This goes out to all of those complaining about not being able to take more than 3 days off for decades at a time - why in heck are you still working for that employer? I've certainly never had difficulty taking vacations, and I've worked at fortune-5 companies and tiny startups and everything in between. If you are silly enough to stay in a job that is not meeting your requirements when there are so many options that would, you have only yourself to blame. If unfair vacation policies were costing such companies their talent pool, you can bet they'd find a way to accommodate you, just as they have found a way to accommodate those affordable indian employees you have all mentioned, who get 2-3 weeks at a stretch. Heck, these days, I tend to negotiate an exchange of salary for more 'european' quantities of PTO during the hiring process, and you can bet that if I've exchanged income for extra PTO, I'm damn well going to take it every year. If you are a valued employee, no employer is going to be able to limit your PTO. If you're not a valued employee, either become one, or find an employer who will recognize your value. Those are really your only options in a market economy unless you are going to form a union and force a contract on them - and good luck with that.
So basically, there will eventually be a strong market for experienced enterprise developers who have taken the time to learn COBOL. They can maintain the existing system while learning it in sufficient detail to begin the process of implementing a replacement via 'modern' technology. Learning a new language, I don't care how obtuse, is not some kind of impossible task, especially for an experienced software engineer. I've lost count of how many new languages and frameworks I've had to pick up on the job over the course of a 22 year career so far - pretty much all of the mainstream options, at one point or another, with COBOL being one of the few exceptions, and my modern enterprise software development chops are top notch. If some bank wants to double my income, I'll happily start learning COBOL right now. Triple it and I'll even consider moving to NYC. Until the market provides that kind of return on my own investment of time and effort, neither I nor the vast majority of my peers are interested. As soon as it does, there won't be a shortage of capable COBOL talent for long.
Having been through this very scenario, you'd all be wise to go back and read your stock option grants very carefully because odds are very good that the fine print says that the company can 'buy' any unvested options back for the strike price, meaning you don't get squat. At a certain advertising company (that I'm perfectly happy to name - fastclick, taken over by valueclick), the acquiring company turned around and revoked the unvested options of every non-executive employee at the acquired company. They turned that around and offered a much less lucrative deal to anyone that stayed, then promptly drove the company into the ground - or should I say, continued the process of driving the company into the ground.
IMO, the kind of people who would do something like this tend to be in the process of making their own bed. This'll come back to haunt Zynga, one way or another. The whole point of offering equity is because early employees are taking a huge risk, precisely because the potential upside is large. To have the efforts of those employees drive the value of the company up to the point that the company then turns around and says that their equity grant is now too large is just so much bullshit. Back when those shares were next to worthless and the early employees were putting in the long hours to make something from nothing, would the CEO have been so comfortable coming to those employees and telling them that they were only worth some fraction of what they had previously been offered? I highly doubt it.
Sadly, this kind of attitude has become increasingly pervasive in this industry over the last decade. The startup culture developed because employees felt a real sense of ownership of what they built, in large part because they were actually rewarded for their efforts. With the rise of companies financed almost from day one by aggressive venture capitalists, that ethic has disappeared. Now, it is all about VC's preserving as much of the value for themselves as they think they can get away with, at the expense of the folks doing the actual work.
The concept of globalism does not have anything inherently wrong with it. I think it is a tragedy that local cultures tend to die under the weight of the incoming american culture, which has very little to recommend it. I lived in London, England during the decade that American culture really began to dominate youths under 25, and it is quite sad how different the place is today, 10 years after I left. Strip malls and fast food everywhere you look, just like here.
However, when politicians speak of globalism, they are usually referring to efforts to create a unified global economy. Once again, this idea does not have anything inherently wrong with it, except that the efforts are dominated by western economic interests, most specifically trans national corporations. Also, the WTO mandates that WTO interests supercede local laws. This has the potential to limit democracy in member nations, since a democratically elected government body might enact environmental legislation that 'violates' a WTO trade rule, and any company negatively affected by the legislation would have the ability to sue the member nation for damages to their 'free trade.' Clearly, this gives much greater power to corporate interests than to voters. Additionally, globalization allows corps to transfer assets between subsidiaries in multiple countries, eliminating the impression of profitability and thereby eliminating any taxation that they may be responsible for. This transfers more and more of the tax burden to ordinary taxpayers at the same time that more and more of the world's money supply is actually controlled by corporations.
I believe that 'globalization' could be a positive force for the global community, but its current implementation serves noone without a massive stake in a transnational corporation, kind of like most politicians in the US and elsewhere.
Certainly, organizations like the Imf COULD serve a vital purpose, but that doesn't mean that they do. When the global financial institutions provide grants and loans only on condition that the country receiving the funds direct their economy in a manner that benefits corporate interests, it is criminal. Forcing a farmer away from subsistence farming into cash crops that are dependant upon fertilizer and seed stock purchases from 1st world agribusiness, not to mention forcing monoculture practices that promote infestation of pests, thereby encouraging dependance upon chemical pest control, is doing nothing other than funnel profits into corporate pockets at the expense of human quality of life. We should be providing funds to help those economies become self sufficient, not dependant upon our corporations.
Organizations like the WTO have the power to override local environmental legislation if it impacts corporate profits, under the guise of 'fair trade.' No one is going to convince me that organizations such as the IMF or WTO are essential to the well being of the world economy. They are nothing more than organization designed to strongarm smaller economies into funneling their limited funds right into corporate pockets
I do believe that globalization could be a good thing. Certainly, we want conditions in the 3rd world to improve, but I have yet to see evidence that the new world order does anything whatsoever towards that goal. I do see corporate support of Death Squads, green 'revolution' caused famine, and the violation of human rights wherever corporations have significant influence over 3rd world government. If our global economic organizations worked to PREVENT such conditions, then we might be onto something. Until then, however, I will be 100% opposed to corporatization and globalization. The goal should be an improvement on the human condition around the planet, not maximizing profits for the tiny fraction of people that actually benefit from these programs.
I have been on both sides of this equation. Some years ago I was a junior level programmer at a small failing startup. We had one experienced and talented programmer who made all architectural decisions, and 3 (including myself) engineers who were talented but exceedingly lacking in experience. When the company started to fail, the eperienced engineer started fielding job offers from a variety of companies, and he ALWAYS proposed to prospective employers that they take the entire engineering team. It is unclear how forceful his proposals were, but it might well have been a condition of his acceptance (thank you, James!). And that is the story of how I came to be an engineer at Cisco with no degree and almost no experience.
Years later, I was in the same position, although I wasn't interested in preserving an entire team. There were members of the team I wanted to keep together, and made sure that everone important received job offers appropriate to their skills and needs.
Don't forget that a really good team is worth far more than the sum of its members. It can take a long time to build a really good rapport between team members, if it happens at all, and it isn't something that any prospective employer should throw away lightly. That is a pretty compelling argument.
The whole point of all of the global economic organizations and treaties is to provide market protection to the large transnational corporations. Any time a member country passes legislation giving preferential treatment to small or local businesses, the WTO turns around and levies fines and/or trade sanctions, or the world bank restricts devlopment funds until the restrictions are removed. If you think you can escape the large transnationals just by hiding behind a border, you have another think coming.
Every country may not be quite a bad as ours, but they are all heading that direction, and it is only a matter of time. I guess you could move to Cuba! At least right now, in the US, citizens have some rights and protection from the authorities, even if certain forces are constantly lobbying to reduce our rights and freedoms. I would still rather live in a place where the press is free to report what they want, even if the press is almost entirely dominated by corporate interests, and where cops have to at least call a judge before breaking down my door to confiscate my belongings.
I certainly wouldn't mind if my tax dollars went to services that I actually felt I needed, but then I wouldn't have to spend my after tax dollars on the very consumables I should have subsidized by my government, and that might cut into corporate profits. God forbid I should spend a couple dollars a day on public transport, rather than $20,000+ dollars on a car plus maintenance, insurance, and petroleum costs (and pollution).
But that's just my opinion.
Ask this question again in 4 years, and we will see just how bad our new friend in the white house has made things.
Not true. Before, nearly all of the kinetic energy of the wave converts to potential energy (and sound, heat, etc), which converts back into kinteic energy as the wave rolls back out. Now, some of the kinetic energy is converted into electricity, which means less converts to potential, which means that the wave rolls back with less energy. This will MOST DEFINITELY have an impact, although it might well be negligible.
Folks, this is not totally renewable. Granted, this is probably far fetched, but the principle of conservation of energy does apply. Has anyone done any research into the affect of the depletion of wave energy on the world ecosystem. Could installing these systems ruin it for surfers everywhere?
--sam
A pressure sensitive platform or pad which is capable of sending a single signal upon detecting the presence of a suitable quantity of pressure on itself from above. The signal may be in any form, a voltage, a distinguishing sound, a distinctive colored light,...
Extensions of the above patent might include pressure sensitivity allowing modulation of the original signal, or labeling the upper surface of the device in order to identify the signal which will be sent
Slashdot Mirror
This goes out to all of those complaining about not being able to take more than 3 days off for decades at a time - why in heck are you still working for that employer? I've certainly never had difficulty taking vacations, and I've worked at fortune-5 companies and tiny startups and everything in between. If you are silly enough to stay in a job that is not meeting your requirements when there are so many options that would, you have only yourself to blame. If unfair vacation policies were costing such companies their talent pool, you can bet they'd find a way to accommodate you, just as they have found a way to accommodate those affordable indian employees you have all mentioned, who get 2-3 weeks at a stretch. Heck, these days, I tend to negotiate an exchange of salary for more 'european' quantities of PTO during the hiring process, and you can bet that if I've exchanged income for extra PTO, I'm damn well going to take it every year. If you are a valued employee, no employer is going to be able to limit your PTO. If you're not a valued employee, either become one, or find an employer who will recognize your value. Those are really your only options in a market economy unless you are going to form a union and force a contract on them - and good luck with that.
So basically, there will eventually be a strong market for experienced enterprise developers who have taken the time to learn COBOL. They can maintain the existing system while learning it in sufficient detail to begin the process of implementing a replacement via 'modern' technology. Learning a new language, I don't care how obtuse, is not some kind of impossible task, especially for an experienced software engineer. I've lost count of how many new languages and frameworks I've had to pick up on the job over the course of a 22 year career so far - pretty much all of the mainstream options, at one point or another, with COBOL being one of the few exceptions, and my modern enterprise software development chops are top notch. If some bank wants to double my income, I'll happily start learning COBOL right now. Triple it and I'll even consider moving to NYC. Until the market provides that kind of return on my own investment of time and effort, neither I nor the vast majority of my peers are interested. As soon as it does, there won't be a shortage of capable COBOL talent for long.
Having been through this very scenario, you'd all be wise to go back and read your stock option grants very carefully because odds are very good that the fine print says that the company can 'buy' any unvested options back for the strike price, meaning you don't get squat. At a certain advertising company (that I'm perfectly happy to name - fastclick, taken over by valueclick), the acquiring company turned around and revoked the unvested options of every non-executive employee at the acquired company. They turned that around and offered a much less lucrative deal to anyone that stayed, then promptly drove the company into the ground - or should I say, continued the process of driving the company into the ground.
IMO, the kind of people who would do something like this tend to be in the process of making their own bed. This'll come back to haunt Zynga, one way or another. The whole point of offering equity is because early employees are taking a huge risk, precisely because the potential upside is large. To have the efforts of those employees drive the value of the company up to the point that the company then turns around and says that their equity grant is now too large is just so much bullshit. Back when those shares were next to worthless and the early employees were putting in the long hours to make something from nothing, would the CEO have been so comfortable coming to those employees and telling them that they were only worth some fraction of what they had previously been offered? I highly doubt it.
Sadly, this kind of attitude has become increasingly pervasive in this industry over the last decade. The startup culture developed because employees felt a real sense of ownership of what they built, in large part because they were actually rewarded for their efforts. With the rise of companies financed almost from day one by aggressive venture capitalists, that ethic has disappeared. Now, it is all about VC's preserving as much of the value for themselves as they think they can get away with, at the expense of the folks doing the actual work.
The concept of globalism does not have anything inherently wrong with it. I think it is a tragedy that local cultures tend to die under the weight of the incoming american culture, which has very little to recommend it. I lived in London, England during the decade that American culture really began to dominate youths under 25, and it is quite sad how different the place is today, 10 years after I left. Strip malls and fast food everywhere you look, just like here.
However, when politicians speak of globalism, they are usually referring to efforts to create a unified global economy. Once again, this idea does not have anything inherently wrong with it, except that the efforts are dominated by western economic interests, most specifically trans national corporations. Also, the WTO mandates that WTO interests supercede local laws. This has the potential to limit democracy in member nations, since a democratically elected government body might enact environmental legislation that 'violates' a WTO trade rule, and any company negatively affected by the legislation would have the ability to sue the member nation for damages to their 'free trade.' Clearly, this gives much greater power to corporate interests than to voters. Additionally, globalization allows corps to transfer assets between subsidiaries in multiple countries, eliminating the impression of profitability and thereby eliminating any taxation that they may be responsible for. This transfers more and more of the tax burden to ordinary taxpayers at the same time that more and more of the world's money supply is actually controlled by corporations.
I believe that 'globalization' could be a positive force for the global community, but its current implementation serves noone without a massive stake in a transnational corporation, kind of like most politicians in the US and elsewhere.
Certainly, organizations like the Imf COULD serve a vital purpose, but that doesn't mean that they do. When the global financial institutions provide grants and loans only on condition that the country receiving the funds direct their economy in a manner that benefits corporate interests, it is criminal. Forcing a farmer away from subsistence farming into cash crops that are dependant upon fertilizer and seed stock purchases from 1st world agribusiness, not to mention forcing monoculture practices that promote infestation of pests, thereby encouraging dependance upon chemical pest control, is doing nothing other than funnel profits into corporate pockets at the expense of human quality of life. We should be providing funds to help those economies become self sufficient, not dependant upon our corporations.
Organizations like the WTO have the power to override local environmental legislation if it impacts corporate profits, under the guise of 'fair trade.' No one is going to convince me that organizations such as the IMF or WTO are essential to the well being of the world economy. They are nothing more than organization designed to strongarm smaller economies into funneling their limited funds right into corporate pockets
I do believe that globalization could be a good thing. Certainly, we want conditions in the 3rd world to improve, but I have yet to see evidence that the new world order does anything whatsoever towards that goal. I do see corporate support of Death Squads, green 'revolution' caused famine, and the violation of human rights wherever corporations have significant influence over 3rd world government. If our global economic organizations worked to PREVENT such conditions, then we might be onto something. Until then, however, I will be 100% opposed to corporatization and globalization. The goal should be an improvement on the human condition around the planet, not maximizing profits for the tiny fraction of people that actually benefit from these programs.
I have been on both sides of this equation. Some years ago I was a junior level programmer at a small failing startup. We had one experienced and talented programmer who made all architectural decisions, and 3 (including myself) engineers who were talented but exceedingly lacking in experience. When the company started to fail, the eperienced engineer started fielding job offers from a variety of companies, and he ALWAYS proposed to prospective employers that they take the entire engineering team. It is unclear how forceful his proposals were, but it might well have been a condition of his acceptance (thank you, James!). And that is the story of how I came to be an engineer at Cisco with no degree and almost no experience.
Years later, I was in the same position, although I wasn't interested in preserving an entire team. There were members of the team I wanted to keep together, and made sure that everone important received job offers appropriate to their skills and needs.
Don't forget that a really good team is worth far more than the sum of its members. It can take a long time to build a really good rapport between team members, if it happens at all, and it isn't something that any prospective employer should throw away lightly. That is a pretty compelling argument.
--sam
Every country may not be quite a bad as ours, but they are all heading that direction, and it is only a matter of time. I guess you could move to Cuba! At least right now, in the US, citizens have some rights and protection from the authorities, even if certain forces are constantly lobbying to reduce our rights and freedoms. I would still rather live in a place where the press is free to report what they want, even if the press is almost entirely dominated by corporate interests, and where cops have to at least call a judge before breaking down my door to confiscate my belongings.
I certainly wouldn't mind if my tax dollars went to services that I actually felt I needed, but then I wouldn't have to spend my after tax dollars on the very consumables I should have subsidized by my government, and that might cut into corporate profits. God forbid I should spend a couple dollars a day on public transport, rather than $20,000+ dollars on a car plus maintenance, insurance, and petroleum costs (and pollution). But that's just my opinion. Ask this question again in 4 years, and we will see just how bad our new friend in the white house has made things.
Not true. Before, nearly all of the kinetic energy of the wave converts to potential energy (and sound, heat, etc), which converts back into kinteic energy as the wave rolls back out. Now, some of the kinetic energy is converted into electricity, which means less converts to potential, which means that the wave rolls back with less energy. This will MOST DEFINITELY have an impact, although it might well be negligible.
Folks, this is not totally renewable. Granted, this is probably far fetched, but the principle of conservation of energy does apply. Has anyone done any research into the affect of the depletion of wave energy on the world ecosystem. Could installing these systems ruin it for surfers everywhere? --sam
A pressure sensitive platform or pad which is capable of sending a single signal upon detecting the presence of a suitable quantity of pressure on itself from above. The signal may be in any form, a voltage, a distinguishing sound, a distinctive colored light,... Extensions of the above patent might include pressure sensitivity allowing modulation of the original signal, or labeling the upper surface of the device in order to identify the signal which will be sent