Full time employees, if they stick around, know the company, the technology, and their jobs.
Contractors who are captive by temp firms, and who see themselves as simply another kind of employee, don't develop that relationship with the company, that's true. Contractors who are truly self-employed had BETTER develop that in-depth knowledge of the company (client), technology, etc. because the profit is in repeat engagements. It's a lot harder to sell the first contract into a company than it is to sell follow-on work. Put another way: the cost to acquire a new client is huge, the cost to retain them much lower. Same pay with less marketing cost = higher profit on return engagements.
Contractors who don't do everything they can to establish those ongoing relationships shoot themselves in the foot.
I bought some older PIII/550's from uBid and got a great price. Competition is pretty intense, but if you follow the auctions for your desired machine type, especially in the evening and on weekends, you can usually find a particular auction with few bidders. Selection is not always the best, but if they have what you want it's a good deal. Good luck!
"My answer to this was to file for unemployment. If you haven't, you should. Its good money, and you *earned* it because whats being returned is money that was taken from you before. Unemployment is not welfare."
Except that if he was working as a consultant before, he can't file unemployment against the employer (client) because that would be a red flag to the IRS to reclassify him as an employee. The employer (client) would be liable for back taxes and penalties: not a good way to create strong customer relationships!
It's not clear from your comment whether you want to be a regular full-time employee because you prefer it, or just because your savings is running dry.
If you prefer being a consultant, but you're not getting contracts, you need to up your marketing and sales. Some excellent advice is in the Contract Employees Handbook, especially the appendix on resources. Another good place to check is Janet Ruhl's site, Real Rates which tells what recent contracts have gone for by specialty.
(A great tip I heard is to bypass HR altogether and ask the switchboard for "procurement" or "vendor relations". You are, after all, a business offering a product, not a worker offering to become an employee.)
On the other hand, if you prefer to be an employee, dig out your trusty copy of What Color Is Your Parachute. Do the exercises, then go after companies who do what it is you want to do.
Either way, it has to start with what YOU want to do. You might take something else as an interim measure, but always keep your focus.
I disagree. The reason for multiple passwords is historical: each system was an isolated island that had to create its own security checking routines. With everything more and more interconnected, it just makes administrative sense to centralize authentication. Thus the term "single sign on," or SSO.
Now IMPLEMENTING that is a challenge. There are various approaches, such as NIS, Kerberos, RADIUS and LDAP directories with X.509 certificates. We're not there yet but getting closer.
Sounds like a good idea to me, sorta like software companies that put their source code into escrow so that if they go under, their customers can legally obtain it.
Depending on the agreement you signed with the recruiter who got you the job, a pass-through agency may be a better bet than incorporating. Pass-throughs act as your employer for tax, invoicing and collections purposes. But they don't take as much as regular agencies do because you have to find your own projects. Like a partner in a law firm, you have the responsibility of bringing in business and controlling expenses in your "practice".
Benefits:
You can deduct the same kinds of expenses.
They bill the customer and collect the money.
They deduct for pension, healthcare and taxes.
At year end, taxes are as simple as a W-2.
If you're buying a house or car, you look like an employee with continuous work history, instead of having periods of unemployment between gigs.
Downsides:
They charge 5% off the top in addition to withholding taxes.
You have to get your own gigs, they don't find projects for you.
One example is Professional Association of Contract Employees (P.A.C.E.). There is some good info on their site about using pass-through agencies. Also check their sister site, the Contract Employees Handbook for info on dealing with recruiters and the games they play.
Otherwise, with the EMF radiation so close to Big Jim and the Twins, I could be creating some really interesting genetic mutations in future offspring.
Seems to me this thread is locked into an either/or mentality. But think about this: if you had a nice stable government/government contractor position with good benefits, that was relatively mundane with fixed hours, and you supplemented that by moonlighting on a project you were really, really interested in (Open Source, hint, hint) you'd have the best of both worlds.
It may even be possible to hire in at less than full time, depends on the position whether or not you would get benefits.
Is that corporations CAN get rid of their people. It takes an act of God (not to mention congress) to get rid of civil servants. Contractors are not as locked in, but depending on the contract it can be difficult to release them too.
Most corporate employment is "at will" these days: you can leave for any reason, they can let you go for any (or no) reason.
Most people who have used the Internet for some time understand that anyone can link to you, and that because they did doesn't mean you endorse their site. Many companies have threatened legal action against linkers on the grounds that they don't want to be associated with certain kinds of sites.
The cause for concern is that the human brain tends to associate things that occur together, even though intellectually we know they are separate. So although this case is a bit off target (who cares if GM sucks points to Ford), think of the case where a porno site links to yours. People intellectually know that your site has nothing to do with porno, but will associate the two anyway.
I don't see why Ford had a problem here. In most cases, someone linking to your site is free publicity. In cases where you'd rather not have them link, and asking politely doesn't do the job, just configure the website to reject requests from that referrer.
Oddly enough, we have Bill Gates to thank for slowing down the march to "Entertainment Platforms". Oracle, Sun, etc. had been pushing thin clients for a long while, but Gates was making his money from Operating Systems which ran on full-featured PC's. So Microsoft was pushing the complete PC over dumb devices.
Now with.Net, that incentive is no longer there, so I think the trend will accelerate.
To compare the work of brave men in the same tally as lazy overpriveleged goof-offs is a damned insult.
I agree that people should take responsibility for using their own time productively. However, let's not ignore the toxic organizational environment in some companies that actually discourages personal contribution or penalizes it (no good deed goes unpunished).
Maybe the "lazy overprivileged goof-offs" are the managers of these people, who can't seem to find them anything to do that's more interesting than Solitaire. Yes, in an ideal world each person would manage themselves. But since we live in THIS world, it falls upon the manager to motivate and develop the people who report to them, instead of frustrating them so much they escape into games instead of doing their work.
Oh, I don't know. I find award-winning NY Times journalists to be a more credible source of opinion on world events than, say, anonymous cowards. I didn't see any links or supporting evidence in *your* post.
Agreed. I'm not saying we should sit in front of the TV and do nothing, and it will magically change. What I'm saying is that the actions people are right now taking, in aggregate, amount to a trend that even the Chinese government will find impossible to fight.
In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman writes about the globalization of information. Globalization is a two-edged sword: it enables you to compete more effectively, which improves your economy and standard of living. But it also makes it harder to keep up walls and isolationist policies.
China realizes that they have to have Internet connectivity for its economy to grow and compete with the rest of the global market for products and services. In the long run, it's chasing after windmills with these restrictions. Once a critical mass of Internet users is reached, there will be less support for any administration that tries to enforce such rules.
It's just a matter of time.
Alternatives would be more invasive
on
EU May Outlaw Cookies
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I was initially caught up in the scare about cookies, especially when I discovered some clueless webmasters were storing my site password in cleartext in them. But over time, I realized that the alternatives for creating a stateful session might be far worse. Can you say Java / ActiveX?
BTW, does Microsoft Passport use cookies, or some other method? If they use cookies, I can just imagine the wheels turning in Microsoft's heads right now at reading this story!
"Think of all the medical and financial information that insurance companies have about the people that they insure. People should be more worried that somebody is going to hack into Prudential's database. Frankly, my medical records are a lot more private to me than the books that I buy online."
"We're here to sell things in a democracy, not to practice it."
Manufacturing plants have always had searches like this. You'd be amazed what walks out of the plant in lunchboxes, etc. What is new is that we white collar workers are starting to be subject to the same rules that blue collar workers have had to put up with for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Contractors who don't do everything they can to establish those ongoing relationships shoot themselves in the foot.
I bought some older PIII/550's from uBid and got a great price. Competition is pretty intense, but if you follow the auctions for your desired machine type, especially in the evening and on weekends, you can usually find a particular auction with few bidders. Selection is not always the best, but if they have what you want it's a good deal. Good luck!
Except that if he was working as a consultant before, he can't file unemployment against the employer (client) because that would be a red flag to the IRS to reclassify him as an employee. The employer (client) would be liable for back taxes and penalties: not a good way to create strong customer relationships!
It's not clear from your comment whether you want to be a regular full-time employee because you prefer it, or just because your savings is running dry.
If you prefer being a consultant, but you're not getting contracts, you need to up your marketing and sales. Some excellent advice is in the Contract Employees Handbook, especially the appendix on resources. Another good place to check is Janet Ruhl's site, Real Rates which tells what recent contracts have gone for by specialty.
(A great tip I heard is to bypass HR altogether and ask the switchboard for "procurement" or "vendor relations". You are, after all, a business offering a product, not a worker offering to become an employee.)
On the other hand, if you prefer to be an employee, dig out your trusty copy of What Color Is Your Parachute. Do the exercises, then go after companies who do what it is you want to do.
Either way, it has to start with what YOU want to do. You might take something else as an interim measure, but always keep your focus.
I disagree. The reason for multiple passwords is historical: each system was an isolated island that had to create its own security checking routines. With everything more and more interconnected, it just makes administrative sense to centralize authentication. Thus the term "single sign on," or SSO.
Now IMPLEMENTING that is a challenge. There are various approaches, such as NIS, Kerberos, RADIUS and LDAP directories with X.509 certificates. We're not there yet but getting closer.
Sounds like a good idea to me, sorta like software companies that put their source code into escrow so that if they go under, their customers can legally obtain it.
Depending on the agreement you signed with the recruiter who got you the job, a pass-through agency may be a better bet than incorporating. Pass-throughs act as your employer for tax, invoicing and collections purposes. But they don't take as much as regular agencies do because you have to find your own projects. Like a partner in a law firm, you have the responsibility of bringing in business and controlling expenses in your "practice".
Benefits:
You can deduct the same kinds of expenses.
They bill the customer and collect the money.
They deduct for pension, healthcare and taxes.
At year end, taxes are as simple as a W-2.
If you're buying a house or car, you look like an employee with continuous work history, instead of having periods of unemployment between gigs.
Downsides:
They charge 5% off the top in addition to withholding taxes.
You have to get your own gigs, they don't find projects for you.
One example is Professional Association of Contract Employees (P.A.C.E.). There is some good info on their site about using pass-through agencies. Also check their sister site, the Contract Employees Handbook for info on dealing with recruiters and the games they play.
Otherwise, with the EMF radiation so close to Big Jim and the Twins, I could be creating some really interesting genetic mutations in future offspring.
Seems to me this thread is locked into an either/or mentality. But think about this: if you had a nice stable government/government contractor position with good benefits, that was relatively mundane with fixed hours, and you supplemented that by moonlighting on a project you were really, really interested in (Open Source, hint, hint) you'd have the best of both worlds.
It may even be possible to hire in at less than full time, depends on the position whether or not you would get benefits.
Is that corporations CAN get rid of their people. It takes an act of God (not to mention congress) to get rid of civil servants. Contractors are not as locked in, but depending on the contract it can be difficult to release them too.
Most corporate employment is "at will" these days: you can leave for any reason, they can let you go for any (or no) reason.
If you work for an Oracle shop, you can use Oracle Internet Directory LDAP, which is based on Oracle's Application Server product. Details here.
Most people who have used the Internet for some time understand that anyone can link to you, and that because they did doesn't mean you endorse their site. Many companies have threatened legal action against linkers on the grounds that they don't want to be associated with certain kinds of sites.
The cause for concern is that the human brain tends to associate things that occur together, even though intellectually we know they are separate. So although this case is a bit off target (who cares if GM sucks points to Ford), think of the case where a porno site links to yours. People intellectually know that your site has nothing to do with porno, but will associate the two anyway.
I don't see why Ford had a problem here. In most cases, someone linking to your site is free publicity. In cases where you'd rather not have them link, and asking politely doesn't do the job, just configure the website to reject requests from that referrer.
Oddly enough, we have Bill Gates to thank for slowing down the march to "Entertainment Platforms". Oracle, Sun, etc. had been pushing thin clients for a long while, but Gates was making his money from Operating Systems which ran on full-featured PC's. So Microsoft was pushing the complete PC over dumb devices.
.Net, that incentive is no longer there, so I think the trend will accelerate.
Now with
What, DNA *isn't* open source? Does this mean the Human Genome Project is illegal because according to the DMCA we can't reverse engineer the content?
(consulting my EULA)
I agree that people should take responsibility for using their own time productively. However, let's not ignore the toxic organizational environment in some companies that actually discourages personal contribution or penalizes it (no good deed goes unpunished).
Maybe the "lazy overprivileged goof-offs" are the managers of these people, who can't seem to find them anything to do that's more interesting than Solitaire. Yes, in an ideal world each person would manage themselves. But since we live in THIS world, it falls upon the manager to motivate and develop the people who report to them, instead of frustrating them so much they escape into games instead of doing their work.
I like Garfinkel's writing style. His
O'Reilly manual on PGP was very approachable and useful. I'm looking forward to this book.
Oh, I don't know. I find award-winning NY Times journalists to be a more credible source of opinion on world events than, say, anonymous cowards. I didn't see any links or supporting evidence in *your* post.
Agreed. I'm not saying we should sit in front of the TV and do nothing, and it will magically change. What I'm saying is that the actions people are right now taking, in aggregate, amount to a trend that even the Chinese government will find impossible to fight.
In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas Friedman writes about the globalization of information. Globalization is a two-edged sword: it enables you to compete more effectively, which improves your economy and standard of living. But it also makes it harder to keep up walls and isolationist policies.
China realizes that they have to have Internet connectivity for its economy to grow and compete with the rest of the global market for products and services. In the long run, it's chasing after windmills with these restrictions. Once a critical mass of Internet users is reached, there will be less support for any administration that tries to enforce such rules.
It's just a matter of time.
I was initially caught up in the scare about cookies, especially when I discovered some clueless webmasters were storing my site password in cleartext in them. But over time, I realized that the alternatives for creating a stateful session might be far worse. Can you say Java / ActiveX?
BTW, does Microsoft Passport use cookies, or some other method? If they use cookies, I can just imagine the wheels turning in Microsoft's heads right now at reading this story!
Imagine setting up a dual-homed, 802.11b equipped laptop near a major business, then using this art project to broadcast what you hear to the world.
Scary!
Very true. The real "Men In Black" are a medical database called Medical Information Bureau. It has records on about 15 million Americans and Canadians, according to Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
IIRC, it was TRW that changed its name, and it's spelled ExperiAn. The "big three" credit reporting agencies are:
Equifax
Experian
TransUnion
To paraphrase a line from the movie Crimson Tide:
"We're here to sell things in a democracy, not to practice it."
Manufacturing plants have always had searches like this. You'd be amazed what walks out of the plant in lunchboxes, etc. What is new is that we white collar workers are starting to be subject to the same rules that blue collar workers have had to put up with for decades.