Remember that the Seigenthaler article was tehre for weeks and months. So forget the idea that it's just that people might come across the article on the minute or hour that it had a vandalized version.
For example, the FSLN article has an introduction, and then begins "The FSLN was formally organised in 1961 by recent KGB recruits Carlos Fonseca Amador, Tomás Borge Martínez and Silvio Mayorga." The rest of the article goes on in that sort of tone. I don't know how many people in the world think the main purpose of the FSLN was to establish a satellite of the USSR "two days driving time from Harlingen, Texas", but obviously that is what is considered in this article. Most educated, professional people (at least those outside the US anyhow) in the world would consider this article laughable, and certainly not encylopedic. Microsoft and Encarta, or Encyclopedia Britannica, are not exactly FSLN boosters, but their articles are not silly like this.
This is just one example of many. There is a response that "anyone can edit" and that anyone can just go in and fix it, but that is simply not true. Anyone who edits this article would be descended on by one or more people who believe that, to quote from the article "During the following three years the KGB handpicked several dozen Sandinistas for intelligence and sabotage operation in the United States. In 1966, this KGB-controlled Sandinista sabotage and intelligence group was sent to the U.S.-Mexican border" (you see, the FSLN had nothing to do with conditions in Nicaragua, since the world revolves around the U.S.). So one would waste time on a stalemate for weeks, and ultimately, the admins and ArbCom would back those people up. Once upon a time there were admins or experienced users who would have helped someone tackle this page, but they have been driven off. Jimbo Wales political sympathies have been stated in the past (he ran the Ayn Rand list for years, to give you a clue), and the one appointee to the ArbCom (who he appointed twice, since he couldn't get elected) seemed to be picked only because he edits with a Zionist point of view, he's editing the Lebanon pages currently. Editors with a different political point of view are driven off. The Wikipedia partisans say on Wikipedia there are only "trolls" and "good users" or whatever, but this is more their almost cult-like Manicheanism then reality. The "Criticism of Wikipedia" page forbids links to pages critical of Wikipedia like Wikipedia Review. If Wikipedia is so "open", why do Arbitration Committee members zealously defend the "Criticism of Wikipedia" page from links to a forum of people critical of Wikipedia? Like many others, I have given up on Wikipedia. Unlike most people who grew tired of Wikipedia's nonsense, I continue to edit on alternative wiki encyclopedias. I also post to Wikipedia Review as well.
Wikipedia succeeds in some areas, fails in others
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When Wikipedia Fails
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I have been a user of English Wikipedia for years. I have generally been happy with articles on things such as quantum mechanics and Euler's theorem. But get into any kind of historical or political article and it is generally quite dreadful. For example, Portuguese Communist Party was obviously written by a communist, and has a communist point of view. FSLN was obviously written by someone who vehemently hates communists. When you get onto the main Israel/Palestine pages, they are just a complete mess and edit war, it is like the fight for land over there has spread onto the pages of Wikipedia.
As time has gone by, the situation has gotten worse. As far as I'm concerned, Jimbo Wales input into how to deal with generally hurts the situation, and his like-minded lieutenants follow along. To show the cultish aspect of this, anyone who points this out is called a "troll" or whatnot, I'm sure I'll be called a troll here and modded down by Wikipedia partisans, which kind of proves my point. Another cultish aspect is that no one is allowed to post links to sites truly critical of Wikipedia like Wikipedia Review on the Criticism of Wikipedia page.
What it really is is that old adage of how little problems not dealt with become huge problems as time goes by. Wikipedia has done such a good job with articles on math, science and that type of thing that people tend to ignore how the historical articles are garbage. Aside from the enormous bias of the professional English-speaking Westerner view throughout English Wikipedia, there is focus - Leeroy Jenkins of World of Warcraft fame has an article, while leaders of sub-Saharan African countries get no articles whatsoever. If you combined the Star Trek and Star Wars articles, they would dwarf the size of text written about, say, South America, on English Wikipedia. Anyhow, these things will become more apparent as time goes on, they're apparent to many already, or Wikipedia Review, the site linking of is banned on Wikipedia, wouldn't exist. I don't think Jimbo Wales or Wikipedia will change, and I see a fork certainly coming in the future. I nowadays make about an edit to Wikipedia a month, most of my stuff I put on alternative wikis.
As I said in my post, I knew this was the type of answer I would receive. On some arcane level this may be true - if the company's aim was not maximizing dividends for shareholders, but getting Red Hat and Oracle to work together, and we were fully staffed with the best sysadmins and DBAs out of MIT, then yes, perhaps on that arcane level there is a "sysadmin problem" (what about DBAs?). Of course, none of this is the case, like most companies there is much more work then the staff can handle on a 40 hour week, one of our sysadmins just left for greener pastures, and while we have a good, experienced sysadmin team, we are probably not the brightest out there. And frankly, after putting in 40-50 hours of work in a week, when 6PM rolls around if I had a choice between spending an hour getting Red Hat and Oracle to work, or to spend that hour on my commute so I'd get home earlier, I would choose the latter.
I wonder why the problem is a "sysadmin problem" when so many of our servers and applications run fine - Oracle on Solaris runs fine, our java-based application servers run fine, our Apache web servers run fine, our trouble-ticket system runs fine etc. We seem to be doing a fine and competent job in this respect. We also have a lot of Red Hat experience collectively, since everything but the databases run on it. Yet our migration to Oracle on Red Hat was a disaster. I wonder why we are doing such a fine and competent job in these respects, but when it comes to Oracle on Red Hat we, and not the product(s), are the problem.
The numbers speak for themselves. Compare production Oracle on Red Hat deployments with Oracle on Solaris or SQL Server on Windows. If the problem is just with our particular groups incompetency and not with the products, how come so few people are jumping on board the Oracle/Red Hat train? Massive "incompetency", but on the customer end, not the supplier end? Perhaps, but a supplier who isn't selling isn't going to start selling by having contempt for the customer. We deal with the rules of business, which could really give two shits about technican's elitism - perhaps one of the few good things about the rules of business. Tech elitism can work for Debian or Linux, where people could call me an idiot if I can't get a piece of hardware to work at home. But Red Hat is a business, and at the office that shit doesn't fly.
I work as a UNIX sysadmin at a Fortune 1000 company. Our UNIX environment is Red Hat and Solaris. About a year ago, the idea came about to phase out Solaris, which by that time was only running Oracle, so we began beta-testing Oracle on Red Hat, and had it to the point where we had it in production for a little while. It was disastrous - we actually had to take our production database out of production and switch it to a Solaris box. This has really soured us on the idea of Oracle on Red Hat, and even if there were improvements in the last year, this would still weigh on our minds.
I saw the tag "fud" for this article. Sorry, but this is not fud, it is the truth. You can give those standard Linux zealot lines about how if we had given more resources to it, had more, smarter sysadmins with better experience and so on and so forth that it would work. But the managers do not want to hear that, they are running a business, they are not in the Linux evangelism business. The reason they liked the idea of a switch is Red Hat on Intel is generally cheaper than Solaris on Sun boxes, and it would allow us to standardize on one UNIX platform. But there were just too many problems.
I am a Linux zealot myself, at home I have a Debian with no non-free software, not even non-free Java. But business does not think about that. The Linux kernel core team (Torvalds, Morton etc.) seem to have the strategy of competing for the high-end market with Microsoft and Sun (and some IBM lines, although IBM stands to benefit from Linux in other of its product lines). This seems like a good strategy to me since the high-end market seems up-for-grabs nowadays. Business feeling comfortable with Oracle running on a business-friendly distribution like Red Hat is essential. There are plenty of SQL Server databases running on Windows in production in Fortune 500 companies, how many Oracle on Red Hat's are there? This is essential. The worst-case scenario is it is still not there yet, Sun collapses, and Microsoft swallows up the market.
I am not just all talk - my home desktop is Debian with no non-free software. I evangelize Linux at work. I sent checks to the Free Software Foundation. I write GPL software. But this is not fud, this is reality that must be faced, and business feeling comfortable with Oracle on Red Hat is a must. Someone commented that Oracle support sucks and will they do better than Red Hat? Well, I don't know one way or the other as our DBA is who calls Oracle all the time. But this is important for Oracle, and Red Hat, and Linux and the whole free software community to get right.
Whether or not it was wise of him to sue, SBC screwed up and he is going to get nothing for it. You hear a lot about tort reform from politicians, but the tort reform always seems to strip the little guy of recourse to the courts, and does nothing about the people who really abuse the courts, the corporations. Although now that they're passing laws giving jail time for copying MP3's, it won't even be abusing civil courts soon, now it will be criminal courts.
I ran a website once which was "Web 2.0" before they had a name for it - like Myspace, Geocities, Ebay and whatnot, the public had a lot of input into site content, and if anyone complained about something illegal, I almost always removed it. Anyhow, I got flooded with legal letters, some of them quite ridiculous - Blizzard sent me a letter about some supposed DMCA violation - someone made a hack that let people play Starcraft on non-Battle.net servers. I couldn't afford a court case and those troubles though so I took it down. These are the people who really abuse the court system, the headlines of corporate newspapers always bemoan how it's a travesty the average Joe can sue a big corporation though.
I guess you haven't heard of the White House office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Praise the Lord (the Lord is a magic man who lives in the clouds who controls everything, in case you don't know)!
As far as the article statement ''I think ECS' employees take great pride in their hard work, even though they are getting paid very little in comparison to bloated unionized factories''.
The "bloat" in unionized factories is that the people creating the wealth, the workers, keep more of the wealth they create then their non-unionized counterparts. From the author's perspective, that of the factory owner, or stockholder who owns shares in the corporation which owns a factory, wages are bloat, as lower wages means larger dividend checks coming in the mail every three months.
Then he goes on to talk about hard work and pride, which of course, is the farthest thing in the world from some heir collecting a dividend check from wealth created by other's work. But in his mind, the idler deserves more, and the worker keeping most of the wealth they create is bloat.
As far as pride - if one of these people tried to form a union they would be jailed, or even executed. I'm sure this author a century ago would be talking about how much those negroes had pride in their work of picking cotton in Mississippi. It all kind of reminds me of the ending of the Bridge on the River Kwai.
"If you work hard enough and earn enough to be concerned with the death tax, then it's YOUR money. You earned it."
While I'm aware that Wall Street calls dividends, earnings, sitting on your behind at the 19th hole of your country club is not "earning" money in any sense of the word. It is collecting money - from the workers who are out there sweating and doing the work, who are doing the wealth creation while the rentier sits on his behind and generation to generation collects the proceeds of work he did not do.
Wikipedia has things going for it - the software is GPL, the content is GFDL, and they have decent articles on science and mathematics. But having spent years on it, I can tell you that articles on certain topics, especially history and political articles do not fit into the kind of openness that everything else does. It is hard to convey to someone, especially since everything appears to be open and free, and it is on many topics. You just have to be a heavy editor and read wikien-l for a while and hang out on IRC to realize this. There was a battle for months to get the link of Wikipedia Review on the Criticism of Wikipedia page, it is there for the moment, who knows if it will stay. But that Wikipedia is so sensitive to criticism seems to be a little bit cultish.
There really is a cabal at Wikipedia and editors and administrators who do not tow the line find themselves enmeshed in arbitration and all sorts of things. If you think the "right" way then you are fine, if you think for instance that the FSLN page is so bad you want to go running to Encarta or Encyclopedia Britannica, then you are not thinking in line with the cabal, and you will be tied up in arbitration and so forth. And anyone who answers "well you can just edit it, anyone can edit it" is someone just showing their ignorance of Wikipedia - I have been on Wikipedia for years and know how it works and that is just nonsense. There are just bizarre cabal decisions, let me impart some of it here - according to the cabal, people who say bad things about the Moonies or Scientologists are troublemakers and have to go. But people who say bad things about Lyndon LaRouche are good, and people who defend Lyndon LaRouche are troublemakers. Now in my book, Moonies, Scientologists and LaRouchies are all nuts, but for some reason the cabal (by the cabal I loosely mean Jimbo, ArbCom etc.) has this attitude. I said something about how a pro-LaRouchie person was being persecuted once and cabal people began swarming around accusing me of being a LaRouchie and saying I had to be banned immediately. Wikipedia just goes into crazed witchhunts where they try to tag people as troublemakers and stop trying to have rational discussions. It's true some people tend towards troublemaking, but Wikipedia has managed to drive off some of the calmest most rational people you can imagine, much calmer and more rational than the people driven off.
I think an alternative to Wikipedia needs to exist with different editors and a different board and I work on alternative wikis more than Wikipedia currently.
I have a decade of IT work under my belt in diffent companies of different sizes. It is apparent to me, and somewhat logical and obvious, that the bigger a company gets, the more office politics enters the fray. I worked at a Fortune 100 company where work didn't matter anywhere near as much as office politics - you had about as much chance of getting another business unit to do some work for you as Kafka's narrator in "The Castle" had of completing his task - and with a similar dealing of bureaucracy.
Small companies are not like that. The smaller they are, the less they are the like that. Small companies are where work matters, there is little politics and so forth. Small companies can't SURVIVE otherwise (many don't) as there is no room for this sort of thing as there is in large companies.
Of course small companies have their problems. One big one being they never have money, which is a big problem. It's obvious how important capital is, but as time goes by I become even more aware of how important it is, about how much capital matters in ways that are not immediately obvious, in addition to obvious ways.
Another thing about small companies is if you are not in your early 20s is if you are not an owner or partner you ask yourself why the hell you would work for someone else instead of starting your own company. They have no money, you have no money, so why work for them, why not start your own small company?
As far as bureaucracy, politics and so forth versus work rewarded and innovation, this really depends on societal things. Over the past few decades, things have become more monopolistic, companies merge, even broken up monopolies come together - Bell for one, where 7 Baby Bells have become 4, and will become 3 when AT&T and Bellsouth merge. Or Standard Oil, which a century after being broken up is merging once again into ExxonMobil ('nee Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York). People don't even remember that Exxon and Mobil were originally in the same company.
Most of what I have read of Graham's is useless, this is even more so. If you want to see what made Silicon Valley, simply go back to the 1940's and 1950's and see what made it. Writers from Cringely to Jeff Goodell have done this. Graham can't be bothered with looking back a few decades and seeing what happened, he simply looks around in present time and tries to deduce what happened, without ever looking at what happened, which is not hard to do. If this were a technical discussion I would be telling him to RTFM.
I see one of his headers is "Not Bureaucrats". I'm sorry, but bureaucrats are exactly what created Silicon Valley. Billions of dollars in government contracts in the 1940's, 1950's and on are what created Silicon Valley, are the engine which created it. Look at the Internet - the first RFC came out in 1969, and yet no commercial traffic was officially allowed on it (NSFnet rules) until the mid 1990s. Those 20+ years of interim were from the government gravy train. Exactly what Graham seems to not want to hear, which is probably why people like him are so ahistorical.
I've never worked with the Lotus stuff. I work for a Fortune 1000 company where until a few months ago, all public IT documents were stored in a shared directory on a Windows file server. So there was no record of when it was created, who was modifying it, who erased it if it was erased etc.
Recently we began using Sharepoint. The upside is it's like CVS - you can see who edited a file, when, and what they changed. This is useful more for utilitarian purposes than spying - if I see Joe created a file, or modified it, I can ask Joe about it.
One drawback for Sharepoint is linkage. In the old days I could just tell people to go to \\FILESERVER\IT\Documents\Whatever\Coolstuff.xls . They click on that in e-mail and it pops up. Now I have to give convoluted instructions on how to get the document. The URLs are long and convoluted. It was easier to direct people to information before.
I am stuck here in Windows hell, are there any GPL and possibly UNIX-friendly versions of this type os software?
The ArbCom has nothing to do with how articles are edited unless subject to a complaint.
I mention "Arbitration Committee members", but this turns into the entire ArbCom when you answer what I supposedly said. "Subject to a complaint" is about as vague and subjective as you can get (just how "the cabal" likes the rules), you might as well say they can't be edited unless they flip a coin and it comes up one way or another.
The page is locked because it was being vandalized.
If you consider linking to the main web site critiquing Wikipedia on the Criticism of Wikipedia vandalism, then it is. This is not how Wikipedia defines vandalism however.
Plus, we don't block any mention of Wikipedia Review. To do so would be stupid and have a pro-Wikipedia bias. Unless you can prove these claims, then I would ask that you do your homework a little more before accusing.
Here's just one link of an ArbCom member removing mention of Wikipedia Review. He has locked the Criticism of Wikipedia page, the Criticism of Wikipedia discussion page, and has blocked many, many users who have inserted the link. I myself added the link weeks ago, before it was removed, I didn't even know at the time that this particular deviation from the Wikipedia party line was verboten and all mention of it was removed, with violators blocked at the time. I think you're the one who needs to do your homework.
The Criticism of Wikipedia page is heavily censored by Arbitration Committee members. The page is currently locked, and they even locked the discussion page recently, which AFAIK is unprecedented (AFAIK anyhow). Most of what they are trying to do is block any linking to Wikipedia Review, a discussion site critical of Wikipedia.
Of course, Wikipedia is Wikipedia, and the ArbCom is going to do what they are going to do, but I think it should be generally known how people are unhappy with Wikipedia. A recent poll on Wikipedia Review showed the majority of users there were left-leaning. Wikipedia is run by an Ayn Rand devoted millionaire, who says he runs Wikipedia on a Ludwig von Mises model, so this is not much of a surprise. I hope that Wikipedia Review will build an alternative to Wikipedia, especially in the abysmal categories like History and Culture.
It doesn't even require a moment of thinking to realize an article on IBM.com about this sort of thing is propaganda. What is the article trying to do? Get us to spend tens of thousands of dollars, at our own expense, to pay for skill training so we can then go see if a corporation like IBM wants to employ as as a wage earner on an "at-will" basis. It tells us not to worry about the jobs being out-sourced.
Then it tells us how many new jobs are being created in this field. This is an old trick. I have a cartoon that is a century old of Mr. Block (a recurring character who is basically a rube) travels out west because of newspaper ads about how many jobs are out there and how good they are - he travels thousands of miles and finds out that there are only a few jobs and hundreds of people like him lured in by the ads. Beyond this the job is not as good as promised by the ad - once the bosses have all these suckers competing for a few jobs, they can pay less, increase the hours and have better working conditions. So this sort of nonsense has been going on for a long time.
As other people pointed out, this article does not talk about H1-Bs. IBM is part of the ITAA which is trying to push the H1-B cap up. They spend tons of money in Washington DC and what tchnical professional organizations are spreading money around counetring that? The IEEE? The IEEE gets a great deal of its money from the same corporations funding this, menaing the IEEE is not a real professional organization like the AMA, ABA and so forth. You can read more about how the IEEE is controlled by these companies here.
Does any of this set off bullshit detectors? "Also, a lot of students don't understand the flexibility they can have. You can travel the globe; you have flexibility whether working from an office, from home, full-time, part-time." I am a UNIX sysadmin. I can work from home, part-time? Give me a break, I can do neither. I would love to have a "part-time" UNIX sysadmin job in the sense of only working 40 hours a week. And I can do this for 20 hours a week supposedly? And what's this nonsense about working from home? If I never had to go into the office, I never would. This is a lot of BS, I don't even know why this was posted. Of course, a few of these jobs exist, and we can get away with working from home once in a while, but 99% of jobs be it sysadmins, programmers, DBAs or network admins are at the office and full time, meaning over 40 hours a week.
Another thing is the article does mention "voluntary" attrition being a reason for the lack of people. But of course it never says why people are leaving. They are leaving because they are not getting paid enough to work the hours they do, and having to put up with the BS they have to.
As far as saying there are X many jobs out there, it is really meaningless. Let me create 10 million new jobs right here - I have 10 million openings for C/C++/Java gods, DBAs and sysadmins. The pay is a dollar a week and you have to do a lot of shit. There, I just created 10 million new jobs. If you believe in capitalism and neoclassical economics, and obviously these people do, then supply should always equal demand, if you have X many new jobs that are so great in terms of pay etc., then the market will automatically meet them. This is what is believed from Keynes to Milton Friedman, if you don't believe this you are probably carrying a copy of Marx's Das Kapital. So the idea that there can be a job shortfall is either 1) coming from someone who believes Marx is right and Keynes and Milton Friedman are wrong or 2) someone who is talking out of their ass and just wants people to pay tens of thousands out of their own pocket for an education, so that there will be one more person competing for an IT job, so that the company can then make people work more hours while paying them less money.
There has been talk about how Congressional staffers edit Wikipedia. In April of last year I created an article on Wikipedia about No Gun Ri, which was a My Lai type massacre during the Korean War by US troops. In July, I noticed someone making edits to the article, trying to whitewash it.
So anyhow, I do a dig/nslookup on the IP and discover it is "n-mnstci-142.mnstci.iraq.centcom.mil" - the edit is coming from United States Central Command's Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq. Thus, my tax dollars are going to some guy so he can rewrite history that I had written. And I had been so excited about Wikipedia because I thought, here is finally a medium of information that is not controlled by multi-national corporations, like say the channels on my television. Instead I have to contend with some modern-day version of a bureaucrat in the bowels of some Orwellian Ministry of Truth.
Cringely talks about the capacity to broadcast Desperate Housewives over the Internet, and how much bandwidth that would take. Having worked in Internet-related companies for a decade, the first thought that comes to my mind is Mbone - does anyone remember that? It was a technology set up to save capacity on broadcast, but from what I recall, your Cisco routers would have to allow its multicasting. And when this was requested of ISPs they would balk, saying we don't want that much broadcast over our pipes. Which of course is ironic, because people could broadcast over their pipes anyway, Mbone just existed to save them bandwidth when people did so. Anyhow, Mbone realistically died out long ago, anyone interested in this can do research into its failure to catch on. It failed due to political reasons instead of technical ones, the brighter lights of networking of the day were working on its specs.
Then of course, there's that many people have broadband lines to their home where they can pull down more than they can push up. I can upload about 4-5KB a second and still be able to browse the web, send e-mail etc. without a problem. Meanwhile, I can download at about 90KB a second. So if all my p2p transfers on say Bittorrent after the first one were tit-for-tat, I could only download at 4-5KB a second. This situation is similar for most other broadband users. Anyhow, Bittorrent already includes technology where you tend to share more with people sharing with you. With the advent of Bittorrent I stopped using the ed2k network, but many of those clients have a similar concept. And Gnutella has this with partial file sharing as well, although people mostly use Gnutella for small files. But getting back to the currently important one, Bittorrent, as I said, the applications usually have this anyhow. If that's not enough, some trackers and Bittorrent websites do counts of which of their members are good and bad in an attempt to deal with people who still manage to leech.
One mistake Cringely makes is assuming if I'm downloading, say a video of Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz debating Israel, that someone else at my ISP will be wanting or sharing this same video. Sometimes I'm downloading files where only one person is sharing them and I download it all from them. If its several (often with people from Brazil, Australia, Germany etc.), still what are the odds one of the people sharing this file on this protocol will be from my ISP?
A lot of this could have been solved long ago with Mbone. But the ISPs didn't want it.
A proboards discussion board about Wikipedia has just moved to its own web site - Wikipedia Review. It is an independent discussion board about Wikipedia, in other words not run by the "cabal" (Jimbo and his lieutenants). Wikipedia's English mailing list is moderated, and Arbitration Committee members have beenfighting to keep mention of this board off of Wikipedia itself.
I have been very involved with Wikipedia since 2003, and won't go into why I myself am unhappy with it that much here. Suffice to say, I think Jimbo exercises too much control, which wouldn't be so bad maybe if I didn't think he was making decisions I dislike. I view much of the "cabal", his highest lieutenants in the same manner, especially ones who didn't get properly elected to the Arbitration Committee (the highest authoritative body on Wikipedia) like Jayjg. Of course, even if there are major problems with Wikipedia, people complaining sound like cranks and complainers until they go out and build something better, or at least alternative. I hope Wikipedia Review is a step in that direction. There are alternatives to Wikipedia out there right now, I just hope Wikipedia Review helps in building the momentum of one (or some) of them until they start reaching critical mass.
I have worked at Fortune 100 IT departments before, and it's obvious that the dream of the senior managers is to see if they can dumb down everything to where anyone off the street could do the job just as easily as they could carry boxes or push a mop. They have been trying to do this for a long time, and for the most part it does not work. There are some tasks which are simple and repetitive that can be pushed down to a lower level, and that would be the realm being talked of - mashing, macros and all of that. But most work you need someone who knows what they're doing. It is easy to write 200 lines of spaghetti code that perform an application, but once you get to 2000 lines, never mind 20,000 lines, you need to know what you are doing. You need, at the very least, the kind of programming practices mentioned in Code Complete.
Behlendorf is a smart guy, and who knows what spin the reporter put on his comments. I'm sure Behlendorf is happy to see mashups and people getting into programming with a more simple programming language then, say, assembly. But this concept in the mind of a pointy-headed boss can lead to unpleasantness. I worked as a sysadmin once in a level 2 environment where they were trying to or thought they had made an idiot-proof wrapper around everything for us, but the idiot-proof wrapper itself had problems, so we not only had to deal with broken systems, but with the broken idiot-proofing they had tried to wrap around the systems.
SQL was designed originally so that even non-technical managers could use it. I have worked with SQL for many years, and still have to look for examples on Google whenever I need to do a LEFT JOIN or something like that. The concept of "anyone can program" can be dangerous in the wrong hands.
When the talking heads on the corporate TV channels discuss this, usually they show clips of Republicans saying we need this to protect the US, and then the talking heads say the Democrats will look weak opposing it, although the Democrats don't control either house of Congress anyway. One thing they don't discuss is how domestic spying has been abused in the past. Nixon's lieutenants sent people to break into and bug the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate hotel. The FBI not only illegally monitored and broke into offices of people engaged in political activity, like Martin Luther King, Jr., they actually got involved, sending him threats to him and a lot of other people. There are many memos about actions done in an effort to disrupt political movements. One of their aims was stated in an FBI memo, to 'prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a "messiah;" he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position.'
US intelligence has stepped out of its role of supposedly defending the US, to taking an active, partisan role in US politics. In fact, the beginnings of the FBI were in the first red scare right after the Russian Revolution, the FBI was created with this political police role.
Another thing I hear on TV is how the Church committee tied the arms of the intelligence community in the 1970s. It tied it because "former" CIA agents like E. Howard Hunt were caught in the Watergate trying to wiretap the Democrats phone lines, they tied it because the intelligence community was not only illegally domestically spying in a partisan political manner, it was actively involved in trying to disrupt political groups. Even after these supposed controls were put on, it seemed like this did little good in the 1980s when these big brother institutions came out once again against anyone opposed to US intervention in Central America. The FBI were spying on nuns who were unhappy that teh Archbishop of El Salvador was killed, as well as four nuns who were raped, tortured and killed in El Salvador as well, with most evidence pointing towards military involvement, a military Reagan was supporting. When the lawsuits, FOIAs etc. flew about, it was even found that FBI agents and informants were discussing trying to seduce the US nuns against sending military supplies down there. This is after the "shackles" of the Church committee, which have been lifted and then some by the PATRIOT act.
Which doesn't even get into the question of why the US needs "defending". Everything the US does worldwide is called "defense". Farmers in western Nepal are fighting their landlords and the Nepal dictator who just abolished Congress - the US is sending rifles to the dictator so he can put down this rebellion (along with other countries like France). About half of all military spending worldwide is by the US. If the US can't leave alone farmers in western Nepal who are rebelling against their landlords and the dictator due to their maltreatment, can it be surprised some people somewhere in the world are unhappy with this? Osama Bin Laden stated long before 9/11 his unhappiness with US troops in Saudi Arabia (another dictatorship), in his eyes he saw himself as a defender of his home country, and the US as the attacker, and it seems pretty clear to me who drew first blood. The US will always be under threat as long as it seeks an empire. Just take the UK as an example - after decades, the IRA finally gave up military attacks in England because they were willing to accept a political solution offered - and as soon as that happened subways in London began exploding again due to British troops in Iraq. I think the forces of Halliburton, ExxonMobil and so forth are moving of their own accord, and only a great deal of effort can truly secure the US, by preventing this worldwide intervention.
To start off with I will say one good thing about Froogle - it is free. So everyone uses it. But it sucks for buying items. I know Base is slightly different than Froogle, but I doubt there will be much difference.
First off, there are people who spam the system with thousands of items (often directly, or redirecting to Amazon) where they say they're cheaper than everyone else. When you click on it, instead of being "$40", it is actually "$50". Often the first three or four links are spam like this - you can buy the item, but you're told it's one price and then it's another. When you e-mail Froogle help to report this fraud, they are very slow to respond, if they ever respond.
Another thing is Froogle has started this stupid thing where they group items together, so if yous search for say "onetouch ultra strips", you'll get a first response where it says "Compare 47 prices" currently. But when I click on that I see not only OneTouch Ultra strips but Basic Profile strips, and Surestep strips. I click on the 2nd link, "OneTouch SureStep Test Strips, 50 ea" from Drugstore.com, and nowhere in that page does it say Ultra. Now if I put Ultra in my search, and there are dozens of pages which have those 3 words in my search, why am I being redirected to a page that does not have Ultra? This is not a case of spam, this is a case of Google screwing up.
I actually have a store that has Froogle entries, people get redirected to my store on a false thing like this (the ultra to drugstore.com surestep thing), buy it and then want to cancel their credit card sale or want to send it back, because they think I screwed up somehow, when actually it was Froogle and they who screwed up. Froogle should get rid of this stupid, broken new system and put back the old system where when you looked for the word ultra you'd actually wind up with a product or blurb that had the word ultra in it. I'm using "onetouch ultra strips" as an example, but this goes across many products.
These are both major problems, so I won't even go into minor ones like how they're rating system for merchants has problems. The thing about Froogle is both of the problems I mentioned are new - their search system was working fine until they added this new grouping thing which doesn't work and which I'm sure no one likes. Don't put it out there until it works. And spammers were not around, but now they are, and Froogle doesn't deal with them. If they wait a week to deal with them each time, then they will never go away - if they can get a few hundred sales for each week on the fake prices, I'm sure the spammers will just set up a new storefront each week and make a ton of money. They should fix what's broken instead of coming out with whiz-bang new features every few months. Respond to e-mails about people spamming with fake low prices.
Since usually I'm the sysadmin, I can only think of machines I used where I didn't have root access, yet used the machines.
Two thing thats piss me off the most usually is limitations on my access, or annoying security measures, both of which I look at similarly because they are different sides of the same coin often. I host a website on a host where I don't have root access. They are supposed to be good, and a place geeks like to host, and for the most part they are. But having no root access can be annoying. For example, the machine load average was very high for some weeks. It would shoot up to something like 10 or 20 times the number of processors for an hour and then go back to normal. My e-mails to the techs didn't do anything for some weeks. My ps only let me see my own processes, I couldn't see what processes were hogging the machine. The first time they checked, the spike hadn't happened, so they had no idea what was wrong. So they were slow to do anything about it, I had the ability to better diagnose what was wrong. Eventually I ran a script that did an uptime every minute and wrote it to a file. But after two days they killed that - that's another thing, they killed a script that I was running. Although if it was an attempt to find this rogue process, I didn't care as much. Anyhow, eventually they fixed the problem.
Another thing that happened with these hosters, which again is related to me not being able to see system processes with ps - one day my password protection for directories (htaccess) died. I had to recreate everything with their automatic system in terms of the htaccess and htpasswd files. I couldn't see what user was running our Apache web server processes, I just had no idea why it broke.
Once I worked at a company where you needed SecureID to log into their machine for customers, among other security provisions. I thought it was rather silly - I only read mail from the machine, and not much else, why do I need a SecureID card to do that? Wasn't ssh enough? Did I have to carry around a SecureID card just to access this one machine and my e-mail which I read with pine? Again, a mixture of limited access and what I felt was unnecessary security is what pissed me off. Our company had a lot of smart programmers and sysadmins, I'm sure anyone motivated enough to hack in could get in and get root despite the SecureIDs. It sort of reminds me of the World Trade Center. The security to get in was ridiculous after the first bombing. But they hadn't walked into, but drove into the building the first time, so why was taking my picture and other silly measures necessary? It did little for them as they eventually got flown into, which destroyed the buildings. As I said, once something becomes a target for somebody motivated enough, there is little you can do.
While the ACM or IEEE are theoretically advocates for US IT workers, they both receive a lot of money from the same companies advocating no cap on H1-B visas and so forth. Go to ACM's events and conferences web page and click on SIGCSE 2006. Who is sponsoring this in big letters on the bottom? IBM, Microsoft and Sun, the main drivers behind more H1-B visas.
There are other organizations which are not as in debt to these organizations. I did a web page of my own about this a year or two ago. Any organization like the ACM that takes massive money from these corporations which advocate no H1-B caps can not be trusted to advocate for IT workers. Only an organization that only depends on money from IT workers can be trusted. It's common sense. In fact, these corporate officers usually have more sense about these things, and who is on whose side, than many IT workers.
From what I hear from friends over there and my reading, England is already like this, and Tony Blair has plans to make it even more so. So George Orwell's vision of England is becoming a reality.
And speaking of Orwell's 1984, I watched the documentary about Kevin Mitnick, Freedom Downtime, recently. One scene had a typical bit of Emmanuel Goldstein's dark humor, he was in Philadelphia and he was filming Independence Hall - where the Declaration of Independence and US constitution was signed, it is supposed to be the birthplace of freedom or whatever. Nowadays, on top of its tower is a video camera spying on passerby. If I recall correctly, they're building a prison next to it as well, which has signs that say "no videotaping of prison allowed" (I guess they're allowed to videotape but we're not).
The efforts to stop this will probably be partially unsuccessful, but I'm not too worried about it. All the technology in the world can not keep people down who don't want to be kept down. As Steve Biko once said, "the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
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For example, the FSLN article has an introduction, and then begins "The FSLN was formally organised in 1961 by recent KGB recruits Carlos Fonseca Amador, Tomás Borge Martínez and Silvio Mayorga." The rest of the article goes on in that sort of tone. I don't know how many people in the world think the main purpose of the FSLN was to establish a satellite of the USSR "two days driving time from Harlingen, Texas", but obviously that is what is considered in this article. Most educated, professional people (at least those outside the US anyhow) in the world would consider this article laughable, and certainly not encylopedic. Microsoft and Encarta, or Encyclopedia Britannica, are not exactly FSLN boosters, but their articles are not silly like this.
This is just one example of many. There is a response that "anyone can edit" and that anyone can just go in and fix it, but that is simply not true. Anyone who edits this article would be descended on by one or more people who believe that, to quote from the article "During the following three years the KGB handpicked several dozen Sandinistas for intelligence and sabotage operation in the United States. In 1966, this KGB-controlled Sandinista sabotage and intelligence group was sent to the U.S.-Mexican border" (you see, the FSLN had nothing to do with conditions in Nicaragua, since the world revolves around the U.S.). So one would waste time on a stalemate for weeks, and ultimately, the admins and ArbCom would back those people up. Once upon a time there were admins or experienced users who would have helped someone tackle this page, but they have been driven off. Jimbo Wales political sympathies have been stated in the past (he ran the Ayn Rand list for years, to give you a clue), and the one appointee to the ArbCom (who he appointed twice, since he couldn't get elected) seemed to be picked only because he edits with a Zionist point of view, he's editing the Lebanon pages currently. Editors with a different political point of view are driven off. The Wikipedia partisans say on Wikipedia there are only "trolls" and "good users" or whatever, but this is more their almost cult-like Manicheanism then reality. The "Criticism of Wikipedia" page forbids links to pages critical of Wikipedia like Wikipedia Review. If Wikipedia is so "open", why do Arbitration Committee members zealously defend the "Criticism of Wikipedia" page from links to a forum of people critical of Wikipedia? Like many others, I have given up on Wikipedia. Unlike most people who grew tired of Wikipedia's nonsense, I continue to edit on alternative wiki encyclopedias. I also post to Wikipedia Review as well.
As time has gone by, the situation has gotten worse. As far as I'm concerned, Jimbo Wales input into how to deal with generally hurts the situation, and his like-minded lieutenants follow along. To show the cultish aspect of this, anyone who points this out is called a "troll" or whatnot, I'm sure I'll be called a troll here and modded down by Wikipedia partisans, which kind of proves my point. Another cultish aspect is that no one is allowed to post links to sites truly critical of Wikipedia like Wikipedia Review on the Criticism of Wikipedia page.
What it really is is that old adage of how little problems not dealt with become huge problems as time goes by. Wikipedia has done such a good job with articles on math, science and that type of thing that people tend to ignore how the historical articles are garbage. Aside from the enormous bias of the professional English-speaking Westerner view throughout English Wikipedia, there is focus - Leeroy Jenkins of World of Warcraft fame has an article, while leaders of sub-Saharan African countries get no articles whatsoever. If you combined the Star Trek and Star Wars articles, they would dwarf the size of text written about, say, South America, on English Wikipedia. Anyhow, these things will become more apparent as time goes on, they're apparent to many already, or Wikipedia Review, the site linking of is banned on Wikipedia, wouldn't exist. I don't think Jimbo Wales or Wikipedia will change, and I see a fork certainly coming in the future. I nowadays make about an edit to Wikipedia a month, most of my stuff I put on alternative wikis.
As I said in my post, I knew this was the type of answer I would receive. On some arcane level this may be true - if the company's aim was not maximizing dividends for shareholders, but getting Red Hat and Oracle to work together, and we were fully staffed with the best sysadmins and DBAs out of MIT, then yes, perhaps on that arcane level there is a "sysadmin problem" (what about DBAs?). Of course, none of this is the case, like most companies there is much more work then the staff can handle on a 40 hour week, one of our sysadmins just left for greener pastures, and while we have a good, experienced sysadmin team, we are probably not the brightest out there. And frankly, after putting in 40-50 hours of work in a week, when 6PM rolls around if I had a choice between spending an hour getting Red Hat and Oracle to work, or to spend that hour on my commute so I'd get home earlier, I would choose the latter.
I wonder why the problem is a "sysadmin problem" when so many of our servers and applications run fine - Oracle on Solaris runs fine, our java-based application servers run fine, our Apache web servers run fine, our trouble-ticket system runs fine etc. We seem to be doing a fine and competent job in this respect. We also have a lot of Red Hat experience collectively, since everything but the databases run on it. Yet our migration to Oracle on Red Hat was a disaster. I wonder why we are doing such a fine and competent job in these respects, but when it comes to Oracle on Red Hat we, and not the product(s), are the problem.
The numbers speak for themselves. Compare production Oracle on Red Hat deployments with Oracle on Solaris or SQL Server on Windows. If the problem is just with our particular groups incompetency and not with the products, how come so few people are jumping on board the Oracle/Red Hat train? Massive "incompetency", but on the customer end, not the supplier end? Perhaps, but a supplier who isn't selling isn't going to start selling by having contempt for the customer. We deal with the rules of business, which could really give two shits about technican's elitism - perhaps one of the few good things about the rules of business. Tech elitism can work for Debian or Linux, where people could call me an idiot if I can't get a piece of hardware to work at home. But Red Hat is a business, and at the office that shit doesn't fly.
I saw the tag "fud" for this article. Sorry, but this is not fud, it is the truth. You can give those standard Linux zealot lines about how if we had given more resources to it, had more, smarter sysadmins with better experience and so on and so forth that it would work. But the managers do not want to hear that, they are running a business, they are not in the Linux evangelism business. The reason they liked the idea of a switch is Red Hat on Intel is generally cheaper than Solaris on Sun boxes, and it would allow us to standardize on one UNIX platform. But there were just too many problems.
I am a Linux zealot myself, at home I have a Debian with no non-free software, not even non-free Java. But business does not think about that. The Linux kernel core team (Torvalds, Morton etc.) seem to have the strategy of competing for the high-end market with Microsoft and Sun (and some IBM lines, although IBM stands to benefit from Linux in other of its product lines). This seems like a good strategy to me since the high-end market seems up-for-grabs nowadays. Business feeling comfortable with Oracle running on a business-friendly distribution like Red Hat is essential. There are plenty of SQL Server databases running on Windows in production in Fortune 500 companies, how many Oracle on Red Hat's are there? This is essential. The worst-case scenario is it is still not there yet, Sun collapses, and Microsoft swallows up the market.
I am not just all talk - my home desktop is Debian with no non-free software. I evangelize Linux at work. I sent checks to the Free Software Foundation. I write GPL software. But this is not fud, this is reality that must be faced, and business feeling comfortable with Oracle on Red Hat is a must. Someone commented that Oracle support sucks and will they do better than Red Hat? Well, I don't know one way or the other as our DBA is who calls Oracle all the time. But this is important for Oracle, and Red Hat, and Linux and the whole free software community to get right.
I ran a website once which was "Web 2.0" before they had a name for it - like Myspace, Geocities, Ebay and whatnot, the public had a lot of input into site content, and if anyone complained about something illegal, I almost always removed it. Anyhow, I got flooded with legal letters, some of them quite ridiculous - Blizzard sent me a letter about some supposed DMCA violation - someone made a hack that let people play Starcraft on non-Battle.net servers. I couldn't afford a court case and those troubles though so I took it down. These are the people who really abuse the court system, the headlines of corporate newspapers always bemoan how it's a travesty the average Joe can sue a big corporation though.
I guess you haven't heard of the White House office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Praise the Lord (the Lord is a magic man who lives in the clouds who controls everything, in case you don't know)!
The "bloat" in unionized factories is that the people creating the wealth, the workers, keep more of the wealth they create then their non-unionized counterparts. From the author's perspective, that of the factory owner, or stockholder who owns shares in the corporation which owns a factory, wages are bloat, as lower wages means larger dividend checks coming in the mail every three months.
Then he goes on to talk about hard work and pride, which of course, is the farthest thing in the world from some heir collecting a dividend check from wealth created by other's work. But in his mind, the idler deserves more, and the worker keeping most of the wealth they create is bloat.
As far as pride - if one of these people tried to form a union they would be jailed, or even executed. I'm sure this author a century ago would be talking about how much those negroes had pride in their work of picking cotton in Mississippi. It all kind of reminds me of the ending of the Bridge on the River Kwai.
While I'm aware that Wall Street calls dividends, earnings, sitting on your behind at the 19th hole of your country club is not "earning" money in any sense of the word. It is collecting money - from the workers who are out there sweating and doing the work, who are doing the wealth creation while the rentier sits on his behind and generation to generation collects the proceeds of work he did not do.
There really is a cabal at Wikipedia and editors and administrators who do not tow the line find themselves enmeshed in arbitration and all sorts of things. If you think the "right" way then you are fine, if you think for instance that the FSLN page is so bad you want to go running to Encarta or Encyclopedia Britannica, then you are not thinking in line with the cabal, and you will be tied up in arbitration and so forth. And anyone who answers "well you can just edit it, anyone can edit it" is someone just showing their ignorance of Wikipedia - I have been on Wikipedia for years and know how it works and that is just nonsense. There are just bizarre cabal decisions, let me impart some of it here - according to the cabal, people who say bad things about the Moonies or Scientologists are troublemakers and have to go. But people who say bad things about Lyndon LaRouche are good, and people who defend Lyndon LaRouche are troublemakers. Now in my book, Moonies, Scientologists and LaRouchies are all nuts, but for some reason the cabal (by the cabal I loosely mean Jimbo, ArbCom etc.) has this attitude. I said something about how a pro-LaRouchie person was being persecuted once and cabal people began swarming around accusing me of being a LaRouchie and saying I had to be banned immediately. Wikipedia just goes into crazed witchhunts where they try to tag people as troublemakers and stop trying to have rational discussions. It's true some people tend towards troublemaking, but Wikipedia has managed to drive off some of the calmest most rational people you can imagine, much calmer and more rational than the people driven off.
I think an alternative to Wikipedia needs to exist with different editors and a different board and I work on alternative wikis more than Wikipedia currently.
Small companies are not like that. The smaller they are, the less they are the like that. Small companies are where work matters, there is little politics and so forth. Small companies can't SURVIVE otherwise (many don't) as there is no room for this sort of thing as there is in large companies.
Of course small companies have their problems. One big one being they never have money, which is a big problem. It's obvious how important capital is, but as time goes by I become even more aware of how important it is, about how much capital matters in ways that are not immediately obvious, in addition to obvious ways.
Another thing about small companies is if you are not in your early 20s is if you are not an owner or partner you ask yourself why the hell you would work for someone else instead of starting your own company. They have no money, you have no money, so why work for them, why not start your own small company?
As far as bureaucracy, politics and so forth versus work rewarded and innovation, this really depends on societal things. Over the past few decades, things have become more monopolistic, companies merge, even broken up monopolies come together - Bell for one, where 7 Baby Bells have become 4, and will become 3 when AT&T and Bellsouth merge. Or Standard Oil, which a century after being broken up is merging once again into ExxonMobil ('nee Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York). People don't even remember that Exxon and Mobil were originally in the same company.
I see one of his headers is "Not Bureaucrats". I'm sorry, but bureaucrats are exactly what created Silicon Valley. Billions of dollars in government contracts in the 1940's, 1950's and on are what created Silicon Valley, are the engine which created it. Look at the Internet - the first RFC came out in 1969, and yet no commercial traffic was officially allowed on it (NSFnet rules) until the mid 1990s. Those 20+ years of interim were from the government gravy train. Exactly what Graham seems to not want to hear, which is probably why people like him are so ahistorical.
Recently we began using Sharepoint. The upside is it's like CVS - you can see who edited a file, when, and what they changed. This is useful more for utilitarian purposes than spying - if I see Joe created a file, or modified it, I can ask Joe about it.
One drawback for Sharepoint is linkage. In the old days I could just tell people to go to \\FILESERVER\IT\Documents\Whatever\Coolstuff.xls . They click on that in e-mail and it pops up. Now I have to give convoluted instructions on how to get the document. The URLs are long and convoluted. It was easier to direct people to information before.
I am stuck here in Windows hell, are there any GPL and possibly UNIX-friendly versions of this type os software?
Nothing I said is incorrect.
The ArbCom has nothing to do with how articles are edited unless subject to a complaint.
I mention "Arbitration Committee members", but this turns into the entire ArbCom when you answer what I supposedly said. "Subject to a complaint" is about as vague and subjective as you can get (just how "the cabal" likes the rules), you might as well say they can't be edited unless they flip a coin and it comes up one way or another.
The page is locked because it was being vandalized.
If you consider linking to the main web site critiquing Wikipedia on the Criticism of Wikipedia vandalism, then it is. This is not how Wikipedia defines vandalism however.
Plus, we don't block any mention of Wikipedia Review. To do so would be stupid and have a pro-Wikipedia bias. Unless you can prove these claims, then I would ask that you do your homework a little more before accusing.
Here's just one link of an ArbCom member removing mention of Wikipedia Review. He has locked the Criticism of Wikipedia page, the Criticism of Wikipedia discussion page, and has blocked many, many users who have inserted the link. I myself added the link weeks ago, before it was removed, I didn't even know at the time that this particular deviation from the Wikipedia party line was verboten and all mention of it was removed, with violators blocked at the time. I think you're the one who needs to do your homework.
Of course, Wikipedia is Wikipedia, and the ArbCom is going to do what they are going to do, but I think it should be generally known how people are unhappy with Wikipedia. A recent poll on Wikipedia Review showed the majority of users there were left-leaning. Wikipedia is run by an Ayn Rand devoted millionaire, who says he runs Wikipedia on a Ludwig von Mises model, so this is not much of a surprise. I hope that Wikipedia Review will build an alternative to Wikipedia, especially in the abysmal categories like History and Culture.
Then it tells us how many new jobs are being created in this field. This is an old trick. I have a cartoon that is a century old of Mr. Block (a recurring character who is basically a rube) travels out west because of newspaper ads about how many jobs are out there and how good they are - he travels thousands of miles and finds out that there are only a few jobs and hundreds of people like him lured in by the ads. Beyond this the job is not as good as promised by the ad - once the bosses have all these suckers competing for a few jobs, they can pay less, increase the hours and have better working conditions. So this sort of nonsense has been going on for a long time.
As other people pointed out, this article does not talk about H1-Bs. IBM is part of the ITAA which is trying to push the H1-B cap up. They spend tons of money in Washington DC and what tchnical professional organizations are spreading money around counetring that? The IEEE? The IEEE gets a great deal of its money from the same corporations funding this, menaing the IEEE is not a real professional organization like the AMA, ABA and so forth. You can read more about how the IEEE is controlled by these companies here.
Does any of this set off bullshit detectors? "Also, a lot of students don't understand the flexibility they can have. You can travel the globe; you have flexibility whether working from an office, from home, full-time, part-time." I am a UNIX sysadmin. I can work from home, part-time? Give me a break, I can do neither. I would love to have a "part-time" UNIX sysadmin job in the sense of only working 40 hours a week. And I can do this for 20 hours a week supposedly? And what's this nonsense about working from home? If I never had to go into the office, I never would. This is a lot of BS, I don't even know why this was posted. Of course, a few of these jobs exist, and we can get away with working from home once in a while, but 99% of jobs be it sysadmins, programmers, DBAs or network admins are at the office and full time, meaning over 40 hours a week.
Another thing is the article does mention "voluntary" attrition being a reason for the lack of people. But of course it never says why people are leaving. They are leaving because they are not getting paid enough to work the hours they do, and having to put up with the BS they have to.
As far as saying there are X many jobs out there, it is really meaningless. Let me create 10 million new jobs right here - I have 10 million openings for C/C++/Java gods, DBAs and sysadmins. The pay is a dollar a week and you have to do a lot of shit. There, I just created 10 million new jobs. If you believe in capitalism and neoclassical economics, and obviously these people do, then supply should always equal demand, if you have X many new jobs that are so great in terms of pay etc., then the market will automatically meet them. This is what is believed from Keynes to Milton Friedman, if you don't believe this you are probably carrying a copy of Marx's Das Kapital. So the idea that there can be a job shortfall is either 1) coming from someone who believes Marx is right and Keynes and Milton Friedman are wrong or 2) someone who is talking out of their ass and just wants people to pay tens of thousands out of their own pocket for an education, so that there will be one more person competing for an IT job, so that the company can then make people work more hours while paying them less money.
So anyhow, I do a dig/nslookup on the IP and discover it is "n-mnstci-142.mnstci.iraq.centcom.mil" - the edit is coming from United States Central Command's Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq. Thus, my tax dollars are going to some guy so he can rewrite history that I had written. And I had been so excited about Wikipedia because I thought, here is finally a medium of information that is not controlled by multi-national corporations, like say the channels on my television. Instead I have to contend with some modern-day version of a bureaucrat in the bowels of some Orwellian Ministry of Truth.
Then of course, there's that many people have broadband lines to their home where they can pull down more than they can push up. I can upload about 4-5KB a second and still be able to browse the web, send e-mail etc. without a problem. Meanwhile, I can download at about 90KB a second. So if all my p2p transfers on say Bittorrent after the first one were tit-for-tat, I could only download at 4-5KB a second. This situation is similar for most other broadband users. Anyhow, Bittorrent already includes technology where you tend to share more with people sharing with you. With the advent of Bittorrent I stopped using the ed2k network, but many of those clients have a similar concept. And Gnutella has this with partial file sharing as well, although people mostly use Gnutella for small files. But getting back to the currently important one, Bittorrent, as I said, the applications usually have this anyhow. If that's not enough, some trackers and Bittorrent websites do counts of which of their members are good and bad in an attempt to deal with people who still manage to leech.
One mistake Cringely makes is assuming if I'm downloading, say a video of Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz debating Israel, that someone else at my ISP will be wanting or sharing this same video. Sometimes I'm downloading files where only one person is sharing them and I download it all from them. If its several (often with people from Brazil, Australia, Germany etc.), still what are the odds one of the people sharing this file on this protocol will be from my ISP?
A lot of this could have been solved long ago with Mbone. But the ISPs didn't want it.
I have been very involved with Wikipedia since 2003, and won't go into why I myself am unhappy with it that much here. Suffice to say, I think Jimbo exercises too much control, which wouldn't be so bad maybe if I didn't think he was making decisions I dislike. I view much of the "cabal", his highest lieutenants in the same manner, especially ones who didn't get properly elected to the Arbitration Committee (the highest authoritative body on Wikipedia) like Jayjg. Of course, even if there are major problems with Wikipedia, people complaining sound like cranks and complainers until they go out and build something better, or at least alternative. I hope Wikipedia Review is a step in that direction. There are alternatives to Wikipedia out there right now, I just hope Wikipedia Review helps in building the momentum of one (or some) of them until they start reaching critical mass.
Behlendorf is a smart guy, and who knows what spin the reporter put on his comments. I'm sure Behlendorf is happy to see mashups and people getting into programming with a more simple programming language then, say, assembly. But this concept in the mind of a pointy-headed boss can lead to unpleasantness. I worked as a sysadmin once in a level 2 environment where they were trying to or thought they had made an idiot-proof wrapper around everything for us, but the idiot-proof wrapper itself had problems, so we not only had to deal with broken systems, but with the broken idiot-proofing they had tried to wrap around the systems.
SQL was designed originally so that even non-technical managers could use it. I have worked with SQL for many years, and still have to look for examples on Google whenever I need to do a LEFT JOIN or something like that. The concept of "anyone can program" can be dangerous in the wrong hands.
US intelligence has stepped out of its role of supposedly defending the US, to taking an active, partisan role in US politics. In fact, the beginnings of the FBI were in the first red scare right after the Russian Revolution, the FBI was created with this political police role.
Another thing I hear on TV is how the Church committee tied the arms of the intelligence community in the 1970s. It tied it because "former" CIA agents like E. Howard Hunt were caught in the Watergate trying to wiretap the Democrats phone lines, they tied it because the intelligence community was not only illegally domestically spying in a partisan political manner, it was actively involved in trying to disrupt political groups. Even after these supposed controls were put on, it seemed like this did little good in the 1980s when these big brother institutions came out once again against anyone opposed to US intervention in Central America. The FBI were spying on nuns who were unhappy that teh Archbishop of El Salvador was killed, as well as four nuns who were raped, tortured and killed in El Salvador as well, with most evidence pointing towards military involvement, a military Reagan was supporting. When the lawsuits, FOIAs etc. flew about, it was even found that FBI agents and informants were discussing trying to seduce the US nuns against sending military supplies down there. This is after the "shackles" of the Church committee, which have been lifted and then some by the PATRIOT act.
Which doesn't even get into the question of why the US needs "defending". Everything the US does worldwide is called "defense". Farmers in western Nepal are fighting their landlords and the Nepal dictator who just abolished Congress - the US is sending rifles to the dictator so he can put down this rebellion (along with other countries like France). About half of all military spending worldwide is by the US. If the US can't leave alone farmers in western Nepal who are rebelling against their landlords and the dictator due to their maltreatment, can it be surprised some people somewhere in the world are unhappy with this? Osama Bin Laden stated long before 9/11 his unhappiness with US troops in Saudi Arabia (another dictatorship), in his eyes he saw himself as a defender of his home country, and the US as the attacker, and it seems pretty clear to me who drew first blood. The US will always be under threat as long as it seeks an empire. Just take the UK as an example - after decades, the IRA finally gave up military attacks in England because they were willing to accept a political solution offered - and as soon as that happened subways in London began exploding again due to British troops in Iraq. I think the forces of Halliburton, ExxonMobil and so forth are moving of their own accord, and only a great deal of effort can truly secure the US, by preventing this worldwide intervention.
First off, there are people who spam the system with thousands of items (often directly, or redirecting to Amazon) where they say they're cheaper than everyone else. When you click on it, instead of being "$40", it is actually "$50". Often the first three or four links are spam like this - you can buy the item, but you're told it's one price and then it's another. When you e-mail Froogle help to report this fraud, they are very slow to respond, if they ever respond.
Another thing is Froogle has started this stupid thing where they group items together, so if yous search for say "onetouch ultra strips", you'll get a first response where it says "Compare 47 prices" currently. But when I click on that I see not only OneTouch Ultra strips but Basic Profile strips, and Surestep strips. I click on the 2nd link, "OneTouch SureStep Test Strips, 50 ea" from Drugstore.com, and nowhere in that page does it say Ultra. Now if I put Ultra in my search, and there are dozens of pages which have those 3 words in my search, why am I being redirected to a page that does not have Ultra? This is not a case of spam, this is a case of Google screwing up.
I actually have a store that has Froogle entries, people get redirected to my store on a false thing like this (the ultra to drugstore.com surestep thing), buy it and then want to cancel their credit card sale or want to send it back, because they think I screwed up somehow, when actually it was Froogle and they who screwed up. Froogle should get rid of this stupid, broken new system and put back the old system where when you looked for the word ultra you'd actually wind up with a product or blurb that had the word ultra in it. I'm using "onetouch ultra strips" as an example, but this goes across many products.
These are both major problems, so I won't even go into minor ones like how they're rating system for merchants has problems. The thing about Froogle is both of the problems I mentioned are new - their search system was working fine until they added this new grouping thing which doesn't work and which I'm sure no one likes. Don't put it out there until it works. And spammers were not around, but now they are, and Froogle doesn't deal with them. If they wait a week to deal with them each time, then they will never go away - if they can get a few hundred sales for each week on the fake prices, I'm sure the spammers will just set up a new storefront each week and make a ton of money. They should fix what's broken instead of coming out with whiz-bang new features every few months. Respond to e-mails about people spamming with fake low prices.
This is correct. I thought this would be so obvious, I didn't bother to explain it. I knew what ps ax did back in the 1980s.
Two thing thats piss me off the most usually is limitations on my access, or annoying security measures, both of which I look at similarly because they are different sides of the same coin often. I host a website on a host where I don't have root access. They are supposed to be good, and a place geeks like to host, and for the most part they are. But having no root access can be annoying. For example, the machine load average was very high for some weeks. It would shoot up to something like 10 or 20 times the number of processors for an hour and then go back to normal. My e-mails to the techs didn't do anything for some weeks. My ps only let me see my own processes, I couldn't see what processes were hogging the machine. The first time they checked, the spike hadn't happened, so they had no idea what was wrong. So they were slow to do anything about it, I had the ability to better diagnose what was wrong. Eventually I ran a script that did an uptime every minute and wrote it to a file. But after two days they killed that - that's another thing, they killed a script that I was running. Although if it was an attempt to find this rogue process, I didn't care as much. Anyhow, eventually they fixed the problem.
Another thing that happened with these hosters, which again is related to me not being able to see system processes with ps - one day my password protection for directories (htaccess) died. I had to recreate everything with their automatic system in terms of the htaccess and htpasswd files. I couldn't see what user was running our Apache web server processes, I just had no idea why it broke.
Once I worked at a company where you needed SecureID to log into their machine for customers, among other security provisions. I thought it was rather silly - I only read mail from the machine, and not much else, why do I need a SecureID card to do that? Wasn't ssh enough? Did I have to carry around a SecureID card just to access this one machine and my e-mail which I read with pine? Again, a mixture of limited access and what I felt was unnecessary security is what pissed me off. Our company had a lot of smart programmers and sysadmins, I'm sure anyone motivated enough to hack in could get in and get root despite the SecureIDs. It sort of reminds me of the World Trade Center. The security to get in was ridiculous after the first bombing. But they hadn't walked into, but drove into the building the first time, so why was taking my picture and other silly measures necessary? It did little for them as they eventually got flown into, which destroyed the buildings. As I said, once something becomes a target for somebody motivated enough, there is little you can do.
While the ACM or IEEE are theoretically advocates for US IT workers, they both receive a lot of money from the same companies advocating no cap on H1-B visas and so forth. Go to ACM's events and conferences web page and click on SIGCSE 2006. Who is sponsoring this in big letters on the bottom? IBM, Microsoft and Sun, the main drivers behind more H1-B visas.
There are other organizations which are not as in debt to these organizations. I did a web page of my own about this a year or two ago. Any organization like the ACM that takes massive money from these corporations which advocate no H1-B caps can not be trusted to advocate for IT workers. Only an organization that only depends on money from IT workers can be trusted. It's common sense. In fact, these corporate officers usually have more sense about these things, and who is on whose side, than many IT workers.
And speaking of Orwell's 1984, I watched the documentary about Kevin Mitnick, Freedom Downtime, recently. One scene had a typical bit of Emmanuel Goldstein's dark humor, he was in Philadelphia and he was filming Independence Hall - where the Declaration of Independence and US constitution was signed, it is supposed to be the birthplace of freedom or whatever. Nowadays, on top of its tower is a video camera spying on passerby. If I recall correctly, they're building a prison next to it as well, which has signs that say "no videotaping of prison allowed" (I guess they're allowed to videotape but we're not).
The efforts to stop this will probably be partially unsuccessful, but I'm not too worried about it. All the technology in the world can not keep people down who don't want to be kept down. As Steve Biko once said, "the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."