Oh, I agree that ultimately, it's the material itself that counts. However, if you're willing to put your name to it and defend it both in public and in court, people are more likely to take the time to read it in the first place.
After all, how many people even SEE anonymous posts here on slashdot? It's part of how we think - we tend to take things more seriously if we can attach a face... or at least a name... to it.
You only have a "price" if you aren't willing to drop your anonymity.
I posted a lot of whistleblowing material this weekend against my former boss - starmedia.ca - about tax fraud, over-billing customers, scamming the government-subsidized job training programs, etc.
I didn't do it anonymously, because anonymous whistle-blowing has zero credibility.
Sure enough, he got so scared he contacted my hosting company (iweb.com - if you don't use adblock, you'll see they're a big advertiser on slashdot and youtube), and they suspended my hosting account. He's too chicken-sh*t to sue me because he knows he'd lose.
So, having my account suspended is a minor inconvenience compared to the price of knuckling under and allowing him to continue to lie, cheat, and steal.
And iWeb is now off the list of hosting companies that I would recommend, since they're located in a country that has no 1st Amendment rights.
Sunlight - it works on vampires, you know. Shine a bit on the businesses that are screwing us, and maybe they'll shrivel up and die because nobody wants to be seen near them. What have you got to lose except your chains?
Nativity scene on the front lawn of a government property should do just nicely. It would probably fall under at least one of the 'frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress to' requirements for someone out there.
1. Child abuse - poor baby Jeebus doesn't have a proper bed or crib to sleep in;
2. Willful endangerment of a minor - those barn animals are not tame, and also the barn is not too sanitary;
3. Promoting ways for Illegal aliens and terr'rists to "live off the land" in communities;
4. Smuggling and undeclared income - gold, frankincense, myrrh;
5. Mary has no visible means of support - obviously she's a prostitute and Joe is her pimp!
6. Keeping barnyard animals in a residential area;
7. Dwelling does not conform to residential land use bylaws;
8. Illegal use of a building as a residence - No smoke detectors;
9. Illegal use of a building as a residence - No running water;
10. Illegal use of a building as a residence - No toilet.
Remember to add lots of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!" (all caps).
Then you can attack Santa Clause - after all, some weirdly-dressed guy is going around offering little kids candy to sit on his lap... sounds like a perv...
There is simply no way this is anything CLOSE to accurate. This is pure FUD and self-promotion. First, they don't have accurate stats on how many ID theft operators there are (if they knew who was doing the stealing, they'd be able to close them down, right?), so this is just a "guestimate" to make people who deal with bulk operators worried that they might be dealing with a "dishonest crook", and to justify their budgets.
Oracle doesn't "own" Java - they own the trademark, one implementation, and the conformance test suites to certify other implementations as to be able to use the name Java instead of, say, IcedTea.
As for Solaris, growth is tied to those (declining) Sun hardware sales. One reason why Oracle has their own linux distro.
Give it up. Really, just give it up. Your post is so much astro-turf it could be a soccer field.
Now OpenOffice represents a huge investment by Sun and by the virtue of purchasing Sun, thus by Oracle into Open Source software
First, Oracle does not get to "own" an open source project - ANY open source project - by purchasing a former sponsor such as SUN. The deal is "you bought it, as long as you continue to be good stewards, people will contribute to it, and you get the same benefits as anyone else who sees value in contributing to an open source code base. You start getting all 'we haz your soul', it'll get forked."
If companies can't live by those rules, they should not consider buying a company for its' open source projects, because their value proposition doesn't align with the community that keeps the project alive.
Second, (since you make mention of getting code into shape) SUN had committed in 2006 to a code cleanup; that didn't happen under SUN, and it didn't happen under Oracle, but it's happening under LibreOffice, because there's simply not any *need* to coordinate with the corporate overlords about resources.
Oracle got caught off-guard at how quickly LibreOffice was forked, how much traction it gained with contributors, and how many distros either already switched to it (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, etc) or have it in TESTING (debian).
Because of the differences in licenses, future improvements are a one-way migration from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, and not the other way around. With this move Oracle has pretty much killed off OpenOffice, leaving the field open for LibreOffice to be the de facto default for those distros that haven't switched.
Once again, Larry meets the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Tivoization isn't that big a deal - if you don't like it, don't buy the hardware
Do you drink GPLv3 soft drinks? Do you eat GPLv3 food at your local restaurant? No. They're products, not software. Tivo is hardware. You're free to download the tivo software and implement your own hardware if you want, completely free of drm, just like you're free to cook your own meals using any publicly available recipe.
The worst, of course, is the AGPL. Do you really want some schmuck asking you for the old version of your web site's code from when they visited it 2 years ago?
I wouldn't call showing someone business specific conventions and procedures "mentoring".
Then your definition of "mentoring" is too narrow. It definitely involves imparting both domain-specific and business-specific knowledge, including conventions and procedures, as well as helping navigate the shoals of corporate politics and relationships with coworkers and management.
It was also used in MS-DOS disk-caching programs, and extended-memory managers back in the 1980s, as well as database buckets back in the 1970s - the patent is totally bogus.
It does have a clause stating the agreed value of a significant breach
Not even that - "The parties agree that a genuine and reasonable pre-estimate of the loss to WikiLeaks from a breach of this agreement based on a typical open market valuation for the information for a significant breach of the agreement is in the region of 12,000,000 pounds (12 million pounds sterling)."
So, it's just a "pre-estimate" - useless.
And "based on a typical open market valuation for the information" - good luck with that - especially since WikiLeaks doesn't sell information on the open market, but a CLOSED market. After all, only people and organizations invited to bid can buy the info.
Unless you're doing cookie-cutter stuff, you can't just take a new hire, no matter how experienced, and expect them to hit the ground running. They're going to need to learn their new employer's way of doing things- coding style norms, version control, who is responsible for what, the chain of command, who to go see when things go really fubar and the database now looks like google threw up...
Remove powerpoint from every computer and all of a sudden you'll have the extra time for some training.
...except for RMS, of course. You seem to be forgetting that using one of _his_ licenses requires copyright assignment to _his_ organization. Convenient.
Not true. Anyone is free to write code, license it under the GPL, the LGPL, or the AGLP, and retain copyright.
Obviously, your education was lacking in firearms training and the study of railroads. You should have put a couple years in the Navy. You would have learned that a riot gun is actually a 12 guage (sic) shotgun, and that a 5 inch 54 caliber gun's chamber is 54 inches long, and 5 inches diameter where it necks down into the barrel.
And perhaps you should have paid attention in your English classes. It's "gauge", not "guage". There's no such word as "guage" in the English language.
... which was also why I made fun of how you would pronounce the fictitious word.
Why not mentor the moron. Maybe they will turn out to be Einstein.
Hiring someone to help with the workload in your department only to have to mentor them is a terrible outcome.
Why? While it's true that adding more people to a late project makes it later, hiring people who need mentoring is not necessarily related. There's nothing wrong with having oodles of experience and still being open to being mentored by someone more experienced... or with complementary experience.
Likewise, someone with more experience should be open to mentoring others, unless they're "hording" their "special knowledge" because of their own insecurity.
Mentoring is a pleasure; you'll find it hard not to, if you know your field and are enthusiastic about it.. Try it - you'll find that you learn as much while mentoring others as the people you mentor, and it's an opportunity to sharpen your communications skills (the #1 reason for failed projects is sucky communications skills. Think about it...)
As other posters point out, the companies with a clue hire directly.
I recently got another unsolicited request for my resume from a wannabe recruiter, so I gave my usual reply:
Thank you for your interest, but I only deal directly with potential employers and clients.
Have a nice day.
... he got a bit pompous about how I'm somehow "missing out on great opportunities." It had only taken 2 minutes of research to show he had NOTHING to offer, So, after his second self-important reply, . seeing as it was Troll Tuesday, I wrote back:
Not really.
First, anyone trying to do IT recruiting who doesn't have either a web site devoted to their work or an email address linked to such a web site starts off with a huge, almost insurmountable, credibility deficit.
So, not to be rude, but seriously, not really.
This whole "recruiters" issue has been discussed in the worlds' largest tech forums, and many developers agree - we get better offers by refusing to go through recruiters.
More and more, employers are using the Internet to find their talent directly. Those who don't tend to be "behind the curve" when it comes to pay, benefits, and flexible working conditions. Or worse, they're not sure of what they want, so they end up wasting everyone's time
When you think about it, any employer can do what you did, and ultimately has a better understanding of what they are looking for.
None of the developers I've worked with has ever had anything positive to say about headhunters, recruiters, etc., so we've agreed to boycott them, same as a growing number of programmers and developers in the US are now doing.
It's also why we no longer use sites like linkedin - they've become a huge "echo chamber", like facebook, and a source of "blog spam", rather than a place to contact people.
The common complaints about agents/recruiters are:
1. "just a bunch of resume-shufflers";
2. Lack of technical proficiency;
3. Dependence on keyword matches to screen candidates;
4. The same job being offered by 20 recruiters;
5. Being submitted to positions that are a bad match;
6. The same position being available through other avenues;
7. Unrealistically low financial and other compensation to try to make the recruiter look good.
8. Barriers imposed by the recruiter that are in addition to requirements of the employer.
9. Outright lies by recruiters to potential employers in an attempt to "sell" a candidate;
10. Simply obsolete.
#9 has led to lawsuits in the US for wrongful dismissal, when it turned out that the recruiter had padded the resume, not the applicant.
It's the same as the real estate market - nobody needs an agent any more, either to buy or to sell, and because of consumer pressure, at least one province is suing the industry to allow consumers to post their homes on the MLS system without an agent.
In the IT industry, we can already post our critical info on job boards, etc., and communicate directly with employers. Legitimate offers will either have an email address or a web site. The web site gives us a chance to evaluate whether we want to work for that particular company, where they're located, what they do, etc. That's a lot better than having some recruiter say that they've got you an interview with company xyz, when you would never have considered xyz because of their corporate values, or the industry they're in, or whatever.
The next logical step is for us to create our own employment agencies or collectives... we're talking about it and experimenting with various forms of web sites, etc.
The Internet changes a lot of things, including the job-seeking process. It's the "great disintermediator".
Please remember, this was not offered as any sort of put-down; it's just that your services are obsolete to much of the
Sorry to have shocked you (though I bet Oracle now wishes they did own Android). What can I say, I had to fit it into the subject character limit, and I didn't notice how strange it looks until you pointed it out.
2. The total system power usage increased with the 4-980 over it's previous bethren in the same chassis, if you want a strict apples-to-apples comparison. It was much higher than even the 6-core cpus at idle, and only 5 watts less than the 6-core at max.
The fact is that the current generation of X4/X6 cpus can't compete with the intel core 2 series on price/performance or performance/watt.
Read the article - the i5-2500 beat it in every test, sometimes by as much as 50%, while using only 2/3 as much electricity. Spend the extra $10-$25 for the i5 - it'll pay for itself in energy savings in less than a year, and you'll have a faster machine.
The i5-2500 is not only faster, it uses a LOT less electricity The Phenom uses slightly more than 50% MORE electricity.
X4 - 157 to 252 watts
i5-2500 - 91 to 164 watts.
In other words, it will cost between $20 (normal use, cheap electricity) and $140 (24/7, expensive electricity) per year extra. Spending the extra $10 to get the faster i5 is a no-brainer.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I agree that ultimately, it's the material itself that counts. However, if you're willing to put your name to it and defend it both in public and in court, people are more likely to take the time to read it in the first place.
After all, how many people even SEE anonymous posts here on slashdot? It's part of how we think - we tend to take things more seriously if we can attach a face ... or at least a name ... to it.
You only have a "price" if you aren't willing to drop your anonymity.
I posted a lot of whistleblowing material this weekend against my former boss - starmedia.ca - about tax fraud, over-billing customers, scamming the government-subsidized job training programs, etc.
I didn't do it anonymously, because anonymous whistle-blowing has zero credibility.
Sure enough, he got so scared he contacted my hosting company (iweb.com - if you don't use adblock, you'll see they're a big advertiser on slashdot and youtube), and they suspended my hosting account. He's too chicken-sh*t to sue me because he knows he'd lose.
So, having my account suspended is a minor inconvenience compared to the price of knuckling under and allowing him to continue to lie, cheat, and steal.
And iWeb is now off the list of hosting companies that I would recommend, since they're located in a country that has no 1st Amendment rights.
And if they put DRM into it so you can't just "print up whatever you want"?
We should all start our own lists of companies to boycott, giving the reasons why, rather than being afraid that they might sue us if we dare to name and shame them.
Sunlight - it works on vampires, you know. Shine a bit on the businesses that are screwing us, and maybe they'll shrivel up and die because nobody wants to be seen near them. What have you got to lose except your chains?
1. Child abuse - poor baby Jeebus doesn't have a proper bed or crib to sleep in;
2. Willful endangerment of a minor - those barn animals are not tame, and also the barn is not too sanitary;
3. Promoting ways for Illegal aliens and terr'rists to "live off the land" in communities;
4. Smuggling and undeclared income - gold, frankincense, myrrh;
5. Mary has no visible means of support - obviously she's a prostitute and Joe is her pimp!
6. Keeping barnyard animals in a residential area;
7. Dwelling does not conform to residential land use bylaws;
8. Illegal use of a building as a residence - No smoke detectors;
9. Illegal use of a building as a residence - No running water;
10. Illegal use of a building as a residence - No toilet.
Remember to add lots of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!" (all caps).
Then you can attack Santa Clause - after all, some weirdly-dressed guy is going around offering little kids candy to sit on his lap ... sounds like a perv ...
I call shenanigans.
There is simply no way this is anything CLOSE to accurate. This is pure FUD and self-promotion. First, they don't have accurate stats on how many ID theft operators there are (if they knew who was doing the stealing, they'd be able to close them down, right?), so this is just a "guestimate" to make people who deal with bulk operators worried that they might be dealing with a "dishonest crook", and to justify their budgets.
Pitifully transparent.
That "multi-billion dollar (quarterly) hardware business" doesn't exist, and hasn't for quite some time. Last year, for example (and remember - this is post-scquisition), they dropped 32% while everyone rose 17%,The actual numbers,
Oracle doesn't "own" Java - they own the trademark, one implementation, and the conformance test suites to certify other implementations as to be able to use the name Java instead of, say, IcedTea.
As for Solaris, growth is tied to those (declining) Sun hardware sales. One reason why Oracle has their own linux distro.
Give it up. Really, just give it up. Your post is so much astro-turf it could be a soccer field.
First, Oracle does not get to "own" an open source project - ANY open source project - by purchasing a former sponsor such as SUN. The deal is "you bought it, as long as you continue to be good stewards, people will contribute to it, and you get the same benefits as anyone else who sees value in contributing to an open source code base. You start getting all 'we haz your soul', it'll get forked."
If companies can't live by those rules, they should not consider buying a company for its' open source projects, because their value proposition doesn't align with the community that keeps the project alive.
Second, (since you make mention of getting code into shape) SUN had committed in 2006 to a code cleanup; that didn't happen under SUN, and it didn't happen under Oracle, but it's happening under LibreOffice, because there's simply not any *need* to coordinate with the corporate overlords about resources.
Oracle got caught off-guard at how quickly LibreOffice was forked, how much traction it gained with contributors, and how many distros either already switched to it (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, etc) or have it in TESTING (debian).
Because of the differences in licenses, future improvements are a one-way migration from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, and not the other way around. With this move Oracle has pretty much killed off OpenOffice, leaving the field open for LibreOffice to be the de facto default for those distros that haven't switched.
Once again, Larry meets the Law of Unintended Consequences.
... will this be released before, or after, Ballmer "resigns".
Maybe that old code has defaults that you have since learned are insane?
Maybe that old code had back doors in it for testing purposes?
Only a fool would use the AGPL when it would require you to distribute old code.
Tivoization isn't that big a deal - if you don't like it, don't buy the hardware
Do you drink GPLv3 soft drinks? Do you eat GPLv3 food at your local restaurant? No. They're products, not software. Tivo is hardware. You're free to download the tivo software and implement your own hardware if you want, completely free of drm, just like you're free to cook your own meals using any publicly available recipe.
The worst, of course, is the AGPL. Do you really want some schmuck asking you for the old version of your web site's code from when they visited it 2 years ago?
I wouldn't call showing someone business specific conventions and procedures "mentoring".
Then your definition of "mentoring" is too narrow. It definitely involves imparting both domain-specific and business-specific knowledge, including conventions and procedures, as well as helping navigate the shoals of corporate politics and relationships with coworkers and management.
It was also used in MS-DOS disk-caching programs, and extended-memory managers back in the 1980s, as well as database buckets back in the 1970s - the patent is totally bogus.
Not even that - "The parties agree that a genuine and reasonable pre-estimate of the loss to WikiLeaks from a breach of this agreement based on a typical open market valuation for the information for a significant breach of the agreement is in the region of 12,000,000 pounds (12 million pounds sterling)."
So, it's just a "pre-estimate" - useless.
And "based on a typical open market valuation for the information" - good luck with that - especially since WikiLeaks doesn't sell information on the open market, but a CLOSED market. After all, only people and organizations invited to bid can buy the info.
Unless you're doing cookie-cutter stuff, you can't just take a new hire, no matter how experienced, and expect them to hit the ground running. They're going to need to learn their new employer's way of doing things- coding style norms, version control, who is responsible for what, the chain of command, who to go see when things go really fubar and the database now looks like google threw up ...
Remove powerpoint from every computer and all of a sudden you'll have the extra time for some training.
And Bill Gates did say that 1.5 meg should be enough, back in the days of the first LIM memory extensions to DOS.
Not true. Anyone is free to write code, license it under the GPL, the LGPL, or the AGLP, and retain copyright.
And it's GNU/RMS, you insensitive clod!
And perhaps you should have paid attention in your English classes. It's "gauge", not "guage". There's no such word as "guage" in the English language.
Rouge nations? Would that be the Kingdom of Maybelline, the Covergirl Islands, or the Republique de l'Oreal?
And what's a "guage"? It sounds french. Do you pronounce it "goo-aj", "g-ow-gh", or "joo-a-jee"?
Why? While it's true that adding more people to a late project makes it later, hiring people who need mentoring is not necessarily related. There's nothing wrong with having oodles of experience and still being open to being mentored by someone more experienced ... or with complementary experience.
Likewise, someone with more experience should be open to mentoring others, unless they're "hording" their "special knowledge" because of their own insecurity.
Mentoring is a pleasure; you'll find it hard not to, if you know your field and are enthusiastic about it.. Try it - you'll find that you learn as much while mentoring others as the people you mentor, and it's an opportunity to sharpen your communications skills (the #1 reason for failed projects is sucky communications skills. Think about it ...)
As other posters point out, the companies with a clue hire directly.
I recently got another unsolicited request for my resume from a wannabe recruiter, so I gave my usual reply:
Sorry to have shocked you (though I bet Oracle now wishes they did own Android). What can I say, I had to fit it into the subject character limit, and I didn't notice how strange it looks until you pointed it out.
2. The total system power usage increased with the 4-980 over it's previous bethren in the same chassis, if you want a strict apples-to-apples comparison. It was much higher than even the 6-core cpus at idle, and only 5 watts less than the 6-core at max.
The fact is that the current generation of X4/X6 cpus can't compete with the intel core 2 series on price/performance or performance/watt.
Read the article - the i5-2500 beat it in every test, sometimes by as much as 50%, while using only 2/3 as much electricity. Spend the extra $10-$25 for the i5 - it'll pay for itself in energy savings in less than a year, and you'll have a faster machine.
X4 - 157 to 252 watts
i5-2500 - 91 to 164 watts.
In other words, it will cost between $20 (normal use, cheap electricity) and $140 (24/7, expensive electricity) per year extra. Spending the extra $10 to get the faster i5 is a no-brainer.