By Quirk's Exception you have invalidated your use of Godwin's Law by invoking it purposefully.
There's no comparison between delaying a passenger boarding a plane for 5 minutes and gassing an entire village because of their ancestry. The TSA, as I understand it, has never claimed to be above reproach or above the US constitution. They're not performing medical experiments on people or pulling out their gold teeth because they were told to do so.
You fail not because of Godwin, but because the very idea that the two situations are comparable makes you look like an idiot. The whole point of Godwin's law is that absurd hyperbolic comparisons to Hitler and Nazis diminishes the comparison when it is relevant.
What was the probable cause to stop the vehicle? The guy with the radioactive cat didn't have a taillight out, AFAICT. You're talking about someone already stopped who raises the suspicion of an officer in one case. You're talking about every vehicle being searched for radiation sources in the other. Using your comparison of the two incidents, if the drug dog sniffed the car at highway speeds at an 80-foot distance and barked, that's probable cause.
I know untargeted police sobriety checkpoints have been deemed proper, and in some places roadside checks for seatbelt violations and insurance violations have become common enough. Yet this wasn't all cars being stopped for a common violation and this one driver being pulled out of the line for further checks because of someone's suspicion. It was every car going down the highway being checked on the off chance one was going to test positive. I fail to see the probably cause.
They may even be concerned with such simple concepts as keeping shelter and food available to their families.
A job that sucks is often a lesser evil than no job at all. It's not like the TSA people are selling crack to school kids on the playground. If the TSA was hiring when a person needed a job, then taking the job vs. having no job isn't really too much of a choice. They're not getting rich, but it's a steady job with government benefits. They might even actually prevent something bad from happening.
Just because the TSA is somewhat broken doesn't mean the workers are idiots, brutes, or power mongers. It just means the policies and training need work. I've worked at several companies where I didn't always agree with management about everything. No person's perfect and no organization is perfect. If you're only willing to collect a paycheck from a perfect organization, then your home probably looks a lot like the one where your parents live.
Actually, I think an entire generation that wants to be leaders could be a great thing. Lots of new, small, entrepreneurial companies could be founded. Lots of not-for-profits could be founded and do lots of charitable work. Lots of people could be competing for political offices, and maybe starting new alternative parties.
In sports they say you can tell a lot about someone by when they want the ball. A glory hog wants the ball all the time so that their personal numbers shine. A team player wants to get the ball to whoever will do the most with it and then help them do that. A team's leader wants the ball when the game's on the line, because he knows how to get his team to score.
More people wanting to really make a difference rather than being drones sounds mighty fine. I just hope people don't make a habit of going massively apeshit when they bang dreams and reality together and find that not everyone's cut out to be a leader.
In my generation (X, I guess, but we were the "Slacker Generation", labeled so while many of us were still in grade school by people who had different values to begin with), many of use wanted to be astronauts or CIA operatives. The Cold War and the shuttle program were big things in the 1980s. Now, the most credible threats to us in the US appear to be a few buildings being leveled, our president and legislature being attacked, and our own investment banks buying too many mortgage-backed securities. I'm not belittling the horror of 9/11 as a single attack, as it was brutal, wicked, and killed thousands of innocent people. Yet it's not the scale of horror of something like a Soviet invasion of the US or a 200-ICBM nuclear launch. Those were things many people actually feared 25 years ago.
The problems to solve within the US are not limited to misdirecting attention from Afghanistan to Iraq or some Wall Street firms having a hard time, though. Epidemiology, network security, an aging population, and many other things we didn't worry so much about in my childhood shape the lives of younger people now. We didn't have SARS in North America 25 or 30 years ago. We were just hearing about AIDS and having hysteria related to that. Now, air travel is cheaper in many parts of the world than it's ever been. Diseases spread worldwide in days. Networks that were government and university projects now have real money being exchanged over them, and real criminals are running huge server farms. We're seeing ever-growing demand for oil, and by most accounts that won't last too much longer. When I learned to drive, we used to put $5 in the tank and spend Friday night just cruising around town.
The world's going to need leaders in every country. Lots of leaders. We need lots of new things invented and lots of new ideas worked out. If Gen Y will lead where leaders are needed from the ground floor up instead of trying to jump into the top of existing companies at 25, then I say that's a damn good thing.
Many get rid of people who make more money, have more disagreements with their boss (whether valid disagreements or not), or who have higher health care premiums than by going on lack of experience. Many let go the people who've put in the most time with the company, so they can save those high salaries. Others cut people just before their company pension is vested.
There are those who get rid of people based on low performance, lack of seniority, or both. Those are better than the ones who fire th 55-and-up crowd specifically to save a penny here and there.
Using seniority alone is detrimental to the company and to employee morale when better-qualified people who happen to have come in later in life to your specific company go away and the goof-off in the department gets to goof off another 20 years because his first 20 were boom years in your market. The good older employees should have increased security. So should the good younger ones.
If you're weeding, pull the weeds. Don't pull the oldest or youngest plants indiscriminately. Of course, some union contracts require just that, but that's another topic entirely.
Fact: I never said the workers deserve even so much as profit-sharing (although that's a nice perk).
What I said was that companies that could take a temporary loss but keep their employees dump the employees to keep the stock price up. I didn't even say whether it was right or wrong. It's what happens, it's often a choice and not necessary to keep the business solvent, and all choices have consequences.
The consequence of showing the employees they have no security with their employer is that the employer will have no security in keeping the employees. If you only keep people at your whim, they will only stay with you at theirs.
This false glamor around fresh development is part of the problem between IT and management.
If a software project does something really neat and novel, sure, it takes a good designer. However, turning a designer's specs into usable code in a new project is the easy part of software development. The only ones doing anything with a high skill barrier are the interface designer, the architect, the specs specialist / user liaison, and possibly the lead developer. That's not to say the rest of fresh development can be done by trained bonobos, but it's far from the most difficult programming.
The hardest things one can do in software development are overwhelmingly represented by maintenance programming. Determining the role of an under-documented function is nothing when your team just wrote it. It's something much more difficult years later. Profiling the code and improving the performance without changing the code's behavior is more difficult than putting together a prototype or a first release. Fixing a bug that's been dormant until after a port or an OS upgrade can be a real challenge. Extending a software system to handle things it was never quite meant to do without breaking existing functionality can be a major pain. These are all things that schools tend not to teach or not to teach very thoroughly. Yet they're where most of the programming in the life of a project happens.
As for additional training, it's best if the employee stakes out an area of interest to study on their own and the company pays for training the employee is going to need but which isn't really interesting, personally, to the employee. Both should be happening in a technical field. If the company works the employee so many hours he can't take any time to read or study on personal time, then that's another issue.
The best advice isn't to take the first paycheck offered and see if you feel exploited. I think it'd be more along the lines of shopping yourself around and seeing the responsibilities, pay, and benefits of multiple offers (if you can get multiple offers). If you only find one place willing to hire you, consider taking a job there temporarily. Then, consider whether it'd be worthwhile as a permanent position. If it's not worthwhile, keep looking while you work there. If it is a good job and you're happy, consider staying if the competition offers you a little bit extra money your employer can't afford right now. That will build the kind of trust these companies say they don't have for their employees. Just be careful that you're not turning down extra cash just to be let go next week or next month anyway.
Ignorant, am I? My, I bet it's convenient that everyone in the world who might happen to disagree with you is stupid, uneducated, amoral, and of questionable parentage, isn't it? Get over yourself, you condescending spoiled brat.
Your job is to make a profit. If making a profit means running with half the employees as you currently have on payroll, most companies will fire half the payroll. I don't mean over the life of the company, either. Many companies will dump up to half the workforce to make a profitable year.
Yes, sales is hard. Nobody's disputing that. Yet many companies are just as quick to trim sales staff as production staff.
So is working 90 hours a week, managing four or five teens and twenty-somethings to make sure a network has less than 1% downtime while cutting costs 20% and integrating the networks of five recently-purchased competitors in 18 months. Yet two months from operational break-even, the investors who had their money in for 5 years decided they wanted their cash back and sold. I was hired on at the new owners long enough to familiarize their existing staff with the network, then dropped one afternoon. I had to fight to get my vacation paid out, and that's compensation to which I'm entitled by law in my state.
I came on at a company with 15,000 customers and was one of three people plus one outside consultant who improve the network infrastructure and scaled it to handle 45,000 customers in two years. I personally streamlined all kinds of procedures, taught my coworker and my boss several things, and saved the company thousands of dollars on software and hardware. I was then let go when they sold. That particular company at least gave me a decent severance -- two weeks pay in addition to my unused vacation.
I worked a year for a consulting company that did mostly government contracts. The contract that I was hired to do ran out a couple of months before my anniversary date, and the company kept me on until the week before my yearly evaluation. They paid for additional training and testing and tried to get me assigned to another contract. They paid me to come into the office for those two months to study for my tests. Since they were the ones to let me go, they waived the payback on the employee-funded training expenses I owed them. They paid me my final two weeks even through I worked only two days of that two-week period. They also paid for my health and life insurance that whole month. The managers from my department and branch office, and the VP of my division wrote me letters of recommendation.
Now, all three of those companies let me go. All three made themselves more cash in the short term by severing the relationship. Guess in which order I'd call them if I needed a job. The third company mentioned clearly values their employees even when work is slow. The second company valued me somewhat, and I'd consider working there again. The first company was disloyal trash. I've advised everyone I know in my field not to do any sort of business with the people who invested in or ran the initial company or the company which bought it, with a couple of exceptions.
My most recent adventure working for someone else was at a very small multidisciplinary firm. The principals decided to stop offering the types of services for which I'd been hired and to focus more directly on another market. They spun off and liquidated my department, as it were. They had money coming in from other sources, but most of the cash flow through the business was from the efforts of myself and one of the principals. Their initial reaction in letting me go was to solicit a position for me directly with a major customer, which they secured for me and I could have simply accepted. This would have left their other customers without a vendor and needing referrals. Instead, I negotiated with the owners to sell me the division of the company for which I had been working. Not everything has gone to plan, and I'm having some cash flow issues. Yet I'm happier working for myself than bei
Is it any wonder, with tens of thousands of layoffs every couple of years, why workers don't feel a strict loyalty to the companies that employ them? If the company isn't willing to maintain their educated, trained, experienced workforce through a minor downturn, then they should expect the employees to look for better opportunities.
There are two different ballots. You get the ballot with your party's candidates on it. If it's an open primary, you request the proper ballot and they give it to you. If it's a closed primary, you have to be a member of the party to get their primary ballot.
If you lose a limb by having a focused beam cut it off, will the wound be cauterized? The sounds much better than a sabot round or a grenade. If I'm using laser-precise weapons on a tank, though, I'm not aiming at the people inside. I'm aiming at the fuel, the engine, the main gun, or the munitions.
Stop whining already and write your own versions of everything from scratch or using a BSD-alike license. It's not evil for someone who writes software to tell you you can't blatantly rip off their work.
Commercial libraries often are far more "viral". They often have per-copy royalties. They often say you can't reveal the source of any part of your application using the library to a third party, for fear their API will get out and be cloned. People who have licensed commercial libraries and source code to build a project often have a hard time opening the source either BSD or GPL later. In some cases, they even have trouble contributing to a competing open-source project ( see SCO vs. IBM ).
If you want a good virus analogy, how about the BSD raiders? Those people who take and take from BSD or similarly licensed software for closed-source projects (often shrink-wrapped products on which they make a killing) without ever giving a line of code back are very much like a virus. They go around producing more closed-source software. When they find a piece of open-sourced software they can commandeer for their own purposes, they do so. Then they go on to make more closed-source software using what was meant to be open-source software. A virus goes around, waiting to fall into some foreign body where it can infiltrate a cell and turn the cell's work against the foreign body to produce and spread more virus. See the analogy?
The GPL, OTOH, doesn't turn other existing software into GPL. Some BSD code might be included in a GPL project, and the changes to that might be called GPL, but that's bad form on the part of the people doing that. The proper way to borrow BSD code for a GPL project is to modularize BSD code and contribute the changes needed to make the module back to the BSD community, then connect to that module from your GPL code in a different source file.
In the case of writing a new application around a bit of GPL, nobody's forcing you to use that GPled code as a starting point. If you're taking advantage of that code, the law (not just RMS) says you're (probably) making a derivative work. In court, a judge might make decisions about scope and size. If you're not a judge or at least a damn good lawyer, it's not really smart to gamble on that. If you write a clone from documentation, then it's not derivative (but don't steal the documentation against its license -- you might have to write your own without quoting directly).
I write software for a living. Some of my original stuff has a proprietary license. Some of my original stuff is BSD or public domain. Some is GPL. I use a lot of GPL code in some situations and I have no issue passing the code on to customers. My customers aren't generally other programmers, but I figure if they can find me and hire me, then they can find and hire another programmer in the future. That's freedom for the end user, because if I sell the customer a closed-source, proprietary application then their new programmer can't do anything with it. I often contribute back to the central project maintainers. In all, the work that the GPL has saved me has far outweighed the work I've invested in my return contributions. I don't consider that a bad deal.
Your traceroute program doesn't tell you when your traffic is being routed four hops through a tunnel to cut down on visible hops and to save space in the ISP's main routing table. Without the routing tables at hand you don't know the chances of being routed through your usual preferred route and through a backup route kept in case of congestion. Nothing from the customer end shows where companies like Level 3 and Internap have three or four layers of physical switches with VLANs piled on top between any two routers. Nothing tells you when you're in a star build-out of ten mid-sized cities that all go to the same NOC vs. when you're being mesh routed over lowest latency-weight round robin, although you might guess by statistical analysis and mesh routing of commercial ISP traffic outside the main NAPs is getting more and more rare.
There's a lot you can easily deduce, especially if your ISP uses honest and informative PTR records. There's still much that an ISP can do that you'll never, ever know about.
I worked for one ISP where we had 5 Internet connections in four cities to three carriers, but we served 25 cities with them. We had point-to-point lines from our dial-in equipment back to our public-facing NOCs. We had a further 18 or so cities served by having the lines back-hauled from those towns to our dial-in equipment. We had about 12k dialup customers and a few hundred DS1, fractional DS1, frame relay, and DSL customers. Everyone's traffic went through one of two main NOCs on a good day, and their mail, DNS, AAA, and the company's web site traffic never touched the public Internet unless we were routing around trouble. In a couple of places we even put RADIUS slaves and DNS caching servers right in the POP.
I worked for another that served over 40k dial-up and wireless customers by the time they sold. We had what we called "island POPs". Each local calling area we served had dial-in equipment and a public-facing 'Net connection. Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting, DNS, Mail, and the ISP's website traffic all flowed over the public Internet except in the two towns we had actual NOCs. There were tunnels set up between routers that made traffic from the remote sites to the NOCs look like local traffic on traceroute, but that was mainly for our ease of routing and to be able to redirect people to the internal notification site when they needed to pay their late bills. We (I, actually) also set up L2TP so that we could use dial-up pools from companies like CISP who would encapsulate a dial-in session over IP, authenticate it against our RADIUS, and then allow the user to surf from their network. We paid per average used port per month to let someone else handle the customer's net connection while we handled marketing, billing, and support.
The first ISP I worked for had lines to four different carriers in four different NAPs in four different states, lots of point-to-point lines for POPs, and a high-speed wireless (4-7 MBps, depending on weather, flocks of birds, and such) link across a major river to tie together two NOCs in two states. Either NOC could route all of the traffic for all the dozens of small towns in both states as long as one of our four main connections and that wireless stayed up (and all the point-to-point ones did, too). If the wireless went down, the two halves of the network could still talk, but over the public Internet. That one got to about 10k customers before it was sold.
At any of those ISPs, I couldn't tell you exactly who was going to be able to get online or where they were going to be able to get to without my status monitoring systems. On one, all the customers could get online even without the ISP having access to the Internet, but they could only see resources hosted at the ISP. Yet that one might drop five towns from a single cable break. Another one might keep 10k people offline due to a routing issue at a tier-1 NAP, but everyone else was okay. However, if that one's NOC went offline, anyone surfing in other
Gee, which one of the two translations I have at home should I reread to know you're a complete ass? The Bloom or the Griffith and Ferrari?
You analogy falls down not because you're defensive and come back with what you think is a witty reply about my lack of reading comprehension (BTW, did you score perfectly on the reading comprehension section of the ACT? I did.). It falls down because a published resource in no way analogizes to an enclosed portion of a private home.
A web site that's not protected by a firewall, password, or limited access notice is more like an outdoor garden than a living room. If you stick a TV on a cart out among the gardenias, don't blame someone for watching it through your wrought-iron fence.
Did you know there are apartment buildings surrounding Wrigley Field in Chicago from which people watch the Cubs play their home games? There are bleachers right up on the rooftops. There was no complaint from the team when it was just the building tenants watching the games. The legal battle flared up when people started to charge for admission. It went along the lines of stopping the practice, but the building owners and tenants demanded they had a right to be on their rooftops and to see whatever it was they could see from their rooftops that wasn't secured from view. The Cubs demanded that a license fee must be paid by anyone profiting from their team's games. The final result is that there are endorsed "Rooftop Partners" of the Chicago Cubs who can charge admission as long as they pay a 17% fee to the ball club. The other option was to build a fence around the top of the stadium to obstruct the view, which was done temporarily to great effect.
That "wind screen" at Wrigley was very much like an authentication and authorization system for a web site. The only reasons to forgo such a security measure are expense, aesthetics, and possibly the arrogant idea that nobody could figure out the URL. Cable, C-Band satellite, Dish Network, DirecTV, and many other Internet video sources use encryption, authentication and authorization, or both to determine who can and cannot view a feed. It's a standard cost of doing business and standard practice in restricted distribution video markets. There are also markets such as terrestrial broadcast television, YouTube, and certain satellite channels that do not use encryption nor authentication/authorization systems because they are trying to secure a broad audience. Therefore, it's easy for a potential viewer to assume an unencrypted and unauthenticated video stream which is accessible over a public network is meant to be a publicly available resource.
As for the actual poster of the link there's something to be said for publicizing a stupid decision by a company. Why would I invest in a company that's giving away a free service and not charging advertisers for time on it? Why would I pay for the service if they are giving it away? If they don't mean to give it away, how technically gifted can their staff be if they think that not publishing the URL makes it secure? These are things people should know about a company before investing in them or doing business with them. The poster was performing a public service by showing the incompetence involved in provision of the service.
Howard Chui neither posted nor, as far as I have seen, advocated using the material in question. He's involved simply because he believes that information about the stupidity of a provider is an important factor for people to consider on a forum about mobile phones and mobile phone services. That he's being attacked for leaving true information about a flaw in someone's service on his forum is a pointless, and frankly juvenile, attempt by the plaintiffs to cover up their own mess.
The people who know it's supposed to be a paid service but who watch it longer than as proof that it's happening are in a much darker gray area than anyone in this situation. If they know the intent of the company providing the feed is not to provide it for free
A website isn't a private home. Your analogy is a complete failure. It's more like saying that my big-screen TV on my front porch can't be watched by anyone. Nobody set up a proxy into a private network nor did they give away a password. TFA doesn't talk about poor encryption or an obvious password. I didn't even notice anywhere it said that the site streaming the video had a proprietary content advisory. If something is made publicly accessible and not advertised, it's still publicly available.
Just to clarify, the benchmark document says October 2007, and the release was February 2008. Where's the changes file to show what changed in the meantime? Plus, the tested scheduler is not yet the default scheduler in the released version.
That benchmark shows some sound methods and shows Linux ahead in performance. As TFS states, a benchmark or two doesn't mean too much. What one can take away from this is that under some tests a prerelease of FreeBSD beats a released Linux kernel and under some others a prerelease Linux kernel beats a prerelease FreeBSD kernel. That means there's probably not enough difference by the time both kernels are released to declare a clear winner based on performance, and if so then not by much. Other factors are probably more important than a vanishingly small performance advantage anyway, but using either FreeBSD or Linux is much faster than some of the other options.
There's also nothing keeping the EFF or anyone else from challenging within the first year. There's also nothing saying the EFF can't provide legal and paralegal support to those directly harmed when those people or companies file.
I think the one-year limit is bad, but it's not as bad as it's being made out to be.
The most important factors aren't in the summary. Does this apply to existing patents once the law passes, or only to new patents issued after? If it applies to existing patents, is the one year from when those preexisting patents were issued (which will largely already be come and gone) or one year from the date the bill becomes law? As a firm Constitutionalist, I believe the "no ex post facto law" clause should apply to anything, but the courts seem to think it only applies to laws which provide for criminal prosecution.
There are worst-time patches and CPU binding patches for Linux. Not only that, but many embedded applications are not, in fact, in need of an RTOS at all. Linux won't displace QNX, LynxOS, and VxWorks completely, but to say it's not making gains in the embedded space is either disingenuous or ignorant of the facts.
It'd also be pretty big news to, for example, MontaVista, Nokia, Cisco, and the BlueCat folks that embedded Linux isn't making any sales.
Those are very good points. The authors of TFA seem to overlook in its conclusions some other factors mentioned throughout the article. Recruiting among medicine, engineering, and science are heavier. The people from poorer countries involved in terrorism in general are more educated and wealthier than average.
It stands to reason that the longer someone is in school, the more chances there are to try to recruit them. It also makes sense that if you have limited recruitment ability you'd try for the most-skilled people you can find.
Perhaps doctors are less likely, wanting to save lives, to be recruited into a cause that takes them. Perhaps scientists, banking their careers on an empirical, secular field often at odds with religion, are less likely to be successfully recruited with strong religious words. Those are two things I don't see considered.
Also, it's clear TFA is showing number both for radical Muslims educated in these fields at home and those educated abroad, but I see no distinction. Surely that difference has something to do with radical indoctrination.
TFA also says that in many cases half the terrorists from a given country have no known educational data, and for instance in Saudi Arabia they base their conclusion on a sample size of 11 people whose major area of study was known.
From the data in the article, any number of hypotheses could be made. Perhaps the engineering departments in some schools are traditionally more radical. Perhaps those who studied other things were not kept track of as closely because engineering is considered a more important career. Perhaps engineering is seen as a revered and important career path, and self-aggrandizing people like radical fundamentalists want the prestige. Maybe the engineers are the only ones able to finance their own terrorist activities, because most other professions don't pay well enough. There are conclusions drawn which just should not be. There are too many alternate explanations.
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In other news, people pay professionals to work on their cars. Film at 11.
By Quirk's Exception you have invalidated your use of Godwin's Law by invoking it purposefully.
There's no comparison between delaying a passenger boarding a plane for 5 minutes and gassing an entire village because of their ancestry. The TSA, as I understand it, has never claimed to be above reproach or above the US constitution. They're not performing medical experiments on people or pulling out their gold teeth because they were told to do so.
You fail not because of Godwin, but because the very idea that the two situations are comparable makes you look like an idiot. The whole point of Godwin's law is that absurd hyperbolic comparisons to Hitler and Nazis diminishes the comparison when it is relevant.
What was the probable cause to stop the vehicle? The guy with the radioactive cat didn't have a taillight out, AFAICT. You're talking about someone already stopped who raises the suspicion of an officer in one case. You're talking about every vehicle being searched for radiation sources in the other. Using your comparison of the two incidents, if the drug dog sniffed the car at highway speeds at an 80-foot distance and barked, that's probable cause.
I know untargeted police sobriety checkpoints have been deemed proper, and in some places roadside checks for seatbelt violations and insurance violations have become common enough. Yet this wasn't all cars being stopped for a common violation and this one driver being pulled out of the line for further checks because of someone's suspicion. It was every car going down the highway being checked on the off chance one was going to test positive. I fail to see the probably cause.
They may even be concerned with such simple concepts as keeping shelter and food available to their families.
A job that sucks is often a lesser evil than no job at all. It's not like the TSA people are selling crack to school kids on the playground. If the TSA was hiring when a person needed a job, then taking the job vs. having no job isn't really too much of a choice. They're not getting rich, but it's a steady job with government benefits. They might even actually prevent something bad from happening.
Just because the TSA is somewhat broken doesn't mean the workers are idiots, brutes, or power mongers. It just means the policies and training need work. I've worked at several companies where I didn't always agree with management about everything. No person's perfect and no organization is perfect. If you're only willing to collect a paycheck from a perfect organization, then your home probably looks a lot like the one where your parents live.
Actually, I think an entire generation that wants to be leaders could be a great thing. Lots of new, small, entrepreneurial companies could be founded. Lots of not-for-profits could be founded and do lots of charitable work. Lots of people could be competing for political offices, and maybe starting new alternative parties.
In sports they say you can tell a lot about someone by when they want the ball. A glory hog wants the ball all the time so that their personal numbers shine. A team player wants to get the ball to whoever will do the most with it and then help them do that. A team's leader wants the ball when the game's on the line, because he knows how to get his team to score.
More people wanting to really make a difference rather than being drones sounds mighty fine. I just hope people don't make a habit of going massively apeshit when they bang dreams and reality together and find that not everyone's cut out to be a leader.
In my generation (X, I guess, but we were the "Slacker Generation", labeled so while many of us were still in grade school by people who had different values to begin with), many of use wanted to be astronauts or CIA operatives. The Cold War and the shuttle program were big things in the 1980s. Now, the most credible threats to us in the US appear to be a few buildings being leveled, our president and legislature being attacked, and our own investment banks buying too many mortgage-backed securities. I'm not belittling the horror of 9/11 as a single attack, as it was brutal, wicked, and killed thousands of innocent people. Yet it's not the scale of horror of something like a Soviet invasion of the US or a 200-ICBM nuclear launch. Those were things many people actually feared 25 years ago.
The problems to solve within the US are not limited to misdirecting attention from Afghanistan to Iraq or some Wall Street firms having a hard time, though. Epidemiology, network security, an aging population, and many other things we didn't worry so much about in my childhood shape the lives of younger people now. We didn't have SARS in North America 25 or 30 years ago. We were just hearing about AIDS and having hysteria related to that. Now, air travel is cheaper in many parts of the world than it's ever been. Diseases spread worldwide in days. Networks that were government and university projects now have real money being exchanged over them, and real criminals are running huge server farms. We're seeing ever-growing demand for oil, and by most accounts that won't last too much longer. When I learned to drive, we used to put $5 in the tank and spend Friday night just cruising around town.
The world's going to need leaders in every country. Lots of leaders. We need lots of new things invented and lots of new ideas worked out. If Gen Y will lead where leaders are needed from the ground floor up instead of trying to jump into the top of existing companies at 25, then I say that's a damn good thing.
Many get rid of people who make more money, have more disagreements with their boss (whether valid disagreements or not), or who have higher health care premiums than by going on lack of experience. Many let go the people who've put in the most time with the company, so they can save those high salaries. Others cut people just before their company pension is vested.
There are those who get rid of people based on low performance, lack of seniority, or both. Those are better than the ones who fire th 55-and-up crowd specifically to save a penny here and there.
Using seniority alone is detrimental to the company and to employee morale when better-qualified people who happen to have come in later in life to your specific company go away and the goof-off in the department gets to goof off another 20 years because his first 20 were boom years in your market. The good older employees should have increased security. So should the good younger ones.
If you're weeding, pull the weeds. Don't pull the oldest or youngest plants indiscriminately. Of course, some union contracts require just that, but that's another topic entirely.
Fact: I own a company.
Fact: I used to work for other people.
Fact: I never said the workers deserve even so much as profit-sharing (although that's a nice perk).
What I said was that companies that could take a temporary loss but keep their employees dump the employees to keep the stock price up. I didn't even say whether it was right or wrong. It's what happens, it's often a choice and not necessary to keep the business solvent, and all choices have consequences.
The consequence of showing the employees they have no security with their employer is that the employer will have no security in keeping the employees. If you only keep people at your whim, they will only stay with you at theirs.
This false glamor around fresh development is part of the problem between IT and management.
If a software project does something really neat and novel, sure, it takes a good designer. However, turning a designer's specs into usable code in a new project is the easy part of software development. The only ones doing anything with a high skill barrier are the interface designer, the architect, the specs specialist / user liaison, and possibly the lead developer. That's not to say the rest of fresh development can be done by trained bonobos, but it's far from the most difficult programming.
The hardest things one can do in software development are overwhelmingly represented by maintenance programming. Determining the role of an under-documented function is nothing when your team just wrote it. It's something much more difficult years later. Profiling the code and improving the performance without changing the code's behavior is more difficult than putting together a prototype or a first release. Fixing a bug that's been dormant until after a port or an OS upgrade can be a real challenge. Extending a software system to handle things it was never quite meant to do without breaking existing functionality can be a major pain. These are all things that schools tend not to teach or not to teach very thoroughly. Yet they're where most of the programming in the life of a project happens.
As for additional training, it's best if the employee stakes out an area of interest to study on their own and the company pays for training the employee is going to need but which isn't really interesting, personally, to the employee. Both should be happening in a technical field. If the company works the employee so many hours he can't take any time to read or study on personal time, then that's another issue.
Nobody said you had to comment, or does someone have a gun against your head?
Read the posts your reply to much?
I bought the division I used to work for in the last company to drop me.
The best advice isn't to take the first paycheck offered and see if you feel exploited. I think it'd be more along the lines of shopping yourself around and seeing the responsibilities, pay, and benefits of multiple offers (if you can get multiple offers). If you only find one place willing to hire you, consider taking a job there temporarily. Then, consider whether it'd be worthwhile as a permanent position. If it's not worthwhile, keep looking while you work there. If it is a good job and you're happy, consider staying if the competition offers you a little bit extra money your employer can't afford right now. That will build the kind of trust these companies say they don't have for their employees. Just be careful that you're not turning down extra cash just to be let go next week or next month anyway.
Ignorant, am I? My, I bet it's convenient that everyone in the world who might happen to disagree with you is stupid, uneducated, amoral, and of questionable parentage, isn't it? Get over yourself, you condescending spoiled brat.
Your job is to make a profit. If making a profit means running with half the employees as you currently have on payroll, most companies will fire half the payroll. I don't mean over the life of the company, either. Many companies will dump up to half the workforce to make a profitable year.
Yes, sales is hard. Nobody's disputing that. Yet many companies are just as quick to trim sales staff as production staff.
So is working 90 hours a week, managing four or five teens and twenty-somethings to make sure a network has less than 1% downtime while cutting costs 20% and integrating the networks of five recently-purchased competitors in 18 months. Yet two months from operational break-even, the investors who had their money in for 5 years decided they wanted their cash back and sold. I was hired on at the new owners long enough to familiarize their existing staff with the network, then dropped one afternoon. I had to fight to get my vacation paid out, and that's compensation to which I'm entitled by law in my state.
I came on at a company with 15,000 customers and was one of three people plus one outside consultant who improve the network infrastructure and scaled it to handle 45,000 customers in two years. I personally streamlined all kinds of procedures, taught my coworker and my boss several things, and saved the company thousands of dollars on software and hardware. I was then let go when they sold. That particular company at least gave me a decent severance -- two weeks pay in addition to my unused vacation.
I worked a year for a consulting company that did mostly government contracts. The contract that I was hired to do ran out a couple of months before my anniversary date, and the company kept me on until the week before my yearly evaluation. They paid for additional training and testing and tried to get me assigned to another contract. They paid me to come into the office for those two months to study for my tests. Since they were the ones to let me go, they waived the payback on the employee-funded training expenses I owed them. They paid me my final two weeks even through I worked only two days of that two-week period. They also paid for my health and life insurance that whole month. The managers from my department and branch office, and the VP of my division wrote me letters of recommendation.
Now, all three of those companies let me go. All three made themselves more cash in the short term by severing the relationship. Guess in which order I'd call them if I needed a job. The third company mentioned clearly values their employees even when work is slow. The second company valued me somewhat, and I'd consider working there again. The first company was disloyal trash. I've advised everyone I know in my field not to do any sort of business with the people who invested in or ran the initial company or the company which bought it, with a couple of exceptions.
My most recent adventure working for someone else was at a very small multidisciplinary firm. The principals decided to stop offering the types of services for which I'd been hired and to focus more directly on another market. They spun off and liquidated my department, as it were. They had money coming in from other sources, but most of the cash flow through the business was from the efforts of myself and one of the principals. Their initial reaction in letting me go was to solicit a position for me directly with a major customer, which they secured for me and I could have simply accepted. This would have left their other customers without a vendor and needing referrals. Instead, I negotiated with the owners to sell me the division of the company for which I had been working. Not everything has gone to plan, and I'm having some cash flow issues. Yet I'm happier working for myself than bei
Is it any wonder, with tens of thousands of layoffs every couple of years, why workers don't feel a strict loyalty to the companies that employ them? If the company isn't willing to maintain their educated, trained, experienced workforce through a minor downturn, then they should expect the employees to look for better opportunities.
There are two different ballots. You get the ballot with your party's candidates on it. If it's an open primary, you request the proper ballot and they give it to you. If it's a closed primary, you have to be a member of the party to get their primary ballot.
If you lose a limb by having a focused beam cut it off, will the wound be cauterized? The sounds much better than a sabot round or a grenade. If I'm using laser-precise weapons on a tank, though, I'm not aiming at the people inside. I'm aiming at the fuel, the engine, the main gun, or the munitions.
Stop whining already and write your own versions of everything from scratch or using a BSD-alike license. It's not evil for someone who writes software to tell you you can't blatantly rip off their work.
Commercial libraries often are far more "viral". They often have per-copy royalties. They often say you can't reveal the source of any part of your application using the library to a third party, for fear their API will get out and be cloned. People who have licensed commercial libraries and source code to build a project often have a hard time opening the source either BSD or GPL later. In some cases, they even have trouble contributing to a competing open-source project ( see SCO vs. IBM ).
If you want a good virus analogy, how about the BSD raiders? Those people who take and take from BSD or similarly licensed software for closed-source projects (often shrink-wrapped products on which they make a killing) without ever giving a line of code back are very much like a virus. They go around producing more closed-source software. When they find a piece of open-sourced software they can commandeer for their own purposes, they do so. Then they go on to make more closed-source software using what was meant to be open-source software. A virus goes around, waiting to fall into some foreign body where it can infiltrate a cell and turn the cell's work against the foreign body to produce and spread more virus. See the analogy?
The GPL, OTOH, doesn't turn other existing software into GPL. Some BSD code might be included in a GPL project, and the changes to that might be called GPL, but that's bad form on the part of the people doing that. The proper way to borrow BSD code for a GPL project is to modularize BSD code and contribute the changes needed to make the module back to the BSD community, then connect to that module from your GPL code in a different source file.
In the case of writing a new application around a bit of GPL, nobody's forcing you to use that GPled code as a starting point. If you're taking advantage of that code, the law (not just RMS) says you're (probably) making a derivative work. In court, a judge might make decisions about scope and size. If you're not a judge or at least a damn good lawyer, it's not really smart to gamble on that. If you write a clone from documentation, then it's not derivative (but don't steal the documentation against its license -- you might have to write your own without quoting directly).
I write software for a living. Some of my original stuff has a proprietary license. Some of my original stuff is BSD or public domain. Some is GPL. I use a lot of GPL code in some situations and I have no issue passing the code on to customers. My customers aren't generally other programmers, but I figure if they can find me and hire me, then they can find and hire another programmer in the future. That's freedom for the end user, because if I sell the customer a closed-source, proprietary application then their new programmer can't do anything with it. I often contribute back to the central project maintainers. In all, the work that the GPL has saved me has far outweighed the work I've invested in my return contributions. I don't consider that a bad deal.
You seem so certain.
Your traceroute program doesn't tell you when your traffic is being routed four hops through a tunnel to cut down on visible hops and to save space in the ISP's main routing table. Without the routing tables at hand you don't know the chances of being routed through your usual preferred route and through a backup route kept in case of congestion. Nothing from the customer end shows where companies like Level 3 and Internap have three or four layers of physical switches with VLANs piled on top between any two routers. Nothing tells you when you're in a star build-out of ten mid-sized cities that all go to the same NOC vs. when you're being mesh routed over lowest latency-weight round robin, although you might guess by statistical analysis and mesh routing of commercial ISP traffic outside the main NAPs is getting more and more rare.
There's a lot you can easily deduce, especially if your ISP uses honest and informative PTR records. There's still much that an ISP can do that you'll never, ever know about.
I worked for one ISP where we had 5 Internet connections in four cities to three carriers, but we served 25 cities with them. We had point-to-point lines from our dial-in equipment back to our public-facing NOCs. We had a further 18 or so cities served by having the lines back-hauled from those towns to our dial-in equipment. We had about 12k dialup customers and a few hundred DS1, fractional DS1, frame relay, and DSL customers. Everyone's traffic went through one of two main NOCs on a good day, and their mail, DNS, AAA, and the company's web site traffic never touched the public Internet unless we were routing around trouble. In a couple of places we even put RADIUS slaves and DNS caching servers right in the POP.
I worked for another that served over 40k dial-up and wireless customers by the time they sold. We had what we called "island POPs". Each local calling area we served had dial-in equipment and a public-facing 'Net connection. Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting, DNS, Mail, and the ISP's website traffic all flowed over the public Internet except in the two towns we had actual NOCs. There were tunnels set up between routers that made traffic from the remote sites to the NOCs look like local traffic on traceroute, but that was mainly for our ease of routing and to be able to redirect people to the internal notification site when they needed to pay their late bills. We (I, actually) also set up L2TP so that we could use dial-up pools from companies like CISP who would encapsulate a dial-in session over IP, authenticate it against our RADIUS, and then allow the user to surf from their network. We paid per average used port per month to let someone else handle the customer's net connection while we handled marketing, billing, and support.
The first ISP I worked for had lines to four different carriers in four different NAPs in four different states, lots of point-to-point lines for POPs, and a high-speed wireless (4-7 MBps, depending on weather, flocks of birds, and such) link across a major river to tie together two NOCs in two states. Either NOC could route all of the traffic for all the dozens of small towns in both states as long as one of our four main connections and that wireless stayed up (and all the point-to-point ones did, too). If the wireless went down, the two halves of the network could still talk, but over the public Internet. That one got to about 10k customers before it was sold.
At any of those ISPs, I couldn't tell you exactly who was going to be able to get online or where they were going to be able to get to without my status monitoring systems. On one, all the customers could get online even without the ISP having access to the Internet, but they could only see resources hosted at the ISP. Yet that one might drop five towns from a single cable break. Another one might keep 10k people offline due to a routing issue at a tier-1 NAP, but everyone else was okay. However, if that one's NOC went offline, anyone surfing in other
Gee, which one of the two translations I have at home should I reread to know you're a complete ass? The Bloom or the Griffith and Ferrari?
You analogy falls down not because you're defensive and come back with what you think is a witty reply about my lack of reading comprehension (BTW, did you score perfectly on the reading comprehension section of the ACT? I did.). It falls down because a published resource in no way analogizes to an enclosed portion of a private home.
A web site that's not protected by a firewall, password, or limited access notice is more like an outdoor garden than a living room. If you stick a TV on a cart out among the gardenias, don't blame someone for watching it through your wrought-iron fence.
Did you know there are apartment buildings surrounding Wrigley Field in Chicago from which people watch the Cubs play their home games? There are bleachers right up on the rooftops. There was no complaint from the team when it was just the building tenants watching the games. The legal battle flared up when people started to charge for admission. It went along the lines of stopping the practice, but the building owners and tenants demanded they had a right to be on their rooftops and to see whatever it was they could see from their rooftops that wasn't secured from view. The Cubs demanded that a license fee must be paid by anyone profiting from their team's games. The final result is that there are endorsed "Rooftop Partners" of the Chicago Cubs who can charge admission as long as they pay a 17% fee to the ball club. The other option was to build a fence around the top of the stadium to obstruct the view, which was done temporarily to great effect.
That "wind screen" at Wrigley was very much like an authentication and authorization system for a web site. The only reasons to forgo such a security measure are expense, aesthetics, and possibly the arrogant idea that nobody could figure out the URL. Cable, C-Band satellite, Dish Network, DirecTV, and many other Internet video sources use encryption, authentication and authorization, or both to determine who can and cannot view a feed. It's a standard cost of doing business and standard practice in restricted distribution video markets. There are also markets such as terrestrial broadcast television, YouTube, and certain satellite channels that do not use encryption nor authentication/authorization systems because they are trying to secure a broad audience. Therefore, it's easy for a potential viewer to assume an unencrypted and unauthenticated video stream which is accessible over a public network is meant to be a publicly available resource.
As for the actual poster of the link there's something to be said for publicizing a stupid decision by a company. Why would I invest in a company that's giving away a free service and not charging advertisers for time on it? Why would I pay for the service if they are giving it away? If they don't mean to give it away, how technically gifted can their staff be if they think that not publishing the URL makes it secure? These are things people should know about a company before investing in them or doing business with them. The poster was performing a public service by showing the incompetence involved in provision of the service.
Howard Chui neither posted nor, as far as I have seen, advocated using the material in question. He's involved simply because he believes that information about the stupidity of a provider is an important factor for people to consider on a forum about mobile phones and mobile phone services. That he's being attacked for leaving true information about a flaw in someone's service on his forum is a pointless, and frankly juvenile, attempt by the plaintiffs to cover up their own mess.
The people who know it's supposed to be a paid service but who watch it longer than as proof that it's happening are in a much darker gray area than anyone in this situation. If they know the intent of the company providing the feed is not to provide it for free
A website isn't a private home. Your analogy is a complete failure. It's more like saying that my big-screen TV on my front porch can't be watched by anyone. Nobody set up a proxy into a private network nor did they give away a password. TFA doesn't talk about poor encryption or an obvious password. I didn't even notice anywhere it said that the site streaming the video had a proprietary content advisory. If something is made publicly accessible and not advertised, it's still publicly available.
Just to clarify, the benchmark document says October 2007, and the release was February 2008. Where's the changes file to show what changed in the meantime? Plus, the tested scheduler is not yet the default scheduler in the released version.
That benchmark shows some sound methods and shows Linux ahead in performance. As TFS states, a benchmark or two doesn't mean too much. What one can take away from this is that under some tests a prerelease of FreeBSD beats a released Linux kernel and under some others a prerelease Linux kernel beats a prerelease FreeBSD kernel. That means there's probably not enough difference by the time both kernels are released to declare a clear winner based on performance, and if so then not by much. Other factors are probably more important than a vanishingly small performance advantage anyway, but using either FreeBSD or Linux is much faster than some of the other options.
There's also nothing keeping the EFF or anyone else from challenging within the first year. There's also nothing saying the EFF can't provide legal and paralegal support to those directly harmed when those people or companies file.
I think the one-year limit is bad, but it's not as bad as it's being made out to be.
The most important factors aren't in the summary. Does this apply to existing patents once the law passes, or only to new patents issued after? If it applies to existing patents, is the one year from when those preexisting patents were issued (which will largely already be come and gone) or one year from the date the bill becomes law? As a firm Constitutionalist, I believe the "no ex post facto law" clause should apply to anything, but the courts seem to think it only applies to laws which provide for criminal prosecution.
No, no smut any longer. They decided to go more vulgar.
There are worst-time patches and CPU binding patches for Linux. Not only that, but many embedded applications are not, in fact, in need of an RTOS at all. Linux won't displace QNX, LynxOS, and VxWorks completely, but to say it's not making gains in the embedded space is either disingenuous or ignorant of the facts.
It'd also be pretty big news to, for example, MontaVista, Nokia, Cisco, and the BlueCat folks that embedded Linux isn't making any sales.
Those are very good points. The authors of TFA seem to overlook in its conclusions some other factors mentioned throughout the article. Recruiting among medicine, engineering, and science are heavier. The people from poorer countries involved in terrorism in general are more educated and wealthier than average.
It stands to reason that the longer someone is in school, the more chances there are to try to recruit them. It also makes sense that if you have limited recruitment ability you'd try for the most-skilled people you can find.
Perhaps doctors are less likely, wanting to save lives, to be recruited into a cause that takes them. Perhaps scientists, banking their careers on an empirical, secular field often at odds with religion, are less likely to be successfully recruited with strong religious words. Those are two things I don't see considered.
Also, it's clear TFA is showing number both for radical Muslims educated in these fields at home and those educated abroad, but I see no distinction. Surely that difference has something to do with radical indoctrination.
TFA also says that in many cases half the terrorists from a given country have no known educational data, and for instance in Saudi Arabia they base their conclusion on a sample size of 11 people whose major area of study was known.
From the data in the article, any number of hypotheses could be made. Perhaps the engineering departments in some schools are traditionally more radical. Perhaps those who studied other things were not kept track of as closely because engineering is considered a more important career. Perhaps engineering is seen as a revered and important career path, and self-aggrandizing people like radical fundamentalists want the prestige. Maybe the engineers are the only ones able to finance their own terrorist activities, because most other professions don't pay well enough. There are conclusions drawn which just should not be. There are too many alternate explanations.