Some people would probably accuse me of not allowing Microsoft to win on any count (which is not quite true; if I think they've done something right, I'll admit it. I just don't see much that makes me think that), but I think they are wrong to take a pro-stance on that legistlation.
Not being from Washington, I'd never heard of this before, so I can look at the whole thing from a fresh perspective, and despite not much caring for MS (both business practices and products), I can in all honesty say (to drag in a cliche) that I have no dog in this race.
The thing is, in general no company - not even one as large and influential as Microsoft (or perhaps especially one as large and influential as Microsoft) should involve itself in public policy decisions that do not directly affect its business. To do so is to infringe upon the democratic process by effectively saying, "We, with all the money and power we posess as a company, believe public policy should be thus." This may be in alignment with what the majority of the voters believe or it may not, but either way, it infringes on the democratic process. Individuals (including Steve Ballmer as an individual but not as a Microsoft executive) can and should take positions on issues and contact their legislators to make those positions known. Companies should not involve themselves in matters that do not directly affect their business.
The legislation in question does not directly affect Microsoft's business, because whether it passes in the next legislative session or not, Microsoft is free to follow those standards on its own and (to its credit; see, MS can win with me sometimes) probably already does so, as does my employer.
The right thing to do here is what Microsoft did in the first place: take a neutral stance. To retreat from that stance and take any other position in response to pressure from either the public or its own employees, is not only infringing on the democratic process, it's plain old pandering. All right, companies pander all the time, so I'll let that part slide, but Microsoft should still be taking a neutral position on this issue.
Kill Bill joke aside, the real Hattori Hanzo was a warrior, not a sword maker. More specifically, he was a ninja who entered the service of Tokugawa Ieyasu and later became what you could call his chief of secret police. Hanzo had a house on the Edo Castle grounds (what is now the Imperial Palace, in Tokyo). The gate near where his house stood came to be named after him: Hanzomon, a placename still in use today. There is a subway station near there, naturally enough called Hanzomon Station.
I've done both: quit a job cold, without a new offer, and turned one down flat. I regretted neither.
In the case of the one I quit, the company was on the skids and late on salaries twice in two months. The second time, they admitted the truth, that they couldn't cover salaries until they got their accounts receivables at the end of the month. When that happened, I gave notice and gave myself 6 weeks to find a new job or I'd leave the area and go back home. I found one, but it came down to the wire and that was before the bubble burst.
In the case of the one I turned down, it became clear to me fairly early in the interview process that it was one of those "You've gotta be kidding" companies and I terminated the interview and left.
Not long thereafter, I was hired by my present employer and in less than 18 months went from team member to team tech lead to team manager.
No regrets here.
That said, quitting a job, esp. in IT, without a new one lined up, is a big risk. In your situation - that they changed the development environment to something you strongly dislike - I would have tried really hard to find a new job before quitting. Writing Windows apps using Visual Studio instead of whatever you were using before isn't the end of the world. I think most people have held a less than enjoyable job at one time or another to put food on the table.
Now, if you have enough money in the bank and no dependents and are young and want to enjoy the time off, then hey, go for it. Something will turn up.
However, one thing to keep in mind while job hunting is this: as a hiring manager, if you told me that your reason for leaving your last job was "We were a Windows shop and switched to Visual Studio and I didn't like it so I quit" I would view that as a sign of immaturity and/or instability and probably not hire you. This is a fun place to work and I work hard to keep my team members happy and keep all administravia far from them so they can concentrate on what they enjoy doing, but everybody has to tolerate some things sometimes. I wouldn't hire somebody who I thought would bail if we changed a tool to something s?he didn't like.
Speaking as a techie (sysadmin, network engineer, and most recently security specialist) who has recently (within the last year) successfully transitioned to management, I can only surmise that the people who modded this insightful have neither management experience, nor maybe even much work experience.
Do I do less technical stuff than I did a year ago? Yes, but I do still write and maintain code. Does being a manager take you in the direction of a different skillset? Sure. I now interview and hire people, I set objectives and write performance reviews based on those objectives, and I assign tasks to members of my team based on their strengths and preferences. I am the contact point with other managers, at my level and above my level, and I report on my team's progress to my boss (director of development).
Those are all skills that I did not have to exercise as a techie (I stay away from the word geek because, well, I have interpersonal skills and don't really care to pin on as a badge of honor a word that has a long history as a pejorative).
However, using and developing a different skillset does not mean that I am "dead." It means I'm doing different things than I did before. I loved doing purely technical work, but I've also found being a manager to be challenging, interesting, and rewarding. I've had the opportunity to hire all of the members of my team, and I can say with no immodesty that I did an outstanding job. They are a crack group and work very well together.
I still have a room full of computers in various states of assembly at home and I expect I always will. I still run Linux on my workstation and I expect I always will (unless it becomes to mainstream and I chuck it for Plan 9 ). I will always love technology and will always keep a hand in it, but management is hardly where I (or every other technical manager I know) went to die. We just expanded our skillsets, and gained a great deal of security at the same time (how many managers do you know whose jobs were sent to India?).
The 486SX and DX actually both had math co-processors on board. The difference is that on the SX it was disabled. Yes. Same CPU, just deliberately crippled.
I think your post is great too, and also worthy of being modded up.
What you say about HR and the corporate culture is spot-on. And as much as it may seem harsh, unreasonable, or unfair to us at times when we are unemployed, that's actually not a bad thing. If you get into a company where you don't fit the culture and it doesn't fit you, you won't be happy and neither will they.
However, in big companies HR departments can certainly get in the way. I'm very happy to work for a company small enough that my first contact with HR came only after the decision to hire me had been made. They mailed be the paperwork to go and take a drug test and a couple of forms to sign and send back. Before that, my very first contact was from the director of software development, to whom I report. We used email to setup an appointment for a phone interview, then I went to a second interview in person to meet her and the CTO. That whole time, I never heard from anyone in HR at all.
We have a great HR department, they're very helpful and really know their stuff, but I do think the best situation is when there are no filters between the hiring manager(s) and the candidate(s). Our HR department takes great care of you after you're hired. You don't even know who they are before you're hired. That's the way it ought to be. I know that probably doesn't scale well and is probably the reason why all big companies make you get over the HR hurdle first. That's one of the reasons I love working at smaller companies (we have under 200 employees and are not publicly traded). Granted, not all smaller companies are like this; some of them suck. But by and large, I prefer them to larger ones (the worst company I ever worked for was also the biggest; over 10,000 employees in 1989 and probably a lot more by now).
So I'm supposed to teach people how to write resumes? Umm, no. Knowing how to write a resume is the applicant's job.
Am I getting a more limited pool of candidates? Oh, yes. I'm limiting it to the more highly qualified ones. If you can't read a job ad and tailor your resume appropriately, or just can't write a good generic resume at all, how likely is it that you can read a more complicated spec and produce good work to meet it?
Resume skills have a lot to do with job skills, and job skills covers a much wider area than just technical skills. If you believe otherwise, that gives me a lot of insight into your (lack of) job skills.
I'm glad you got some response out of it. It may be partially the September effect, and also there are probably a few places where that approach might work. In any case, I hope you find work soon. Things must be rough in that area. I'm from San Diego and moved to LA last year to take a job b/c the market down there was as bad as what you describe. I didn't get a single interview despite having a good resume, proper (and individually tailored) cover letters, and good relevant skills for the jobs I was seeking.
One thing you might want to try is having different versions of your resume. Tailor it to the job you're applying for. If the "Smarter than your average bear" resume seems right, use it. If a good, tight, just-the-facts bullet-point resume is best, use that one. And for each job, save a copy of it with a filename including the name of the employer, the job, and the date you applied, such as acme-coyote-supplies-sysadmin-2004-11-11-resume.tx t. TThat way, you always know what resume you sent to which employer and can answer questions about it and can show up to an interview with a copy of that one.
As far as smart goes, many (perhaps most) employers do not look first at how smart you are. I don't either. I look first at how well I think you will fit in on my team. A resume can create a feel for that (not always, of course, but it seems accurate enough that with the exception of only one person, I would have hired everyone I interviewed this year if I had that many openings). Best personality fit trumps best brain every time.
If the hiring manager has a team of aggressive, in-your-face people who are constantly competing to see who has the most geek cred and think BOFH is a sysadmin how-to (OK, it really is:-) then a resume that says "EXCEPTIONAL INTELLIGENCE" just might get somebody's attention in a positive way.
In other places, not. All of us from the engineering VP (my boss's boss) on down are low-key. We hire people who are passionate about their work and technology, but not in an in-your-face kind of way. Together with personality fit, the other thing we really look for is people who are self-motivated and don't need to be managed. If I hired a person who actually needed to be managed, I'd consider myself to have screwed up in the hiring process. So far, I haven't (knock on wood):-)
After personality fit and self-motivation, then comes smarts and experience. Those things matter, of course, and a candidate who doesn't have what we want in that area will also not succeed. However, fit with the team trumps those to the extent that if the 4th smartest person fits in better than the smartest or most experienced one, the 4th smartest one will get the job. If there's something she doesn't know that we want her to know, we'll teach her.
Why do the people who do the hiring often know less than the people being hired? Depends on the place. Sometimes it's just plain old cluelessness. My brother worked at a place like that. It wasn't that way when he started, but a few years along there were a bunch of management shakeups and stupidity reigned. In other cases, it's because HR acts as a filter and only the resumes that get by HR even get seen by a hiring manager. Finally, you don't have to know more than the person you're hiring to be a good hirer or manager. There are a number of people on my team whose depth of technical knowledge is greater than mine, and I hired all of them. I wasn't a manager when I joined this company, but I rose to team leader in less than a year and manager a few months after that. I did and do have a good skillset for the technical aspects of my job, but the things that made me a team leader and later manager were:
- Demonstrated skill in getting the big picture on our projects and helping manage them and focus on things like quality control and how to improve our process, and voluntarily stepping up to do those things. That really helped out my boss.
I know I could've gotten by just fine without it, but I'm a much more knowledgable and well-rounded person because I did.
You should have logged in and collected some mod points, that really hits the nail on the head:-)
Nearly all of my 20 or so years of full-time work has been spent in IT (I went into teaching for a while, but found that the negatives outweighed the positives for me and went back to commputers), and the skills for that are all things I picked up on my own and/or learned on the job. In college, I didn't study computers at all, I went instead for something that really fascinated me: linguistics. I still love linguistics, although I never seem to have time to even read anything about it anymore, but your point is spot-on: college makes you more well-rounded than you would otherwise be.
If you love software or hardware, taking mandatory writing classes may seem like total drudgery, but they are worth a lot. I probably wouldn't be a manager today if I couldn't communicate well in writing.
History might seem boring too, but you can learn some really interesting things there. One of the most fascinating classes I took in college was modern Chinese history (covered late 1800s through the Cultural Revolution or so).
To me, the well-roundedness aspect was the single greatest thing about going to college. It was wonderful. If I were rich enough to not have to work, I'd go back to school for the rest of my life and just study interesting things.
Some may think this is some kind of flamebait, but it's not. It's just good, practical advice from a hiring manager.
Yes, I'm somewhat impressed on the geek level by your low/. userid. I'm a long time Linux user and have had a/. userid for about 5 years.
However, a good reality check is needed, because I wouldn't hire you either. Why not? Read on.
I'm a hiring manager in charge of an international (two offices, in in Canada and one in California) team. Our company runs its entire infrastructure on Linux. We have close to 400 servers running Linux, and some of our workstations (mine included) also do.
Like you, I have been using Linux since 1997. I love hardware, I love Linux, I prefer to use FOSS wherever possible. I think it would be cool to hang out with you at LUG meeting. I'm also a Debian user (this is being typed in Konqueror on Sid) and we probably started around the same time. My upgrade path from Red Hat 7.3 was Debian and I should have done it sooner.
However, if your resume arrived in my inbox, with that "Exceptional Intelligence" paragraph in it (or other paragraphs written that way), I probably wouldn't even finish reading it before I trashed it.
You have to understand something about how people look at resumes. They're looking for reasons to dump your resume as much as they are looking for reasons to interview you. Maybe more so.
What do you think happens when people look through a stack of resumes? We do triage. There's a "No way" pile, a "Maybe" pile of second-stringers, and a "Potential candidate" pile. The easiest pile to fill is the "No way" pile. Give me a reason to dump your resume and I will. And it won't take long, either. In triage, most resumes don't get more than two minutes of my time. If I spend five minutes on your resume, it was either way too long (I don't care if you have 15 years of relevant experience, distill it into no more than two pages), badly written (if you're not a good writer, pay someone who is), or I was really interested in it.
The second easiest pile to fill is the "Candidate" pile. If your resume has what I need for the job and is well done, it goes here. These are as clear-cut as the ones going to the trash.
The "Maybe" pile is the people who don't go to one of the other extremes. It gets looked at if, for example, the people I want from the "Candidate" pile are not available anymore or they don't pass the interview. So far, I have never touched the "Maybe" pile after triage.
Once triage is done, I take a closer look at the "Candidate" pile and decide which of those I want to interview. Typically, I will interview 1/3 more people than I have openings for, unless there is only one opening. Then I will usually interview only the top two candidates.
I think you can see from this how much your resume is working against you. It doesn't all but scream "OPEN SOURCE!" It screams some less flattering things, like "EGO!" and "IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!" and "PRIMADONNA!"
Now, it may well be that you are not any of those things. I don't know you; you may well be a great worker and a really great team member. However, I can't know that when I read your resume. At that point, you are your resume. It makes the impression of you. Good impression, good resume, good skillset, and you may be getting a call. Otherwise, no chance. In fact, not just that paragraph from your resume, but pretty much your whole post, comes across as an ode to yourself and how great you are. That never gets anybody hired.
You may well have exceptional intelligence. Let your interviewer make up his or her own mind about that, though. Also, don't talk about revolution. As an individual, sure, I think the free software revolution is great, and I do believe it will be the dominant model in the future. However, as a manager, what I care about is getting the work done. Running our business is job one. We mostly run our business on free software, but
I'm not making as much as you are (mid-fives with a bullet), but I have a decent amount of stock options at can't-lose strike price in a not-yet publicly traded but profitable IT company, and in less than a year and a half have gone from being a member of my team to being the manager of my team. My work environment sounds a lot like yours (free food is hit or miss, but we do have Starbucks for our coffee machine), and it's a pretty happy place.
I'm glad this one was hiring when I was looking:-)
The same reason they have trophy : they can afford it.
While that sounds flippant, seriously, how would you solve this apparent inequity in a workable manner?
Would you put in a law that says no lawyer may charge more than $100,000 in legal fees to defend a case? Of course, that limit could only apply to the lawyer's actual fee. If the rich defendant wanted the lawyer to bring in every PI, every forensics expert, every possible expert witness, they would have to be paid as well. That doesn't come out of the lawyer's pocket, but out of the client's. Or would you limit that as well, in effect saying that while the prosecution can put on the best possible case and spare no expense, the defendant is not allowed to put on the best possible defense that s/he can afford?
Maybe it would be the case that a skilled lawyer, capable of putting on the best possible defense, wouldn't be interested in doing that for $100,000 and wouldn't take the case. The lawyer wouldn't work as much, the defendant wouldn't get as good of a defense, and the overall quality level would drop.
Alternatively, you could declare that all defense attorneys, including public defenders, will be paid a flat rate of $1,000,000 per year and that ought to be enough for anyone. The really skilled lawyers might be satisfied with that, even though they can make more under our current system. The hacks, of course, would love it. If you think the income available now draws all sorts of unsavory types to the legal profession, imagine what it would be like if becoming a defense attorney meant you were guaranteed a $1,000,000/year salary even if you were average or less?
Again, the quality of defenses would drop.
One of the few times that regulating prices is kind of workable is when you have a service that everyone needs, such as water, electricity, telephone - and the government grants one company a monopoly in exchange for having regulated prices.
Even then, at least some aspects of quality suffer. "We're the phone company - we don't have to care." I'm not saying that service has always been stellar since deregulation, but there is competition over price and we consumers generally get more bang for our buck than we did during the AT&T monopoly.
Or maybe we could change the law so that instead of getting a public defender if you can't afford a lawyer of your own, you pick any lawyer you want and the government has to pay for it. Assuming this were affordable (and I bet it's not), it would still be doomed to failure b/c there just aren't enough superstar lawyers to go around. it's a simple matter of supply and demand. Imagine that the world's top 20 rock stars were all willing to play at anyone's birthday party for 1 million dollars and the world has enough people with pockets that deep that on any given day at least 21 people want one of those rock stars to play their birthday bash and will happily fork over a million bucks for the privilege. All of a sudden, we have inequality between supply and demand. There are only two ways to solve the problem: draw lots or push up the price. Drawing lots might be more fair and perfectly workable on a small scale, but society has consistently chosen the free market as the preferable means to solve the problem, and it scales a lot better.
The free market may be far from a perfect or equitable way to distribute the scarce commodity of top-notch legal defense, or any other scarce commodity, but as many have observed, it works better than any method we've tried so far. It has certainly worked better than all forms of Marxism.
It would be wonderful if someday all over the world all people were so non-greedy that we were all content to work for no more than what we needed to feed, clothe, and adequately house our children, and give them a reasonable middle-class standard of living. I don't think that will happen (would I be wiling to do it? Sure, if everyone else was, but there's the rub; lots of people never would, so I have to keep tryi
I don't know where you studied linguistics (what!? you didn't?!) No!!!), but English is one of the least consistent languages you're likely to run across. Genetically, it comes from the Germanic branch of the language tree, but then departs wildly from its roots.
About 1/3 of the words in English are derived from French, having been absorbed into the language in the centuries after the Norman Conquest.
Still later, a lot of Latin was artificially injected into the language because Latin was perceived as superior. Quite a few words of Greek derivation came into the language during this same era.
Other words have been absorbed more recently from Italian, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, and, no doubt, others.
Ask any non-native speaker of English about all the inconsistencies and special cases that have to be just memorized. There are many. Probably more than in any other language.
I am a native English speaker. I speak one other language well, and bits of a third. Those other two languages are both far more consistent than English.
Oh, did I mention the huge disconnect between pronunciation and orthography? It stems in large part (but not wholly) from the Great Vowel Shift and the fact that there has never been a central governing authority over English to help move it all in one direction. Of course, that situation got even worse after:
1) The British established far-flung colonies all over the world;
2) Most of the ones in North America struck out to start their own country and began diverging linguistically from Britain.
Now, of course, it's far too late to try and impose any order on the language by fiat.
Today, English is spoken all over the world, as a native language, as a pidgin or creole, and in countless dialects. There are more than a few dialects of English that, despite their status as such, are not very mutually intelligible (at least in speaking), to the point where monolingual speakers of those dialects could probably not communicate with each other unless they resorted to writing down what they wanted to get across.
English is not at all a consistent language - indeed, it would take hundreds of years to impose consistency, if such a thing were possible - so it is ridiculous to state that a president could mess up our linguistic consistency at all, let alone in just four years. Moreover, all the U.S. Presidents of my lifetime - Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II - spoke English differently from one another. John Kerry, if he had won, would have spoken again differently than his predecessors (a bit like Kennedy, although Kerry doesn't seem to have much of a Boston accent), so which one out of all those, if any, would you say was the "linguistically consistent" one?
Detailed information is kind of hard to find, and yes, the link could most charitably be called an opinion piece. It would more accurately be called a raving, America-hating pile of rubbish. It contains no facts, no figures, no proof, nor any links to those things.
That said, some actual information about the Packbot is available. First, from the company website. Near the end of the page, we learn that it runs .
Here is info on the Pacbot EOD, which sounds like the most likely model to carry a shotgun, although no mention is made of that anywhere on the packbot site.
I can, however, confirm that the smear piece at newstarget.com contains no substance whatsover, it's just an anti-American rant. If you want information about Packbots you'll have to google it; you'll find none at newstarget.com.
Now for my own opinion piece.
As others have noted before me, there is no difference between a Packbot with a shotgun and a Predator with a Hellfire missile on board. Neither are robots; both are remotely operated vehicles. One operates in the air, the other on the ground.
I'm sure I'll be modded OT for this (I just said that to guarantee I won't be;-) but I was just M2ed unfair because I modded FCM a troll for posting that troll.
The mods really are on crack. No, I'm not new here, it's just even worse than I thought
Note to anyone receiving mod points in the future: Fecal Troll Matter is a troll. His name should give you a clue. Trolls are happiest when they are modded troll. A troll who is modded insightful is in danger of hurting himself. Please take good care of our trolls and mod them carefully. I'm now frightened for FCM's well being because his post now stands at (the horror!) +1 Insightful even though it was a troll. Somebody please fix it and make him happy.
I did RTFA, and really, I don't know much more than I did from just reading the summary. It's very thin on detail and basically just presents the shop owner's description of events. No important information such as who filed the complaint or what they allege is being infringed, is presented. However, it does at least make it clear that this is a trademark infringement case. The expired patent has nothing to do with it.
As to your question, "Why is DHS enforcing any of these?" the answer is that they are doing it because it's their mission. Really. You see, the former INS (now CIS) and the Customs Service (whatever its proper name is) both are part of DHS, and it was the Customs Service that went to her shop and is responsible for trademark enforcement.
Hey, amid such a totally bolluxed up summary, you didn't really expect any part to be done right, did you?;-)
I'll probably be modded flamebait for saying this, but honestly, that is a load of ignorant rubbish. It may not be terribly polite to say so, but it's the simple truth. Bear with me and I'll explain.
I rather expect that you have never been to Asia. Perhaps you don't even know anyone who has lived there, especially recently.
I lived in Asia for nearly 10 years, the last part of that in Southeast Asia, when many of these factories that you call "slave labour camps" are located.
First, calling them slave labor (we're having a "u" shortage over here) camps goes beyond hyperbole, beyond ignorance, and all the way into being a lie. You may not know that it's a lie and may be just repeating what someone told you, but it is nevertheless a lie. I will explain why, but first, let me state that at no time have I been employed by, nor ever represented in any way, any of the companies we are talking about. I have no dog in that race, this is just the truth, as spoken by one who has been there.
During my years in Asia, I lived on the economy and worked in a regular job just like anyone else, usually under the same terms of employment that a local would expect. I've never had an ex-pat package or been a government employee or anything cushy like that. In my last job there, I made roughly twice as much as a local in my position would have, but I also brought a skillset that was very difficult to find among the local population (partly technical, partly linguistic, and I earned my keep).
Even in Viet Nam (where I lived), which is one of the poorest countries in Asia, people make a lot more than three cents an hour in even the jobs farthest down the ladder, and working in a foreign factory is certainly not that. Even a lot of beggars probably manage more than three cents an hour. If they beg in tourist areas, I guarantee they do.
Working at Nike or other factories is considered to be a relatively good job that pays better wages than people would usually get working for a domestic company. When these factories hire, lots of people turn out to apply for those jobs. There is no slave labor involved. If you don't like it you can quit, and there will be two to take your place immediately before your chair is even cold.
Do girls as young as 12 work these places? Possibly. I won't state absolutely that they don't, but the usual would be at least 15 or 16, which is not unlawful in many countries. Even in the United States, work at 16 is not unlawful. I did it. Lots of people do. Children that age and sometimes even younger work throughout Asia. My own wife had her first full-time job when she was 15, she went to work peeling shrimp to help support her family. Her two brothers dropped out of junior high school to work in the family garage business with their father. Her younger sister was the first one in the family to finish high school, ever. My wife managed to save enough money to later go to secretarial school and worked as a secretary for a foreign company, where she saved enough money to go to sewing school and also found that she was pretty good at floor sales.
After she graduated from sewing school she stayed on as an instructor for a while, then opened her own boutique, which was so successful that it became the new family business and everyone works in it now. In the midst of this we met and were married, and she has now turned the business over completely to her family and they are still doing very well with it.
Many people have success stories like that in developing economies, it's not at all unusual. For a lot of people, getting a job at a Nike factory or a Walmart supplier is their first good step onto the ladder that may lift them out of poverty. If you believe that to be exploitation, you know nothing at all about the situation, or how much better off people are when an athletic shoe factory or Walmart factory comes to town. Governments throughout the region work hard to attract these factories, and certainly not because they want the
Because AOL pays for the CDs and their delivery. You, the recipient, do not. That is the difference between all spam and snail junk mail.
Even with "legitimate" UCE where the sender has paid for bandwidth, servers, rackspace, etc. and sends it in the clear, you still bear some of the cost because it's coming in over your connection that you pay for every month and on your equipment that you bought for your purposes, not the spammers' convenience.
When an AOL CD is delivered, you bear no cost except the effort to open it and place it on your table to use as a drink coaster. Plus,you get the benefit of a CD case you can re-use for yourself. I got two last month, the same day, both addressed to me with slightly different formatting of my address. Awfully nice of them, really. I have several CD cases and a bunch of drink coasters now:-)
I've been in the anti-spam community for years, currently professionally so, and my respect for AOL is both recent and shallow. As a force against spammers, they're a Johnny-come-lately, and I remember well the days not so long ago when the only spam AOL cared about was inbound spam, but outbound spam was a complete non-issue to them. Inside of AOL was one of the safest places for a spammer to be, once upon a time.
There was a spam ring operating *inside* of AOL in the late 1990s that routinely joe-jobbed the ISP I was working for at the time. Entreaties to AOL fell on deaf ears. This joe-job went on for about a year, almost non-stop. They seem to have chosen us because we were very effective at blocking their spew and our 550s weren't always polite:-)
I believed then, and believe now, that the only way a spam ring could operate so brazenly for so long and in the face of all complaints, was if it was an inside job: a spam ring being run by AOL employees, possibly without the knowledge of AOL management, but almost certainly with the complicity of the AOL abuse department; it could even have been them doing it.
I freely admit that I cannot prove any of this and it is all conjecture based upon circumstantial evidence, but lest you start sniggering about tinfoil hats, let me tell you the final chapter in this saga.
After about a year of this almost constant joe-jobbing, my then-employer was bought by a much larger ISP and hosting company, one with enough guns/money/lawyers to make even AOL pay attention. We, the beleaguered engineering department of this smallish ISP, where I was at the time the especially beleaguered postmaster, took our plight to our new parent company's abuse department, who said they would try to help. After not getting much farther than we did, they put us in touch with our new parent company's legal department, who didn't say they would try to help. They said they *would* help.
And lo and behold, not long after the legal department got involved, the spam just stopped. Not just the job-jobbing, but also the large amount of spam directed at our customers from the same spam ring. It went from thousands of direct messages (for an ISP with less than 50,000 customers that was a lot) and thousands more joe-job bounces every day to nothing. Zero. Not a single mail from that ring ever reared its ugly head on our network again during the further three years I worked there.
How could such a thing happen, after constant whining from AOL that they were powerless to prevent it (that was before they started ignoring us entirely)? I can think of only one plausible way, with two scenarios. In both, it's an inside job.
Variation one: after our new legal department took up our cause, that got AOL's attention to a sufficient degree that an actual investigation was opened, the perps were caught, and they were all fired. The trouble with this scenario is, if they were fired, why did they not joe-job us even harder in retaliation for losing their jobs?
Scenario 2: after our new legal department took up the cause, words were spoken to the proper people and it was made clear that they had to leave us alone and find some other victim because we were no longer some piss-ant regional ISP in a niche market, but now part of a big, strong company that could and would sue them if they didn't back off.
Needless to say, I find one of these scenarios far more likely than the other, and I find my respect for AOL still a bit thin, even though they have gone after some spammers and successfully sued them. Their new embrace of the still patent-encumbered Sender-ID doesn't exactly raise them in my estimation.
They are so invested in taking the anti-SCO side I don't see them as able to really bring an unbiased analysis
Groklaw does not claim to be unbiased. They support Novell/IBM/Red Hat/Anyone else arrayed against SCO, and have never claimed, implied, or pretended otherwise. That's fine. Groklaw exists to point out SCO FUD and BS, and that is a Good Thing.
That said, would they admit it if they were wrong about something? I think so. Groklaw is not impartial and doesn't pretend to be, but based on everything I've seen their, PJ strikes me as a person of integrity and I believe that if Groklaw got something wrong, it would be admitted. Not that I expect that to ever be necessary, of course.
Two other points about why fly-by-wire tends to be good in aircraft:
- Aircraft hydraulic systems are far more complex than simple things like brakes in cars, and therefore more likely to fail
- Fly-by-wire systems are easy to make multiply redundant and usually are. I'm not sure how redundant they are in civilian aircraft, but I hope there is at least one level of redundancy in fly-by-wire planes. In military aircraft, quadruple redundancy is normal.
- It would be difficult/expensive/heavy to make quadruple redundant hydraulic systems in a passenger jet. If it could still fly after you put them in, it could carry a lot less cargo or passengers, which would make it difficult to sell to airlines.
If cars had quadruple-redundant electrical braking systems, I'd be fine with that, if they feedback were as good as with a hydraulic system. However, building that system would probably cost more than a hydraulic system, so the auto makers probably wouldn't do it. They'd most likely go for no redundancy at all or just one level.
Usually, phishing also involves cracking a server somewhere. I'm in the email security business, so I feel almost as close as family to hundreds of wealth but desperate Nigerians (who don't get to deliver much mail on the networks I protect) and loads of phishers (who don't get to deliver much more mail than the Nigerians).
In almost all cases, the link in the phishing mail leads to a compromised host. Phishers (most of them, anyway) aren't dumb enough to put the phishing site on a host that's actually theirs. Usually, it's all too obvious that the rightful admin of the host in question is utterly clueless that he/she has been owned.
You're dead right about the ROI, though. Stealing usable financial data off of a server is a lot harder than phishing. People report successfully filtered phishing mails to me as false positives every single day, and I always wonder if they sent it in before or after they gave away all of their financial info.
Spot-on. A Linux Zaurus has some cool features and all, but even without going into the stability area you mention, my needs are better met by a Palm device.
I have a TRG Pro that I bought in 1999. It's just like a Palm III, but it has an integral CF socket (great for backing up data, and you can also swap programs out to it if memory is getting full) and it runs on two AAA batteries. That is one of my favorite things about it.
It doesn't play videos. It doesn't play music. It doesn't have wifi. It doesn't have any of that other junk that detracts from the function of a PDA. It's just a great little handheld, and I will use it until it breaks. When that sad day happens, I'll probably look for a replacement on eBay.
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Some people would probably accuse me of not allowing Microsoft to win on any count (which is not quite true; if I think they've done something right, I'll admit it. I just don't see much that makes me think that), but I think they are wrong to take a pro-stance on that legistlation.
Not being from Washington, I'd never heard of this before, so I can look at the whole thing from a fresh perspective, and despite not much caring for MS (both business practices and products), I can in all honesty say (to drag in a cliche) that I have no dog in this race.
The thing is, in general no company - not even one as large and influential as Microsoft (or perhaps especially one as large and influential as Microsoft) should involve itself in public policy decisions that do not directly affect its business. To do so is to infringe upon the democratic process by effectively saying, "We, with all the money and power we posess as a company, believe public policy should be thus." This may be in alignment with what the majority of the voters believe or it may not, but either way, it infringes on the democratic process. Individuals (including Steve Ballmer as an individual but not as a Microsoft executive) can and should take positions on issues and contact their legislators to make those positions known. Companies should not involve themselves in matters that do not directly affect their business.
The legislation in question does not directly affect Microsoft's business, because whether it passes in the next legislative session or not, Microsoft is free to follow those standards on its own and (to its credit; see, MS can win with me sometimes) probably already does so, as does my employer.
The right thing to do here is what Microsoft did in the first place: take a neutral stance. To retreat from that stance and take any other position in response to pressure from either the public or its own employees, is not only infringing on the democratic process, it's plain old pandering. All right, companies pander all the time, so I'll let that part slide, but Microsoft should still be taking a neutral position on this issue.
Kill Bill joke aside, the real Hattori Hanzo was a warrior, not a sword maker. More specifically, he was a ninja who entered the service of Tokugawa Ieyasu and later became what you could call his chief of secret police. Hanzo had a house on the Edo Castle grounds (what is now the Imperial Palace, in Tokyo). The gate near where his house stood came to be named after him: Hanzomon, a placename still in use today. There is a subway station near there, naturally enough called Hanzomon Station.
... four empty torpedo tubes, 600 more jobs for American programmers.
Now it's Miller Time!
I've done both: quit a job cold, without a new offer, and turned one down flat. I regretted neither.
In the case of the one I quit, the company was on the skids and late on salaries twice in two months. The second time, they admitted the truth, that they couldn't cover salaries until they got their accounts receivables at the end of the month. When that happened, I gave notice and gave myself 6 weeks to find a new job or I'd leave the area and go back home. I found one, but it came down to the wire and that was before the bubble burst.
In the case of the one I turned down, it became clear to me fairly early in the interview process that it was one of those "You've gotta be kidding" companies and I terminated the interview and left.
Not long thereafter, I was hired by my present employer and in less than 18 months went from team member to team tech lead to team manager.
No regrets here.
That said, quitting a job, esp. in IT, without a new one lined up, is a big risk. In your situation - that they changed the development environment to something you strongly dislike - I would have tried really hard to find a new job before quitting. Writing Windows apps using Visual Studio instead of whatever you were using before isn't the end of the world. I think most people have held a less than enjoyable job at one time or another to put food on the table.
Now, if you have enough money in the bank and no dependents and are young and want to enjoy the time off, then hey, go for it. Something will turn up.
However, one thing to keep in mind while job hunting is this: as a hiring manager, if you told me that your reason for leaving your last job was "We were a Windows shop and switched to Visual Studio and I didn't like it so I quit" I would view that as a sign of immaturity and/or instability and probably not hire you. This is a fun place to work and I work hard to keep my team members happy and keep all administravia far from them so they can concentrate on what they enjoy doing, but everybody has to tolerate some things sometimes. I wouldn't hire somebody who I thought would bail if we changed a tool to something s?he didn't like.
Speaking as a techie (sysadmin, network engineer, and most recently security specialist) who has recently (within the last year) successfully transitioned to management, I can only surmise that the people who modded this insightful have neither management experience, nor maybe even much work experience.
Do I do less technical stuff than I did a year ago? Yes, but I do still write and maintain code. Does being a manager take you in the direction of a different skillset? Sure. I now interview and hire people, I set objectives and write performance reviews based on those objectives, and I assign tasks to members of my team based on their strengths and preferences. I am the contact point with other managers, at my level and above my level, and I report on my team's progress to my boss (director of development).
Those are all skills that I did not have to exercise as a techie (I stay away from the word geek because, well, I have interpersonal skills and don't really care to pin on as a badge of honor a word that has a long history as a pejorative).
However, using and developing a different skillset does not mean that I am "dead." It means I'm doing different things than I did before. I loved doing purely technical work, but I've also found being a manager to be challenging, interesting, and rewarding. I've had the opportunity to hire all of the members of my team, and I can say with no immodesty that I did an outstanding job. They are a crack group and work very well together.
I still have a room full of computers in various states of assembly at home and I expect I always will. I still run Linux on my workstation and I expect I always will (unless it becomes to mainstream and I chuck it for Plan 9 ). I will always love technology and will always keep a hand in it, but management is hardly where I (or every other technical manager I know) went to die. We just expanded our skillsets, and gained a great deal of security at the same time (how many managers do you know whose jobs were sent to India?).
The 486SX and DX actually both had math co-processors on board. The difference is that on the SX it was disabled. Yes. Same CPU, just deliberately crippled.
I think your post is great too, and also worthy of being modded up.
What you say about HR and the corporate culture is spot-on. And as much as it may seem harsh, unreasonable, or unfair to us at times when we are unemployed, that's actually not a bad thing. If you get into a company where you don't fit the culture and it doesn't fit you, you won't be happy and neither will they.
However, in big companies HR departments can certainly get in the way. I'm very happy to work for a company small enough that my first contact with HR came only after the decision to hire me had been made. They mailed be the paperwork to go and take a drug test and a couple of forms to sign and send back. Before that, my very first contact was from the director of software development, to whom I report. We used email to setup an appointment for a phone interview, then I went to a second interview in person to meet her and the CTO. That whole time, I never heard from anyone in HR at all.
We have a great HR department, they're very helpful and really know their stuff, but I do think the best situation is when there are no filters between the hiring manager(s) and the candidate(s). Our HR department takes great care of you after you're hired. You don't even know who they are before you're hired. That's the way it ought to be. I know that probably doesn't scale well and is probably the reason why all big companies make you get over the HR hurdle first. That's one of the reasons I love working at smaller companies (we have under 200 employees and are not publicly traded). Granted, not all smaller companies are like this; some of them suck. But by and large, I prefer them to larger ones (the worst company I ever worked for was also the biggest; over 10,000 employees in 1989 and probably a lot more by now).
So I'm supposed to teach people how to write resumes? Umm, no. Knowing how to write a resume is the applicant's job.
Am I getting a more limited pool of candidates? Oh, yes. I'm limiting it to the more highly qualified ones. If you can't read a job ad and tailor your resume appropriately, or just can't write a good generic resume at all, how likely is it that you can read a more complicated spec and produce good work to meet it?
Resume skills have a lot to do with job skills, and job skills covers a much wider area than just technical skills. If you believe otherwise, that gives me a lot of insight into your (lack of) job skills.
I'm glad you got some response out of it. It may be partially the September effect, and also there are probably a few places where that approach might work. In any case, I hope you find work soon. Things must be rough in that area. I'm from San Diego and moved to LA last year to take a job b/c the market down there was as bad as what you describe. I didn't get a single interview despite having a good resume, proper (and individually tailored) cover letters, and good relevant skills for the jobs I was seeking.
:-) then a resume that says "EXCEPTIONAL INTELLIGENCE" just might get somebody's attention in a positive way.
:-)
One thing you might want to try is having different versions of your resume. Tailor it to the job you're applying for. If the "Smarter than your average bear" resume seems right, use it. If a good, tight, just-the-facts bullet-point resume is best, use that one. And for each job, save a copy of it with a filename including the name of the employer, the job, and the date you applied, such as acme-coyote-supplies-sysadmin-2004-11-11-resume.tx t. TThat way, you always know what resume you sent to which employer and can answer questions about it and can show up to an interview with a copy of that one.
As far as smart goes, many (perhaps most) employers do not look first at how smart you are. I don't either. I look first at how well I think you will fit in on my team. A resume can create a feel for that (not always, of course, but it seems accurate enough that with the exception of only one person, I would have hired everyone I interviewed this year if I had that many openings). Best personality fit trumps best brain every time.
If the hiring manager has a team of aggressive, in-your-face people who are constantly competing to see who has the most geek cred and think BOFH is a sysadmin how-to (OK, it really is
In other places, not. All of us from the engineering VP (my boss's boss) on down are low-key. We hire people who are passionate about their work and technology, but not in an in-your-face kind of way. Together with personality fit, the other thing we really look for is people who are self-motivated and don't need to be managed. If I hired a person who actually needed to be managed, I'd consider myself to have screwed up in the hiring process. So far, I haven't (knock on wood)
After personality fit and self-motivation, then comes smarts and experience. Those things matter, of course, and a candidate who doesn't have what we want in that area will also not succeed. However, fit with the team trumps those to the extent that if the 4th smartest person fits in better than the smartest or most experienced one, the 4th smartest one will get the job. If there's something she doesn't know that we want her to know, we'll teach her.
Why do the people who do the hiring often know less than the people being hired? Depends on the place. Sometimes it's just plain old cluelessness. My brother worked at a place like that. It wasn't that way when he started, but a few years along there were a bunch of management shakeups and stupidity reigned. In other cases, it's because HR acts as a filter and only the resumes that get by HR even get seen by a hiring manager. Finally, you don't have to know more than the person you're hiring to be a good hirer or manager. There are a number of people on my team whose depth of technical knowledge is greater than mine, and I hired all of them. I wasn't a manager when I joined this company, but I rose to team leader in less than a year and manager a few months after that. I did and do have a good skillset for the technical aspects of my job, but the things that made me a team leader and later manager were:
- Demonstrated skill in getting the big picture on our projects and helping manage them and focus on things like quality control and how to improve our process, and voluntarily stepping up to do those things. That really helped out my boss.
You should have logged in and collected some mod points, that really hits the nail on the head
Nearly all of my 20 or so years of full-time work has been spent in IT (I went into teaching for a while, but found that the negatives outweighed the positives for me and went back to commputers), and the skills for that are all things I picked up on my own and/or learned on the job. In college, I didn't study computers at all, I went instead for something that really fascinated me: linguistics. I still love linguistics, although I never seem to have time to even read anything about it anymore, but your point is spot-on: college makes you more well-rounded than you would otherwise be.
If you love software or hardware, taking mandatory writing classes may seem like total drudgery, but they are worth a lot. I probably wouldn't be a manager today if I couldn't communicate well in writing.
History might seem boring too, but you can learn some really interesting things there. One of the most fascinating classes I took in college was modern Chinese history (covered late 1800s through the Cultural Revolution or so).
To me, the well-roundedness aspect was the single greatest thing about going to college. It was wonderful. If I were rich enough to not have to work, I'd go back to school for the rest of my life and just study interesting things.
Some may think this is some kind of flamebait, but it's not. It's just good, practical advice from a hiring manager.
/. userid. I'm a long time Linux user and have had a /. userid for about 5 years.
Yes, I'm somewhat impressed on the geek level by your low
However, a good reality check is needed, because I wouldn't hire you either. Why not? Read on.
I'm a hiring manager in charge of an international (two offices, in in Canada and one in California) team. Our company runs its entire infrastructure on Linux. We have close to 400 servers running Linux, and some of our workstations (mine included) also do.
Like you, I have been using Linux since 1997. I love hardware, I love Linux, I prefer to use FOSS wherever possible. I think it would be cool to hang out with you at LUG meeting. I'm also a Debian user (this is being typed in Konqueror on Sid) and we probably started around the same time. My upgrade path from Red Hat 7.3 was Debian and I should have done it sooner.
However, if your resume arrived in my inbox, with that "Exceptional Intelligence" paragraph in it (or other paragraphs written that way), I probably wouldn't even finish reading it before I trashed it.
You have to understand something about how people look at resumes. They're looking for reasons to dump your resume as much as they are looking for reasons to interview you. Maybe more so.
What do you think happens when people look through a stack of resumes? We do triage. There's a "No way" pile, a "Maybe" pile of second-stringers, and a "Potential candidate" pile. The easiest pile to fill is the "No way" pile. Give me a reason to dump your resume and I will. And it won't take long, either. In triage, most resumes don't get more than two minutes of my time. If I spend five minutes on your resume, it was either way too long (I don't care if you have 15 years of relevant experience, distill it into no more than two pages), badly written (if you're not a good writer, pay someone who is), or I was really interested in it.
The second easiest pile to fill is the "Candidate" pile. If your resume has what I need for the job and is well done, it goes here. These are as clear-cut as the ones going to the trash.
The "Maybe" pile is the people who don't go to one of the other extremes. It gets looked at if, for example, the people I want from the "Candidate" pile are not available anymore or they don't pass the interview. So far, I have never touched the "Maybe" pile after triage.
Once triage is done, I take a closer look at the "Candidate" pile and decide which of those I want to interview. Typically, I will interview 1/3 more people than I have openings for, unless there is only one opening. Then I will usually interview only the top two candidates.
I think you can see from this how much your resume is working against you. It doesn't all but scream "OPEN SOURCE!" It screams some less flattering things, like "EGO!" and "IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!" and "PRIMADONNA!"
Now, it may well be that you are not any of those things. I don't know you; you may well be a great worker and a really great team member. However, I can't know that when I read your resume. At that point, you are your resume. It makes the impression of you. Good impression, good resume, good skillset, and you may be getting a call. Otherwise, no chance. In fact, not just that paragraph from your resume, but pretty much your whole post, comes across as an ode to yourself and how great you are. That never gets anybody hired.
You may well have exceptional intelligence. Let your interviewer make up his or her own mind about that, though. Also, don't talk about revolution. As an individual, sure, I think the free software revolution is great, and I do believe it will be the dominant model in the future. However, as a manager, what I care about is getting the work done. Running our business is job one. We mostly run our business on free software, but
They do exist.
:-)
I'm not making as much as you are (mid-fives with a bullet), but I have a decent amount of stock options at can't-lose strike price in a not-yet publicly traded but profitable IT company, and in less than a year and a half have gone from being a member of my team to being the manager of my team. My work environment sounds a lot like yours (free food is hit or miss, but we do have Starbucks for our coffee machine), and it's a pretty happy place.
I'm glad this one was hiring when I was looking
The same reason they have trophy : they can afford it.
While that sounds flippant, seriously, how would you solve this apparent inequity in a workable manner?
Would you put in a law that says no lawyer may charge more than $100,000 in legal fees to defend a case? Of course, that limit could only apply to the lawyer's actual fee. If the rich defendant wanted the lawyer to bring in every PI, every forensics expert, every possible expert witness, they would have to be paid as well. That doesn't come out of the lawyer's pocket, but out of the client's. Or would you limit that as well, in effect saying that while the prosecution can put on the best possible case and spare no expense, the defendant is not allowed to put on the best possible defense that s/he can afford?
Maybe it would be the case that a skilled lawyer, capable of putting on the best possible defense, wouldn't be interested in doing that for $100,000 and wouldn't take the case. The lawyer wouldn't work as much, the defendant wouldn't get as good of a defense, and the overall quality level would drop.
Alternatively, you could declare that all defense attorneys, including public defenders, will be paid a flat rate of $1,000,000 per year and that ought to be enough for anyone. The really skilled lawyers might be satisfied with that, even though they can make more under our current system. The hacks, of course, would love it. If you think the income available now draws all sorts of unsavory types to the legal profession, imagine what it would be like if becoming a defense attorney meant you were guaranteed a $1,000,000/year salary even if you were average or less?
Again, the quality of defenses would drop.
One of the few times that regulating prices is kind of workable is when you have a service that everyone needs, such as water, electricity, telephone - and the government grants one company a monopoly in exchange for having regulated prices.
Even then, at least some aspects of quality suffer. "We're the phone company - we don't have to care." I'm not saying that service has always been stellar since deregulation, but there is competition over price and we consumers generally get more bang for our buck than we did during the AT&T monopoly.
Or maybe we could change the law so that instead of getting a public defender if you can't afford a lawyer of your own, you pick any lawyer you want and the government has to pay for it. Assuming this were affordable (and I bet it's not), it would still be doomed to failure b/c there just aren't enough superstar lawyers to go around. it's a simple matter of supply and demand. Imagine that the world's top 20 rock stars were all willing to play at anyone's birthday party for 1 million dollars and the world has enough people with pockets that deep that on any given day at least 21 people want one of those rock stars to play their birthday bash and will happily fork over a million bucks for the privilege. All of a sudden, we have inequality between supply and demand. There are only two ways to solve the problem: draw lots or push up the price. Drawing lots might be more fair and perfectly workable on a small scale, but society has consistently chosen the free market as the preferable means to solve the problem, and it scales a lot better.
The free market may be far from a perfect or equitable way to distribute the scarce commodity of top-notch legal defense, or any other scarce commodity, but as many have observed, it works better than any method we've tried so far. It has certainly worked better than all forms of Marxism.
It would be wonderful if someday all over the world all people were so non-greedy that we were all content to work for no more than what we needed to feed, clothe, and adequately house our children, and give them a reasonable middle-class standard of living. I don't think that will happen (would I be wiling to do it? Sure, if everyone else was, but there's the rub; lots of people never would, so I have to keep tryi
I don't know where you studied linguistics (what!? you didn't?!) No!!!), but English is one of the least consistent languages you're likely to run across. Genetically, it comes from the Germanic branch of the language tree, but then departs wildly from its roots.
About 1/3 of the words in English are derived from French, having been absorbed into the language in the centuries after the Norman Conquest.
Still later, a lot of Latin was artificially injected into the language because Latin was perceived as superior. Quite a few words of Greek derivation came into the language during this same era.
Other words have been absorbed more recently from Italian, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, and, no doubt, others.
Ask any non-native speaker of English about all the inconsistencies and special cases that have to be just memorized. There are many. Probably more than in any other language.
I am a native English speaker. I speak one other language well, and bits of a third. Those other two languages are both far more consistent than English.
Oh, did I mention the huge disconnect between pronunciation and orthography? It stems in large part (but not wholly) from the Great Vowel Shift and the fact that there has never been a central governing authority over English to help move it all in one direction. Of course, that situation got even worse after:
1) The British established far-flung colonies all over the world;
2) Most of the ones in North America struck out to start their own country and began diverging linguistically from Britain.
Now, of course, it's far too late to try and impose any order on the language by fiat.
Today, English is spoken all over the world, as a native language, as a pidgin or creole, and in countless dialects. There are more than a few dialects of English that, despite their status as such, are not very mutually intelligible (at least in speaking), to the point where monolingual speakers of those dialects could probably not communicate with each other unless they resorted to writing down what they wanted to get across.
English is not at all a consistent language - indeed, it would take hundreds of years to impose consistency, if such a thing were possible - so it is ridiculous to state that a president could mess up our linguistic consistency at all, let alone in just four years. Moreover, all the U.S. Presidents of my lifetime - Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II - spoke English differently from one another. John Kerry, if he had won, would have spoken again differently than his predecessors (a bit like Kennedy, although Kerry doesn't seem to have much of a Boston accent), so which one out of all those, if any, would you say was the "linguistically consistent" one?
That said, some actual information about the Packbot is available. First, from the company website. Near the end of the page, we learn that it runs .
Here is info on the Pacbot EOD, which sounds like the most likely model to carry a shotgun, although no mention is made of that anywhere on the packbot site.
Here is an army.mil article that mentions in passing that " In combat, the PackBot would be equipped with a pump-action shotgun system able to recycle itself and fire remotely," however, it does not state that such a system is currently available on the Packbot. So far, I have been able to neither confirm nor disprove that a shotgun is available now.
I can, however, confirm that the smear piece at newstarget.com contains no substance whatsover, it's just an anti-American rant. If you want information about Packbots you'll have to google it; you'll find none at newstarget.com.
Now for my own opinion piece.
As others have noted before me, there is no difference between a Packbot with a shotgun and a Predator with a Hellfire missile on board. Neither are robots; both are remotely operated vehicles. One operates in the air, the other on the ground.
Nothing to see here folks. Move along.
I'm sure I'll be modded OT for this (I just said that to guarantee I won't be ;-) but I was just M2ed unfair because I modded FCM a troll for posting that troll.
The mods really are on crack. No, I'm not new here, it's just even worse than I thought
Note to anyone receiving mod points in the future: Fecal Troll Matter is a troll. His name should give you a clue. Trolls are happiest when they are modded troll. A troll who is modded insightful is in danger of hurting himself. Please take good care of our trolls and mod them carefully. I'm now frightened for FCM's well being because his post now stands at (the horror!) +1 Insightful even though it was a troll. Somebody please fix it and make him happy.
Thank you.
I did RTFA, and really, I don't know much more than I did from just reading the summary. It's very thin on detail and basically just presents the shop owner's description of events. No important information such as who filed the complaint or what they allege is being infringed, is presented. However, it does at least make it clear that this is a trademark infringement case. The expired patent has nothing to do with it.
;-)
As to your question, "Why is DHS enforcing any of these?" the answer is that they are doing it because it's their mission. Really. You see, the former INS (now CIS) and the Customs Service (whatever its proper name is) both are part of DHS, and it was the Customs Service that went to her shop and is responsible for trademark enforcement.
Hey, amid such a totally bolluxed up summary, you didn't really expect any part to be done right, did you?
I'll probably be modded flamebait for saying this, but honestly, that is a load of ignorant rubbish. It may not be terribly polite to say so, but it's the simple truth. Bear with me and I'll explain.
I rather expect that you have never been to Asia. Perhaps you don't even know anyone who has lived there, especially recently.
I lived in Asia for nearly 10 years, the last part of that in Southeast Asia, when many of these factories that you call "slave labour camps" are located.
First, calling them slave labor (we're having a "u" shortage over here) camps goes beyond hyperbole, beyond ignorance, and all the way into being a lie. You may not know that it's a lie and may be just repeating what someone told you, but it is nevertheless a lie. I will explain why, but first, let me state that at no time have I been employed by, nor ever represented in any way, any of the companies we are talking about. I have no dog in that race, this is just the truth, as spoken by one who has been there.
During my years in Asia, I lived on the economy and worked in a regular job just like anyone else, usually under the same terms of employment that a local would expect. I've never had an ex-pat package or been a government employee or anything cushy like that. In my last job there, I made roughly twice as much as a local in my position would have, but I also brought a skillset that was very difficult to find among the local population (partly technical, partly linguistic, and I earned my keep).
Even in Viet Nam (where I lived), which is one of the poorest countries in Asia, people make a lot more than three cents an hour in even the jobs farthest down the ladder, and working in a foreign factory is certainly not that. Even a lot of beggars probably manage more than three cents an hour. If they beg in tourist areas, I guarantee they do.
Working at Nike or other factories is considered to be a relatively good job that pays better wages than people would usually get working for a domestic company. When these factories hire, lots of people turn out to apply for those jobs. There is no slave labor involved. If you don't like it you can quit, and there will be two to take your place immediately before your chair is even cold.
Do girls as young as 12 work these places? Possibly. I won't state absolutely that they don't, but the usual would be at least 15 or 16, which is not unlawful in many countries. Even in the United States, work at 16 is not unlawful. I did it. Lots of people do. Children that age and sometimes even younger work throughout Asia. My own wife had her first full-time job when she was 15, she went to work peeling shrimp to help support her family. Her two brothers dropped out of junior high school to work in the family garage business with their father. Her younger sister was the first one in the family to finish high school, ever. My wife managed to save enough money to later go to secretarial school and worked as a secretary for a foreign company, where she saved enough money to go to sewing school and also found that she was pretty good at floor sales.
After she graduated from sewing school she stayed on as an instructor for a while, then opened her own boutique, which was so successful that it became the new family business and everyone works in it now. In the midst of this we met and were married, and she has now turned the business over completely to her family and they are still doing very well with it.
Many people have success stories like that in developing economies, it's not at all unusual. For a lot of people, getting a job at a Nike factory or a Walmart supplier is their first good step onto the ladder that may lift them out of poverty. If you believe that to be exploitation, you know nothing at all about the situation, or how much better off people are when an athletic shoe factory or Walmart factory comes to town. Governments throughout the region work hard to attract these factories, and certainly not because they want the
Because AOL pays for the CDs and their delivery. You, the recipient, do not. That is the difference between all spam and snail junk mail.
,you get the benefit of a CD case you can re-use for yourself. I got two last month, the same day, both addressed to me with slightly different formatting of my address. Awfully nice of them, really. I have several CD cases and a bunch of drink coasters now :-)
Even with "legitimate" UCE where the sender has paid for bandwidth, servers, rackspace, etc. and sends it in the clear, you still bear some of the cost because it's coming in over your connection that you pay for every month and on your equipment that you bought for your purposes, not the spammers' convenience.
When an AOL CD is delivered, you bear no cost except the effort to open it and place it on your table to use as a drink coaster. Plus
I've been in the anti-spam community for years, currently professionally so, and my respect for AOL is both recent and shallow. As a force against spammers, they're a Johnny-come-lately, and I remember well the days not so long ago when the only spam AOL cared about was inbound spam, but outbound spam was a complete non-issue to them. Inside of AOL was one of the safest places for a spammer to be, once upon a time.
:-)
There was a spam ring operating *inside* of AOL in the late 1990s that routinely joe-jobbed the ISP I was working for at the time. Entreaties to AOL fell on deaf ears. This joe-job went on for about a year, almost non-stop. They seem to have chosen us because we were very effective at blocking their spew and our 550s weren't always polite
I believed then, and believe now, that the only way a spam ring could operate so brazenly for so long and in the face of all complaints, was if it was an inside job: a spam ring being run by AOL employees, possibly without the knowledge of AOL management, but almost certainly with the complicity of the AOL abuse department; it could even have been them doing it.
I freely admit that I cannot prove any of this and it is all conjecture based upon circumstantial evidence, but lest you start sniggering about tinfoil hats, let me tell you the final chapter in this saga.
After about a year of this almost constant joe-jobbing, my then-employer was bought by a much larger ISP and hosting company, one with enough guns/money/lawyers to make even AOL pay attention. We, the beleaguered engineering department of this smallish ISP, where I was at the time the especially beleaguered postmaster, took our plight to our new parent company's abuse department, who said they would try to help. After not getting much farther than we did, they put us in touch with our new parent company's legal department, who didn't say they would try to help. They said they *would* help.
And lo and behold, not long after the legal department got involved, the spam just stopped. Not just the job-jobbing, but also the large amount of spam directed at our customers from the same spam ring. It went from thousands of direct messages (for an ISP with less than 50,000 customers that was a lot) and thousands more joe-job bounces every day to nothing. Zero. Not a single mail from that ring ever reared its ugly head on our network again during the further three years I worked there.
How could such a thing happen, after constant whining from AOL that they were powerless to prevent it (that was before they started ignoring us entirely)? I can think of only one plausible way, with two scenarios. In both, it's an inside job.
Variation one: after our new legal department took up our cause, that got AOL's attention to a sufficient degree that an actual investigation was opened, the perps were caught, and they were all fired. The trouble with this scenario is, if they were fired, why did they not joe-job us even harder in retaliation for losing their jobs?
Scenario 2: after our new legal department took up the cause, words were spoken to the proper people and it was made clear that they had to leave us alone and find some other victim because we were no longer some piss-ant regional ISP in a niche market, but now part of a big, strong company that could and would sue them if they didn't back off.
Needless to say, I find one of these scenarios far more likely than the other, and I find my respect for AOL still a bit thin, even though they have gone after some spammers and successfully sued them. Their new embrace of the still patent-encumbered Sender-ID doesn't exactly raise them in my estimation.
Groklaw does not claim to be unbiased. They support Novell/IBM/Red Hat/Anyone else arrayed against SCO, and have never claimed, implied, or pretended otherwise. That's fine. Groklaw exists to point out SCO FUD and BS, and that is a Good Thing.
That said, would they admit it if they were wrong about something? I think so. Groklaw is not impartial and doesn't pretend to be, but based on everything I've seen their, PJ strikes me as a person of integrity and I believe that if Groklaw got something wrong, it would be admitted. Not that I expect that to ever be necessary, of course.
Two other points about why fly-by-wire tends to be good in aircraft:
- Aircraft hydraulic systems are far more complex than simple things like brakes in cars, and therefore more likely to fail
- Fly-by-wire systems are easy to make multiply redundant and usually are. I'm not sure how redundant they are in civilian aircraft, but I hope there is at least one level of redundancy in fly-by-wire planes. In military aircraft, quadruple redundancy is normal.
- It would be difficult/expensive/heavy to make quadruple redundant hydraulic systems in a passenger jet. If it could still fly after you put them in, it could carry a lot less cargo or passengers, which would make it difficult to sell to airlines.
If cars had quadruple-redundant electrical braking systems, I'd be fine with that, if they feedback were as good as with a hydraulic system. However, building that system would probably cost more than a hydraulic system, so the auto makers probably wouldn't do it. They'd most likely go for no redundancy at all or just one level.
Usually, phishing also involves cracking a server somewhere. I'm in the email security business, so I feel almost as close as family to hundreds of wealth but desperate Nigerians (who don't get to deliver much mail on the networks I protect) and loads of phishers (who don't get to deliver much more mail than the Nigerians).
In almost all cases, the link in the phishing mail leads to a compromised host. Phishers (most of them, anyway) aren't dumb enough to put the phishing site on a host that's actually theirs. Usually, it's all too obvious that the rightful admin of the host in question is utterly clueless that he/she has been owned.
You're dead right about the ROI, though. Stealing usable financial data off of a server is a lot harder than phishing. People report successfully filtered phishing mails to me as false positives every single day, and I always wonder if they sent it in before or after they gave away all of their financial info.
Spot-on. A Linux Zaurus has some cool features and all, but even without going into the stability area you mention, my needs are better met by a Palm device.
I have a TRG Pro that I bought in 1999. It's just like a Palm III, but it has an integral CF socket (great for backing up data, and you can also swap programs out to it if memory is getting full) and it runs on two AAA batteries. That is one of my favorite things about it.
It doesn't play videos. It doesn't play music. It doesn't have wifi. It doesn't have any of that other junk that detracts from the function of a PDA. It's just a great little handheld, and I will use it until it breaks. When that sad day happens, I'll probably look for a replacement on eBay.
I hate it when my VPN connection gets loose. Fortunately, my router came with a handy adjustable VPN wrench to take care of just that problem.