And it would be shameful that me, a foreigner living in the UK, would have to explain this to you.
Peter Mandelson, Lord Mandelson (for fucks sakes...) is "Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, First Secretary and Lord President of the Council"
Secretaries of government in the UK are selected by the PM of the day, the only requisite is that the lucky one should be member of one of the legislative chambers (Commons or Lords).
Since Mandelson is not elected, the the only way is for him to be offered the patronage of the PM in order to accede to the House of Lords.
This system is corrupt and contrary to the most basic democratic principles, but the current Labout government wasted his majority in Parliment and never delivered the promise of wholesale reform of the unelected House of Lords....
You claim many things, but the only you have to offer us is your assertive, but subjective and very personal point of view.
The points of view of people demanding despenalization fro the consumption of all kind of drugs deserved to be heard.
You seem to imply that "people" and individuals debating issues are non intersecting sets, which is, demonstrably (unlike your rants) stupid, since clearly all people proposing despenalization of drug consumption are part of the populace, and as such they don't "turn off people" since they are part of the people after all.
If you think that a different strategy would work better, all the power to you, but your attitude is patronizing on the extreme.
"For starters a public education system is the tenth plank of the communist manifesto."
So? Millions of people all around the world benefit from this.
I am an Engineer and classically trained musician, my sister is a violin player and Engineer and my brother (RIP) was a yet another Engineer (he was the dumb one in the family, so he didn't study music).
My parents were a low rank soldier and a primary school teacher.
My grand parents were all poor, subsistence farmers, who could hardly feed themselves and their families (which is why they moved to a big city to find new oportunities, like education).
There is simply no chance whatsoever that my parents could have afforded the real cost of our education, or my grandparents the cost of my parents' one.
The cost to our family? Zilch. Nada. Zero (OK, I paid 200 pesos a year in university, before the Mexican peso dropped 3 zeros from any monetary amounts in order to rationalize the monetary system, after years of high inflation, you do the math, to say the payment was symbolic is an understatement).
The social and economic benefits are obvious. Instead of having 5 more subsistence farmers (or more, since more likely my parents would have had more children had they remained uneducated) the country got 5 people that achieved more socially and economically that would have otherwise been expected.
Education is the pillar of social mobility, and if Marx was all for it, count me as a Marxist then.
I have more expertise than you do, and have worked in only top 20 or 30 global companies in different countries and continents.
I thought I was also almost irreplaceable, until the day I was introduced "to the new guys from $REMOTE_LOCATION" that "will help you with the workload".
To cut matters short, I was in effect training my replacements. I knew it, my company knew it, the guys in $REMOTE_LOCATION most likely knew it.
And finally I was let go, with a great redundancy package mind you, but still, was let go.
But it was not only me, it was all my team and many other teams who had to pack their boxes and go home. And it was not only our company, many companies collapsed and the ones that didn't let many *very* clever and talented people go.
So now people begin to apply for the very few jobs out there, all with CVs as impressive as yours or mine, and guess what? Companies can pick and choose, after all they have the guys from $REMOTE_LOCATION slaving themselves away in 16 hour shifts for 1/5th of what local people used to earn. If the costumer service suffers (which it does) then apologize, throw two more chaps to the problem and wait for the next complain.
I have been applying for jobs for months, I must be nearing 100 applications (not for the run of the mill jobs mind you, but for the ones that need highly complex skills). No luck. But I am not surprised, one buddy of mine had to take a cut of 35% on his salary, another one had to relocate, some other started their own companies but remains to be seen if the effort will pay off.
In theory, yeah, people that have been there, done that, and got the scars to probe it, should have it easy, but when every job opening receives 100 CVs, 20 of them actually very good, then no amount of wishful thinking will make matters better for the applicants that are not successful.
If you are set on quitting IT save some money and then take a break, if possible arrange with your current employer for a period of unpaid leave, or working part time (I wonder if such things are possible in the good olde US of A)
Then study something you are interested in. You don't need to spend tons of money, get books from the library, attend trade shows and seminars, if you can pay one or two proper courses.
This will give you the chance to clear your head, realize if you really hate IT that much, of if your future is elsewhere.
Something I am personally exploring is to do 3 or 4 different but marginally related things. I will remain on IT but I may do something much simpler instead of administering cutting edge stuff. It seems that Western companies want only people based in Mumbai and Manila (hello guys!) doing any interesting work, so I am happy to do the work that needs a personal touch, even if it pays less.
But at the same time I am learning to be a translator (English speaking people should really get of their asses and learn a second language), a photographer and film maker and dabbling in long term share trading (the bozos managing our money don't really know what they are doing any way, so I can as well trust another economics ignoramus: me) and spread betting (are USians allowed to actually do that? Or is not halal?)
"Actually, every big corp which holds patents MUST sue to protect their patent"
Nope, they must not.
You are thinking trademarks.
You don't lose the right to your patent if you don't defend it, you can start defending it whenever you feel like it, if at all, irrespective of what you do the patent remains yours.
And developers of closed source software are very well aware of this (as is anybody else really, including users of any kind of software: I have the code, I have more power; I don't have any code, I am powerless).
You may not be an evil person, but certainly the situation of complete dependency in which you put your clients could be aptly described as evil (the path to hell is paved with good intentions they say).
It is always though when somebody finds something unethical about the way you earn a living (there are many cases of this situation), but the rational answer is not pretend nothing is happening, since clearly a lot of people think they are being short changed by closed source software providers.
The principles are pretty similar, so somebody working in a small company can look at the above process, understand it, and then apply the most important points to his own environment.
Sorry, but the people that decide if a merger is legitimate or not are working on it.
We are glad and very flattered to know some people around here have access to all the pertinent facts, but we would prefer that you go back to deciding the issue rather than waste your time ranting in Slashdot.
Wait, unless you have no grasp of all the facts and are assuming too much while knowing too little.
In any case your claim is ridiculous, there are legitimate monopolistic concerns (most glaringly the situation of MySQL) and it is just unfortunate that Oracle and Sun don;t move faster in order to provide all theinformation the EU competition authorities need in order to deal with this faster.
Sun's dire economic predicaments have been brewing since the collapse of the dotcom bubble.
Sun, for reasons we could spend days discussing, failed on the execution of their tactics and put themselves in a position where all the good work they made may disappears or be substantially changed very soon.
That lack of good business execution came way before the Oracle takeover and the EU investigating monopolistic concerns.
it is also worth nothing that official government bodies of any kind should do their job as they are tasked to do. The EU is not dragging their feet, they are clearly stating that they have requested documentation from Oracle and this has not been forthcoming. How this is the EU's fault is left to be explained to people that are more acquainted to explain false jumps of logic.
Slashdot Mirror
And it would be shameful that me, a foreigner living in the UK, would have to explain this to you.
Peter Mandelson, Lord Mandelson (for fucks sakes...) is "Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, First Secretary and Lord President of the Council"
Secretaries of government in the UK are selected by the PM of the day, the only requisite is that the lucky one should be member of one of the legislative chambers (Commons or Lords).
Since Mandelson is not elected, the the only way is for him to be offered the patronage of the PM in order to accede to the House of Lords.
This system is corrupt and contrary to the most basic democratic principles, but the current Labout government wasted his majority in Parliment and never delivered the promise of wholesale reform of the unelected House of Lords....
You claim many things, but the only you have to offer us is your assertive, but subjective and very personal point of view.
The points of view of people demanding despenalization fro the consumption of all kind of drugs deserved to be heard.
You seem to imply that "people" and individuals debating issues are non intersecting sets, which is, demonstrably (unlike your rants) stupid, since clearly all people proposing despenalization of drug consumption are part of the populace, and as such they don't "turn off people" since they are part of the people after all.
If you think that a different strategy would work better, all the power to you, but your attitude is patronizing on the extreme.
I do know, and have updated a good amount of machines without any major issues (last time with no issues at all).
.... if they are in the driving seat?
And tied all the passengers to the seats.
And some of the passengers even enjoy to be tied to their seats, or like them because is the only kind of seat they have seen before...
They bitch, yet change happens.
So let them bitch and move away from unnecessary dependencies from predatory companies.
"For starters a public education system is the tenth plank of the communist manifesto."
So? Millions of people all around the world benefit from this.
I am an Engineer and classically trained musician, my sister is a violin player and Engineer and my brother (RIP) was a yet another Engineer (he was the dumb one in the family, so he didn't study music).
My parents were a low rank soldier and a primary school teacher.
My grand parents were all poor, subsistence farmers, who could hardly feed themselves and their families (which is why they moved to a big city to find new oportunities, like education).
There is simply no chance whatsoever that my parents could have afforded the real cost of our education, or my grandparents the cost of my parents' one.
The cost to our family? Zilch. Nada. Zero (OK, I paid 200 pesos a year in university, before the Mexican peso dropped 3 zeros from any monetary amounts in order to rationalize the monetary system, after years of high inflation, you do the math, to say the payment was symbolic is an understatement).
The social and economic benefits are obvious. Instead of having 5 more subsistence farmers (or more, since more likely my parents would have had more children had they remained uneducated) the country got 5 people that achieved more socially and economically that would have otherwise been expected.
Education is the pillar of social mobility, and if Marx was all for it, count me as a Marxist then.
... we can have Mr Myung as well....
Darn ...
The genetic differences between different human populations is minimal. Which is why we are one species only.
From which country?
Chile, Costa Rica or Canada?
I have more expertise than you do, and have worked in only top 20 or 30 global companies in different countries and continents.
I thought I was also almost irreplaceable, until the day I was introduced "to the new guys from $REMOTE_LOCATION" that "will help you with the workload".
To cut matters short, I was in effect training my replacements. I knew it, my company knew it, the guys in $REMOTE_LOCATION most likely knew it.
And finally I was let go, with a great redundancy package mind you, but still, was let go.
But it was not only me, it was all my team and many other teams who had to pack their boxes and go home. And it was not only our company, many companies collapsed and the ones that didn't let many *very* clever and talented people go.
So now people begin to apply for the very few jobs out there, all with CVs as impressive as yours or mine, and guess what? Companies can pick and choose, after all they have the guys from $REMOTE_LOCATION slaving themselves away in 16 hour shifts for 1/5th of what local people used to earn. If the costumer service suffers (which it does) then apologize, throw two more chaps to the problem and wait for the next complain.
I have been applying for jobs for months, I must be nearing 100 applications (not for the run of the mill jobs mind you, but for the ones that need highly complex skills). No luck. But I am not surprised, one buddy of mine had to take a cut of 35% on his salary, another one had to relocate, some other started their own companies but remains to be seen if the effort will pay off.
In theory, yeah, people that have been there, done that, and got the scars to probe it, should have it easy, but when every job opening receives 100 CVs, 20 of them actually very good, then no amount of wishful thinking will make matters better for the applicants that are not successful.
If you were a business partner then you would have ensured that your opinion mattered.
Or am I missing something?
If you are set on quitting IT save some money and then take a break, if possible arrange with your current employer for a period of unpaid leave, or working part time (I wonder if such things are possible in the good olde US of A)
Then study something you are interested in. You don't need to spend tons of money, get books from the library, attend trade shows and seminars, if you can pay one or two proper courses.
This will give you the chance to clear your head, realize if you really hate IT that much, of if your future is elsewhere.
Something I am personally exploring is to do 3 or 4 different but marginally related things. I will remain on IT but I may do something much simpler instead of administering cutting edge stuff. It seems that Western companies want only people based in Mumbai and Manila (hello guys!) doing any interesting work, so I am happy to do the work that needs a personal touch, even if it pays less.
But at the same time I am learning to be a translator (English speaking people should really get of their asses and learn a second language), a photographer and film maker and dabbling in long term share trading (the bozos managing our money don't really know what they are doing any way, so I can as well trust another economics ignoramus: me) and spread betting (are USians allowed to actually do that? Or is not halal?)
Backups become immensely simpler with ZFS.
Any desktop user with tons of media files would appreciate that.
The GNOME file manager in Solaris is being integrated with ZFS features, so snapshots become a point and click task.
Backup your snapshots (incremental backups for all practical means) and you will be in business without needing to understand complex backup policies.
Poor sod, have you ever worked with multimillion $ ( or £ or € ) complex systems?
Even with a basic setup, the advantages for a real pro become obvious in no time.
As long as there i no judicial order issued, this EU directive will be easily laughed out of courts all around the EU.
The UK's government already realized this and has stopped peddling the disconnection of users without a legal order.
You can't be punished before first being judged.
In the UK the government has already given up on that one because they are fully aware the law will not stand the most basic legal scrutiny.
It will be painful, but eventually this nonsense will be stopped, I just hope that French voters remember who was pushing for this idiocy..
It would be mightily unwise to try to use them, they could end with no access to the EU market.
Since Nokia has been making mobile phones way before Apple even thought about it, I think having a gut feeling favoring Nokia is just fair.
"Actually, every big corp which holds patents MUST sue to protect their patent"
Nope, they must not.
You are thinking trademarks.
You don't lose the right to your patent if you don't defend it, you can start defending it whenever you feel like it, if at all, irrespective of what you do the patent remains yours.
And we will have nothing but what Sun wanted to give. If anything.
Remind us, what is Apple giving away as a thank you for the BSD base of OSX?
You are really stretching it there.
There is not such a legal thing in existence.
And developers of closed source software are very well aware of this (as is anybody else really, including users of any kind of software: I have the code, I have more power; I don't have any code, I am powerless).
You may not be an evil person, but certainly the situation of complete dependency in which you put your clients could be aptly described as evil (the path to hell is paved with good intentions they say).
It is always though when somebody finds something unethical about the way you earn a living (there are many cases of this situation), but the rational answer is not pretend nothing is happening, since clearly a lot of people think they are being short changed by closed source software providers.
The principles are pretty similar, so somebody working in a small company can look at the above process, understand it, and then apply the most important points to his own environment.
Sorry, but the people that decide if a merger is legitimate or not are working on it.
We are glad and very flattered to know some people around here have access to all the pertinent facts, but we would prefer that you go back to deciding the issue rather than waste your time ranting in Slashdot.
Wait, unless you have no grasp of all the facts and are assuming too much while knowing too little.
In any case your claim is ridiculous, there are legitimate monopolistic concerns (most glaringly the situation of MySQL) and it is just unfortunate that Oracle and Sun don;t move faster in order to provide all theinformation the EU competition authorities need in order to deal with this faster.
Sun's dire economic predicaments have been brewing since the collapse of the dotcom bubble.
Sun, for reasons we could spend days discussing, failed on the execution of their tactics and put themselves in a position where all the good work they made may disappears or be substantially changed very soon.
That lack of good business execution came way before the Oracle takeover and the EU investigating monopolistic concerns.
it is also worth nothing that official government bodies of any kind should do their job as they are tasked to do. The EU is not dragging their feet, they are clearly stating that they have requested documentation from Oracle and this has not been forthcoming. How this is the EU's fault is left to be explained to people that are more acquainted to explain false jumps of logic.