I am sorry, but this tariff business is definitely a two way street. For example, from WTO news:
The United States and New Zealand requested the establishment of a World Trade Organization (WTO) panel to review Canada's compliance with a previous WTO ruling against Canada's excessive use of export subsidies.
What you're describing is known as insider trading - it's a very serious offense and typically involves prison time.
With insider trading you have to have foreknowledge of information that will affect stock price and trade based on that information. There is nothing that prevents insiders buying company stock and later selling the stock after a increase in price so long as the transactions are not driven by knowledge that is available only by insiders.
IBM will continue to ship, support and develop AIX which represents years of IBM innovation, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and many patents. As always, IBM will stand behind our products and our customers.
That's too bad. Amazon.com readers picked these books as the best fiction of the 20th century. To really enjoy the movie you have to know the books.
Does Tolkien ever get around to tying all these loose ends together?
He ties all the loose ends together, and then in the appendices adds in enough backstory to support another 10 books.
Do you think that Jackson can tear himself away from the computerized stuff long enough to actually tell a story in this one?
I don't think that it is possible to tell the LOTR story in less than about 20-30 hours of movies. When I saw that somebody was going to try I shuddered. There is a lot of stuff getting mutilated or left out in these movies.
On the other hand I do not believe that it is possible to do any better on film than Jackson is doing. What he is doing is far beyond what I thought would happen.
I saw an interesting study of MRIs conducted on human brains after excessively long work hours. The conclusion was that anything much over 8 hrs per day the MRI of the worker was indistinguishable from that of a sleeping person.
I wish you luck on a project coded by a bunch of sleepwalkers.
Clearly you are being asked to make a lot of personal sacrifices - and ridiculous ones at that. One thing you didn't say is why they don't bring in more consultants to lighten the load? Clearly that would result in a more realistic work load and probably a better quality product.
Unless you have a really stupid management team, they are going to realize what you are doing, and have some regrets about it. Point out the absurdity of he situation and ask for some compensation down the road.
If neither of these approaches work, you are sort of stuck in this economy because of the risk of blowing it off. But you sure should start looking for another job if your management doesn't care enough about you and know enough about software development to force this on you.
That is assuming that you are actually being paid on a salary basis. Many employers in small companies are sloppy about this, having provisions to dock pay etc.
the overall jobless rate was twenty-five precent with another twenty-five percent of breadwinners having their wages and hours cut.
That does not include the population of people who while employed had jobs that were below their skill level, nor does it include people who had dropped out of the labor market and stopped looking for jobs.
The dust bowl problem was blown out of proportion for political purposes
That could be said about almost anything that happens in the US.
the population was still largely farm-based
Not so. The farm based population in the US at this time was at 20%.
Most of the farming families still had pioneer land from their ancestors and had not yet been conned into leveraging that land in a big way to buy huge combines
A large number farms by that period of time were using some mechanized equipment, often purchased on credit. By this time new crops, tractors capable of both plowing and harvesting were in wide use. This led to cultivation practices and overplanting that caused a large oversupply of farm produce and numbers of bankruptcies large enough to cause bank failures. One of the causes of the dust bowl was in fact this mechanization.
The fact of the matter is that farm prices and income were extremely depressed during this period of time, and did not recover until WW II. Farm income fell 66% from 1920 to 1932. Starting in 1920 per acre land prices started dropping severely to the point were they were less than half their 1920 value in 1932. The all-time record for farm bankruptcies occured in 1925.
Nor was the US economy at that time anything like agrarian. The US populatation was NOT 'largely farm based', far from it. Farm income in 1929 was only 9% of the total national income, and the per capita farm income was 1/3 that of the national per capita income. There is no way that this provided any sort of buffer to the economy.
If you have a majority of your population who can get their essential needs filled by their own land
20% is NOT the majority of the population.
you have a huge "domestic product" that isn't in the figures you cite
GDP is a composite number that includes farm output.
I am sorry, but your premise that current economic conditions somehow are as bad as the great depression are totally off the wall. The fact is that by real historical measurements what we have now barely qualifies as a recession. When I see things like increases in outbreaks of diseases like tuberculosis, malaria and yellow fever like in the Great Depression, or numbers like 65% of the population is living below the poverty line, THEN you would have an argument. Right now there is no such thing.
While I agree that underemployment is a more meaningful indicator of the pain that is going in in the job market, you are on pretty shaky ground when you try to equate unemployment in the 30s to underemployment in the 21st century. In the 30's underemployment reached estimated levels of 80%.
Sure there were many more farms in that period of time. They were going bust too. Didn't you ever read Grapes of Wrath? And then there were the bank failures. Now banks are far safer. Now we have Social Security. No such thing in the 30's. Ditto unemployment insurance. Today most families have two wage earners - not so in the 30's.
Even more telling is what happened to GDP. In the 1929 - 1933 the US GDP fell a staggering 33 percent. That is a horrific number by any standard.
If we compare GDP changes we get something like:
1927-1931 = -33% (the big one) 1972-1975 = -4.9% (biggest postwar recession) 2000-2003 = +6.5% (because of GDP drops in 2001 have been wiped out by ecomomic growth since then)
People are complaining now that about 1/2 of college grads are not getting offers. Well, you know what? I graduated from college during the 70's recession. At the time we were seeing numbers like 10% of the graduating class getting job offers.
What we have here is tough times for job seekers, not a great depression.
Oh, btw I am underemployed, and my wife is unemployed. Is it a real problem? I'm having a tough time seeing it. SUre the car won't be new this year, and no HDTV with digital cable, and few nights out in restaurants. But the bills are getting paid, and the retirement account is being funded.
Compared to what my grandparents went through in the 30's I have no problems at all.
I'd go along with Photoshop and Quark as being irreplaceable in Linux. However I think Dreamweaver and it's ilk are not acceptable for professional level HTML work and wouldn't let anyone reporting to me use it.
MS Publisher - I don't know anyone who has ever used it.
LaTeX is not at all in the same domain as Pagemaker. Two completely different ballgames.
You are not able to communicate to other business people.
That is not what I said. 95% of the documents I get from Windows boxes open fine. In the other 5% people have no objection to storing the file in an alternative format. I communicate with them just fine.
My problem with Windows (which is also shared by a lot of governments) is the proprietary file format may not be accessable at some time in the future. To me that makes Windows unacceptable for business use where the lifetime of a corporation may exceed 100 years.
In the course of my business career I have had need to access 50 year old documents related to critical employee health issues related to workspace chemical exposure. If people were using proprietary storage methods 50 years ago I would not have access to this information. That would have had a negative impact on issues like medical treatment.
And Yes, MacOSX and Windows CAN.
If you think Mac OS X is seamless with Windows, you are incorrect.
but not just any old printer out there works with linux.
That may be important to a hobbyist rummaging through a junk bin, but not to a business environment where there is always an approved hardware list.
KDE & GNOME crash as much if not more than Windows 95. I'm sorry.
Now I know you are out of touch with reality.
and lack of good SOLID multi-processor support.
Even if I agreed with you, which I don't, how is multiprocessor support relevent the the desktop business user? You are grasping at straws.
If you ever want to get into some of the latest applications, you spend HOURS updating libraries which seem to have endless dependancy trees.
Theoretically that is possible. However these days very few applications are distributed in a manner that would require this. In the context of the business user, the fact is that a roll-out of a new application would be handled using a pre-built package.
I am sorry, but you are out of it. The fact of life is that major organizations are starting to realize that there are some very important issues to being tied to a single vendor using using proprietary data storage formats, and that there is a way out.
The only problems I have with the Linux desktop (and yes I use it exclusively) are the occasional MS files that trickle in that Open Office can't handle. You know what? While this may fly in the face of business reality, so far I have been able to get by asking for that occasional bad actor to be resent using RTF or CSV or whatever.
It seems to me that the problem is NOT Linux, but rather widespread reliance on proprietary standards that cannot be read by other software. To me, if I was running a company this tying up of the companies documents in this manner would not be accepted.
Until MS gets out of the proprietary file format business, Windows is not ready for the desktop.
They're really pushing for an operating system that let you browse the Internet instead, where perhaps the browser component of the OS might happen to be called Internet Explorer.
In a related story, DrJooz and his hax0r budz cross off MacOS X as a happy hacking playground with the statement "Without direct access to the underlying OS via the browser Mac OS X is just going to too secure to be any fun."
It is widely anticipated that Microsoft's plans to run Windows browsing services in Ring 0 will provide DrJooz and his friends lots of fun and games.
Lazy Hiring Managers get what they deserve
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The fact is that there are many candidates to choose from for any open position, and hiring managers are always looking for one way or another to eliminate an applicant based on any concievable characteristic regardless of the likelihood that characteristic affects the ability and commitment to getting the job done.
How wrong the concept can be is easily shown by the record of a person I used to work for, John Fenn.
Now John is a little up there in years. He's 84 or so years old. John's mind however is as active as anyone 1/4 his age. Plus he has great enthusiasm for his work, and a tremendously broad experience to draw from. John's current employer offered him a job when his last employer forced him out.
Now John's new employer has found itself with a great deal of prestige, because John was awarded a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For work he did while in his 70's.
If you judge people's capabilities based on age, you are making a HUGE mistake. Those 20-somethings? They haven't proved that they are capable of anything but littering a source code repository with crap. Now that 40 year old coder? Do your think he would still be coding if he didn't enjoy it? Or wasn't succesful at it? Chances are that 40 ear old coder has turned down promotion to management a number of times - he enjoys coding to much to leave it.
Remember - Albert Einstein turned down opportunities to be head of the IfAS, and the first President of Israel for the simple reason he liked what he was doing better.
The fact is that one of these hiring managers would have turned down what Time now calls the 'Man of The Century' because he didn't make that jump to management.
It's too bad (for them) because I am going to eat their lunch with my team of 40+ year old programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
What we really need is a device to detect use of a cellphone in a moving car, and steer well clear of it...
In luxury vehicles it could also fire an EMP pulse thus burning out the phone.
What I want is a genetically engineered lawn - the blades of grass never grow to 3" and stop, and there is built-in resistance to Round-Up.
I am sorry, but this tariff business is definitely a two way street. For example, from WTO news:
The United States and New Zealand requested the establishment of a World Trade Organization (WTO) panel to review Canada's compliance with a previous WTO ruling against Canada's excessive use of export subsidies.
SCO is going to sue Linus Torvalds
Since Torvalds is holder of the Linux trademark, I think that SCO must eventually do this to realize their ultimate goal of owning Linux.
This will unleash a jihad.
What you're describing is known as insider trading - it's a very serious offense and typically involves prison time.
With insider trading you have to have foreknowledge of information that will affect stock price and trade based on that information. There is nothing that prevents insiders buying company stock and later selling the stock after a increase in price so long as the transactions are not driven by knowledge that is available only by insiders.
Right now it's hard to tell if this is going on.
I remember reading somewhere that some of the root nameservers were running on AIX.
IBM will continue to ship, support and develop AIX which represents years of IBM innovation, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and many patents. As always, IBM will stand behind our products and our customers.
# # #
Trink Guarino
Director, IBM Media Relations
PS. Nyah Nyah Nyah
So when does SCO sue Sun?
Not likely. Sun paid a double buttload of money to get full rights to include SysV source in thier systems.
IBM can't sell me a server with AIX on it?
Much more likely that the sun won't come up tomorrow.
-Eric
I haven't read the books
That's too bad. Amazon.com readers picked these books as the best fiction of the 20th century. To really enjoy the movie you have to know the books.
Does Tolkien ever get around to tying all these loose ends together?
He ties all the loose ends together, and then in the appendices adds in enough backstory to support another 10 books.
Do you think that Jackson can tear himself away from the computerized stuff long enough to actually tell a story in this one?
I don't think that it is possible to tell the LOTR story in less than about 20-30 hours of movies. When I saw that somebody was going to try I shuddered. There is a lot of stuff getting mutilated or left out in these movies.
On the other hand I do not believe that it is possible to do any better on film than Jackson is doing. What he is doing is far beyond what I thought would happen.
From Fortune :
As a delighted user has put it, "The only way to make this software malfunction is to fire a bullet into the computer running it."
Didn't Tandem actually run an ad claiming that if you shot a bullet into their servers they would keep running?
I saw an interesting study of MRIs conducted on human brains after excessively long work hours. The conclusion was that anything much over 8 hrs per day the MRI of the worker was indistinguishable from that of a sleeping person.
I wish you luck on a project coded by a bunch of sleepwalkers.
Clearly you are being asked to make a lot of personal sacrifices - and ridiculous ones at that. One thing you didn't say is why they don't bring in more consultants to lighten the load? Clearly that would result in a more realistic work load and probably a better quality product.
Unless you have a really stupid management team, they are going to realize what you are doing, and have some regrets about it. Point out the absurdity of he situation and ask for some compensation down the road.
If neither of these approaches work, you are sort of stuck in this economy because of the risk of blowing it off. But you sure should start looking for another job if your management doesn't care enough about you and know enough about software development to force this on you.
That is assuming that you are actually being paid on a salary basis. Many employers in small companies are sloppy about this, having provisions to dock pay etc.
the overall jobless rate was twenty-five precent with another twenty-five percent of breadwinners having their wages and hours cut.
That does not include the population of people who while employed had jobs that were below their skill level, nor does it include people who had dropped out of the labor market and stopped looking for jobs.
The dust bowl problem was blown out of proportion for political purposes
That could be said about almost anything that happens in the US.
the population was still largely farm-based
Not so. The farm based population in the US at this time was at 20%.
Most of the farming families still had pioneer land from their ancestors and had not yet been conned into leveraging that land in a big way to buy huge combines
A large number farms by that period of time were using some mechanized equipment, often purchased on credit. By this time new crops, tractors capable of both plowing and harvesting were in wide use. This led to cultivation practices and overplanting that caused a large oversupply of farm produce and numbers of bankruptcies large enough to cause bank failures. One of the causes of the dust bowl was in fact this mechanization.
The fact of the matter is that farm prices and income were extremely depressed during this period of time, and did not recover until WW II. Farm income fell 66% from 1920 to 1932. Starting in 1920 per acre land prices started dropping severely to the point were they were less than half their 1920 value in 1932. The all-time record for farm bankruptcies occured in 1925.
Nor was the US economy at that time anything like agrarian. The US populatation was NOT 'largely farm based', far from it. Farm income in 1929 was only 9% of the total national income, and the per capita farm income was 1/3 that of the national per capita income. There is no way that this provided any sort of buffer to the economy.
If you have a majority of your population who can get their essential needs filled by their own land
20% is NOT the majority of the population.
you have a huge "domestic product" that isn't in the figures you cite
GDP is a composite number that includes farm output.
I am sorry, but your premise that current economic conditions somehow are as bad as the great depression are totally off the wall. The fact is that by real historical measurements what we have now barely qualifies as a recession. When I see things like increases in outbreaks of diseases like tuberculosis, malaria and yellow fever like in the Great Depression, or numbers like 65% of the population is living below the poverty line, THEN you would have an argument. Right now there is no such thing.
While I agree that underemployment is a more meaningful indicator of the pain that is going in in the job market, you are on pretty shaky ground when you try to equate unemployment in the 30s to underemployment in the 21st century. In the 30's underemployment reached estimated levels of 80%.
Sure there were many more farms in that period of time. They were going bust too. Didn't you ever read Grapes of Wrath? And then there were the bank failures. Now banks are far safer. Now we have Social Security. No such thing in the 30's. Ditto unemployment insurance. Today most families have two wage earners - not so in the 30's.
Even more telling is what happened to GDP. In the 1929 - 1933 the US GDP fell a staggering 33 percent. That is a horrific number by any standard.
If we compare GDP changes we get something like:
1927-1931 = -33% (the big one)
1972-1975 = -4.9% (biggest postwar recession)
2000-2003 = +6.5% (because of GDP drops in 2001 have been wiped out by ecomomic growth since then)
People are complaining now that about 1/2 of college grads are not getting offers. Well, you know what? I graduated from college during the 70's recession. At the time we were seeing numbers like 10% of the graduating class getting job offers.
What we have here is tough times for job seekers, not a great depression.
Oh, btw I am underemployed, and my wife is unemployed. Is it a real problem? I'm having a tough time seeing it. SUre the car won't be new this year, and no HDTV with digital cable, and few nights out in restaurants. But the bills are getting paid, and the retirement account is being funded.
Compared to what my grandparents went through in the 30's I have no problems at all.
There's no good reason to switch to the metric system.
I would think that the simple economics of having to maintain two standards vs. one standard would be a good reason.
it doesn't really matter all that much in day to day life
Except I have to buy two sets of wrenches.
I use PHP/Postgresql for this sort of thing. It's far better than Access after you build up a code base.
I'd go along with Photoshop and Quark as being irreplaceable in Linux. However I think Dreamweaver and it's ilk are not acceptable for professional level HTML work and wouldn't let anyone reporting to me use it.
MS Publisher - I don't know anyone who has ever used it.
LaTeX is not at all in the same domain as Pagemaker. Two completely different ballgames.
I don't think the government of Brazil is going to be the next Pixar
e ad er$107
Pixar is pretty much a Linux shop these days.
http://linux.bryanconsulting.com/stories/storyR
You are not able to communicate to other business people.
That is not what I said. 95% of the documents I get from Windows boxes open fine. In the other 5% people have no objection to storing the file in an alternative format. I communicate with them just fine.
My problem with Windows (which is also shared by a lot of governments) is the proprietary file format may not be accessable at some time in the future. To me that makes Windows unacceptable for business use where the lifetime of a corporation may exceed 100 years.
In the course of my business career I have had need to access 50 year old documents related to critical employee health issues related to workspace chemical exposure. If people were using proprietary storage methods 50 years ago I would not have access to this information. That would have had a negative impact on issues like medical treatment.
And Yes, MacOSX and Windows CAN.
If you think Mac OS X is seamless with Windows, you are incorrect.
but not just any old printer out there works with linux.
That may be important to a hobbyist rummaging through a junk bin, but not to a business environment where there is always an approved hardware list.
KDE & GNOME crash as much if not more than Windows 95. I'm sorry.
Now I know you are out of touch with reality.
and lack of good SOLID multi-processor support.
Even if I agreed with you, which I don't, how is multiprocessor support relevent the the desktop business user? You are grasping at straws.
If you ever want to get into some of the latest applications, you spend HOURS updating libraries which seem to have endless dependancy trees.
Theoretically that is possible. However these days very few applications are distributed in a manner that would require this. In the context of the business user, the fact is that a roll-out of a new application would be handled using a pre-built package.
I am sorry, but you are out of it. The fact of life is that major organizations are starting to realize that there are some very important issues to being tied to a single vendor using using proprietary data storage formats, and that there is a way out.
Linux isn't ready for the desktop.
Then what is? Windows? BeOS? Mac OS X?
The only problems I have with the Linux desktop (and yes I use it exclusively) are the occasional MS files that trickle in that Open Office can't handle. You know what? While this may fly in the face of business reality, so far I have been able to get by asking for that occasional bad actor to be resent using RTF or CSV or whatever.
It seems to me that the problem is NOT Linux, but rather widespread reliance on proprietary standards that cannot be read by other software. To me, if I was running a company this tying up of the companies documents in this manner would not be accepted.
Until MS gets out of the proprietary file format business, Windows is not ready for the desktop.
They're really pushing for an operating system that let you browse the Internet instead, where perhaps the browser component of the OS might happen to be called Internet Explorer.
In a related story, DrJooz and his hax0r budz cross off MacOS X as a happy hacking playground with the statement "Without direct access to the underlying OS via the browser Mac OS X is just going to too secure to be any fun."
It is widely anticipated that Microsoft's plans to run Windows browsing services in Ring 0 will provide DrJooz and his friends lots of fun and games.
The fact is that there are many candidates to choose from for any open position, and hiring managers are always looking for one way or another to eliminate an applicant based on any concievable characteristic regardless of the likelihood that characteristic affects the ability and commitment to getting the job done.
How wrong the concept can be is easily shown by the record of a person I used to work for, John Fenn.
Now John is a little up there in years. He's 84 or so years old. John's mind however is as active as anyone 1/4 his age. Plus he has great enthusiasm for his work, and a tremendously broad experience to draw from. John's current employer offered him a job when his last employer forced him out.
Now John's new employer has found itself with a great deal of prestige, because John was awarded a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For work he did while in his 70's.
If you judge people's capabilities based on age, you are making a HUGE mistake. Those 20-somethings? They haven't proved that they are capable of anything but littering a source code repository with crap. Now that 40 year old coder? Do your think he would still be coding if he didn't enjoy it? Or wasn't succesful at it? Chances are that 40 ear old coder has turned down promotion to management a number of times - he enjoys coding to much to leave it.
Remember - Albert Einstein turned down opportunities to be head of the IfAS, and the first President of Israel for the simple reason he liked what he was doing better.
The fact is that one of these hiring managers would have turned down what Time now calls the 'Man of The Century' because he didn't make that jump to management.
It's too bad (for them) because I am going to eat their lunch with my team of 40+ year old programmers.
Yes.