As it should be. I have personally been opposed to the IT world's infatuation with contractors throughout my very long career in this business. I have been (and am now) in the "front lines" writing code and building, deploying, and supporting systems and applications, and I have been in various levels of management, some quite high, and sometimes at very large companies. I'm generalizing of course, but it is my experience that contractors are a lot more trouble than they're usually worth. Here I'm speaking of true contractors, who come in to do a job, and leave when that job is complete -- the workforce's equivalent of a transient population -- or prostitutes, LOL.
I am also opposed to the perma-temp phenomenon, and now that I'm writing this, I suspect that's closer to the scenario you're describing. A discussion of perma-temps leads to the greatest evil that exists in corporate culture today: Human Resources. I've ranted about it before, and I'll do it again: people should not be treated in the same way you address a shortage of copier-paper and rubber bands. The primary role of HR in large corporations today is to simply make people disposable. Contractors go a long way towards enabling this mindset.
There are a million other angles, of course. I won't pretend I haven't done contract work before, but it's typically to get my foot in the door of a good company, at which point I jump ship and go permanent. Again, I prefer this from long experience working with both sides. And I'll add that in that experience, I've also seen no shortage of contractors with attitudes. We once had an MQ expert on contract with us, and while he was generally a nice guy, when it came to any discussion of contracting versus FTEs, he made it clear that his opinion of going full-time was that only the stupid or incapable did this. Hopefully the door didn't hit his ass too hard on the way out.
Face it, you're temporary. It was your choice. Don't like it? Change it.
Better equipment was exactly the reason I originally started telecommuting. I quickly realized that everything is better at home than what they provide in the office. Today my in-office co-workers suffer those little pseudo-cubicles -- connected desks with half-height walls. And these are the highest ranking non-management employees in a company of 50,000+ people. No windows, no privacy, noisy environment, crappy lighting, equipment that is years out of date, cheap office chairs... No thanks.
On top of that, instead of wasting an hour each day driving to and from work, I either get an extra hour of work finished (if I'm on a project which requires it), or I finish an hour earlier.
To get on-topic with the article itself, what always depresses me is to see the people who get excited about these ill-conceived team-building events. I go to work to get paid. I don't take jobs to make friends, I'm able to do that on my own, in Real Life, without the assistance of HR. And in my world, I certainly don't make friends by playing games better suited to a classroom full of eight-year-olds.
In general I think this leads directly back to a trend which disturbs me greatly: management treating lower-ranking employees as if they're children, almost quite literally. I walked around the office building early one morning, before anyone was there, and was pretty surprised at how much the look-and-feel really does resemble an elementary school. For example, one area is involved in global fund trade corrections. This is an important, complex business which manipulates tens of billions in assets each year. Spread across the wall in that department was a faded series of colored construction-paper circles with big googly eyes at one end, and "FUND CATERPILLAR OF SUCCESS!!" written above it. I have no idea what it meant, but as "motivational decor" options go, it ranked right up there with any third-grade classroom. We have admin assistants who hand out trinkets and junk -- candy, little cheesy "office toys" which invariably bear the company name and logo. There are entire HR-attached groups who do nothing but think up goofy contests and similar activities: my e-mail inbox receives a constant barrage of trivia (often with some politically-correct theme from the Black, Hispanic, Asian or some other Employee Network, one of many GoodThink pseudo-official groups)... Yeah, it's tedious. I don't know, maybe it works. My co-workers aren't exactly the "office pool" types, so we probably aren't the main target of these activities -- but in any case, it really bugs me to see the blatant expression of the attitude that if you're not Management, you're basically a child masquerading as an adult.
I often wonder how much of the company's profits are squandered on this crap. It has to be a significant portion.
You can pair a headset simultaneously with other devices. I don't know that you can pair with two devices when neither is a headset. I imagine the need to do that would be pretty rare, though. Bluetooth in the Treo 650 is strong enough that I can sync with my PC halfway across the house, which is about 70 feet. Well, it's either that strong in the Treo or in the Belkin USB Bluetooth dongle (which is sadly plagued with shitty driver software that WILL destabilize your machine... made by Widpro or somebody like that).
And you'll get a wireless Bluetooth version of file drag/drop that the OP requested, too.
At least in GE's implementation of Six Sigma. They found a way to take what is essentially the engineering version of the scientific process, wrap it in so much red tape that it is unworkable (a 12-step process that really had 15 steps) , and put it in the hands of every worker in the company. Originally they gave bonuses for doing it, but eventually they took those away and declared "Thou shalt not get a raise without a Six Sigma Project." What ended up happening is that people refused to make any process or product improvements unless they were part of somebody's (preferably their own) Six Sigma project.
I've seen this happen at four major companies so far (two are places I've worked, and two are places a friend has worked).
Wanna see a pure clusterfuck of total bureaucracy? Find a place that tries to combine Six Sigma and CMM. It's buzzwordolicious!
By that point in WWII, the Germans who opposed the Russians in WWII were technologically superior largely in theory. They were poorly trained, ill prepared, largely unsupported in the field, their command and support structure at home was crumbling, and they sought to control and occupy a vast, probably unconquerable territory, and their equipment was not designed for the environment in which they fought. Your comparison bears little relevance to America's technological superiority versus the Chinese. We are able to fight wars in ways which were purely science fiction in WWII terms: the gap which superior numbers would have to fill is incalculably more significant.
Plus, of course, you have a progressive effect whereby larger fighting forces require increasingly larger and more complex support structures to maintain their ability to fight. Given the present relatively basic state of the Chinese military, this vast structure would also be extremely difficult to defend. 500 million militarily-capable people doesn't translate into 500 million bullet sponges.
Similarly, in the Korean War the Chinese were technologically very close (or in terms of combat aircraft, often superior) to their opponents. They also had the advantage of fighting on what amounted to home turf, in global terms. Of course, we're arguing about a purely hypothetical scenario which lacks any sort of detailed parameters, so who knows why this conflict would happen, or where, or how, but I can't see the US pulling a Hitleresque World Domination Tour, so I doubt we'd be in any sort of global conquer-and-control conflict, and fighting on home turf is really the sole advantage any high-population low-tech military could hope to recognize.
The mistake everyone seems to be making in this somewhat ludicrous discussion is to assume that the US would fight such a war in the same way the US fights today, or has fought in recent history. Taking on the entire planet would probably be a defensive operation, and while the US isn't geographically ideal for defense, it's pretty good. The US has more than sufficient capability to "reach out and touch" opponents using forces based in the US -- they leave US soil, and they return to US soil after the mission is complete. Few nations can say the same, and none can make that claim on the same scale. So while the US would fight a defensive war, the capability exists to whittle away at the opposition. It seems likely that any such catastrophic conflict would not see the US show the current near-neurotic concern for avoiding civilian casualties, and that factor alone would make things much easier.
All that being said, I'm not convinced it would be a winnable scenario -- quite the opposite -- but sheer simple manpower numbers are hardly the ace in the hole which you and others are making it out to be.
Ha! If I could make the same coin just for lounging around naked all day, or maybe having sex with a bunch of experienced professionals, I sure as hell would ditch this desk job double-quick. As for "stealing a woman's innocence"... I'd wager that few pornstars got tricked into that line of work during whatever period of their life they were experiencing this mystical innocence you're hung up on.
Go for the money. You are paid to work. If they stopped paying, you'd stop going. That simple fact should form the basis of all your work decisions. Keep your work and the rest of your life separate. You'll be happier in the long run. There is a good reason "don't mix business and pleasure" has become a well-known aphorism.
In my opinion, there isn't much in this world that is more pathetic than people who look to their jobs to find friends and entertainment activities. I want to stress that I certainly have no problems with making friends or having fun at work when it happens "naturally" as a simple result of normal human interaction. I've made my share of friends through work. I even met my wife through work, although we didn't get together until years after we worked together. It's just that a lot of people seem to have lost the ability to separate the two, and the question posed in the article is a prime example of this. Asking whether you should accept a job offer based on how they plan to entertain you is literally the last question you should be asking when seeking employment -- if all else is equal, it's a fine point to consider, but otherwise it should be almost irrelevant.
This job-as-your-life trend has taken on a creepy, over-the-top significance in Corporate America. Now employees are expected to be best-buddies with everybody around them, and to engage in goofy "team building exercises" and other non-work-related activities. In larger companies, it has become de rigueur to structure your life around your job, to the point that simply choosing to not attend "optional" non-work activities can literally jeopardize your position.
Travel a little. There aren't a lot of places left with stations that aren't controlled by ClearChannel or the like. I'd have to drive approximately three hours to come into range of any significant number of stations that aren't "corporate" and I live in an area who's population is approaching the 2 million mark.
In this case, I'd probably blame InterVideo. I've never been too impressed with them or PowerDVD.
As I understand it, the hardware is supposed to be capable of downgrading any HDCP signal.
There is something called the ICF (Image Control Flag, or something like that) which applies to Blu-Ray discs (I'm not sure about HD-DVD) which the pigopolist-types have announced will not be used until 2010. Other HDCP-encoded sources should already be affected by the SDTV downgrade if a filthy-nasty-pirate ("analog") device is mixed into the display chain.
I have heard two conflicting explanations about how this ICF will kick-in in 2010 (or whenever Sony determines that the market is adequately saturated that they can risk pissing everyone off for awhile). The first is that new discs will have this ICF flag activated, and existing equipment will begin to enforce HDCP on media which is so-encoded. The second is that all discs already have the ICF flag set, and that new discs will do something to cause the equipment to begin enforcing HDCP on all ICF-flagged media, including the stuff that was purchased prior to the kick-in date.
Regardless of which is true, both are extremely crappy. I don't care enough about movies to rip them off but these pricks with their increasingly onerous DRM schemes are making it incredibly difficult to do other useful things with home electronics -- things which would otherwise be very easy and useful. Oh well. Entropy increases.
I thought Google Maps was supposed to be the big important world-changing app that brought us the name...??
I'm still kicking myself for not giving this technique a name (and self-promoting For The Win!!!1!) when I started using it this way about seven years ago when IE5 showed up. It seemed like such an obvious thing to do. Within a few weeks we had built a pretty solid, easy to use RPC mechanism around it for internal use, long before SOAP had a name (and long before the standards-nerds mangled SOAP into the hellishly over-complicated monster that it is today -- back then I begged Dave Weiner not to do this, apparently to no effective result).
You know, it's funny how these/. articles never seem to mention that this glorious XMLHttpRequest revolution is entirely based on a Microsoft addition to XML parsing. I think the only place I've ever seen that directly mentioned is on the Apple Developer pages about AJAX (ah yes, here).
Sorry, rambling... to swerve back on topic -- wasn't Google Maps supposed to be THE fancy new AJAX web-app???
And why does "public safety" need 14-20 and 52-69? thats a bit much.
A medium-sized city of perhaps 1 million people is going to have several firefighter and paramedic teams active at any given moment, and a few hundred active-duty police, and those are just the most obvious public safety workers. Allocating 20-some-odd channels to that many people -- and potentially many, many more when a major disaster occurs -- isn't exactly outrageous.
Ah, good old slashdot. A cum-and-blood disease joke warrants a funny mod, whereas you get screwed with a flamebait mod for cleverly turning it into a joke about the miracle of the flow. Probably some foul smelling geek who wishes he went outside enough to play druid wiccan, which he imagines would mean he gets laid more often, but in reality means he'd just be a different kind of smelly hippie.
Having Metric Shitloads of excellent Karma is good, and the occasional troll can be invigorating. Do your worst, filthy hippies.
Slashdot Mirror
As it should be. I have personally been opposed to the IT world's infatuation with contractors throughout my very long career in this business. I have been (and am now) in the "front lines" writing code and building, deploying, and supporting systems and applications, and I have been in various levels of management, some quite high, and sometimes at very large companies. I'm generalizing of course, but it is my experience that contractors are a lot more trouble than they're usually worth. Here I'm speaking of true contractors, who come in to do a job, and leave when that job is complete -- the workforce's equivalent of a transient population -- or prostitutes, LOL.
I am also opposed to the perma-temp phenomenon, and now that I'm writing this, I suspect that's closer to the scenario you're describing. A discussion of perma-temps leads to the greatest evil that exists in corporate culture today: Human Resources. I've ranted about it before, and I'll do it again: people should not be treated in the same way you address a shortage of copier-paper and rubber bands. The primary role of HR in large corporations today is to simply make people disposable. Contractors go a long way towards enabling this mindset.
There are a million other angles, of course. I won't pretend I haven't done contract work before, but it's typically to get my foot in the door of a good company, at which point I jump ship and go permanent. Again, I prefer this from long experience working with both sides. And I'll add that in that experience, I've also seen no shortage of contractors with attitudes. We once had an MQ expert on contract with us, and while he was generally a nice guy, when it came to any discussion of contracting versus FTEs, he made it clear that his opinion of going full-time was that only the stupid or incapable did this. Hopefully the door didn't hit his ass too hard on the way out.
Face it, you're temporary. It was your choice. Don't like it? Change it.
Better equipment was exactly the reason I originally started telecommuting. I quickly realized that everything is better at home than what they provide in the office. Today my in-office co-workers suffer those little pseudo-cubicles -- connected desks with half-height walls. And these are the highest ranking non-management employees in a company of 50,000+ people. No windows, no privacy, noisy environment, crappy lighting, equipment that is years out of date, cheap office chairs... No thanks.
On top of that, instead of wasting an hour each day driving to and from work, I either get an extra hour of work finished (if I'm on a project which requires it), or I finish an hour earlier.
To get on-topic with the article itself, what always depresses me is to see the people who get excited about these ill-conceived team-building events. I go to work to get paid. I don't take jobs to make friends, I'm able to do that on my own, in Real Life, without the assistance of HR. And in my world, I certainly don't make friends by playing games better suited to a classroom full of eight-year-olds.
In general I think this leads directly back to a trend which disturbs me greatly: management treating lower-ranking employees as if they're children, almost quite literally. I walked around the office building early one morning, before anyone was there, and was pretty surprised at how much the look-and-feel really does resemble an elementary school. For example, one area is involved in global fund trade corrections. This is an important, complex business which manipulates tens of billions in assets each year. Spread across the wall in that department was a faded series of colored construction-paper circles with big googly eyes at one end, and "FUND CATERPILLAR OF SUCCESS!!" written above it. I have no idea what it meant, but as "motivational decor" options go, it ranked right up there with any third-grade classroom. We have admin assistants who hand out trinkets and junk -- candy, little cheesy "office toys" which invariably bear the company name and logo. There are entire HR-attached groups who do nothing but think up goofy contests and similar activities: my e-mail inbox receives a constant barrage of trivia (often with some politically-correct theme from the Black, Hispanic, Asian or some other Employee Network, one of many GoodThink pseudo-official groups)... Yeah, it's tedious. I don't know, maybe it works. My co-workers aren't exactly the "office pool" types, so we probably aren't the main target of these activities -- but in any case, it really bugs me to see the blatant expression of the attitude that if you're not Management, you're basically a child masquerading as an adult.
I often wonder how much of the company's profits are squandered on this crap. It has to be a significant portion.
You can pair a headset simultaneously with other devices. I don't know that you can pair with two devices when neither is a headset. I imagine the need to do that would be pretty rare, though. Bluetooth in the Treo 650 is strong enough that I can sync with my PC halfway across the house, which is about 70 feet. Well, it's either that strong in the Treo or in the Belkin USB Bluetooth dongle (which is sadly plagued with shitty driver software that WILL destabilize your machine ... made by Widpro or somebody like that).
And you'll get a wireless Bluetooth version of file drag/drop that the OP requested, too.
And all sorts of sync features.
All while enjoying an Apple-smarm-free lifestyle.
Unpiloted isn't the same as remotely-piloted.
I blame television.
At least in GE's implementation of Six Sigma. They found a way to take what is essentially the engineering version of the scientific process, wrap it in so much red tape that it is unworkable (a 12-step process that really had 15 steps) , and put it in the hands of every worker in the company. Originally they gave bonuses for doing it, but eventually they took those away and declared "Thou shalt not get a raise without a Six Sigma Project." What ended up happening is that people refused to make any process or product improvements unless they were part of somebody's (preferably their own) Six Sigma project.
I've seen this happen at four major companies so far (two are places I've worked, and two are places a friend has worked).
Wanna see a pure clusterfuck of total bureaucracy? Find a place that tries to combine Six Sigma and CMM.
It's buzzwordolicious!
That wouldn't buy much, militarily.
By that point in WWII, the Germans who opposed the Russians in WWII were technologically superior largely in theory. They were poorly trained, ill prepared, largely unsupported in the field, their command and support structure at home was crumbling, and they sought to control and occupy a vast, probably unconquerable territory, and their equipment was not designed for the environment in which they fought. Your comparison bears little relevance to America's technological superiority versus the Chinese. We are able to fight wars in ways which were purely science fiction in WWII terms: the gap which superior numbers would have to fill is incalculably more significant.
Plus, of course, you have a progressive effect whereby larger fighting forces require increasingly larger and more complex support structures to maintain their ability to fight. Given the present relatively basic state of the Chinese military, this vast structure would also be extremely difficult to defend. 500 million militarily-capable people doesn't translate into 500 million bullet sponges.
Similarly, in the Korean War the Chinese were technologically very close (or in terms of combat aircraft, often superior) to their opponents. They also had the advantage of fighting on what amounted to home turf, in global terms. Of course, we're arguing about a purely hypothetical scenario which lacks any sort of detailed parameters, so who knows why this conflict would happen, or where, or how, but I can't see the US pulling a Hitleresque World Domination Tour, so I doubt we'd be in any sort of global conquer-and-control conflict, and fighting on home turf is really the sole advantage any high-population low-tech military could hope to recognize.
The mistake everyone seems to be making in this somewhat ludicrous discussion is to assume that the US would fight such a war in the same way the US fights today, or has fought in recent history. Taking on the entire planet would probably be a defensive operation, and while the US isn't geographically ideal for defense, it's pretty good. The US has more than sufficient capability to "reach out and touch" opponents using forces based in the US -- they leave US soil, and they return to US soil after the mission is complete. Few nations can say the same, and none can make that claim on the same scale. So while the US would fight a defensive war, the capability exists to whittle away at the opposition. It seems likely that any such catastrophic conflict would not see the US show the current near-neurotic concern for avoiding civilian casualties, and that factor alone would make things much easier.
All that being said, I'm not convinced it would be a winnable scenario -- quite the opposite -- but sheer simple manpower numbers are hardly the ace in the hole which you and others are making it out to be.
Are you proposing that they'll throw rocks at us?
There is far more to an effective military than raw manpower figures.
LOL, perfect... Blog has to be the dumbest fucking word my generation has created to date.
Ha! If I could make the same coin just for lounging around naked all day, or maybe having sex with a bunch of experienced professionals, I sure as hell would ditch this desk job double-quick. As for "stealing a woman's innocence"... I'd wager that few pornstars got tricked into that line of work during whatever period of their life they were experiencing this mystical innocence you're hung up on.
You have issues.
Go for the money. You are paid to work. If they stopped paying, you'd stop going. That simple fact should form the basis of all your work decisions. Keep your work and the rest of your life separate. You'll be happier in the long run. There is a good reason "don't mix business and pleasure" has become a well-known aphorism.
In my opinion, there isn't much in this world that is more pathetic than people who look to their jobs to find friends and entertainment activities. I want to stress that I certainly have no problems with making friends or having fun at work when it happens "naturally" as a simple result of normal human interaction. I've made my share of friends through work. I even met my wife through work, although we didn't get together until years after we worked together. It's just that a lot of people seem to have lost the ability to separate the two, and the question posed in the article is a prime example of this. Asking whether you should accept a job offer based on how they plan to entertain you is literally the last question you should be asking when seeking employment -- if all else is equal, it's a fine point to consider, but otherwise it should be almost irrelevant.
This job-as-your-life trend has taken on a creepy, over-the-top significance in Corporate America. Now employees are expected to be best-buddies with everybody around them, and to engage in goofy "team building exercises" and other non-work-related activities. In larger companies, it has become de rigueur to structure your life around your job, to the point that simply choosing to not attend "optional" non-work activities can literally jeopardize your position.
Speaking as somebody who works with VCs regularly, I assure you they generally weren't the ones who lost their shirts when "the bubble" burst.
Yay! Then you can watch them in depressingly over-aggressive hyper-compressed format. Awesome.
It was known in IE6. It's hardly accurate to say it was "discovered" in IE7.
Travel a little. There aren't a lot of places left with stations that aren't controlled by ClearChannel or the like. I'd have to drive approximately three hours to come into range of any significant number of stations that aren't "corporate" and I live in an area who's population is approaching the 2 million mark.
something our exploration of it could take advantage of
Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ.
Just for future reference, "lamenting" doesn't mean "doubting," "questioning," etc.
And to test drive - what's wrong with the radio?
Not everybody has Back Street Boys posters on the ceiling over their bed.
In this case, I'd probably blame InterVideo. I've never been too impressed with them or PowerDVD.
As I understand it, the hardware is supposed to be capable of downgrading any HDCP signal.
There is something called the ICF (Image Control Flag, or something like that) which applies to Blu-Ray discs (I'm not sure about HD-DVD) which the pigopolist-types have announced will not be used until 2010. Other HDCP-encoded sources should already be affected by the SDTV downgrade if a filthy-nasty-pirate ("analog") device is mixed into the display chain.
I have heard two conflicting explanations about how this ICF will kick-in in 2010 (or whenever Sony determines that the market is adequately saturated that they can risk pissing everyone off for awhile). The first is that new discs will have this ICF flag activated, and existing equipment will begin to enforce HDCP on media which is so-encoded. The second is that all discs already have the ICF flag set, and that new discs will do something to cause the equipment to begin enforcing HDCP on all ICF-flagged media, including the stuff that was purchased prior to the kick-in date.
Regardless of which is true, both are extremely crappy. I don't care enough about movies to rip them off but these pricks with their increasingly onerous DRM schemes are making it incredibly difficult to do other useful things with home electronics -- things which would otherwise be very easy and useful. Oh well. Entropy increases.
It's supposed to downgrade to a standard-definition resolution when some part of the chain fails the HDCP handshaking operation.
Gmail is arguably the best-known AJAX application
/. articles never seem to mention that this glorious XMLHttpRequest revolution is entirely based on a Microsoft addition to XML parsing. I think the only place I've ever seen that directly mentioned is on the Apple Developer pages about AJAX (ah yes, here).
I thought Google Maps was supposed to be the big important world-changing app that brought us the name...??
I'm still kicking myself for not giving this technique a name (and self-promoting For The Win!!!1!) when I started using it this way about seven years ago when IE5 showed up. It seemed like such an obvious thing to do. Within a few weeks we had built a pretty solid, easy to use RPC mechanism around it for internal use, long before SOAP had a name (and long before the standards-nerds mangled SOAP into the hellishly over-complicated monster that it is today -- back then I begged Dave Weiner not to do this, apparently to no effective result).
You know, it's funny how these
Sorry, rambling... to swerve back on topic -- wasn't Google Maps supposed to be THE fancy new AJAX web-app???
I have mod points, but I can't seem to find "poster is a humorless cocksmoker" in the drop-down list.
And why does "public safety" need 14-20 and 52-69? thats a bit much.
A medium-sized city of perhaps 1 million people is going to have several firefighter and paramedic teams active at any given moment, and a few hundred active-duty police, and those are just the most obvious public safety workers. Allocating 20-some-odd channels to that many people -- and potentially many, many more when a major disaster occurs -- isn't exactly outrageous.
Ah, good old slashdot. A cum-and-blood disease joke warrants a funny mod, whereas you get screwed with a flamebait mod for cleverly turning it into a joke about the miracle of the flow. Probably some foul smelling geek who wishes he went outside enough to play druid wiccan, which he imagines would mean he gets laid more often, but in reality means he'd just be a different kind of smelly hippie.
Having Metric Shitloads of excellent Karma is good, and the occasional troll can be invigorating. Do your worst, filthy hippies.
"Not even a little bit curious? You're not really a lesbian if I'm there..."