Well it all started back when Redhat was picking a default desktop. At that time the QT toolkit wasn't open enough for commercial distribution so they went with Gnome which was free beer. Shortly afterwards Troll opened Qt and Mandrake had KDE as it's default (as did SuSE). You're right about people still being scared of it, it's stupid but that's how it is.
No increase in hiring because the dow reaching 10k is relatively recent. If it continues, companies will feel like they can afford to hire people, stockholders won't be such dicks, and spending will increase.
This happened a long, long time ago, and it's starting back up again. Next year should be a good year.
It's legal to kill people using a gun in some circumstances, be clear. If someone breaks into your house at night and you think they're going to kill you or your family, you can blow a hole through them. (The Make My Day law, legal in many states). The other instance is if you feel your life is being threatened, the other person has a gun, and if you shoot first you win. Of course in this case there are a host of mitigating circumstances and it'll definitely go before the court, but your chances of winning are generally high. In the previous scenario, you're almost guaranteed to not have a problem with the law.
So yeah, if you own a gun, it's legal to kill people with it under some circumstances.
Damn man, you've got to be the worst typist ever. Did you know there's a backspace key that allows you to correct mistakes?
At any rate, yeah, they TRIED to save money and weren't able to do it because they hired a ton of morons, but if they stuck to it, they could pull it off. Mexicans are ignorant but they're not stupid. Ignorant meaning uneducated of course. They are eager to learn and hard workers, given time and beer. I've seen it first hand many times.
If Boeing was serious they would have set up an education center near whatever town they were hiring in and give their guys some knowledge before they went on a hiring spree. I've never met a Mexi-can't. Mexicans will say they can do anything for any length of time to land the job, that's the spirit of any true opportunist. Whether or not they know what they hell they're doing once you hire them is a mystery, but they always manage to find the one guy that knows what to do and learn QUICK from him.
Basically I'm reinforcing your point that the guys they hired probably weren't sufficiently educated, but that's no fault of their own. Maybe the Boeing tutorial was poorly translated.
I figured the economy would turn around once the Dow hit the magical 10k mark. Take a look at your local stock ticker, it's finally above 9k again, and the economy is indeed looking better overall.
That has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with shareholder expectations. Once the shareholders have your publicly held company by the short hairs, anything goes. Economists have shown that downsizing ultimately hurts companies in the long run (retraining costs, hiring costs, etc. etc.) but they'll do it to shave fat for the quarterly reports. This makes shareholders happy because losing employees=lowering costs=raising stock price or perceived value. Even if sales are flat companies will still drop 5000 people off the roster to boost their stock price.
My advice to you is stick with privately held companies. They don't give a shit about the stock market or whims of the shareholders, they are only in business to make money.
Unionization isn't what's making those jobs disappear, it's overall labor/skill costs. Sure, unions make demands, but in Mexico there are no environmental controls. Union Carbide or Ford or whoever can setup shop down there and dump toxins into the environment all day long and nobody cares. That saves money. Also when Pablo is getting paid $20 US every day, that's a big savings too. The NAFTA is just one wonderful plan that made this possible. Textiles, well again, slave labor in another country takes care of that. Thailand, Bali, Turkey, you name it, wherever cost of living is super low, wages will be low as well.
Globalization helps YOU by bringing down the cost of goods. Globalization helps THEM by lowering costs. The only people it hurts (ultimately) is the third world country that the actual manufacturing takes place in. Some companies have been known to buy land in these countries, destroy the local economy by buying up farms and razing them, then dropping in a factory. The people work in the factory right away just to survive.
"Can you find a job at another company, sometimes even a competitor, and instantly go work there with little fear of backlash from your current employer? Yes."
This isn't always the case. Some companies have limiting contracts that prevent you from working in the same field in your next job. This isn't legal and binding in ALL states but in most it can be upheld. This prevents YOU from learning skills at X and going to work at Y the same day, with all the knowledge of trade skills, etc. that you learned at X.
"If a company lets you go, are you entitled to unemployment compenstation of some sort? Yes."
This depends on your length and type of employment. Anything less than 6 months at a job does not entitle you to unemployment benefits, and if you were under a contract through a third party such as a temp service you have nothing coming to you.
"Can a company legally tell another company that you don't bathe, you write shitty code and your mother-in-law calls you 17 times a day distracting you at work? No."
Actually that's not true at all. Again, it varies by state, but here in Texas employers are entitled to full disclosure without fear of retribution by law. Anything your PHB tells a prospective employer about you is held in confidence, he/she can say what he/she wants, true or not. There are actually companies that call places you used to work for, on your behalf, to see what kind of things they're saying about you. You hire them to see what mud has been slung by former employers.
So yeah, your final point about employers having more rights than the employed is dead on. It's just sad that most people don't realize just how unprivileged employees are.
You'll never see 1000 day uptime from Microsoft until they learn how to apply patches and updates that don't force the machine to reboot nearly every time. Maybe that's what the core developers are focusing their attention on. Forget the heavy usage, I'd enjoy seeing a picture of any Windows machine that has been patched on time and is still 'up', i.e. not rebooted.
I mean seriously, in this day and age of modular kernels and separate daemons for everything, can't you just kill a service/daemon and restart it without power cycling your machine?!
AFAIK New Zealand and particularly Australia don't respect region encoding, some laws they have setup don't allow for it. I think all the players in that region of the globe ignore region encoding.
At least, the bios for my Apex AD1200 came from Australia, fully unlocked.
I don't know about all that. I've watched alot of recent releases from all studios, and my Apex 1200 hasn't had a problem with any of them. Lucky I got a good one when I did...although the power supply tried to commit suicide, I resurrected it with a new capacitor and a little soldering.
All it took was a cd burned with a new bios to 'fix' it. No region encoding OR macrovision.:)
That's actually a pretty astute observation. I used to live in Oklahoma City where the voters approved a 1 cent MAPS Tax to increase funds available to renovate downtown OKC. They got a riverwalk (sort of), a baseball field (which was subsequently bought by and named Southwestern Bell Field, keep in mind this was publicly funded), a renovated Bricktown area, etc. Ok, so once everything was built, the MAPS tax disappeared right? Hell no! It's still in effect to this day.
My father said his father gave him a nugget of wisdom before he died. He said that new taxes never, ever disappear. Once the government becomes dependent on the income from a new tax, they never kill it, even if it was designed for a new project that has a clear completion date.
The main factor here in having lower wages for Asians in general is cost of living. When, in Thailand, you can get a fresh bowl of rice and seafood soup for less than $1 US, and a nice apartment with air conditioning and plenty of space costs you around $150-$200 a month (depending on region), how can US companies compete on labor costs? The US has a horribly inflated cost of living compared to asian countries and arguably the quality of life isn't that much better. At least in Thailand you can afford to get dental work done, some people fly there just for that reason. For the price of a root canal here you can fly to Bangkok and get all the work you need done professionally.
I, too, feel offended when newscasters or the public in general refers to myself or businesses as 'consumers'. It's really dehumanizing and makes one feel as though they're nothing more than a digit in a database, a statistic on a chart. Consumer is fundamentally insulting because it feels as though you're not afforded the same rights as you might have had under the customer label.
The customer is never wrong, but the consumer is never right.
Scientific American had rejected his article as 'unbelievable' and 'having no practical application'.
Hmmm, and you are the great-great-grandson of Mr. Root? I wonder...the reason why all of my good slashdot story submissions get bounced every freakin' time. Maybe CmdrTaco and pals are the great-great-grandsons of those same Scientific American editors!
Ironically enough, living in the past is what they do best. 2d games are a relic of the past (and still my favorite, hence my GBA and Castlevania/FFTA) and has always been SNK's trademark. If SNK made a 3d game, you'd see a televised snowball fight in hell on CNN.
So I guess it has its pluses and minuses. On one hand they still make fun 2d games, on the other they still think american censorship is a problem. Hell, even NINTENDO doesn't make green blood anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it all started back when Redhat was picking a default desktop. At that time the QT toolkit wasn't open enough for commercial distribution so they went with Gnome which was free beer. Shortly afterwards Troll opened Qt and Mandrake had KDE as it's default (as did SuSE). You're right about people still being scared of it, it's stupid but that's how it is.
I'll take that challenge!
Your momma wears combat boots in the shower! Also, she has a nagging tendency to pick her nose while stopped in traffic!
Wait, maybe that's my mother...
No increase in hiring because the dow reaching 10k is relatively recent. If it continues, companies will feel like they can afford to hire people, stockholders won't be such dicks, and spending will increase.
This happened a long, long time ago, and it's starting back up again. Next year should be a good year.
To summarize your whole point:
only !== best
It's legal to kill people using a gun in some circumstances, be clear. If someone breaks into your house at night and you think they're going to kill you or your family, you can blow a hole through them. (The Make My Day law, legal in many states). The other instance is if you feel your life is being threatened, the other person has a gun, and if you shoot first you win. Of course in this case there are a host of mitigating circumstances and it'll definitely go before the court, but your chances of winning are generally high. In the previous scenario, you're almost guaranteed to not have a problem with the law.
So yeah, if you own a gun, it's legal to kill people with it under some circumstances.
Damn man, you've got to be the worst typist ever. Did you know there's a backspace key that allows you to correct mistakes?
At any rate, yeah, they TRIED to save money and weren't able to do it because they hired a ton of morons, but if they stuck to it, they could pull it off. Mexicans are ignorant but they're not stupid. Ignorant meaning uneducated of course. They are eager to learn and hard workers, given time and beer. I've seen it first hand many times.
If Boeing was serious they would have set up an education center near whatever town they were hiring in and give their guys some knowledge before they went on a hiring spree. I've never met a Mexi-can't. Mexicans will say they can do anything for any length of time to land the job, that's the spirit of any true opportunist. Whether or not they know what they hell they're doing once you hire them is a mystery, but they always manage to find the one guy that knows what to do and learn QUICK from him.
Basically I'm reinforcing your point that the guys they hired probably weren't sufficiently educated, but that's no fault of their own. Maybe the Boeing tutorial was poorly translated.
I figured the economy would turn around once the Dow hit the magical 10k mark. Take a look at your local stock ticker, it's finally above 9k again, and the economy is indeed looking better overall.
Time to get that new job guys.
Looks like you're doing a fine job also. While you're posting on slashdot there are 20 people in line there at your window at the DMV.
:)
And all this time I thought you guys were 'looking up some information' while I waited.
Government cheese sure is sweet.
That has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with shareholder expectations. Once the shareholders have your publicly held company by the short hairs, anything goes. Economists have shown that downsizing ultimately hurts companies in the long run (retraining costs, hiring costs, etc. etc.) but they'll do it to shave fat for the quarterly reports. This makes shareholders happy because losing employees=lowering costs=raising stock price or perceived value. Even if sales are flat companies will still drop 5000 people off the roster to boost their stock price.
My advice to you is stick with privately held companies. They don't give a shit about the stock market or whims of the shareholders, they are only in business to make money.
Unionization isn't what's making those jobs disappear, it's overall labor/skill costs. Sure, unions make demands, but in Mexico there are no environmental controls. Union Carbide or Ford or whoever can setup shop down there and dump toxins into the environment all day long and nobody cares. That saves money. Also when Pablo is getting paid $20 US every day, that's a big savings too. The NAFTA is just one wonderful plan that made this possible. Textiles, well again, slave labor in another country takes care of that. Thailand, Bali, Turkey, you name it, wherever cost of living is super low, wages will be low as well.
Globalization helps YOU by bringing down the cost of goods. Globalization helps THEM by lowering costs. The only people it hurts (ultimately) is the third world country that the actual manufacturing takes place in. Some companies have been known to buy land in these countries, destroy the local economy by buying up farms and razing them, then dropping in a factory. The people work in the factory right away just to survive.
"Can you find a job at another company, sometimes even a competitor, and instantly go work there with little fear of backlash from your current employer? Yes."
This isn't always the case. Some companies have limiting contracts that prevent you from working in the same field in your next job. This isn't legal and binding in ALL states but in most it can be upheld. This prevents YOU from learning skills at X and going to work at Y the same day, with all the knowledge of trade skills, etc. that you learned at X.
"If a company lets you go, are you entitled to unemployment compenstation of some sort? Yes."
This depends on your length and type of employment. Anything less than 6 months at a job does not entitle you to unemployment benefits, and if you were under a contract through a third party such as a temp service you have nothing coming to you.
"Can a company legally tell another company that you don't bathe, you write shitty code and your mother-in-law calls you 17 times a day distracting you at work? No."
Actually that's not true at all. Again, it varies by state, but here in Texas employers are entitled to full disclosure without fear of retribution by law. Anything your PHB tells a prospective employer about you is held in confidence, he/she can say what he/she wants, true or not. There are actually companies that call places you used to work for, on your behalf, to see what kind of things they're saying about you. You hire them to see what mud has been slung by former employers.
So yeah, your final point about employers having more rights than the employed is dead on. It's just sad that most people don't realize just how unprivileged employees are.
What do you expect, it's Gnome. I've never had a good experience with Gnome. KDE, on the other hand, is solid as a rock for me.
Then again, you can't really expect the window manager to represent the entire OS. Unless you're looking at it from a windows perspective, of course.
You speak of this boss in the past tense, which begs the question....
Just how many stuffed frogs did you collect?
You'll never see 1000 day uptime from Microsoft until they learn how to apply patches and updates that don't force the machine to reboot nearly every time. Maybe that's what the core developers are focusing their attention on. Forget the heavy usage, I'd enjoy seeing a picture of any Windows machine that has been patched on time and is still 'up', i.e. not rebooted.
I mean seriously, in this day and age of modular kernels and separate daemons for everything, can't you just kill a service/daemon and restart it without power cycling your machine?!
...and the world will officially end the day Bill Gates steps up to the mic and sings the horrible Hackers song by ESR.
*shudder*
Bahahahaah there really IS a Sancho and with a user number so low...it might even be the first Sancho to ever read /.
AFAIK New Zealand and particularly Australia don't respect region encoding, some laws they have setup don't allow for it. I think all the players in that region of the globe ignore region encoding.
At least, the bios for my Apex AD1200 came from Australia, fully unlocked.
I don't know about all that. I've watched alot of recent releases from all studios, and my Apex 1200 hasn't had a problem with any of them. Lucky I got a good one when I did...although the power supply tried to commit suicide, I resurrected it with a new capacitor and a little soldering.
:)
All it took was a cd burned with a new bios to 'fix' it. No region encoding OR macrovision.
Bah, come on now, this is government we're talking about here. Tax Refund is an oxymoron.
That's actually a pretty astute observation. I used to live in Oklahoma City where the voters approved a 1 cent MAPS Tax to increase funds available to renovate downtown OKC. They got a riverwalk (sort of), a baseball field (which was subsequently bought by and named Southwestern Bell Field, keep in mind this was publicly funded), a renovated Bricktown area, etc. Ok, so once everything was built, the MAPS tax disappeared right? Hell no! It's still in effect to this day.
My father said his father gave him a nugget of wisdom before he died. He said that new taxes never, ever disappear. Once the government becomes dependent on the income from a new tax, they never kill it, even if it was designed for a new project that has a clear completion date.
The main factor here in having lower wages for Asians in general is cost of living. When, in Thailand, you can get a fresh bowl of rice and seafood soup for less than $1 US, and a nice apartment with air conditioning and plenty of space costs you around $150-$200 a month (depending on region), how can US companies compete on labor costs? The US has a horribly inflated cost of living compared to asian countries and arguably the quality of life isn't that much better. At least in Thailand you can afford to get dental work done, some people fly there just for that reason. For the price of a root canal here you can fly to Bangkok and get all the work you need done professionally.
I, too, feel offended when newscasters or the public in general refers to myself or businesses as 'consumers'. It's really dehumanizing and makes one feel as though they're nothing more than a digit in a database, a statistic on a chart. Consumer is fundamentally insulting because it feels as though you're not afforded the same rights as you might have had under the customer label.
The customer is never wrong, but the consumer is never right.
Scientific American had rejected his article as 'unbelievable' and 'having no practical application'.
Hmmm, and you are the great-great-grandson of Mr. Root? I wonder...the reason why all of my good slashdot story submissions get bounced every freakin' time. Maybe CmdrTaco and pals are the great-great-grandsons of those same Scientific American editors!
Ironically enough, living in the past is what they do best. 2d games are a relic of the past (and still my favorite, hence my GBA and Castlevania/FFTA) and has always been SNK's trademark. If SNK made a 3d game, you'd see a televised snowball fight in hell on CNN.
So I guess it has its pluses and minuses. On one hand they still make fun 2d games, on the other they still think american censorship is a problem. Hell, even NINTENDO doesn't make green blood anymore.
Where are the before and after pictures of the server pre-and-post slashdotting?
Figure 1. A normal webserver
Figure 2. A molten, smoking mass.