"They were going to have to learn to dress, communicate, and adapt all the traditional corporate ideals that IT has been exempt from during the dot-com boom."
IT was never exempt from communication, as IT is all ABOUT communication. Learning to dress usually means adhering to an arbitarily strict dress code that interferes with the nature of IT work to begin with. Ever try to set up a work station while wearing a suit and tie or something similar? You end up fighting your clothes more than the probelm at hand.
And corporate ideals aren't exactly something that I feel good about taking part in. Corporate ideals, for the most part, are trying to figure out how to save the company millions while keeping your mouth shut about anything shady the higher ups are doing. If we went by what people do rather than say, most corporate ideals could be summarized as 'looking for the golden parachute' or 'going to the company picnic to weasel my way into a promotion'.
There's a good reason the dot com companies didn't adhere to most of these. One, if you're working with an open minded crew, dress code doesn't matter aside from a few very basic rules. Two, ideals mean NOTHING if they aren't followed. You can bitch about how its all for the workers all you want, but when you give yourself a nice fat bonus over your workers, all of that just went out the window.
I call it breaking tradition. Tradition is you sit down, shut up, and do your job and whatever else they can trick you into doing. You're to dress up like good little sheeple and make sure not to look any of the higher ups in the eye.
IT people by nature are used to being different. They're used to thinking for themselves, because its probably the only reason they've survived into the IT field far enough to be employed for it. We aren't used to keeping our mouths closed while being treated like shit, or putting on four layers of expensive clothes just to dirty them up by rewiring the networking cabinet.
I wish it could be a wakeup call for all jobs that don't deal with customers/clients face-to-face. Just because the person processing your invoices is wearing a suit and tie doesn't mean he isn't forwarding your account information to his shady cousin. Nor does it mean he isn't talking smack about his co-workers or fantasizing about the new girl down in Advertising. All it means is he's wearing a suit beacuse someone made a policy saying that he had to.
Valve marked me a cheater on Half Life 2/Counter-Strike Source (which is all one account) and refuses to mark me as not-a-cheater. I had not played the game in six months, only to come back to find myself banned. They then said all bans were final, and refused to let me know what servers/times/dates/logs/etc (aka evidence) they had.
I guess I have to make a whole new account for when HL2 ep. 2 comes out so I can fucking play on secure servers again.
Not saying its a good excuse, but put yourself in the same situation.
Your wife is in love/lust with your bi-S&M-druggie friend.
She files for divorce.
They conspire to take your company and everything you've worked for.
You know (or at least think) that after this, there's never going to be anyone else. He had to turn to a Russian bride already. I bet his social skills aren't even that great. Its easy to envision living alone forever after that, while your friend and your ex-wife run off together.
If you want to know why he looks/talks crazy..that's why. Doesn't justify murder, but might give some insight into why he looks shitty.
Most people think that every free inch of their home must be covered with jubilant decorations. Their couches must be the best they can possibly afford, same with their beds, light fixtures, silverware, cups, papertowels, etc.
They will pay double the price for 1% extra cleaning power on toilet paper.
Technology is just the new realm of home itemization. You want the best cell phone. The biggest SUV. The biggest latte. The biggest TV and fastest computer. You want a palmtop with 2 gigs of RAM. You want a lawnmower that can cut down thick saplings without stopping. You want a bathtub that can fit three people. You want a high-end widescreen plasma monitor to check your email on.
I signed up with Sprint for a 2 year contract. Near the end of the second year, my phone died. I was able to get a credit towards the purchase of a new phone by adding an extra year, though.
Anyway..when I got my first phone, it was $100 + 2 year contract. It wasn't even top of the line. More of mid-road.
Second phone was about $150 + 1 year contract and only slightly better than the first phone. The kicker? They still sell the first phone for $100 + 2 years.
The only phones that come free are tiny cheap plastic phones, with a 2 year agreement.
I'm sure she could have been sued had the thief been injured in the chase. Thief should have just broken her arm in a fall and sued the chaser for the sum of the woman's bank accounts and called it even..
I'm surprised no one has played the rape card yet.
"That teacher was raping their precious minds with such smut!"
But anyway, the companies doing the advertising should be smashed by this. I don't know a single person that wants popups or spam. Not the students. Not the teacher. The students thought it was funny I bet, but still hate popups. It was solely the fault of the advertisers, and if they are US-based or have a US-based wing should be fed to the vultures calling for the death of this teacher.
I definately agree, however, we don't have the numbers. Lets say that slashdot readers made up 10% of the voters in the nation. Or hell..lets say the 'well informed'.
Now a bill comes up. We'll call it the 'Land of the Free' Act. Of course people will vote on it because they never heard of it but it sounds like an improvement. Those 10% know that it will make all non-licenced display or audio playback devices illegal, and old models will not be grandfathered in. If you're caught with one you get 5 years in jail.
10% of the population representing the informed vote against it. Another 30% of the population does too, on reccomendation of friends. 60% of people vote it in. The same stupid assholes who are responsible for spam being lucrative are now responsible for your 5 years in jail for that MP3 player in your car that you forgot to licence.
Now imagine that you helped build the coffee shop. Your friends helped build it as well. You met acquaintances there that you like to run into when you're having your coffee. Then they start the throwing it in your face shit.
You've already invested in the shop. You donated to help keep it open through hard times. You've invested time and money around this shop.
And then they start that.
Is it so easy just to move on now? Just to erase it from your life? I'd hope you would try to salvage it first. To get them to come around and see the light from your angle. If you want to just give up on it that easily, good luck being successful in any relationships.
Of course if it doesn't help to talk to them/bitch/whatever, take your money elsewhere.
They can still easily be manipulated to provide irrefutable proof that you were in that anti-government parade or that you are one of the resistance members fighting to save the country when invades and takes over the camera controls...
American companies are quick to smell blood and jump on it.
Instead of, "This technology starts out expensive, and gets cheaper over time" is more like "This technology starts out expensive, and gets cheaper if its not that popular, but will get more expensive if it is popular and we have people to exploit."]
Granted the purpose of companies is to make money, they aren't providing products for the consumers anymore. They're first-and-foremost trying to provide money to their shareholders. Once a company moves from providing products and services for the consumers to providing happy numbers for the shareholders, its all downhill from there.
Eventually you get EA Madden 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, with minor changes, released at full price. Every year.
Or text messages who's cost is skyrocketing.
Perfect example, most companies offer unlimited texting for a decent fee. If they can do millions of texts for $15, why do they charge 1/1000th of that fee PER TEXT if you don't? Another example. Don't even DREAM of using data services on your phone if you don't have a plan to cover it. Their default rate is something like 20 or 30 cents per kilobyte, which there are 10-100 of on each small webpage.
Intra-continental routing is also full of its own politics.
Playing host to DDOS-bots is one of those 'you just sent troops to shoot up a trailer park' moments and is definately frowned upon. Its like the USPS delivering a thousand or more letters of spam to your house in one day.
Eventually pressure on the USPS would cause them to stop accepting 1000 messages at the same time for EACH ADDRESS IN THE CITY. They should do this. Don't RBL their IPs, but if repetitive traffic like this keeps coming out, throttle or tempRBL them.
So if we cut their IP blocks off from the world beacuse of botnets, what other excuses could we use? Well, China supports terrorism, so lets cut them off too. And both Koreas. And the entire middle east. Etc.
Also, the hackers would end up proxying through another set of IPs and getting to where they need to be anyway. And could write up their bots to do the same.
That said, don't use technical solutions for social problems. The problem is the governments of the countries in question don't care. They can deny involvement but still watch their enemies writhe. It should be treated as if a stream of foreign nationals marched out of their country and into ours, guns drawn. And that their government is doing nothing to stop them.
Your rates are higher because you smoke like a train and are on the verge of liver cancer from drinking. You can stop any time you want with a little effort.
Now what about Mary that's definately without a doubt going to get breast cancer? She can't just take some easy step to avoid it. Should she have to pay an extra $50 a month for the rest of her life because of it? Because of something she didn't do at all?
The whole insurance system is fucked up anyway. Those companies aren't interested in your wellbeing unless you can turn a profit for them. Like all companies, no doubt, which I understand. The whole thing should be run by the government in the first place.
Email your..no write..no call...well hell. They don't care anyway.
Soap box, check. Ballot box, check. Anyone remember what came next? Jury box? How do we get in on that? Oh well, probably won't work. Lets skip it and go straight to the ammo box.
What can we reasonably do against a government that sits there and sells our freedoms to the highest vendor? It won't be long before we're forced to pay three easy payments of $599.99 for a new TV-doo-hickie to watch us while we're watching TV. In the name of advertisement, of course, to figure out how we react to some shows.
Woman works hard. Gets degree in IT-related field. Goes into IT.
She's making great pay, but is on-call 24/7. The bosses are annoying. The guys look at them and treat them like goddesses, worshiping the ground they walked on last week. The departmental funds are low. Management is out of touch.
To say that this creates a hostile work environment is an understatement.
So after a good year of every guy they work with treating them like a princess, after they see that the field they went into sucks as far as work environments, and that there are so many jobs with better environments, they leave.
They find a guy who's in IT and makes a shitload of money, and they take up a nice quiet job as a technical writer or admin. assistant someplace. After all, there are thousands and thousands of guys within a mile of her that would be willing to work 15 hours a day to keep her happy.
She has a family, holds down the fort, and pursues her interests with a lot less stress and hassle.
Now, lets fast forward to her male counterpart. He's one of 20 people in the department. He has to keep this job because he knows that living with his parents will make him a loser and virtually no female within a fifty mile radius would give him a second look. He knows the pay isn't too great, the hours suck, and work is stressful. But he does it anyway, because that is what is expected of him. His boss is fresh out of the marketing department and only knows how to please his bosses with uninformed promises and decisions. Pretty much everyone is intimidated by him.
What recourse does he have? He's not going to be able to go out and find a self-respecting girlfriend who's going to take care of him and accept that he has very little ambition to move up past something like a technical writer. He feels pressured to go and work those 10 hours a day. Society is pressuring him to shut up and 'take it like a man'. And if he does manage to get married and have kids, he'll be pulling the cart for at least a few weeks while she takes care of herself, the birth, and the baby.
That's the difference right there. Its not about intelligence, its about strong pressures forced upon us from society.
Lets say that you're sitting at home one day. You get your credit card statement. Apparently your card is maxed out at $10,000. Your interest rate has tripled and the company is calling you wondering why you spent $10,000 in Bumfuck, India.
Ok, so you're not responsible.
How do you know how they got your info? It could have been from a call center, when you called about double billing you over and over. It could have been when you called your bank, which also has call centers in India. It could have been when you lost your card, someone found it.
Point is, you probably will never know how they got your info. Only that they did. Even if you did find out, could you prove it in a court of law enough to sue TJX?
Fair deal I suppose. Spend a good third of your yearly income, plus $60 a month, and equipment purchases. Just to have cable modem service. I guess this is a way to tell the complainers to put-up-or-shut-up. If you think about it, all industries could do this.
"You want air conditioning in your car? Pay us a few million and we'll start offering with air conditioning. We have to cover our costs, ya know."
"You don't want your food to contain lumps of processed animal shit? Fine, couple hundred thousand to add some de-shitting equipment to our food processors."
Lets hope the other industries don't catch wind of this.
Do you think the immigrants have these qualifications? Hell no.
All they have to do is have proof that they've tried and tried and tried to find someone with these requirements and can't. Then they get the OK to hire a foreign worker.
I can bet if someone could possibly have all that experience, they wouldn't be applying for that job. They'd already be with a company somewhere, with decades of experience, making a lot more than starting pay at another job. It would be like me putting an ad in the paper for someone with a master's degree for $10 an hour. Like anyone with a master's degree would work for that. Then I hire Pablo from Mexico to teach at my school because I couldn't find an American willing to work for pay that shitty.
Slashdot Mirror
"They were going to have to learn to dress, communicate, and adapt all the traditional corporate ideals that IT has been exempt from during the dot-com boom."
IT was never exempt from communication, as IT is all ABOUT communication. Learning to dress usually means adhering to an arbitarily strict dress code that interferes with the nature of IT work to begin with. Ever try to set up a work station while wearing a suit and tie or something similar? You end up fighting your clothes more than the probelm at hand.
And corporate ideals aren't exactly something that I feel good about taking part in. Corporate ideals, for the most part, are trying to figure out how to save the company millions while keeping your mouth shut about anything shady the higher ups are doing. If we went by what people do rather than say, most corporate ideals could be summarized as 'looking for the golden parachute' or 'going to the company picnic to weasel my way into a promotion'.
There's a good reason the dot com companies didn't adhere to most of these. One, if you're working with an open minded crew, dress code doesn't matter aside from a few very basic rules. Two, ideals mean NOTHING if they aren't followed. You can bitch about how its all for the workers all you want, but when you give yourself a nice fat bonus over your workers, all of that just went out the window.
I call it breaking tradition. Tradition is you sit down, shut up, and do your job and whatever else they can trick you into doing. You're to dress up like good little sheeple and make sure not to look any of the higher ups in the eye.
IT people by nature are used to being different. They're used to thinking for themselves, because its probably the only reason they've survived into the IT field far enough to be employed for it. We aren't used to keeping our mouths closed while being treated like shit, or putting on four layers of expensive clothes just to dirty them up by rewiring the networking cabinet.
I wish it could be a wakeup call for all jobs that don't deal with customers/clients face-to-face. Just because the person processing your invoices is wearing a suit and tie doesn't mean he isn't forwarding your account information to his shady cousin. Nor does it mean he isn't talking smack about his co-workers or fantasizing about the new girl down in Advertising. All it means is he's wearing a suit beacuse someone made a policy saying that he had to.
It doesn't even look better than business-casual.
Activation problems? With the iPhone being hyped for a year?
Never saw it coming.
Especially since AT&T, a company known for shitty service, was given launch rights.
Valve marked me a cheater on Half Life 2/Counter-Strike Source (which is all one account) and refuses to mark me as not-a-cheater. I had not played the game in six months, only to come back to find myself banned. They then said all bans were final, and refused to let me know what servers/times/dates/logs/etc (aka evidence) they had.
I guess I have to make a whole new account for when HL2 ep. 2 comes out so I can fucking play on secure servers again.
Not saying its a good excuse, but put yourself in the same situation.
Your wife is in love/lust with your bi-S&M-druggie friend.
She files for divorce.
They conspire to take your company and everything you've worked for.
You know (or at least think) that after this, there's never going to be anyone else. He had to turn to a Russian bride already. I bet his social skills aren't even that great. Its easy to envision living alone forever after that, while your friend and your ex-wife run off together.
If you want to know why he looks/talks crazy..that's why. Doesn't justify murder, but might give some insight into why he looks shitty.
Home decoration.
Most people think that every free inch of their home must be covered with jubilant decorations. Their couches must be the best they can possibly afford, same with their beds, light fixtures, silverware, cups, papertowels, etc.
They will pay double the price for 1% extra cleaning power on toilet paper.
Technology is just the new realm of home itemization. You want the best cell phone. The biggest SUV. The biggest latte. The biggest TV and fastest computer. You want a palmtop with 2 gigs of RAM. You want a lawnmower that can cut down thick saplings without stopping. You want a bathtub that can fit three people. You want a high-end widescreen plasma monitor to check your email on.
Nothing new here.
Hahaha.
Ok, here's how it goes.
I signed up with Sprint for a 2 year contract. Near the end of the second year, my phone died. I was able to get a credit towards the purchase of a new phone by adding an extra year, though.
Anyway..when I got my first phone, it was $100 + 2 year contract. It wasn't even top of the line. More of mid-road.
Second phone was about $150 + 1 year contract and only slightly better than the first phone. The kicker? They still sell the first phone for $100 + 2 years.
The only phones that come free are tiny cheap plastic phones, with a 2 year agreement.
I bet your body can sustain other life. A lot of your digestive tract is other life.
Parasites? Other life..etc.
I'm sure she could have been sued had the thief been injured in the chase. Thief should have just broken her arm in a fall and sued the chaser for the sum of the woman's bank accounts and called it even..
Indeed..
I'm surprised no one has played the rape card yet.
"That teacher was raping their precious minds with such smut!"
But anyway, the companies doing the advertising should be smashed by this. I don't know a single person that wants popups or spam. Not the students. Not the teacher. The students thought it was funny I bet, but still hate popups. It was solely the fault of the advertisers, and if they are US-based or have a US-based wing should be fed to the vultures calling for the death of this teacher.
I definately agree, however, we don't have the numbers. Lets say that slashdot readers made up 10% of the voters in the nation. Or hell..lets say the 'well informed'. Now a bill comes up. We'll call it the 'Land of the Free' Act. Of course people will vote on it because they never heard of it but it sounds like an improvement. Those 10% know that it will make all non-licenced display or audio playback devices illegal, and old models will not be grandfathered in. If you're caught with one you get 5 years in jail. 10% of the population representing the informed vote against it. Another 30% of the population does too, on reccomendation of friends. 60% of people vote it in. The same stupid assholes who are responsible for spam being lucrative are now responsible for your 5 years in jail for that MP3 player in your car that you forgot to licence.
Now imagine that you helped build the coffee shop. Your friends helped build it as well. You met acquaintances there that you like to run into when you're having your coffee. Then they start the throwing it in your face shit.
You've already invested in the shop. You donated to help keep it open through hard times. You've invested time and money around this shop.
And then they start that.
Is it so easy just to move on now? Just to erase it from your life? I'd hope you would try to salvage it first. To get them to come around and see the light from your angle. If you want to just give up on it that easily, good luck being successful in any relationships.
Of course if it doesn't help to talk to them/bitch/whatever, take your money elsewhere.
They can still easily be manipulated to provide irrefutable proof that you were in that anti-government parade or that you are one of the resistance members fighting to save the country when invades and takes over the camera controls...
American companies are quick to smell blood and jump on it.
Instead of, "This technology starts out expensive, and gets cheaper over time" is more like "This technology starts out expensive, and gets cheaper if its not that popular, but will get more expensive if it is popular and we have people to exploit."]
Granted the purpose of companies is to make money, they aren't providing products for the consumers anymore. They're first-and-foremost trying to provide money to their shareholders. Once a company moves from providing products and services for the consumers to providing happy numbers for the shareholders, its all downhill from there.
Eventually you get EA Madden 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, with minor changes, released at full price. Every year.
Or text messages who's cost is skyrocketing.
Perfect example, most companies offer unlimited texting for a decent fee. If they can do millions of texts for $15, why do they charge 1/1000th of that fee PER TEXT if you don't? Another example. Don't even DREAM of using data services on your phone if you don't have a plan to cover it. Their default rate is something like 20 or 30 cents per kilobyte, which there are 10-100 of on each small webpage.
Great idea.
Because a population of mostly fowl mouthed racist sexist kids would make an excellent and unbiased jury.
Intra-continental routing is also full of its own politics.
Playing host to DDOS-bots is one of those 'you just sent troops to shoot up a trailer park' moments and is definately frowned upon. Its like the USPS delivering a thousand or more letters of spam to your house in one day.
Eventually pressure on the USPS would cause them to stop accepting 1000 messages at the same time for EACH ADDRESS IN THE CITY. They should do this. Don't RBL their IPs, but if repetitive traffic like this keeps coming out, throttle or tempRBL them.
Problem is this could be a slippery slope.
So if we cut their IP blocks off from the world beacuse of botnets, what other excuses could we use? Well, China supports terrorism, so lets cut them off too. And both Koreas. And the entire middle east. Etc.
Also, the hackers would end up proxying through another set of IPs and getting to where they need to be anyway. And could write up their bots to do the same.
That said, don't use technical solutions for social problems. The problem is the governments of the countries in question don't care. They can deny involvement but still watch their enemies writhe. It should be treated as if a stream of foreign nationals marched out of their country and into ours, guns drawn. And that their government is doing nothing to stop them.
The insurance companies would be happy to pay a few bucks per oil change to make sure those numbers get sent to them along with the VINs.
A lot of those things are voluntary.
Your rates are higher because you smoke like a train and are on the verge of liver cancer from drinking. You can stop any time you want with a little effort.
Now what about Mary that's definately without a doubt going to get breast cancer? She can't just take some easy step to avoid it. Should she have to pay an extra $50 a month for the rest of her life because of it? Because of something she didn't do at all?
The whole insurance system is fucked up anyway. Those companies aren't interested in your wellbeing unless you can turn a profit for them. Like all companies, no doubt, which I understand. The whole thing should be run by the government in the first place.
It was a month ago.
Email your..no write..no call...well hell. They don't care anyway.
Soap box, check. Ballot box, check. Anyone remember what came next? Jury box? How do we get in on that? Oh well, probably won't work. Lets skip it and go straight to the ammo box.
What can we reasonably do against a government that sits there and sells our freedoms to the highest vendor? It won't be long before we're forced to pay three easy payments of $599.99 for a new TV-doo-hickie to watch us while we're watching TV. In the name of advertisement, of course, to figure out how we react to some shows.
Here's a perfect example.
Woman works hard. Gets degree in IT-related field. Goes into IT.
She's making great pay, but is on-call 24/7. The bosses are annoying. The guys look at them and treat them like goddesses, worshiping the ground they walked on last week. The departmental funds are low. Management is out of touch.
To say that this creates a hostile work environment is an understatement.
So after a good year of every guy they work with treating them like a princess, after they see that the field they went into sucks as far as work environments, and that there are so many jobs with better environments, they leave.
They find a guy who's in IT and makes a shitload of money, and they take up a nice quiet job as a technical writer or admin. assistant someplace. After all, there are thousands and thousands of guys within a mile of her that would be willing to work 15 hours a day to keep her happy.
She has a family, holds down the fort, and pursues her interests with a lot less stress and hassle.
Now, lets fast forward to her male counterpart. He's one of 20 people in the department. He has to keep this job because he knows that living with his parents will make him a loser and virtually no female within a fifty mile radius would give him a second look. He knows the pay isn't too great, the hours suck, and work is stressful. But he does it anyway, because that is what is expected of him. His boss is fresh out of the marketing department and only knows how to please his bosses with uninformed promises and decisions. Pretty much everyone is intimidated by him.
What recourse does he have? He's not going to be able to go out and find a self-respecting girlfriend who's going to take care of him and accept that he has very little ambition to move up past something like a technical writer. He feels pressured to go and work those 10 hours a day. Society is pressuring him to shut up and 'take it like a man'. And if he does manage to get married and have kids, he'll be pulling the cart for at least a few weeks while she takes care of herself, the birth, and the baby.
That's the difference right there. Its not about intelligence, its about strong pressures forced upon us from society.
Just an excuse to be a lying asshole and get away with it. Much like alcohol, or drugs.
Lets say that you're sitting at home one day. You get your credit card statement. Apparently your card is maxed out at $10,000. Your interest rate has tripled and the company is calling you wondering why you spent $10,000 in Bumfuck, India.
Ok, so you're not responsible.
How do you know how they got your info? It could have been from a call center, when you called about double billing you over and over. It could have been when you called your bank, which also has call centers in India. It could have been when you lost your card, someone found it.
Point is, you probably will never know how they got your info. Only that they did. Even if you did find out, could you prove it in a court of law enough to sue TJX?
Fair deal I suppose. Spend a good third of your yearly income, plus $60 a month, and equipment purchases. Just to have cable modem service. I guess this is a way to tell the complainers to put-up-or-shut-up. If you think about it, all industries could do this.
"You want air conditioning in your car? Pay us a few million and we'll start offering with air conditioning. We have to cover our costs, ya know."
"You don't want your food to contain lumps of processed animal shit? Fine, couple hundred thousand to add some de-shitting equipment to our food processors."
Lets hope the other industries don't catch wind of this.
Do you think the immigrants have these qualifications? Hell no.
All they have to do is have proof that they've tried and tried and tried to find someone with these requirements and can't. Then they get the OK to hire a foreign worker.
I can bet if someone could possibly have all that experience, they wouldn't be applying for that job. They'd already be with a company somewhere, with decades of experience, making a lot more than starting pay at another job. It would be like me putting an ad in the paper for someone with a master's degree for $10 an hour. Like anyone with a master's degree would work for that. Then I hire Pablo from Mexico to teach at my school because I couldn't find an American willing to work for pay that shitty.