduced in an attempt to make more money due to the dust bowls. It never went away.
If all supplies could be replicated like star trek then perhaps we would not need money and we would all work to better ourselves but our human nature to have more than our neighbor and the scarcity of goods and services makes us work.
In moving out of my parents home I felt the fight or flight syndrome of not having money and becoming frantic over finances. This helped me mature and look at things in a newer perspective. This condition of working hard for ourselves helps others and is the most efficient system that is known to work unfortunately.
Watch what happens when we have no government? No one can read nor write, no roads, no jobs as employers move to countries with educated work forces, no law and order, and abunch of militias controlling everything due to the vacuum of power.
Public goods need to be paid for and volunteering payments for education and the military are unreasonable. It costs thousands for a single child to attend school for one year. Thats out of reach for most families. What would happen if we had no military? We would probably be invaded by now and the soviets would run the world. Also why would I pay for these things when I someone else can? This is called a public good that the free market can not solve which is why we have governments.
Do I think taxes are too high. YES. Our government wastes money left and right but still its our responsbility to pay them and vote others who want to raise them out.
I wouldn't and neither would anyone else. Public goods unfortunately are goods that can't be privatized as if you paid for a military then I wouldn't have to and would enjoy the same benefit.
If you have an issue then you can vote. If you do not like the candidates then get involved in the primaries and form groups to help raise funds with the candidates who agree with you. I read about many libertarians here who like ron paul and I have a feeling your views would probably match his.
Educated work force, power, phone, a military to avoid invasions, and a government to support free trade.
Yes these are very expensive and roads cost A TON of money. The government pays verizon to put in your phone lines and subsidizes them to a certain extent.
It costs $7,000 per year on average for each school aged child to stay in school. Multiple that by 12?
Without electricity, roads, and a workforce that can read and write you are screwed if you own a business.
Yes taxes are a necessary evil and anyone who uses governmental services needs to pay and corporations need to. I am conservative myself on this issue but realize its unrealistic to have businesses have a free ride when they use government the most.
I used to see X terminals for POS systems in places like TGIF and even some small businesses.
I am guessing the reason to use Windows has to do with the fact everyone runs it. Programmers for windows are everywhere and so are windows experts to help with any strange issues the programmers encounter. Sure there are unix programmers but how much do they cost? What about the specialized hardware that pos systems use?
Last windows systems have bad memory management and application conflict issue over time known as Windows rot. POS systems only run 1 app and thats it and they are shut down everynight so no problems can ixist there. A multitasking multiuser os is probably overkill.
Sure you read about a few corporations buying mail boxes in Bermuda and claiming they are Bermadan but overall the rich pay more with things like AMT.
If not then we would all suffer form higher taxes. Trying to support your income and family financially does not excuse unethical and illegal behavior. If you end up in jail for tax evasion no employer will ever trust you or hire you again besides McD's so it makes since for yourself to be ethical and pay.
If you do not like what the government is doing then vote.
Most rich people had their taxes slashed down to the 34% we have today and they still cheat more than ever.
I do not disagree with you that taxes are quite high and could be lowered more. But for a business its job is to make money and make shareholders happy at all costs. Ethics are gone through the window and I hope this is just a recent phase by business to treat all their employers as numbers and only focus on the short term numbers.
There is talk of abandoning all internet sales taxes so business doing internet sales transactions do not have to do 50 different tax codes to compute the taxes owed. I wonder how many just buy servers in India to avoid this problem?
I used to think about this when I was a kid that money is the problem and people need to work for their own benefit.
I am grown up now and realized that this would never happen.
What your describing is the basis of communism and socialism and it has terrible side effects.
For one the head of state becomes a dictator as he or she holds the jobs which are your family's future in line. If you hate your current job you can quit or be fired and get another one in time. You can't if the state owns all the jobs. But without money this wont be a problem right? Well if I work at a store and only had a limited number of food and you and several others wanted whats left then who am I going to give it too? We have no shortages today as the owner of the store prices everything properly to keep supply down to those who need it and everyone has more. What if your neighbor overbought everything at the grocery store and left you with no food left?
This then creates the dictatorships found in communistic countries. You can argue that we all do not have to be like that but who is going to enforce everyone not to make money but a strong government has to enforce it.... which leads us to the economic argument agaisnt communism. If money is taken away people do not work and food and goods are not amply delivered. Soviets had to wait hours in line to get things like Milk or pots or pans. This is because the laws of supply and demand dictate the correct amount of goods at the correct price and everyone benefits because we all want money. Why would I want to get up at 5:30am everyday? If I had my choice I would not and who suffers? Not my employer but everyone who depends on me in society.
If things like housing and food did not have a limited supply we would not need to work or have money but since scarcities exist we need a system that rewards what the market wants by providing the correct work it most desires in the forms of higher salaries.
Last time I checked (a year and a half ago) on www.dice.com I found that java programmer jobs outnumbered c# jobs by a 9 to 1 margin.
I do wonder about job saturation as I wonder how many universities teach Java rather than C# but I am imagining that is changing with Microsoft's academic alliance program.
Also you can download javadocs onto your hard drive to see the object oriented relationship and class structure of all the core Java api's. Whats great about javadocs is that its a tool that will automatically autodocument your whole program for you in the same tree structure. All you have to do is put a "///" instead of a "//" and your comments will be recorded in the html tree of your documentation as well. No other language comes close to this besides perldocs. Sandcastle is Microsoft's way of a javadoc knockoff for c# but its not finished yet.
This of course assumes you know how object oriented programming works which you do according to your experience in C++. You can learn java quickly if your familiar with these concepts as even data types such as strings and integers are objects in Java.
I used the sixth edition of this book when I took advanced java programming in college which is very detailed with over 10k lines of code. Its very academic oriented if you do not mind it but has directions on how to do almost anything. You can skip sections such as if/then structures and see how the memory reference object oriented model works and how its different from other languages.
This newer edition even has tutorials on ajax. Damn I am tempted to get it.
Keep in mind I have not written a line of code in over 2 years and am not a professional programmer so take what I say with a grain of salt.
However I do agree with others here that unless you have real work experience with java that you will be turned down from any job requiring it regardless of your experience. HR wants the impossible and do not understand programmers. They think programmers who use different languages can't learn another and they also worry about retraining costs. If all they have is an entry level budget then they can hire an Indian to do the work for alot cheaper sigh.
If i were you I would write small applications in java at work for small intranet sites so you could claim you have X amount of years of experience web programming and used java. This will satisfy the HR weenies so you can then interview and you can show your better for mission critical work than abunch of Indians. (Perhaps this is why I do not want to work in I.T. again)
Do not mention you programmed in Java for X years. Just mention that you programmed for X years and used Java and this will get you past the filter. But try it at work with something small.
This is how IE came into existence. It was a hair pulling experience to support multiple browsers or you could write to only one that came with Windows and had over a %70 marketshare.
If all teh browsers followed standards we would not have this problem. After all any text editor today can read ascii text files. I guess html is a little different.
Another browser that will erode firefox's marketshare and convince more webmasters to write IE only websites. Safari was bad enough but this will make it look like IE is gaining marketshare as firefox drops.
Well I know many users who tried Linux and laughed at it when they found out it was so primptive that it didn't support mp3s, clear type fonts, and dvd playing.
I explained it did and I used to do it and got a strange look back. The fact that its been removed and many users such as myself switched back to windows to not have to deal with the inconvenience does show that patents are relevant.
My guess is Microsoft is planning to launch the mother of all assaults on the free software foundation, sun Microsystems, and IBM. The CIO's of most companies will enact a ms only plan to prevent potential liabilities and ms can make more money.
many companies are not traded in London and not on Wall Street in order to get around SarbanesOxley. Unfortunately myself and other potential investors wonder what they are hiding?
Its true it does move some companies not to be a US traded company but overall I think some form of auditing is good as history repeats itself over and over again with companies cheating. The housing market had this happen at least several times over the century. Of course with that there is no penalty for committing fraud.
Bush attacked Edwards in 2004 saying Cheney can be president.
The result worked in Bush's favor agaisn't the experienced Kerry.
THe dems need to make this an issue as most voters are unaware of her inexperience. Obama has at least 4 years ?? (I am not too sure on the exact amount) and this woman has less than 2 (pretty bad).
Obama was also a state senator for years as well. ANd she admits was just a regular hockey mom until recently.
McCain was diagnosed with cancer 4 times and is 72.
This woman could be our next president if something happens to him.
SHe was only governor since 2006 in a state that has more raindeer than people and before that was a mayor of a village with 5k people.
Yes attacking Obama on experience is the pot calling the kettle black. If the democrats are smart (I doubt it these days) they will need to launch a whole campaign to define her before the media does in a positive spotlight.
When Kerry picked Edwards Bush responded back within 12 hours saying Cheney can be president. The result was no one took Edwards seriously and Kerry's approval ratings went down as Karl Rove defined the enemy before people could think.
Watch the same from the democrats (again if they have brains). If not then mcCain just might win on the experience argument.
It was a dumb move for McCain as I would not pick her. She doesn't even have 2 years of experience?? TO me all these things disqualifies her from being the president.
It seems to me that if you work for a company that already views you as a cost center then you are already screwed.
After all how can you or your contributions be valued if you are an annoying cost that should be eliminated.
I was going to say you need to sell yourself as a non cost center but you tried that. I would quit too in your case as your bond to get fired anyway by the new school of though "avoid any investment and focus on the short term investments only".
I think the internet bubble of 2000 caused much cynicism about anything technology as an investment and its extremely frustrating.
I went back to school after I got booted from IT work myself and I hope I never work in computers again after I graduate. I am thinking of being an accountant as bean counters are the most valuable assest in any company right now. I at least can see the value of investing in systems that save tons of money and get work done.
Also for the slashdotter who asked how what the raito is in their company the answer depends on how technology dependant the company is. Walmart is cheap as hell but has extensive IT that rivals even Google as they are investments that work with their bussiness model. A large law firm only needs desktop support and would have a very low IT to employee ration. It all varies.
The bean counters with their MBA's came in and removed 4 of the 6 major cities citing to move this project out by christmas rather than doing it right.
I think I will be sticking with Wow for awhile after hearing this.
As someone who worked in a call center I can tell you that 90% of users do not know the difference between a hardware or software issue and just want it fixed YESTERDAY!
The technical jabber between the too just doesnt work. THey also do not care about running older software either and many do not know or are too illiterate to upgrade.
I can see why OEM's do not want people to mess with their systems. They can break something and blame you for it which ends up charging the company money for added support costs and giving it a bad name.
If they want free support they can't mess with their systems. If they do then they should pay like everyone else or face the consequences.
Does Hyundai honor my warranty if I take my engine apart or mod it? I dont think so.
After having hardware break on my homebrew system my wife decided to stick with Vista on a generic HP system. The integrated controller can barely play WOW decently which is the one critical app we both use.
I have a nice nvidia 7600 GT and an XP Pro disc but Geeksquad will not service it and it will void the warranty if I install either or.
I also own a toshiba and I can't even find Xp drivers for all the components as its Vista only.
What if you need real uptime with a load of 80 on a 32 cpu system? Can Linux handle the load and have years of uptime?
Solaris just works and its made for servers. Linux seems always beta quality with its cutting edgness and is desktop oriented. I would not trust my job to it unless its Debian or RHES which costs $$$ as cutting edge features are not needed on a mission critical server. Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Oh and the article discussed a scarcity of third party apps. I found the opposite as most server ERP and database apps are on Solaris than Linux.
Do not worry about at will-employement or being fired but just have a simple and empathetic conversation on how you feel.
Bosses respect this and like it. If I were a boss I would like this from an employee as I would not want to fire anyone or see someone leave unless absolutely neccessary for the good of the company. It costs money and hassle to fire and hire new employees.
Its possible your boss is just setting a defensive patent in case of a lawsuit which is a good idea.
Just do not say anything stupid like threatening to quit.
If you can't do this with him or her then look for another job. Look not because of the patent issue but because the boss is an asshole if he wont listen or will fire you for your opinion. No one deserves this and the boss shouldn't be a boss. It sounds like a good idea.
Remember the company will file that patent with or without you. But a conversation may open their eyes and make you look better as they know if you have any problem in the future they can just talk to you to fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Now, how many people get into IT through "non standard" channels? How many self-taught pros are there out there? How many people have a non-IT educational background? How many people from other countries?
Do you really want a bunch of senior people telling you what qualifications you need to have? This is a young industry, and it's changing all the time. What you need to know changes all the time. And they think setting up a professional organization is a good thing? Instead of clueless PHBs, we'll have 30 year vets telling us that our modern methods are crap compared to the work they did, back in the day, with punchcards."
Its already like that today. How many reading this with no college degree could find another programming or system administration job tomorrow? My guess would be a no for the majority. Yes there are few jobs for local pc repair techs and maybe a lan admin job for a few small consulting companies if you have years and years of experience but your choices are limited.
Fortune 1,000 companies want 4 year cs degrees, MCSE, A+, Cisco, NCE(this maybe outdated as Novell is used less and less. I haven't in IT for awhile), and 5 to 6 years experience for any jr entry level job. Its quite competitive without any magical piece of paper called a degree and a few certifications thrown into the mix.
Oh and to be even a supervisor an MBA is part of the job requirements in most fortunate 1,000 companies.
The result has been a shift in outsourcing as not many people have these abilities who want to work for 40k a year. There is a shortage of labor for those who keep high barriers of entry.
I am going back to school because no employer will take my technical skills seriously since I am not obsolete (haven't done real computer work since the .bomb besides pc repair) and have no college degree. I am smart enough this time not to major in computer science but the certification and educational requirements do put a hamper on hiring as computer science is hard and will no longer make a geek the money he wants compared to an MBA or business degree.
We already have the programmer guild which lobbies on behalf of I.T. professionals and making more requirements will do to computer professionals what the CPA did to accountants which is only to inflate their salaries and make outsourcing look more attractive.
I was thinking of star trek when I was a kid wondering if we could just get rid of money as well.
In places such as post soviet union Russia and Columbia people began bartering with cocaine or vodka as a form of currency when a weak governmental currency was widely in use.
People are greedy, lazy and wont work and a farmer probably would not bust his butt from 5am to 6pm in the fields to feed all of us if he didn't have too.
I hate farm subsidies which is why the farmers destroy milk and purposely not grow wheat. FDR did this because the price of milk went low as farmers overproduced in an attempt to make more money due to the dust bowls. It never went away.
If all supplies could be replicated like star trek then perhaps we would not need money and we would all work to better ourselves but our human nature to have more than our neighbor and the scarcity of goods and services makes us work.
In moving out of my parents home I felt the fight or flight syndrome of not having money and becoming frantic over finances. This helped me mature and look at things in a newer perspective. This condition of working hard for ourselves helps others and is the most efficient system that is known to work unfortunately.
Watch what happens when we have no government? No one can read nor write, no roads, no jobs as employers move to countries with educated work forces, no law and order, and abunch of militias controlling everything due to the vacuum of power.
Public goods need to be paid for and volunteering payments for education and the military are unreasonable. It costs thousands for a single child to attend school for one year. Thats out of reach for most families. What would happen if we had no military? We would probably be invaded by now and the soviets would run the world. Also why would I pay for these things when I someone else can? This is called a public good that the free market can not solve which is why we have governments.
Do I think taxes are too high. YES. Our government wastes money left and right but still its our responsbility to pay them and vote others who want to raise them out.
Then who is going to voluntarily pay?
I wouldn't and neither would anyone else. Public goods unfortunately are goods that can't be privatized as if you paid for a military then I wouldn't have to and would enjoy the same benefit.
If you have an issue then you can vote. If you do not like the candidates then get involved in the primaries and form groups to help raise funds with the candidates who agree with you. I read about many libertarians here who like ron paul and I have a feeling your views would probably match his.
Educated work force, power, phone, a military to avoid invasions, and a government to support free trade.
Yes these are very expensive and roads cost A TON of money. The government pays verizon to put in your phone lines and subsidizes them to a certain extent.
It costs $7,000 per year on average for each school aged child to stay in school. Multiple that by 12?
Without electricity, roads, and a workforce that can read and write you are screwed if you own a business.
Yes taxes are a necessary evil and anyone who uses governmental services needs to pay and corporations need to. I am conservative myself on this issue but realize its unrealistic to have businesses have a free ride when they use government the most.
I used to see X terminals for POS systems in places like TGIF and even some small businesses.
I am guessing the reason to use Windows has to do with the fact everyone runs it. Programmers for windows are everywhere and so are windows experts to help with any strange issues the programmers encounter. Sure there are unix programmers but how much do they cost? What about the specialized hardware that pos systems use?
Last windows systems have bad memory management and application conflict issue over time known as Windows rot. POS systems only run 1 app and thats it and they are shut down everynight so no problems can ixist there. A multitasking multiuser os is probably overkill.
The rich pay for over 80% of our taxes.
Sure you read about a few corporations buying mail boxes in Bermuda and claiming they are Bermadan but overall the rich pay more with things like AMT.
If not then we would all suffer form higher taxes. Trying to support your income and family financially does not excuse unethical and illegal behavior. If you end up in jail for tax evasion no employer will ever trust you or hire you again besides McD's so it makes since for yourself to be ethical and pay.
If you do not like what the government is doing then vote.
Most rich people had their taxes slashed down to the 34% we have today and they still cheat more than ever.
I do not disagree with you that taxes are quite high and could be lowered more. But for a business its job is to make money and make shareholders happy at all costs. Ethics are gone through the window and I hope this is just a recent phase by business to treat all their employers as numbers and only focus on the short term numbers.
There is talk of abandoning all internet sales taxes so business doing internet sales transactions do not have to do 50 different tax codes to compute the taxes owed. I wonder how many just buy servers in India to avoid this problem?
I used to think about this when I was a kid that money is the problem and people need to work for their own benefit.
I am grown up now and realized that this would never happen.
What your describing is the basis of communism and socialism and it has terrible side effects.
For one the head of state becomes a dictator as he or she holds the jobs which are your family's future in line. If you hate your current job you can quit or be fired and get another one in time. You can't if the state owns all the jobs. But without money this wont be a problem right? Well if I work at a store and only had a limited number of food and you and several others wanted whats left then who am I going to give it too? We have no shortages today as the owner of the store prices everything properly to keep supply down to those who need it and everyone has more. What if your neighbor overbought everything at the grocery store and left you with no food left?
This then creates the dictatorships found in communistic countries. You can argue that we all do not have to be like that but who is going to enforce everyone not to make money but a strong government has to enforce it. ... which leads us to the economic argument agaisnt communism. If money is taken away people do not work and food and goods are not amply delivered. Soviets had to wait hours in line to get things like Milk or pots or pans. This is because the laws of supply and demand dictate the correct amount of goods at the correct price and everyone benefits because we all want money. Why would I want to get up at 5:30am everyday? If I had my choice I would not and who suffers? Not my employer but everyone who depends on me in society.
If things like housing and food did not have a limited supply we would not need to work or have money but since scarcities exist we need a system that rewards what the market wants by providing the correct work it most desires in the forms of higher salaries.
Last time I checked (a year and a half ago) on www.dice.com I found that java programmer jobs outnumbered c# jobs by a 9 to 1 margin.
I do wonder about job saturation as I wonder how many universities teach Java rather than C# but I am imagining that is changing with Microsoft's academic alliance program.
here
Also you can download javadocs onto your hard drive to see the object oriented relationship and class structure of all the core Java api's. Whats great about javadocs is that its a tool that will automatically autodocument your whole program for you in the same tree structure. All you have to do is put a "///" instead of a "//" and your comments will be recorded in the html tree of your documentation as well. No other language comes close to this besides perldocs. Sandcastle is Microsoft's way of a javadoc knockoff for c# but its not finished yet.
This of course assumes you know how object oriented programming works which you do according to your experience in C++. You can learn java quickly if your familiar with these concepts as even data types such as strings and integers are objects in Java.
I used the sixth edition of this book when I took advanced java programming in college which is very detailed with over 10k lines of code. Its very academic oriented if you do not mind it but has directions on how to do almost anything. You can skip sections such as if/then structures and see how the memory reference object oriented model works and how its different from other languages.
This newer edition even has tutorials on ajax. Damn I am tempted to get it.
Keep in mind I have not written a line of code in over 2 years and am not a professional programmer so take what I say with a grain of salt.
However I do agree with others here that unless you have real work experience with java that you will be turned down from any job requiring it regardless of your experience. HR wants the impossible and do not understand programmers. They think programmers who use different languages can't learn another and they also worry about retraining costs. If all they have is an entry level budget then they can hire an Indian to do the work for alot cheaper sigh.
If i were you I would write small applications in java at work for small intranet sites so you could claim you have X amount of years of experience web programming and used java. This will satisfy the HR weenies so you can then interview and you can show your better for mission critical work than abunch of Indians. (Perhaps this is why I do not want to work in I.T. again)
Do not mention you programmed in Java for X years. Just mention that you programmed for X years and used Java and this will get you past the filter. But try it at work with something small.
This is how IE came into existence. It was a hair pulling experience to support multiple browsers or you could write to only one that came with Windows and had over a %70 marketshare.
If all teh browsers followed standards we would not have this problem. After all any text editor today can read ascii text files. I guess html is a little different.
Another browser that will erode firefox's marketshare and convince more webmasters to write IE only websites. Safari was bad enough but this will make it look like IE is gaining marketshare as firefox drops.
Well I know many users who tried Linux and laughed at it when they found out it was so primptive that it didn't support mp3s, clear type fonts, and dvd playing.
I explained it did and I used to do it and got a strange look back. The fact that its been removed and many users such as myself switched back to windows to not have to deal with the inconvenience does show that patents are relevant.
My guess is Microsoft is planning to launch the mother of all assaults on the free software foundation, sun Microsystems, and IBM. The CIO's of most companies will enact a ms only plan to prevent potential liabilities and ms can make more money.
many companies are not traded in London and not on Wall Street in order to get around SarbanesOxley. Unfortunately myself and other potential investors wonder what they are hiding?
Its true it does move some companies not to be a US traded company but overall I think some form of auditing is good as history repeats itself over and over again with companies cheating. The housing market had this happen at least several times over the century. Of course with that there is no penalty for committing fraud.
"No more so than selecting Obama as presidential candidate when he has no more--and arguably less--experience than Palin"
He has 8 years in the senate and more in the Illinois state legislature. SHe does not even have 2 years of experience as governor yet.
Stalin himself said if you shout a lie enough times it will become true. I suppose the same is true as many our misguided by this false rumor.
Bush attacked Edwards in 2004 saying Cheney can be president.
The result worked in Bush's favor agaisn't the experienced Kerry.
THe dems need to make this an issue as most voters are unaware of her inexperience. Obama has at least 4 years ?? (I am not too sure on the exact amount) and this woman has less than 2 (pretty bad).
Obama was also a state senator for years as well. ANd she admits was just a regular hockey mom until recently.
Yes I do think it will be an issue.
McCain was diagnosed with cancer 4 times and is 72.
This woman could be our next president if something happens to him.
SHe was only governor since 2006 in a state that has more raindeer than people and before that was a mayor of a village with 5k people.
Yes attacking Obama on experience is the pot calling the kettle black. If the democrats are smart (I doubt it these days) they will need to launch a whole campaign to define her before the media does in a positive spotlight.
When Kerry picked Edwards Bush responded back within 12 hours saying Cheney can be president. The result was no one took Edwards seriously and Kerry's approval ratings went down as Karl Rove defined the enemy before people could think.
Watch the same from the democrats (again if they have brains). If not then mcCain just might win on the experience argument.
It was a dumb move for McCain as I would not pick her. She doesn't even have 2 years of experience?? TO me all these things disqualifies her from being the president.
It seems to me that if you work for a company that already views you as a cost center then you are already screwed.
After all how can you or your contributions be valued if you are an annoying cost that should be eliminated.
I was going to say you need to sell yourself as a non cost center but you tried that. I would quit too in your case as your bond to get fired anyway by the new school of though "avoid any investment and focus on the short term investments only".
I think the internet bubble of 2000 caused much cynicism about anything technology as an investment and its extremely frustrating.
I went back to school after I got booted from IT work myself and I hope I never work in computers again after I graduate. I am thinking of being an accountant as bean counters are the most valuable assest in any company right now. I at least can see the value of investing in systems that save tons of money and get work done.
Also for the slashdotter who asked how what the raito is in their company the answer depends on how technology dependant the company is. Walmart is cheap as hell but has extensive IT that rivals even Google as they are investments that work with their bussiness model. A large law firm only needs desktop support and would have a very low IT to employee ration. It all varies.
The bean counters with their MBA's came in and removed 4 of the 6 major cities citing to move this project out by christmas rather than doing it right.
I think I will be sticking with Wow for awhile after hearing this.
As someone who worked in a call center I can tell you that 90% of users do not know the difference between a hardware or software issue and just want it fixed YESTERDAY!
The technical jabber between the too just doesnt work. THey also do not care about running older software either and many do not know or are too illiterate to upgrade.
I can see why OEM's do not want people to mess with their systems. They can break something and blame you for it which ends up charging the company money for added support costs and giving it a bad name.
If they want free support they can't mess with their systems. If they do then they should pay like everyone else or face the consequences.
Does Hyundai honor my warranty if I take my engine apart or mod it? I dont think so.
I have the same problem here too.
After having hardware break on my homebrew system my wife decided to stick with Vista on a generic HP system. The integrated controller can barely play WOW decently which is the one critical app we both use.
I have a nice nvidia 7600 GT and an XP Pro disc but Geeksquad will not service it and it will void the warranty if I install either or.
I also own a toshiba and I can't even find Xp drivers for all the components as its Vista only.
Stay away?
What if you need real uptime with a load of 80 on a 32 cpu system? Can Linux handle the load and have years of uptime?
Solaris just works and its made for servers. Linux seems always beta quality with its cutting edgness and is desktop oriented. I would not trust my job to it unless its Debian or RHES which costs $$$ as cutting edge features are not needed on a mission critical server. Solaris scales far better than any BSD or Linux distro out there.
Ask any *real* Unix admin who uses both and more than likely they will say Linux is great for small jobs but Solaris is king for anything else.
Oh and the article discussed a scarcity of third party apps. I found the opposite as most server ERP and database apps are on Solaris than Linux.
Where they dont care what a few thousand people have to say and they listen to the lobbiest more for more campaign cash.
Do not worry about at will-employement or being fired but just have a simple and empathetic conversation on how you feel.
Bosses respect this and like it. If I were a boss I would like this from an employee as I would not want to fire anyone or see someone leave unless absolutely neccessary for the good of the company. It costs money and hassle to fire and hire new employees.
Its possible your boss is just setting a defensive patent in case of a lawsuit which is a good idea.
Just do not say anything stupid like threatening to quit.
If you can't do this with him or her then look for another job. Look not because of the patent issue but because the boss is an asshole if he wont listen or will fire you for your opinion. No one deserves this and the boss shouldn't be a boss. It sounds like a good idea.
Remember the company will file that patent with or without you. But a conversation may open their eyes and make you look better as they know if you have any problem in the future they can just talk to you to fix it.