I think you're missing the bad side of this rule. This is just a plain dumb rule. If an employee spends an unreasonable time on the phone, then they can be dealt with without requiring a sweeping rule.
One obvious way to tell if a rule is a bad one is: Are the upper management willing to follow it? I guarantee that the CEO will talk on his cell-phone whenever he damn well wants. If that's fair for him, then why isn't it fair for you?
I was on a processing ship, so it was basically a factory that happened to be in the middle of the ocean. The dangerous job is crabbing, actually going out & catching the crabs. That is extremely dangerous, but it paid well. You were paid according the catch, and once you'd been on the ship a few seasons & earned a full share, it is possible to make $25,000 during a two-week King crab season. But you work 21 hours a day, seven days a week, moving around 1000 pound crab traps, often in sub-zero conditions, on a slippery, wildly rocking boat. Because of the speed at which you need to work, it's not possible for you to wear a life jacket, and if you go overboard, you'll be dead in about 4 minutes. Oh, and the crabs can easily take off a finger.
I briefly thought about trying to get a job on a crabber, but promptly realized that I wasn't cut out for that sort of work & stuck to the shitty processing job.
I worked in Alaska on a crab processing ship, & we used to do the same thing to crabs all the time. You'd toss them in the brine (salt water cooled well below freezing) for a few minutes & they'd come back to life pretty consistently. Crab's (& presumably lobsters as well) are pretty simple life forms, so they respond just fine to the freezing.
.. but that slim, stylish Digimaxtrix box costs $1,112.42, starting price point.
That's not the price for the box, that's the price for the loaded system with WinXP. Do a Google search & you can find the barebones system for under $450 & add the components you need & probably come in well under $1000 (A quick check at zipzoomfly.com has a fairly basic system, 1.8G/512MB/160GB and a combo DVD player & cd burner (from NewEgg, they didn't have one at zzf) comes in at about $810). Cappuccinopc.com is even cheaper with a barebones price of $349 & similarly configured system at $764.
But is it really worth it? AFAICS, the barebones rig has no proc, no drives, nor does it have the dvd/cdr mentioned in the article.
Hence the barebones. You add the components of your choice. I'm sure if you did a Google search you could also find a company that offers ready-to-use systems sans-OS as well. So stop complaining & search already.
Lot's of people have built similar systems. DashPC (which runs Linux) comes to mind. Try Googling for "Car PC" or "car mp3 player" and you should find lot's of other examples.
Howard Computers isn't the only source for these-- they're just the ones who have paid Asus for the ad space. Do a Google search & you can find it as a barebones system.
If you are running such a big corp, then its your responsibility to forsee and handle problems.
And how would you have anticipated & resolved this problem if you were the president of Dish? Raised everyone's rates? Viacom is being a bully & trying to blackmail Dish into paying an unfair price and force them to carry channels that they don't want to. I don't know how long the negotiations have been going on, but Viacom really doesn't have much to lose here, so I doubt that they've made much in the way of concessions. Why should they. I think that Dish really deserves applause for there decision to stand up to to the bullies under the circumstances.
All "innovate" means is to produce something that's different from others in somee minor way. Small, cosmetic changes qualify as "innovations".
No, that is a refinement, not an innovation. Regardless of what the marketing department may call it, it's still not innovation. "Embrace & Extend" is not innovation, in fact it is exactly the opposite. The whole point of embrace & extend is to lock you into MS's platforms so they don't need to innovate. (I know you are playing devil's advocate here, but I thought I'd respond at face value...)
The "market leaders" in most industries act exactly the same way.
I challenge you to find another market leader in any major industry who has built their entire corporation on a history of non-innovation. I mean MS from day one was built on other peoples ideas (MS DOS 1.0 was a slightly refined version of another companies CP/M). Of the core products they currently market, I don't think that a single one is in a market category that didn't have a solid market before MS moved into it (the two possible exceptions that I can think of are Flight Simulator & Project-- I don't know the backgrounds of those markets, so it's conceivable that MS was there first in one or both of those fields). I'm sure there is at least one thing in the MS corporate history (other then the aforementioned Bob) that is innovative, but I sure can't think of one.
I would like to see ANY example of true MS innovation. Sure, they are great at making minor refinements to other peoples ideas (usually with the goal of locking people into their implementation), but where have they truly came up with a unique idea?
Of course, there is the one excellent example, MS Bob. Now there's innovation.
5. Few hosting providers will upgrade their servers, it's just too much trouble. So if you got a FreeBSD 4.3 or RedHat 7.2, it will probably stay this way despite of what the sales guy may tell you. Once again, with a UML host like Linode.com this is not an issue at all. You control all of the software on your server and can upgrade whenever you see fit.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with you here... Unless you are planning to be a fulltime admin, keeping up with the necessary security patches & such that are necessary to run a web based business responsibly is a lot of work. Personally, I'd rather focus on my business. The host that I previously recommended, bsdhosting.net rocks in this regard. You have full root access, so you can upgrade anything at anytime you want. But you don't need to worry about the security stuff because they will take care of it for you.
Check out BSDHosting.net. They use FreeBSD to provide jailed servers with full root access. I've been with them for more then a year now, and I've been blown away by the level of service. FAR superior to any other host that I've ever used. Their support is provided by serious geeks, and they will go out of their way to solve any problems you may have. Try calling them & asking them a few questions & you'll quickly see just how good these guys are.
"Don't folks get it? All Mandrake is doing is... In other words, just adding another "super stable" release to the current release cycle. "
Right... It looks more like an admission by Mandrake that they are unable to address the QA problems that have plagued their distro for years. Rather than putting even more effort into testing, they're just going to wait for all the major bugs to hit the folks that download before pressing CDs.
What is it with you Mandrake bashers? You're worse then the MS trolls. Mandrake has always been rock-solid for me. I've used it for years. I'm currently running 10.0b1, and even it has been quite stable so far.
The current plan makes perfect sense. Think of it this way. Instead of the current two release levels (stable & dev), you now have three: Stable, very-stable & dev. Very-stable is perfect for users who need a high level of stability, servers, office use, your grandma's system. Stable is great for the average user, possibly a bit more adventurous, but still quite stable. Finally you have dev which is for developers & those who want to be on the bleeding edge.
The reality of developing a distribution the size of Mandrake-- especially one that prides itself on being on the cutting edge-- is that some bugs won't be caught until they reach the wide market of an official release. The same is true of Red Hat as well, but their target market is different. They don't aim to be state-of-the-art, so they may not be bitten quite as often-- Mandrake has already fixed the problems before Red Hat has to deal with it.
"if you're an hourly worker, comp time is actually illegal in at least some states"
Maybe, but in my case I work in Australia. I guess the original poster may be US-based, but other slashdot readers are worldwide, and I was being general. Maybe you should be, too.
Umm, pointing out that your solution may be illegal in some jurisdictions is quite general. Had I said "Comp time is illegal.", your reply would be valid. Since I didn't say that, it's you who is not being general (I suppose that I could have been more general had I said "in some US states", but that seems a little pedantic.). Considering that the poster is asking a legal question, on a US based discussion site, I think it's reasonable to assume that he is probably based in the US. If he were somewhere else, he probably would have mentioned it in the post, wouldn't he?
You're right, the situation should have been negotiated up front, but I can think of many cases where these issues may crop up. For example if the employee was promised comp time at a future date, then leaves the job before he is able to take that time, the employer is still liable for the pay. Or perhaps, he didn't want to rock the boat to much because he was loyal to the company, only to be unceremoniously laid off without notice (as happens all the time here), so he now feels he should be able to collect on the back pay he is legally owed.
Where you're being naieve is in your assumption that it's the employee in this case that is doing the screwing over. Perhaps things are different in Australia, or maybe you've just been lucky, but in corporate America, it's the companies that usually do the screwing. Certainly there are exceptions, but in this case, it sounds like he has a perfectly reasonable case.
At first, I thought you were just trolling, but as I read you're comment, I realized you're serious, just being naieve.
You're right, you should be loyal to the company, as long as that loyalty is returned. But when you work overtime for months & years on end without getting paid, where does that loyalty end? The original poster said in a later follow-up that he was owed in the neighborhood of $30,000. Once the company owes you five digits of back pay, all bets are off, it's time to get a lawyer. If they're willing to give you an equivalent amount of comp time, and that is alright with you, then fine (though if you're an hourly worker, comp time is actually illegal in at least some states). But you should feel no obligation to take comp time if you don't want to. And of course, in this case, it's irrelevant: as he stated in the original article, he no longer works for the company. It's hard to take time off from a job that he no longer holds.
It would be a waiste of space to try and achieve both on a single disk as you would be taking away from the much needed storage capacity for hi bit rate audio and video formats that HDTV signals are.
Well, if you re-read the parent, I think you'll see that that was exactly what he said ("If it fails to run *any* DVD collection, I will consider it a failure, because all the factory efficiency in the world won't make me toss my existing DVD collections.").
However, the flip side should also be true. I should be able to buy an HD DVD and play it in a standard DVD player (of course not in HD mode). A new standard that is not backwards compatible is bad for everyone involved. It's bad for studios because they have to release & maintain two versions of every new DVD released. It's bad for retailers since they will have to stock two versions of each title. It's bad for the tech companies since the lack of compatibility will hinder market acceptance. And it's bad for consumers since they won't be able to buy HD titles until they've upgraded to HD players (of course there is some benefit here to the studios & tech companies since it encourages upgrades & repeat purchases, but I suspect that the bad outweighs the good for all involved).
One easy solution that would not require any complicated engineering would simply be to put the HD on one side & the standard on the other. That seems to me to be the best compromise between compatibility & engineering, while still allowing for the extra space required for the occasional huge title (both sides could be HD when needed).
I was almost taking the survey seriously until I saw those options.
Actually, those are important questions. Any surveys that say that any of those areas are "very important", are immediately assumed to be from zealots, and there answers are given less credence if not ignored completely. I haven't submitted my response yet (still debating on whethter or not I want to help them.) but when I do, the answer to all four of those questions will be #2 out of the 5 point scale.
Oracle has had this functionality since 8.x. Java is *very* fast inside of Oracle, and is more efficient than PL/SQL in a few cases. Again, OSS is playing catch up.
SO? Oracle has lots of features that MySQL lacks. The point of the post isn't that this is some wonderful new feature never before seen in the world, only that it's new to MySQL.
Oh, and one of the fabulous features that Oracle has over MySQL is the price. I mean, who wouldn't prefer to spend many thousands of dollars? This is obviously another area where OSS needs to start playing catch-up.
No, a national standard for voting is a bad idea. It would allow a national exploit as well.
It depends on what the national standard describes... I don't think that the parent poster was suggesting that we need a national standard for the actual voting software, only a standard saying that a VVPAT is required. How that paper trail is implemented, and the software used, does not necessarily need to be standardized.
You're right, this isn't HDTV. However it is DVB, AKA Digital Cable, though it's vague on what Cable providers it supports. There are few, if any, decoder cards that can be had for a standard PC that do digital cable. If you can find one at all, I doubt it can be had for less then $200
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I think you're missing the bad side of this rule. This is just a plain dumb rule. If an employee spends an unreasonable time on the phone, then they can be dealt with without requiring a sweeping rule.
One obvious way to tell if a rule is a bad one is: Are the upper management willing to follow it? I guarantee that the CEO will talk on his cell-phone whenever he damn well wants. If that's fair for him, then why isn't it fair for you?
I was on a processing ship, so it was basically a factory that happened to be in the middle of the ocean. The dangerous job is crabbing, actually going out & catching the crabs. That is extremely dangerous, but it paid well. You were paid according the catch, and once you'd been on the ship a few seasons & earned a full share, it is possible to make $25,000 during a two-week King crab season. But you work 21 hours a day, seven days a week, moving around 1000 pound crab traps, often in sub-zero conditions, on a slippery, wildly rocking boat. Because of the speed at which you need to work, it's not possible for you to wear a life jacket, and if you go overboard, you'll be dead in about 4 minutes. Oh, and the crabs can easily take off a finger.
I briefly thought about trying to get a job on a crabber, but promptly realized that I wasn't cut out for that sort of work & stuck to the shitty processing job.
I know people who pay about the same price for bottled drinking water.
.66 liter) for M-Water, AKA "Water that has been ... energized and vibrationally balanced". Some people have to much money.
How about $39 / 20 oz. (roughly
Kill them once, shame on you; kill them twice, shame on them.
I think a certain bowl of Petunias would disagree with you on this one...
I worked in Alaska on a crab processing ship, & we used to do the same thing to crabs all the time. You'd toss them in the brine (salt water cooled well below freezing) for a few minutes & they'd come back to life pretty consistently. Crab's (& presumably lobsters as well) are pretty simple life forms, so they respond just fine to the freezing.
.. but that slim, stylish Digimaxtrix box costs $1,112.42, starting price point.
That's not the price for the box, that's the price for the loaded system with WinXP. Do a Google search & you can find the barebones system for under $450 & add the components you need & probably come in well under $1000 (A quick check at zipzoomfly.com has a fairly basic system, 1.8G/512MB/160GB and a combo DVD player & cd burner (from NewEgg, they didn't have one at zzf) comes in at about $810). Cappuccinopc.com is even cheaper with a barebones price of $349 & similarly configured system at $764.
But is it really worth it? AFAICS, the barebones rig has no proc, no drives, nor does it have the dvd/cdr mentioned in the article.
Hence the barebones . You add the components of your choice. I'm sure if you did a Google search you could also find a company that offers ready-to-use systems sans-OS as well. So stop complaining & search already.
Lot's of people have built similar systems. DashPC (which runs Linux) comes to mind. Try Googling for "Car PC" or "car mp3 player" and you should find lot's of other examples.
Howard Computers isn't the only source for these-- they're just the ones who have paid Asus for the ad space. Do a Google search & you can find it as a barebones system.
If you are running such a big corp, then its your responsibility to forsee and handle problems.
And how would you have anticipated & resolved this problem if you were the president of Dish? Raised everyone's rates? Viacom is being a bully & trying to blackmail Dish into paying an unfair price and force them to carry channels that they don't want to. I don't know how long the negotiations have been going on, but Viacom really doesn't have much to lose here, so I doubt that they've made much in the way of concessions. Why should they. I think that Dish really deserves applause for there decision to stand up to to the bullies under the circumstances.
All "innovate" means is to produce something that's different from others in somee minor way. Small, cosmetic changes qualify as "innovations".
No, that is a refinement, not an innovation. Regardless of what the marketing department may call it, it's still not innovation. "Embrace & Extend" is not innovation, in fact it is exactly the opposite. The whole point of embrace & extend is to lock you into MS's platforms so they don't need to innovate. (I know you are playing devil's advocate here, but I thought I'd respond at face value...)
The "market leaders" in most industries act exactly the same way.
I challenge you to find another market leader in any major industry who has built their entire corporation on a history of non-innovation. I mean MS from day one was built on other peoples ideas (MS DOS 1.0 was a slightly refined version of another companies CP/M). Of the core products they currently market, I don't think that a single one is in a market category that didn't have a solid market before MS moved into it (the two possible exceptions that I can think of are Flight Simulator & Project-- I don't know the backgrounds of those markets, so it's conceivable that MS was there first in one or both of those fields). I'm sure there is at least one thing in the MS corporate history (other then the aforementioned Bob) that is innovative, but I sure can't think of one.
I would like to see ANY example of true MS innovation. Sure, they are great at making minor refinements to other peoples ideas (usually with the goal of locking people into their implementation), but where have they truly came up with a unique idea?
Of course, there is the one excellent example, MS Bob. Now there's innovation.
The AC parent should be modded up... Excellent comparison of the two languages.
5. Few hosting providers will upgrade their servers, it's just too much trouble. So if you got a FreeBSD 4.3 or RedHat 7.2, it will probably stay this way despite of what the sales guy may tell you.
Once again, with a UML host like Linode.com this is not an issue at all. You control all of the software on your server and can upgrade whenever you see fit.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with you here... Unless you are planning to be a fulltime admin, keeping up with the necessary security patches & such that are necessary to run a web based business responsibly is a lot of work. Personally, I'd rather focus on my business. The host that I previously recommended, bsdhosting.net rocks in this regard. You have full root access, so you can upgrade anything at anytime you want. But you don't need to worry about the security stuff because they will take care of it for you.
Check out BSDHosting.net. They use FreeBSD to provide jailed servers with full root access. I've been with them for more then a year now, and I've been blown away by the level of service. FAR superior to any other host that I've ever used. Their support is provided by serious geeks, and they will go out of their way to solve any problems you may have. Try calling them & asking them a few questions & you'll quickly see just how good these guys are.
"Don't folks get it? All Mandrake is doing is... In other words, just adding another "super stable" release to the current release cycle. "
Right... It looks more like an admission by Mandrake that they are unable to address the QA problems that have plagued their distro for years. Rather than putting even more effort into testing, they're just going to wait for all the major bugs to hit the folks that download before pressing CDs.
What is it with you Mandrake bashers? You're worse then the MS trolls. Mandrake has always been rock-solid for me. I've used it for years. I'm currently running 10.0b1, and even it has been quite stable so far.
The current plan makes perfect sense. Think of it this way. Instead of the current two release levels (stable & dev), you now have three: Stable, very-stable & dev. Very-stable is perfect for users who need a high level of stability, servers, office use, your grandma's system. Stable is great for the average user, possibly a bit more adventurous, but still quite stable. Finally you have dev which is for developers & those who want to be on the bleeding edge.
The reality of developing a distribution the size of Mandrake-- especially one that prides itself on being on the cutting edge-- is that some bugs won't be caught until they reach the wide market of an official release. The same is true of Red Hat as well, but their target market is different. They don't aim to be state-of-the-art, so they may not be bitten quite as often-- Mandrake has already fixed the problems before Red Hat has to deal with it.
"if you're an hourly worker, comp time is actually illegal in at least some states"
Maybe, but in my case I work in Australia. I guess the original poster may be US-based, but other slashdot readers are worldwide, and I was being general. Maybe you should be, too.
Umm, pointing out that your solution may be illegal in some jurisdictions is quite general. Had I said "Comp time is illegal.", your reply would be valid. Since I didn't say that, it's you who is not being general (I suppose that I could have been more general had I said "in some US states", but that seems a little pedantic.). Considering that the poster is asking a legal question, on a US based discussion site, I think it's reasonable to assume that he is probably based in the US. If he were somewhere else, he probably would have mentioned it in the post, wouldn't he?
You're right, the situation should have been negotiated up front, but I can think of many cases where these issues may crop up. For example if the employee was promised comp time at a future date, then leaves the job before he is able to take that time, the employer is still liable for the pay. Or perhaps, he didn't want to rock the boat to much because he was loyal to the company, only to be unceremoniously laid off without notice (as happens all the time here), so he now feels he should be able to collect on the back pay he is legally owed.
Where you're being naieve is in your assumption that it's the employee in this case that is doing the screwing over. Perhaps things are different in Australia, or maybe you've just been lucky, but in corporate America, it's the companies that usually do the screwing. Certainly there are exceptions, but in this case, it sounds like he has a perfectly reasonable case.
At first, I thought you were just trolling, but as I read you're comment, I realized you're serious, just being naieve.
You're right, you should be loyal to the company, as long as that loyalty is returned. But when you work overtime for months & years on end without getting paid, where does that loyalty end? The original poster said in a later follow-up that he was owed in the neighborhood of $30,000. Once the company owes you five digits of back pay, all bets are off, it's time to get a lawyer. If they're willing to give you an equivalent amount of comp time, and that is alright with you, then fine (though if you're an hourly worker, comp time is actually illegal in at least some states). But you should feel no obligation to take comp time if you don't want to. And of course, in this case, it's irrelevant: as he stated in the original article, he no longer works for the company. It's hard to take time off from a job that he no longer holds.
It would be a waiste of space to try and achieve both on a single disk as you would be taking away from the much needed storage capacity for hi bit rate audio and video formats that HDTV signals are.
Well, if you re-read the parent, I think you'll see that that was exactly what he said ("If it fails to run *any* DVD collection, I will consider it a failure, because all the factory efficiency in the world won't make me toss my existing DVD collections.").
However, the flip side should also be true. I should be able to buy an HD DVD and play it in a standard DVD player (of course not in HD mode). A new standard that is not backwards compatible is bad for everyone involved. It's bad for studios because they have to release & maintain two versions of every new DVD released. It's bad for retailers since they will have to stock two versions of each title. It's bad for the tech companies since the lack of compatibility will hinder market acceptance. And it's bad for consumers since they won't be able to buy HD titles until they've upgraded to HD players (of course there is some benefit here to the studios & tech companies since it encourages upgrades & repeat purchases, but I suspect that the bad outweighs the good for all involved).
One easy solution that would not require any complicated engineering would simply be to put the HD on one side & the standard on the other. That seems to me to be the best compromise between compatibility & engineering, while still allowing for the extra space required for the occasional huge title (both sides could be HD when needed).
Another way:
Get rid of invasive licensing terms such as the "we can upgrade your software at anytime, and in any way we see fit" from (I believe) WMP 9.0.
I was almost taking the survey seriously until I saw those options.
Actually, those are important questions. Any surveys that say that any of those areas are "very important", are immediately assumed to be from zealots, and there answers are given less credence if not ignored completely. I haven't submitted my response yet (still debating on whethter or not I want to help them.) but when I do, the answer to all four of those questions will be #2 out of the 5 point scale.
Oracle has had this functionality since 8.x. Java is *very* fast inside of Oracle, and is more efficient than PL/SQL in a few cases. Again, OSS is playing catch up.
SO? Oracle has lots of features that MySQL lacks. The point of the post isn't that this is some wonderful new feature never before seen in the world, only that it's new to MySQL.
Oh, and one of the fabulous features that Oracle has over MySQL is the price. I mean, who wouldn't prefer to spend many thousands of dollars? This is obviously another area where OSS needs to start playing catch-up.
Actually, the first (short) season of Andy Richter was quite good. It wasn't until the Fox execs "reworked" it for the second season that it sucked.
No, a national standard for voting is a bad idea. It would allow a national exploit as well.
It depends on what the national standard describes... I don't think that the parent poster was suggesting that we need a national standard for the actual voting software, only a standard saying that a VVPAT is required. How that paper trail is implemented, and the software used, does not necessarily need to be standardized.
You're right, this isn't HDTV. However it is DVB, AKA Digital Cable, though it's vague on what Cable providers it supports. There are few, if any, decoder cards that can be had for a standard PC that do digital cable. If you can find one at all, I doubt it can be had for less then $200