Why should anything change? I'll tell you why it shouldn't.
I spent the last nine years living outside the United States, in countries where English is not commonly spoken, and even less commonly spoken with any degree of proficiency. In one of those countries, I speak the local language at a business level, and in the other, my wife is a native speaker, so it wasn't a problem. I shopped in the local stores, bought what the locals bought, lived like a native, and paid prices like the locals pay.
However, not everyone there can speak or read the local language (in one of them, it's not written in Roman letters, in the other, it's Roman letters plus a whole bunch of diacritics). For them, goods that are labeled in English and/or imported from their home country, are pretty important. And do you know what? You will pay more for goods labeled in English. Even if they are locally produced, you will pay more for them if they are labeled in English.
Why is this so? There are two reasons. First, it simply costs more to have a product specially labeled in a language other than the default local language. In the United States, that default is English. Second, it's a value-add. If you can't read the local language and a vendor says "Hey, no problem, I'll label my products in your language, but it's going to cost you." people who need that service will (most of them) pay the cost rather than do with out.
Because of that, I have no problem with a supermarket charging more for goods that are (re)labeled in Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, or any other non-default language. It costs them more to do it that way, and they are providing a value-added service to to their customers.
If I were that customer - and I was, for nine years - the extra cost of the value-add would give me added incentive to gain at least reading proficiency in the local language. Don't like paying $1 extra for a box of Nestle's Quick? No problem: learn to read the label in English and you won't.
I learned to read labels in two other languages so that I could always pay the same price as the locals. Nobody here who can't read English has any right to be whining about the supermarket charging extra for the *service* of native-labeling.
I don't know how things are in other states, but here in California, many products are labeled in both English and Spanish, and there's no extra charge. Or maybe there is, and the overall price goes up, causing people who can read English to subsidize those who can't. Draw your own conclusions about the justice of that.
*New* most evil company? Heheh, you don't know Verisign very well, do you?:-)
Ask any current or former DNS admin at an ISP (myself, for example) about the two-headed Verisign-Network Solutions monster and you've doubtless get a response filled with invective and something pretty near outright hatred. OK, it probably will be outright hatred.
There's a reason why competing registrars are so popular that has nothing to do with the merits of those registrars.
In the pantheon of companies most-hated by IT people, SCO is the newcomer. Verisign-NetSol has for years been at a level only surpassed (and not always) by Microsoft.
If all (or even most) people had a traffic avoidance system, they would all take the alternate route to avoid congestion, and then the alternate route would also be congested.
I know several routes that help me avoid very congested stretches of road and make better time, but they work only because most people don't know them and/or can't use them to get where they're going.
Sure it's fair to do a country by country comparison. The public transportation infrastructure is good pretty much everywhere in Japan, except Okinawa (no trains).
I never worked six days a week in Japan, except for a period of several months where I had two jobs, and then I worked seven days a week for about six months. I usually managed about one day off every month, and after six months of that I went full-time with the company where I was moonlighting.
I did usually work 10 hours a day, and sometimes more, I do that in LA, too. What's the difference?
No, that's ridiculous. The spelling, that is, not the idea.
I lived in Japan for 8 years, and during that time I never owned a car, or any other motor vehicle. Not because I couldn't afford one, but because the public transportation infrastructure is so good I simply didn't need one. I never lived more than a ten-minute walk from a train station, and usually less. Bus lines nearly all originate and terminate at train stations. Stop at a store on the way home? No problem. There is almost certainly a train station within a few minutes' walk of there.
Want to go out drinking after work? No problem, drink as much as you like. You're not driving home.
Now I'm back in the US and living in LA. I live 17 - 18 miles from my office and it takes me an hour to get there by car. In Japan, I lived about the same distance from my office, and it took me about the same amount of time to get there, including walking to and from the train station at both ends.
In Japan, I spent my commuting time reading a newspaper, reading a book, or even just sleeping if I had a seat. It was far more productive than how I spend my commuting time here, which is, of course, operating my car.
Believe me when I say that being forced to take my car anywhere that's not within walking distance of my apartment because the public transportation infrastructure in SoCal (and pretty much everywhere else in the USA except maybe NYC) is crap is most definitely *not* a convenience.
That doesn't mean having a car isn't sometimes convenient. I can carry most large things home with me instead of having them delivered by the store later. However, there is nothing convenient about having to spend an hour in stop and go (mostly stop) traffic to go less than twenty miles to work every day.
Now, watch me be modded troll for having the audacity to point out an error.
That's the funny thing about Slashdot: most people here would agree that errors in language meant for consumption by a computer are a bad thing, that code should be as error-free as possible, and that writing code with few errors is the mark of a skilled and educated programmer, and that identifying bugs and other coding errors that you happen to see in publicly available code (e.g., GPLed stuff) is a good thing. However, if you dare to point out an error in language intended for human consumption, you will be denounced as a troll and grammar nazi.
You can mod me off-topic (this is OT, after all) and I will not object, but anyone who mods me troll is simply wrong.
You seem to be rather young and without a great deal of work experience, but with a great deal of (maybe justified) ego.
I was like you once. Then, I happened to marry a wonderful woman, a successful entrepreneur who had saved her money until she could start her own business, then struck out on her own. She was quite succesful, and not just because of the high quality of her products, which she designed herself and made in-house. She was that successful because she has great people skills and could teach those skills to her sales staff. There are other businesses whose product is as good as hers, but not so many who are as good at making customers *want* to buy from them over the others.
One day, fully cognizant of my BOFHier than thou approach, she bought me a copy of How To Win Friends and Influence people. It made all the difference.
For a number of years, I worked at a corporate-oriented ISP. Not all of our new sales people had experience in the ISP and networking fields. We hired good sales people, even if they'd never worked in our business before. It fell to the engineering dept. to help them learn what they needed to know. As I developed better people skills, I became *the* person in engineering that they would go to with questions, and they learned. Far more than to my boss, who was a brilliant engineer and sysadmin, but whose overly technical explanations often left non-tech people with more questions and no more comprehension than they had at the start.
Our best salesman was a guy who walked in the door knowing nothing about the computer business. He'd been in advertising sales before, and was good at it. He didn't stay ignorant. After a few months of talking mostly to me, he was not only the top-producing salesman, he knew more about networking than any of the others. He didn't know how data is encapsulated on a T-1 and I didn't try to tell him, but he sure knew what he needed to know to sell one, and he knew who to go to if he didn't have the answer.
Your career will go much more smoothly if you develop the people skills to go with your technical skills.
BTW, if you think academic and research environments aren't filled with at least as much politicking and ass-kissing as any corporate environment, You need to put down that crack pipe and get clean . Sorry, sometimes my old attitude comes back. Academic/research environments are just as bad, and often worse than, the corporate world when it comes to those things.
When instructions that layoffs must be made come down, managers need to decide who is going to go. Let's say that next week your boss was told to lay off two people from your department?
If you're lucky, (s)he will have a couple of people mind whom (s)he has just been waiting for an excuse to get rid of, and neither of them is you.
If you're less lucky, your boss will have to sit down and consider all of the staff members in the department, and choose two. Factors that are up for consideration may be seniority, salary, how many people are doing that job, or, often, how good/productive is each person. Now, if your boss knows in fairly well what 80% of the people in your department do, and thinks those people are doing it well, the other 20% are going to be looked at for the layoffs. Your chances of being on the chopping block just went *way* up.
You sound like you haven't been in the work force for long. I have, and believe me, it's usually never good for your boss to have no clear idea what you do or how you're doing it. The only exception to this is if you don't do much of anything and/or you're doing what you do very badly. Then you're better off if your boss doesn't know, but that won't protect you forever.
It's far better to have your boss know what you're doing, and know (or at least believe) that you are doing it very well.
That's the easy way out. When my dad was a young man (the 1950s), guys with perhaps more guts than common sense would get flaming exhausts the he-man way: a plug in each tail pipe, a rich mixture on the carb, pull the choke on hard and floor it. Then hit the switch. This was in the day when carburetors normally had manual chokes. You couldn't do it with any more modern (1960s and up) carb.
I'll address this issue from the other side. About 1.5 years ago, my former employer wanted/needed to replace an aging application that was shared source. That application had been customized by a former employee, but the original perl source was deliberately obfuscated, and the customizations were an ugly hack, completely undocumented, and had been done by an employee who was later fired.
I found a GPLed project that would meet all our needs except for a couple of missing features. I took that to my boss and suggested we pay the author to add what we needed and GPL that code as part of the main project. This was approved in principle, so I contacted the author.
We quickly negotiated a set price for the features we wanted, and I took that back to management for approval. It was quickly approved, and he got to work on the things we needed. It was a real win for everybody. We got all we asked for and then some, at a great price. Because we were (at that time) the largest deployment of that software in the world, it got the most thorough workout and bug discovery process of its life and many fixes of previously unknown bugs resulted from our testing and use.
It would have been much harder to sell management on an hourly rate. Since I was able to go to management with a list of what we needed and a concrete price to get those things, the deal was approved almost immediately, with no dissent. Every level of management, from my boss to the top, liked the fact that they could put a specific, reasonable price on it rather than an open-ended situation that they would have had with a per-hour contract.
I know how you feel. It will be about a year yet before my wife gets her immigrant visa. In the meantime, I'm here, back in the US and working. She's in her country of citizenship and is not allowed to enter the United States *at all* until her visa is approved (astonishingly, she could do it if she did not have a US citizen husband and a US citizen child, but somehow those two things make her untrustworthy to enter the United States).
I used to live in Japan and some foreigners there complain about the Japanese immigration department and sometimes about the immigration laws and regulations. Heh. They have no idea. It's about 100 times worse here. If I'd known how bad it was going to be, I would have just stayed in my wife's country, even though it's a poor, third-world nation with little decent medical care, and it's really hard to make a living there if you're a foreigner. It's not a democracy, either, so freedoms are rather constrained. However, being forced to spend over a year living away from my wife because of our ridiculous immigration laws is kind of giving me better perspective on how much my freedoms are curtailed now that I'm home. At least I'm free to bitch about the law here. That could get you put in jail in my wife's country.
Tell me, does your company employ any H1B visa workers? If so, how many? How many American citizens have lost their jobs because of these far less competent but far cheaper employees? If your answer to those questions is anything but zero, you need to either retract the above or resign in protest. What SCO is doing is wrong and foolish, but putting hundreds of thousands of American workers out of jobs not because of any fault of their own, but because you can get an H1B worker from (complete with falsified resume and falsified academic records at no extra charge!) for 1/4 to 1/3 the price, and who cares if this worker is actually competent or not (usually not)?
Next up: if your little children didn't have food or health care because you decided you would tell your company to take their job and shove it because of principle, how would you make a one or two year old understand that you thought quitting your job on that principle was more important than feeding her? Could you look into your child's tear-stained face as she went to bed hungry (and cold, because you couldn't pay for heat, or were maybe already sleeping on the street by then) and say you did the right thing? If you could, well, I hope you don't have children, and I feel sorry for them if you do.
I have been an exclusive Linux user for the last five years. I really believe in Open Source and Free Software. I avoid using proprietary software as much as possible, unless there is simply no FOSS alternative, not even a bad one. But I will tell you straight, I would work for Microsoft, or even SCO, to support my wife and kids. I disagree with MS's business practices, and with SCO's even stronger than that, but let's keep a perspective here. Microsoft and SCO may be repulsive, but they are operating within the law (as flawed as that law may be), and my/your/everyone's obligation to our families is a much higher moral imperative than any committment to Free and Open Source software, which is basically a lifestyle choice, not a matter of morality.
I have recently found work after being fully unemployed for 3 months and very underemployed for eight months before that. I'm making $10,000 less than I did in my last full time job, I have to move to another city, and my employer produces a proprietary software product (at least it runs on Linux), but do you know what? I'm grateful to have this job. I'm grateful my employer didn't give this job to an H1B visa holder. I'm grateful I found work while I still had savings left and my children will be in no danger of being hungry. And my company is a decent company. I like them.
I'm sure SCO employees probably like their company far, far less than I like mine. I'm just as certain that SCO employees like their jobs far less than I like mine, but that they are just as grateful as I am to have an income and be able to feed their kids in these difficult economic times. I most certainly don't hold their employer against them. I'll tell you, if I were sorting through a stack of resumes looking for someone to fill a job, the highest ranked among the shortlist would be those who didn't have work and needed it, followed by anyone who worked for SCO and wanted out. There's no way I would deny someone employment on the basis of the fact that they were currently stuck at SCO. Yet here you are disagreeing with a person who says that SCO employees should not be punished for the sins of their employer. Come on. We can and should boycott SCO and moreover seek to drive that company into bankruptcy, but we also most certainly should try to get SCO employees into honest jobs at other companies. In fact, actively recruiting SCO technical staff would be a good way to further punish the SCO non-technical staff who are behind this frivolous lawsuit.
About condoning.
In Nazi Germany, not everyone who was in the army (they had a draft, you know) supported Hitler, even if most of them did. The alternative, however, was to be shot. That can be pretty persuasive. Following orders
Nope, sorry. I've got lots of experience with pallet jacks, too. Like a lot of mainframers, early parts of my career involved shlepping paper into IBM 3800-series laser printers (and also a 3211 and a 3203), which can knock off a 2500 sheet box of continuous form paper in 15 minutes. They're impressive machines to watch, and nice and big. The warm paper coming out feels great on your hands in a cold computer room:-)
You could not get a mainframe out on a pallet jack easily, if at all. Most of them are too big, and a pallet jack is designed to do one thing and do it well: haul pallets around. Unless a mainframe happened to fit on a pallet (many of them don't, unless they are partly disassembled) and also happened to already be on a pallet (and there's no way two guys can wrestle a mainframe onto a pallet), you'd never have a chance. A pallet jack has two prongs that are a few centimeters off the floor a a few centimeters thick, designed to slide into a pallet and then lift it when you pump the handle.
Of course, it's already been pretty well established that what was stolen were not mainframes, just a couple of server boxes, so why are we even talking about it?:-)
Interesting. I'd never seen a Multiprise before, but a quick google was quite informative. The Multiprise 2000 w/out disk weighs in a 485 kg. With disk, it goes up to 1,083 kg (that's a lot of internal disk!).
You're right, that's quite rare. Two guys getting one of those out of a computer room on a trolley would be rarer still:-)
Thank you. I've got years of mainframe experience, and I have yet to see one that could either be removed in two hours by two people and hauled away on a trolley (much less getting *two* of them out in that time!), nor one that has disks inside of it. Mainframes are filled with CPUs and memory and usually a liquid cooling system, but they are not filled with disks.
You find that the editors of the CMOS do not themselves put a space before a question mark (Search for "question" in the text).
I have yet to see any manual of style that recommends a space before any punctuation character. There are some that recommend two spaces after a colon or period (full stop, for you Brits), however, the Chicago Manual of Style recommends only a single space in both cases.
I suspect that the CMOS has changed its standard, or you are misremembering its guidelines.
The big problem isn't a migration from MS Office to OOo. That could still be done, although with extra work because of having to convert all of the DRM-protected documents to an unprotected format, import them into OOo, and then put them into a protected format there. It's a lot more work, and thus raises the cost of conversion (something MS has absolutely thought of; indeed, I'm sure they're counting on it). However, it doesn't make conversion impossible if an organization has settled on doing it.
What it does make impossible, though, is for people who prefer to use OOo, whether on Linux or any other platform on which OOo runs, to co-exist in a shop that primarily uses MS Office. That shop will now have to have a copy of MS Office on every desk or none; there will be no middle ground.
As a sysadmin, I am used to having a Linux machine, and only a Linux machine, even if the majority of the desktops in the company run Windows, and thanks to OOo, that's not a problem at all. If my employer were to begin using MS Office-based DRM on its documents, however, that would at the very least require me to run MS Office under Wine or Crossover Office. More likely, it would require me to actually have a Windows machine in order to log in to a W2K3 domain. Samba 3 plus MS Office under Wine might be enough, but I doubt it. I'm sure MS has thought of those things and made it unworkable.
That brings up two unpleasant situations: me living in dual-boot hell, having to stop whatever I'm doing and reboot anytime I need to view a protected document, or having to have two computers on my desk: one for doing my real work, and another one with Windows, just for dealing with DRM-managed MS Office documents. I'm not sure how that would go at my company, but at some companies, they would say "Can't afford it. Your Linux box has to become a Windows box. Get used to Teraterm SSH or Putty." Of course, then the danger arises that some PHB might look upon that as a reason to migrate away from *nix, foolishly believing it will reduce TCO and increase ROI.
In situation 1, I lose productivity from having to stop my work and reboot a lot. In situation 2, I lose productivity from having to work from a Windows box. Either way, I lose. Situation 2 has its advantages, in that it's harder to pin the blame on the employee, who can say "Well, you made me do this as a cost-saving measure. It did save on one-time expenditures, but now it takes longer to do things, and our running costs have gone up as a result."
The bottom line: it will help MS a lot to enforce completely homogeneous MS Office environments, something that OOo and Star Office leave them fairly powerless to do at present, and might even help them to eliminate Free and and Open Source software from many businesses.
I agree with those who say that OOo and Star Office need to implement something like this, and do it both sooner and better than Microsoft. An OOo authentication server running on a Linux box on the company LAN and using existing standards that are both open and Open Source would to the job.
*Good* MCSEs are still very well paid, at least if they're in the right shop. I'm a *nix admin and know enough Windows administration to get along, but I've worked with some really, really sharp Windows admins who made just as much as their *nix counterparts and were well worth it.
One of them even looked and acted like a stereotypical *nix admin: fat, ugly, rude, bad attitude, complete prick (like BOFH, except he was for real), hair in a ponytail, the works. He's a very good Windows sysadmin, though, and apparently pretty good at politics as well, since the fact that most of his users would probably like to see him dead doesn't seem to have harmed his career in the least.
All the *nix admins in that shop were cleancut, had short hair (one used to have a ponytail, but he chopped it), not fat, and were well-enough liked by all the users, and not as ugly as the above-mentioned Windows admin. For that matter, one of them is female and a whole lot less ugly than him:-) The Windows users especially liked us b/c we would try to help them out with stuff even though it wasn't really our problem at all. We were only responsible for infrastructure (Cisco) and the mail and web systems, which all ran on *nix.
Don't look now, but "to beg the question" does not at all mean "to invite/ask for/provoke a question." Rather, it means to base a conclusion on the foundation that what is being discussed must be true, although such truth has not been established. In other words, circular logic. Put another way, you beg the question when you assume the truth of whatever it is you're trying to prove.
"Bet the question" is an English translation from the Latin "petitio principii." Look it up.
Am I terribly disappointed that a number of/. readers perpetuated the erroneous usage instead of correcting it? Not particularly, because A) This is/. and the standards are low, and B) The truly functionally illiterate are all over at http://www.forwardgarden.com/ (you probably don't want to know; if you go there anyway, don't say I didn't warn you:-)
Of course, someone will probably mod me as a troll for having the temerity to point out blatantly incorrect English usage, but I don't care. It's not like/. karma actually means anything. That may shock some of you, but it's true. Uh-oh, now I'll get modded as a troll even more for daring to say such a thing:-)
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Why should anything change? I'll tell you why it shouldn't.
I spent the last nine years living outside the United States, in countries where English is not commonly spoken, and even less commonly spoken with any degree of proficiency. In one of those countries, I speak the local language at a business level, and in the other, my wife is a native speaker, so it wasn't a problem. I shopped in the local stores, bought what the locals bought, lived like a native, and paid prices like the locals pay.
However, not everyone there can speak or read the local language (in one of them, it's not written in Roman letters, in the other, it's Roman letters plus a whole bunch of diacritics). For them, goods that are labeled in English and/or imported from their home country, are pretty important. And do you know what? You will pay more for goods labeled in English. Even if they are locally produced, you will pay more for them if they are labeled in English.
Why is this so? There are two reasons. First, it simply costs more to have a product specially labeled in a language other than the default local language. In the United States, that default is English. Second, it's a value-add. If you can't read the local language and a vendor says "Hey, no problem, I'll label my products in your language, but it's going to cost you." people who need that service will (most of them) pay the cost rather than do with out.
Because of that, I have no problem with a supermarket charging more for goods that are (re)labeled in Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, or any other non-default language. It costs them more to do it that way, and they are providing a value-added service to to their customers.
If I were that customer - and I was, for nine years - the extra cost of the value-add would give me added incentive to gain at least reading proficiency in the local language. Don't like paying $1 extra for a box of Nestle's Quick? No problem: learn to read the label in English and you won't.
I learned to read labels in two other languages so that I could always pay the same price as the locals. Nobody here who can't read English has any right to be whining about the supermarket charging extra for the *service* of native-labeling.
I don't know how things are in other states, but here in California, many products are labeled in both English and Spanish, and there's no extra charge. Or maybe there is, and the overall price goes up, causing people who can read English to subsidize those who can't. Draw your own conclusions about the justice of that.
*New* most evil company? Heheh, you don't know Verisign very well, do you? :-)
Ask any current or former DNS admin at an ISP (myself, for example) about the two-headed Verisign-Network Solutions monster and you've doubtless get a response filled with invective and something pretty near outright hatred. OK, it probably will be outright hatred.
There's a reason why competing registrars are so popular that has nothing to do with the merits of those registrars.
In the pantheon of companies most-hated by IT people, SCO is the newcomer. Verisign-NetSol has for years been at a level only surpassed (and not always) by Microsoft.
... only a few people are using them.
If all (or even most) people had a traffic avoidance system, they would all take the alternate route to avoid congestion, and then the alternate route would also be congested.
I know several routes that help me avoid very congested stretches of road and make better time, but they work only because most people don't know them and/or can't use them to get where they're going.
Sure it's fair to do a country by country comparison. The public transportation infrastructure is good pretty much everywhere in Japan, except Okinawa (no trains).
I never worked six days a week in Japan, except for a period of several months where I had two jobs, and then I worked seven days a week for about six months. I usually managed about one day off every month, and after six months of that I went full-time with the company where I was moonlighting.
I did usually work 10 hours a day, and sometimes more, I do that in LA, too. What's the difference?
No, that's ridiculous. The spelling, that is, not the idea.
I lived in Japan for 8 years, and during that time I never owned a car, or any other motor vehicle. Not because I couldn't afford one, but because the public transportation infrastructure is so good I simply didn't need one. I never lived more than a ten-minute walk from a train station, and usually less. Bus lines nearly all originate and terminate at train stations. Stop at a store on the way home? No problem. There is almost certainly a train station within a few minutes' walk of there.
Want to go out drinking after work? No problem, drink as much as you like. You're not driving home.
Now I'm back in the US and living in LA. I live 17 - 18 miles from my office and it takes me an hour to get there by car. In Japan, I lived about the same distance from my office, and it took me about the same amount of time to get there, including walking to and from the train station at both ends.
In Japan, I spent my commuting time reading a newspaper, reading a book, or even just sleeping if I had a seat. It was far more productive than how I spend my commuting time here, which is, of course, operating my car.
Believe me when I say that being forced to take my car anywhere that's not within walking distance of my apartment because the public transportation infrastructure in SoCal (and pretty much everywhere else in the USA except maybe NYC) is crap is most definitely *not* a convenience.
That doesn't mean having a car isn't sometimes convenient. I can carry most large things home with me instead of having them delivered by the store later. However, there is nothing convenient about having to spend an hour in stop and go (mostly stop) traffic to go less than twenty miles to work every day.
litigaton? Is it anything like litigation?
Now, watch me be modded troll for having the audacity to point out an error.
That's the funny thing about Slashdot: most people here would agree that errors in language meant for consumption by a computer are a bad thing, that code should be as error-free as possible, and that writing code with few errors is the mark of a skilled and educated programmer, and that identifying bugs and other coding errors that you happen to see in publicly available code (e.g., GPLed stuff) is a good thing. However, if you dare to point out an error in language intended for human consumption, you will be denounced as a troll and grammar nazi.
You can mod me off-topic (this is OT, after all) and I will not object, but anyone who mods me troll is simply wrong.
... at first glance you thought the subject of the article said "GNAA to use P2P to avoid litigation" :-p
You seem to be rather young and without a great deal of work experience, but with a great deal of (maybe justified) ego.
I was like you once. Then, I happened to marry a wonderful woman, a successful entrepreneur who had saved her money until she could start her own business, then struck out on her own. She was quite succesful, and not just because of the high quality of her products, which she designed herself and made in-house. She was that successful because she has great people skills and could teach those skills to her sales staff. There are other businesses whose product is as good as hers, but not so many who are as good at making customers *want* to buy from them over the others.
One day, fully cognizant of my BOFHier than thou approach, she bought me a copy of How To Win Friends and Influence people. It made all the difference.
For a number of years, I worked at a corporate-oriented ISP. Not all of our new sales people had experience in the ISP and networking fields. We hired good sales people, even if they'd never worked in our business before. It fell to the engineering dept. to help them learn what they needed to know. As I developed better people skills, I became *the* person in engineering that they would go to with questions, and they learned. Far more than to my boss, who was a brilliant engineer and sysadmin, but whose overly technical explanations often left non-tech people with more questions and no more comprehension than they had at the start.
Our best salesman was a guy who walked in the door knowing nothing about the computer business. He'd been in advertising sales before, and was good at it. He didn't stay ignorant. After a few months of talking mostly to me, he was not only the top-producing salesman, he knew more about networking than any of the others. He didn't know how data is encapsulated on a T-1 and I didn't try to tell him, but he sure knew what he needed to know to sell one, and he knew who to go to if he didn't have the answer.
Your career will go much more smoothly if you develop the people skills to go with your technical skills.
BTW, if you think academic and research environments aren't filled with at least as much politicking and ass-kissing as any corporate environment, You need to put down that crack pipe and get clean . Sorry, sometimes my old attitude comes back. Academic/research environments are just as bad, and often worse than, the corporate world when it comes to those things.
Don't be so sure that it represents job security.
When instructions that layoffs must be made come down, managers need to decide who is going to go. Let's say that next week your boss was told to lay off two people from your department?
If you're lucky, (s)he will have a couple of people mind whom (s)he has just been waiting for an excuse to get rid of, and neither of them is you.
If you're less lucky, your boss will have to sit down and consider all of the staff members in the department, and choose two. Factors that are up for consideration may be seniority, salary, how many people are doing that job, or, often, how good/productive is each person. Now, if your boss knows in fairly well what 80% of the people in your department do, and thinks those people are doing it well, the other 20% are going to be looked at for the layoffs. Your chances of being on the chopping block just went *way* up.
You sound like you haven't been in the work force for long. I have, and believe me, it's usually never good for your boss to have no clear idea what you do or how you're doing it. The only exception to this is if you don't do much of anything and/or you're doing what you do very badly. Then you're better off if your boss doesn't know, but that won't protect you forever.
It's far better to have your boss know what you're doing, and know (or at least believe) that you are doing it very well.
That's the easy way out. When my dad was a young man (the 1950s), guys with perhaps more guts than common sense would get flaming exhausts the he-man way: a plug in each tail pipe, a rich mixture on the carb, pull the choke on hard and floor it. Then hit the switch. This was in the day when carburetors normally had manual chokes. You couldn't do it with any more modern (1960s and up) carb.
I'll address this issue from the other side. About 1.5 years ago, my former employer wanted/needed to replace an aging application that was shared source. That application had been customized by a former employee, but the original perl source was deliberately obfuscated, and the customizations were an ugly hack, completely undocumented, and had been done by an employee who was later fired.
I found a GPLed project that would meet all our needs except for a couple of missing features. I took that to my boss and suggested we pay the author to add what we needed and GPL that code as part of the main project. This was approved in principle, so I contacted the author.
We quickly negotiated a set price for the features we wanted, and I took that back to management for approval. It was quickly approved, and he got to work on the things we needed. It was a real win for everybody. We got all we asked for and then some, at a great price. Because we were (at that time) the largest deployment of that software in the world, it got the most thorough workout and bug discovery process of its life and many fixes of previously unknown bugs resulted from our testing and use.
It would have been much harder to sell management on an hourly rate. Since I was able to go to management with a list of what we needed and a concrete price to get those things, the deal was approved almost immediately, with no dissent. Every level of management, from my boss to the top, liked the fact that they could put a specific, reasonable price on it rather than an open-ended situation that they would have had with a per-hour contract.
Is it the one where all those rich Nigerians have their millions of dollars on deposit?
I know how you feel. It will be about a year yet before my wife gets her immigrant visa. In the meantime, I'm here, back in the US and working. She's in her country of citizenship and is not allowed to enter the United States *at all* until her visa is approved (astonishingly, she could do it if she did not have a US citizen husband and a US citizen child, but somehow those two things make her untrustworthy to enter the United States).
I used to live in Japan and some foreigners there complain about the Japanese immigration department and sometimes about the immigration laws and regulations. Heh. They have no idea. It's about 100 times worse here. If I'd known how bad it was going to be, I would have just stayed in my wife's country, even though it's a poor, third-world nation with little decent medical care, and it's really hard to make a living there if you're a foreigner. It's not a democracy, either, so freedoms are rather constrained. However, being forced to spend over a year living away from my wife because of our ridiculous immigration laws is kind of giving me better perspective on how much my freedoms are curtailed now that I'm home. At least I'm free to bitch about the law here. That could get you put in jail in my wife's country.
Tell me, does your company employ any H1B visa workers? If so, how many? How many American citizens have lost their jobs because of these far less competent but far cheaper employees? If your answer to those questions is anything but zero, you need to either retract the above or resign in protest. What SCO is doing is wrong and foolish, but putting hundreds of thousands of American workers out of jobs not because of any fault of their own, but because you can get an H1B worker from (complete with falsified resume and falsified academic records at no extra charge!) for 1/4 to 1/3 the price, and who cares if this worker is actually competent or not (usually not)?
Next up: if your little children didn't have food or health care because you decided you would tell your company to take their job and shove it because of principle, how would you make a one or two year old understand that you thought quitting your job on that principle was more important than feeding her? Could you look into your child's tear-stained face as she went to bed hungry (and cold, because you couldn't pay for heat, or were maybe already sleeping on the street by then) and say you did the right thing?
If you could, well, I hope you don't have children, and I feel sorry for them if you do.
I have been an exclusive Linux user for the last five years. I really believe in Open Source and Free Software. I avoid using proprietary software as much as possible, unless there is simply no FOSS alternative, not even a bad one. But I will tell you straight, I would work for Microsoft, or even SCO, to support my wife and kids. I disagree with MS's business practices, and with SCO's even stronger than that, but let's keep a perspective here. Microsoft and SCO may be repulsive, but they are operating within the law (as flawed as that law may be), and my/your/everyone's obligation to our families is a much higher moral imperative than any committment to Free and Open Source software, which is basically a lifestyle choice, not a matter of morality.
I have recently found work after being fully unemployed for 3 months and very underemployed for eight months before that. I'm making $10,000 less than I did in my last full time job, I have to move to another city, and my employer produces a proprietary software product (at least it runs on Linux), but do you know what? I'm grateful to have this job. I'm grateful my employer didn't give this job to an H1B visa holder. I'm grateful I found work while I still had savings left and my children will be in no danger of being hungry. And my company is a decent company. I like them.
I'm sure SCO employees probably like their company far, far less than I like mine. I'm just as certain that SCO employees like their jobs far less than I like mine, but that they are just as grateful as I am to have an income and be able to feed their kids in these difficult economic times. I most certainly don't hold their employer against them. I'll tell you, if I were sorting through a stack of resumes looking for someone to fill a job, the highest ranked among the shortlist would be those who didn't have work and needed it, followed by anyone who worked for SCO and wanted out. There's no way I would deny someone employment on the basis of the fact that they were currently stuck at SCO. Yet here you are disagreeing with a person who says that SCO employees should not be punished for the sins of their employer. Come on. We can and should boycott SCO and moreover seek to drive that company into bankruptcy, but we also most certainly should try to get SCO employees into honest jobs at other companies. In fact, actively recruiting SCO technical staff would be a good way to further punish the SCO non-technical staff who are behind this frivolous lawsuit.
About condoning.
In Nazi Germany, not everyone who was in the army (they had a draft, you know) supported Hitler, even if most of them did. The alternative, however, was to be shot. That can be pretty persuasive. Following orders
Nope, sorry. I've got lots of experience with pallet jacks, too. Like a lot of mainframers, early parts of my career involved shlepping paper into IBM 3800-series laser printers (and also a 3211 and a 3203), which can knock off a 2500 sheet box of continuous form paper in 15 minutes. :-)
:-)
They're impressive machines to watch, and nice and big. The warm paper coming out feels great on your hands in a cold computer room
You could not get a mainframe out on a pallet jack easily, if at all. Most of them are too big, and a pallet jack is designed to do one thing and do it well: haul pallets around. Unless a mainframe happened to fit on a pallet (many of them don't, unless they are partly disassembled) and also happened to already be on a pallet (and there's no way two guys can wrestle a mainframe onto a pallet), you'd never have a chance. A pallet jack has two prongs that are a few centimeters off the floor a a few centimeters thick, designed to slide into a pallet and then lift it when you pump the handle.
Of course, it's already been pretty well established that what was stolen were not mainframes, just a couple of server boxes, so why are we even talking about it?
And did you have impressive numbers in that LUGs RC5-64 effort?
Interesting. I'd never seen a Multiprise before, but a quick google was quite informative. The Multiprise 2000 w/out disk weighs in a 485 kg. With disk, it goes up to 1,083 kg (that's a lot of internal disk!).
:-)
You're right, that's quite rare. Two guys getting one of those out of a computer room on a trolley would be rarer still
And googling for the Chicago Printing Style Guide returns zero matches because why?
I think I may know you :-)
Is this certain city home to what is probably the oldest English-language LUG in Asia?
Thank you. I've got years of mainframe experience, and I have yet to see one that could either be removed in two hours by two people and hauled away on a trolley (much less getting *two* of them out in that time!), nor one that has disks inside of it. Mainframes are filled with CPUs and memory and usually a liquid cooling system, but they are not filled with disks.
If you care to visit the Chicago Manual of Style web site, you will find that in fact they do not put spaces before question marks:
f aq /cmosfaq.Quotations.html
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/
Moreover, if you look here:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmos
You find that the editors of the CMOS do not themselves put a space before a question mark (Search for "question" in the text).
I have yet to see any manual of style that recommends a space before any punctuation character. There are some that recommend two spaces after a colon or period (full stop, for you Brits), however, the Chicago Manual of Style recommends only a single space in both cases.
I suspect that the CMOS has changed its standard, or you are misremembering its guidelines.
The big problem isn't a migration from MS Office to OOo. That could still be done, although with extra work because of having to convert all of the DRM-protected documents to an unprotected format, import them into OOo, and then put them into a protected format there. It's a lot more work, and thus raises the cost of conversion (something MS has absolutely thought of; indeed, I'm sure they're counting on it). However, it doesn't make conversion impossible if an organization has settled on doing it.
What it does make impossible, though, is for people who prefer to use OOo, whether on Linux or any other platform on which OOo runs, to co-exist in a shop that primarily uses MS Office. That shop will now have to have a copy of MS Office on every desk or none; there will be no middle ground.
As a sysadmin, I am used to having a Linux machine, and only a Linux machine, even if the majority of the desktops in the company run Windows, and thanks to OOo, that's not a problem at all. If my employer were to begin using MS Office-based DRM on its documents, however, that would at the very least require me to run MS Office under Wine or Crossover Office. More likely, it would require me to actually have a Windows machine in order to log in to a W2K3 domain. Samba 3 plus MS Office under Wine might be enough, but I doubt it. I'm sure MS has thought of those things and made it unworkable.
That brings up two unpleasant situations: me living in dual-boot hell, having to stop whatever I'm doing and reboot anytime I need to view a protected document, or having to have two computers on my desk: one for doing my real work, and another one with Windows, just for dealing with DRM-managed MS Office documents. I'm not sure how that would go at my company, but at some companies, they would say "Can't afford it. Your Linux box has to become a Windows box. Get used to Teraterm SSH or Putty." Of course, then the danger arises that some PHB might look upon that as a reason to migrate away from *nix, foolishly believing it will reduce TCO and increase ROI.
In situation 1, I lose productivity from having to stop my work and reboot a lot. In situation 2, I lose productivity from having to work from a Windows box. Either way, I lose. Situation 2 has its advantages, in that it's harder to pin the blame on the employee, who can say "Well, you made me do this as a cost-saving measure. It did save on one-time expenditures, but now it takes longer to do things, and our running costs have gone up as a result."
The bottom line: it will help MS a lot to enforce completely homogeneous MS Office environments, something that OOo and Star Office leave them fairly powerless to do at present, and might even help them to eliminate Free and and Open Source software from many businesses.
I agree with those who say that OOo and Star Office need to implement something like this, and do it both sooner and better than Microsoft. An OOo authentication server running on a Linux box on the company LAN and using existing standards that are both open and Open Source would to the job.
*Good* MCSEs are still very well paid, at least if they're in the right shop. I'm a *nix admin and know enough Windows administration to get along, but I've worked with some really, really sharp Windows admins who made just as much as their *nix counterparts and were well worth it.
:-) The Windows users especially liked us b/c we would try to help them out with stuff even though it wasn't really our problem at all. We were only responsible for infrastructure (Cisco) and the mail and web systems, which all ran on *nix.
One of them even looked and acted like a stereotypical *nix admin: fat, ugly, rude, bad attitude, complete prick (like BOFH, except he was for real), hair in a ponytail, the works. He's a very good Windows sysadmin, though, and apparently pretty good at politics as well, since the fact that most of his users would probably like to see him dead doesn't seem to have harmed his career in the least.
All the *nix admins in that shop were cleancut, had short hair (one used to have a ponytail, but he chopped it), not fat, and were well-enough liked by all the users, and not as ugly as the above-mentioned Windows admin. For that matter, one of them is female and a whole lot less ugly than him
Don't look now, but "to beg the question" does not at all mean "to invite/ask for/provoke a question." Rather, it means to base a conclusion on the foundation that what is being discussed must be true, although such truth has not been established. In other words, circular logic. Put another way, you beg the question when you assume the truth of whatever it is you're trying to prove.
/. readers perpetuated the erroneous usage instead of correcting it? Not particularly, because A) This is /. and the standards are low, and B) The truly functionally illiterate are all over at http://www.forwardgarden.com/ (you probably don't want to know; if you go there anyway, don't say I didn't warn you :-)
/. karma actually means anything. That may shock some of you, but it's true. Uh-oh, now I'll get modded as a troll even more for daring to say such a thing :-)
"Bet the question" is an English translation from the Latin "petitio principii." Look it up.
Am I terribly disappointed that a number of
Of course, someone will probably mod me as a troll for having the temerity to point out blatantly incorrect English usage, but I don't care. It's not like