Former boss of mine, he was working for the same company for the last 10 years and goes into this charade (not disimilar to yours) about overtime and loyality and all the rest.
When after that I explained in no uncertain terms I will not do unpaid overtime, he threatened with, get this, no bonus. Since I don't work for a meagre bonus, I said that was fine with me.
A few weeks later company panics because profits are lower than expected (mind you, they did not loose money, they just made less than what they had expected) and goes in a wild downsizing exercise.
Guess who got the axe? Yea, the loyal employee that would spend any amount of weekends and unsocial hours working and always sung the prises about the company. He was kicked out of the building with a cardboard for his personal belongings escorted by two guards. A vulgar thief would get more deferential treatment. That after 11 years of loyal services.
That is loyalty for you. I will be damned, I am professional and will work to deliver a good service for my employer, but I feel no emotional attachment whatsoever to the company I work for, because the only relationship between my company and my is a business transaction: they pay, I work, we are happy. Fortunately I enjoy what I do thus it is much better than it sounds.
You obviously have no idea how muc money IBM makes overseas which is brought to the US in the form of taxes.
Yup, that is right, the fact that IBM is incorporated in the US means that you, USian slashbots, get to reap the benefits of global capitalism to pay for things like your miltary adventurism.
If you want to practice shuch "enlightened" ideas I hope your next proposal is that IBM also renounces all overseas profits and closes all its operations abroad, after all it seems like US base companies should be contained to the US only and be only for US people.
Well, you can have it, keey your companies in your country full of happy US workers but I hope you don;t mind that they don;t make business elsewhere.
You can have your companies back, but I hope you will also demand that the profits they collect overseas are not funnelled back into the US economy and tha the US goverment also forbids them to intiate any new businesses abroad.
If you want to shut down the door you can leave half of the companies in and the other hal (the one convenient for you) out.
.... is that Juan does not make 22 cents per week.
People normally do better than what they would fo otherwise.
What is offensive here is the assupmtion that people in other places are so damn stupid that will allow to be exploited. In some extreme circumstances, when force is used, yes, there is explotation, but that is minimal. In most cases the salaries obtained by working for a foreign company are much better that what you would do working in a farm or just not working at all.
Of course you are ignorant of thelong history and tradition of union in Latinamerica, otherwise you would have placed your example not in the most stable democracy in the continent but somewhere where dictatorship flourished under the benevolent shadow of unconuntable US administrations, and even in those cases, the people did not allowed itself to be exploited all the time.
I can cite anecdotes as well, I prefer to analyze trends.
The writing is in the wall, you may prefer to ignore it, rant and cry like a child to your politician, cite anecdotal evidence that would seem to support your needs and prejudices, the fact is that people in the developping world (for many reasons) are far too expensive. Period. Punkt. Punto.
You may decide to do something idiotic about it (like passing a law) or something useful (like liberalizing labour markets, so people can compete based on their abilities), because you are not affraid of competing, arent you? After all those Indian IT people are rubbish? Right.
I work every day with people from India, and dear USians let me tell you, they are not only cheaper, but hardworking and on my personal experience on average are more capable than their counterparts in the US, UK and the far east. No wonder you are afraid, but the way to fight for your jobs is not by closing your eyes and hope that your goverment is going to take away economic realities.
You may need to completely change your carrier, dedicate yourself to something completely different or improve yourself on the IT field more than you ever dreamed would be necessary. I see tha the most talented people now a days are drawn from all around the world, not only from India, but these realities may escape some of the readership in/. that may work in places where this reality is not obvious, but here in London one knows one has to be on his toes or one will be flipping the proverbial burger.
How idiotic. Then you will be told they are in the US.
What are you going to do? QUiz them about US history? Ask them to sing the hymn of an US football or baseball team?
How petty and small minded, if you want drap yourself in your bar-spangled flag and be blinded by its stars go ahead, that is the right of nationalists and bigots.
But be consistent: go back home and throw away anything that is not produced in the good ole US of A, land of the free. I assure you you would be incommunicado and perhaps starving in less than a week.
How a company increasing its profits is sucking your taxes?
You know, the more profits a company makes, the more taxes they pay?
Why should the chap pay taxes in the US? He is working in india you know?
Next thing you are going to suggest is that people that work for Japanese or German companies in the US pay their 45% income tax and is sent to the respective countries.
Please I urge you to convince your politicians to enact trade barriers like the dement taxes you are suggesting. That will drive investment to other countries that would be less shortsighted.
Oh my, oh my, some people have a weird sense of logic....
You have to judge what he wrote about outsourcing on its own merits, not be refering to a descontextualized article (I would be surprised that there were no doubts in sme people just a few days after the attacks)...
You can't diferentiate between trade and labour issues to start with.
If you want to protect your workers impose restrictions in foreign workers coming to your country, push for the liberalization of working markets and practices in other countries that want to trade with you.
The steel example is so dumb it begs disbelief that there are still people believeing it was a good thing.
What Mr Bush did was to subsidize an inneficient industry by means of denying US customers access to cheap steel. He gave with one hand to steel producers while harming with the other US steel consumers whose industries were damaged by being forced to buy expensive steel.
Sorry, but the private sector seems to bi as bad as the public one.
At least politicians can be voted out of office, we can't do much about Billy Gates and Darl.
Although Europe is not as prosperous as the US it is certainly more egalitarian and less disparate, the deprived parts of Europe are immensily better to the ones in the US. Been in both of them, I would not wish on my worst enemy to be a poor person in the US...
Free, as in you are master of your software and hardware is good.
MS may some times try the first, but there is enough anecdotal evidence that gifts from MS (or any commercial entity for that matter) have normally strings attached.
In the case of most companies that have a minimum of decency it normaly means a mention that the company is helping or an small placement of a company logo somewhere where it can be seen and associated with the good deed.
In the case of MS that giving is perverse: they intrude themselves in the computing infrastructure of the beneficiaries and eventually, when the goodwill is over, the poor sods that accepted MS "charity" are faced with forced upgrades and forced application replacement with all the retraining and expenditure that this brings.
How intelligent people suggest such a practice is remotely good defies logic.
Repeat to me: convicted. We are not guessing, we are not venturing an opinion, we are stating a matter of fact proven in a court of law.
I did not make it up. They lost, not only once, but twice when they went to appeal.
If MS has some amount of competition that is beyond the point, that has been facilitated by a ruling that although only slapped them in the wirst, showed without any doubt the immorall company they are.
The situation is so bad that the only way a creadible competition could be organized was for people mightly desperate about the state of affairs decided to donate their work to ensure there is some freedom of choice.
For all practical purposes, any commercial alternatives were buried due to the predatory practices of MS.
But people like you will not rest until Photoshop goes away, Tomb Raider goes away, AutoCad goes away and every single software company that ever had an idea goes away and the only company allowed to produce software, and by extension, the only company that decides how and when people access the Internet, is MS.
I want no part of your world, thank you very much.
You make it appear like if you can freely choose what OS you want to use.
If it was not for the fine folks that bring us *BSD and Linux, your choices would be down to MS and between a tiny company called Apple making some nice computers. er, somewhere, which received some major investment from MS itself.
Do you like an out of the box os? Fine, good for you. I don't and I should not be forced to get one if I want to buy a new computer from any major manufacturer.
I can convince some of them to sell me a computer without OS but they masy still charge me fro an OS I did not buy. Try buying a new laptop without Windows. That is the convinience and choice to which lazy people are sommiting all of us.
With RedHat, Suse, *BSD you can easily strip the application software and leave the kernel bare if so you wish. You have freedom of choice in how your hardware and software resources should work.
Try to uninstall some of the applications from XP. Good luck.
I hope that explains fully the meaning of "bundling" in this context.
Without probe of who it was that can be construed as libel, or whatever it is called in the US.
If SCO is attacked they should pursue this with the appropriate authorities. I hope the perpetrator is caught, brought to justice and fairly punished.
The OSS community should be completely unambigous about this matter, illegal means have never been supported or encouraged in order to promote the aims of OSS, not only because it is immoral but also completely unnecessary and childish.
I am appalled that the response of many around here is "SCO deserves it". No dear slashbots, nobody deserves that their resources are abussed in this manner, not even SCO. I am behind them in any action they wish to pursue against the perpetrators, but equally I hope (perhaps in vain) that they will not do false claims without the knowledge of whom and why did this.
I am also peeved that people here are not unambigious about the condemnation of this DOS attack. This is not only illegal and immoral but also counter productive and it would be nice to see complete and unambigous condemnation of these tactics.
Do you want to show OSS tactics and aims are reasonable and beneficial? A wonderfule way would be for true hackers organizing themselves and try to identify, shame and denounce the perpetrators of this (or any other) charade.
Only because people have remained silent and unwilling to help the Internet, bit by bit, little by litte, is being taken away from us, but alas, we have not protected it as it deserves.
Slashdot Mirror
The games are overpriced and the game companies stop retailers trying to offer best price by forcing them to sell at the same price.
If the games would cost 10 or 15 GBP I would buy some, as things stand 35 or 40 GBP for a game is completely irrational.
I but all my games second hand. It is legal, legitimate and sends the message nicely.
That is a least 2 hours (otherwise it is not plural).
I just don't believe you, unless you are sleeping only 4 or 5 hours every day, work from home, and have no other hobby.
My oh my, I would hate to spoil another movie for you.
/. crowd.
How inconsiderate of the
Mea culpa, mea culpa (beating chest, lowering head...).
Whay should they have to think about it?
There is no reason whatsoever to receive executable attachments.
You should be filtering them out of your emails.
Former boss of mine, he was working for the same company for the last 10 years and goes into this charade (not disimilar to yours) about overtime and loyality and all the rest.
When after that I explained in no uncertain terms I will not do unpaid overtime, he threatened with, get this, no bonus. Since I don't work for a meagre bonus, I said that was fine with me.
A few weeks later company panics because profits are lower than expected (mind you, they did not loose money, they just made less than what they had expected) and goes in a wild downsizing exercise.
Guess who got the axe? Yea, the loyal employee that would spend any amount of weekends and unsocial hours working and always sung the prises about the company. He was kicked out of the building with a cardboard for his personal belongings escorted by two guards. A vulgar thief would get more deferential treatment. That after 11 years of loyal services.
That is loyalty for you. I will be damned, I am professional and will work to deliver a good service for my employer, but I feel no emotional attachment whatsoever to the company I work for, because the only relationship between my company and my is a business transaction: they pay, I work, we are happy. Fortunately I enjoy what I do thus it is much better than it sounds.
You obviously have no idea how muc money IBM makes overseas which is brought to the US in the form of taxes.
Yup, that is right, the fact that IBM is incorporated in the US means that you, USian slashbots, get to reap the benefits of global capitalism to pay for things like your miltary adventurism.
If you want to practice shuch "enlightened" ideas I hope your next proposal is that IBM also renounces all overseas profits and closes all its operations abroad, after all it seems like US base companies should be contained to the US only and be only for US people.
Well, you can have it, keey your companies in your country full of happy US workers but I hope you don;t mind that they don;t make business elsewhere.
Yeah, now also the Univerities, the furreygners are also stealing your education.
Xenophobia at its worst...
My job could dissapear in a puf but I am grown up enough to know that is a good thing in the great scheme of things.
I will adapt and carry on, as will do all of you.
The difference is that I am mentally and practically prepared to accept reality, others not so much so.
Free trade exists independently of liberalized labour markets.
You can have free trade (of IT services for example) without having a free labour market.
You can have your companies back, but I hope you will also demand that the profits they collect overseas are not funnelled back into the US economy and tha the US goverment also forbids them to intiate any new businesses abroad.
If you want to shut down the door you can leave half of the companies in and the other hal (the one convenient for you) out.
Nobody makes that little money working full time in a company.
There are unions in many countries.
.... is that Juan does not make 22 cents per week.
People normally do better than what they would fo otherwise.
What is offensive here is the assupmtion that people in other places are so damn stupid that will allow to be exploited. In some extreme circumstances, when force is used, yes, there is explotation, but that is minimal. In most cases the salaries obtained by working for a foreign company are much better that what you would do working in a farm or just not working at all.
Of course you are ignorant of thelong history and tradition of union in Latinamerica, otherwise you would have placed your example not in the most stable democracy in the continent but somewhere where dictatorship flourished under the benevolent shadow of unconuntable US administrations, and even in those cases, the people did not allowed itself to be exploited all the time.
I can cite anecdotes as well, I prefer to analyze trends.
/. that may work in places where this reality is not obvious, but here in London one knows one has to be on his toes or one will be flipping the proverbial burger.
The writing is in the wall, you may prefer to ignore it, rant and cry like a child to your politician, cite anecdotal evidence that would seem to support your needs and prejudices, the fact is that people in the developping world (for many reasons) are far too expensive. Period. Punkt. Punto.
You may decide to do something idiotic about it (like passing a law) or something useful (like liberalizing labour markets, so people can compete based on their abilities), because you are not affraid of competing, arent you? After all those Indian IT people are rubbish? Right.
I work every day with people from India, and dear USians let me tell you, they are not only cheaper, but hardworking and on my personal experience on average are more capable than their counterparts in the US, UK and the far east. No wonder you are afraid, but the way to fight for your jobs is not by closing your eyes and hope that your goverment is going to take away economic realities.
You may need to completely change your carrier, dedicate yourself to something completely different or improve yourself on the IT field more than you ever dreamed would be necessary. I see tha the most talented people now a days are drawn from all around the world, not only from India, but these realities may escape some of the readership in
How idiotic. Then you will be told they are in the US.
What are you going to do? QUiz them about US history? Ask them to sing the hymn of an US football or baseball team?
How petty and small minded, if you want drap yourself in your bar-spangled flag and be blinded by its stars go ahead, that is the right of nationalists and bigots.
But be consistent: go back home and throw away anything that is not produced in the good ole US of A, land of the free. I assure you you would be incommunicado and perhaps starving in less than a week.
How a company increasing its profits is sucking your taxes?
You know, the more profits a company makes, the more taxes they pay?
Why should the chap pay taxes in the US? He is working in india you know?
Next thing you are going to suggest is that people that work for Japanese or German companies in the US pay their 45% income tax and is sent to the respective countries.
Please I urge you to convince your politicians to enact trade barriers like the dement taxes you are suggesting. That will drive investment to other countries that would be less shortsighted.
Oh my, oh my, some people have a weird sense of logic....
You have to judge what he wrote about outsourcing on its own merits, not be refering to a descontextualized article (I would be surprised that there were no doubts in sme people just a few days after the attacks)...
You can't diferentiate between trade and labour issues to start with.
If you want to protect your workers impose restrictions in foreign workers coming to your country, push for the liberalization of working markets and practices in other countries that want to trade with you.
The steel example is so dumb it begs disbelief that there are still people believeing it was a good thing.
What Mr Bush did was to subsidize an inneficient industry by means of denying US customers access to cheap steel. He gave with one hand to steel producers while harming with the other US steel consumers whose industries were damaged by being forced to buy expensive steel.
Enron.
Power deregulation in the US.
Train privatization in the UK.
Parmalat.
WorldCom.
Higway and bank privatization in Mexico.
Sorry, but the private sector seems to bi as bad as the public one.
At least politicians can be voted out of office, we can't do much about Billy Gates and Darl.
Although Europe is not as prosperous as the US it is certainly more egalitarian and less disparate, the deprived parts of Europe are immensily better to the ones in the US. Been in both of them, I would not wish on my worst enemy to be a poor person in the US...
Obviously you don't.
Free, as in no price, is not necessarily good.
Free, as in you are master of your software and hardware is good.
MS may some times try the first, but there is enough anecdotal evidence that gifts from MS (or any commercial entity for that matter) have normally strings attached.
In the case of most companies that have a minimum of decency it normaly means a mention that the company is helping or an small placement of a company logo somewhere where it can be seen and associated with the good deed.
In the case of MS that giving is perverse: they intrude themselves in the computing infrastructure of the beneficiaries and eventually, when the goodwill is over, the poor sods that accepted MS "charity" are faced with forced upgrades and forced application replacement with all the retraining and expenditure that this brings.
How intelligent people suggest such a practice is remotely good defies logic.
Or whatever MS offering for web server is.
It would be a waste of my time and obviously yours.
MS is a convicted abuser of their monopoly power.
Repeat to me: convicted. We are not guessing, we are not venturing an opinion, we are stating a matter of fact proven in a court of law.
I did not make it up. They lost, not only once, but twice when they went to appeal.
If MS has some amount of competition that is beyond the point, that has been facilitated by a ruling that although only slapped them in the wirst, showed without any doubt the immorall company they are.
The situation is so bad that the only way a creadible competition could be organized was for people mightly desperate about the state of affairs decided to donate their work to ensure there is some freedom of choice.
For all practical purposes, any commercial alternatives were buried due to the predatory practices of MS.
But people like you will not rest until Photoshop goes away, Tomb Raider goes away, AutoCad goes away and every single software company that ever had an idea goes away and the only company allowed to produce software, and by extension, the only company that decides how and when people access the Internet, is MS.
I want no part of your world, thank you very much.
Go and check the definition of what an OS is.
Damn, people here are suppossed to be informed about these issues....
You make it appear like if you can freely choose what OS you want to use.
If it was not for the fine folks that bring us *BSD and Linux, your choices would be down to MS and between a tiny company called Apple making some nice computers. er, somewhere, which received some major investment from MS itself.
Do you like an out of the box os? Fine, good for you. I don't and I should not be forced to get one if I want to buy a new computer from any major manufacturer.
I can convince some of them to sell me a computer without OS but they masy still charge me fro an OS I did not buy. Try buying a new laptop without Windows. That is the convinience and choice to which lazy people are sommiting all of us.
With RedHat, Suse, *BSD you can easily strip the application software and leave the kernel bare if so you wish. You have freedom of choice in how your hardware and software resources should work.
Try to uninstall some of the applications from XP. Good luck.
I hope that explains fully the meaning of "bundling" in this context.
Without probe of who it was that can be construed as libel, or whatever it is called in the US.
If SCO is attacked they should pursue this with the appropriate authorities. I hope the perpetrator is caught, brought to justice and fairly punished.
The OSS community should be completely unambigous about this matter, illegal means have never been supported or encouraged in order to promote the aims of OSS, not only because it is immoral but also completely unnecessary and childish.
I am appalled that the response of many around here is "SCO deserves it". No dear slashbots, nobody deserves that their resources are abussed in this manner, not even SCO. I am behind them in any action they wish to pursue against the perpetrators, but equally I hope (perhaps in vain) that they will not do false claims without the knowledge of whom and why did this.
I am also peeved that people here are not unambigious about the condemnation of this DOS attack. This is not only illegal and immoral but also counter productive and it would be nice to see complete and unambigous condemnation of these tactics.
Do you want to show OSS tactics and aims are reasonable and beneficial? A wonderfule way would be for true hackers organizing themselves and try to identify, shame and denounce the perpetrators of this (or any other) charade.
Only because people have remained silent and unwilling to help the Internet, bit by bit, little by litte, is being taken away from us, but alas, we have not protected it as it deserves.