Being an American worker, I consider the activity of the CIA during the Cold War to be a tragedy. Not just out of guilt, but because I feel much of it went against the interest of workers like myself. I certainly don't see myself "winning" anything by the collapse of the USSR, with it's 0% unemployment rate and lack of poverty, although America's idle class may have, and I don't see the US as some white knight saving the world. I don't see the USSR as a white knight either - even considering their hostility to the idle class, the communists demanded control over workers as well - starting with Kronstadt, Trotsky's war against Makhno, betraying the Spanish revolution not to mention what happened after the Cold War started. I see two countries who did what they did to serve their own ruling classes.
What did the US do to help win the Cold War? First of all, it's always mentioned in US schools or corporate media how the Russians occupied Eastern Europe with it's armies. What's not mentioned is that the US occupied Western Europe with it's armies. Until 1956 in France, the communist party (PCF) was the most popular party in elections. In Italy the communist party was so popular the US had to result in subterfuge and election tampering to keep Italy from going communist. In fact Italy was the main focus of the Cold War starting with Truman, and as late as 1976 communists were winning over one third of the vote, and coming in less than 5% behind the Christian Democrats (center-right) in Italy. The US ruling class supported the Spanish dictatorship because resistance continued even after the civil war was lost. Stalin agreed to not interfere with Greece, yet the resistance there to English/US meddling was so great that the US had to militarily take over the country and supprot dictators there as well. Not to mention the dictators and attacks on popular movements the US supported in Latin America, Asia, Africa and so forth.
The US said it had to do this because of the USSR. The US idle class said they would not have foreign bases if not for the USSR. Yet the USSR collapses and - nothing changes. The US continues with it's military bases and personnel on over half the countries on earth, military spending stays near cold war levels, billions go to Colombia to put down worker movements there, or Israel to pay for the Palestinian occupation. In fact, the US doesn't have the USSR to check it's power any more so it becomes even more bold since it has unilateral power. Nothing could prove the premise of the cold war was a lie like the actions of the US elite post-Cold War, who are making war on the world. Now they say they are against "terrorism" which apparently means anyone who does not like US troops in their country (Osama Bin Laden), and doesn't like having the US idle class take over the land and natural resources and exporting the profits back to the US. It should be noted of course that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are old friends of the US elite who armed them during the 1980's, even though they had the same disregard for human life back then as they do now. If they didn't, the US ruling class would have never supported them.
How has this helped American workers? Not at all - blue collar jobs were shipped out for decades, and now white collar jobs are being shipped out. Mexicans and H1-Bs are imported for the jobs that are left. The US economy has been stagnating since the late 1960's (albeit a bump in the late 1990's) with a tepid growth of production while the rest of the world has been catching up - the EU's GDP rivaling the US's and Japan and the Asian tigers as well with China growing 8% a year or so. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 35 years ago. Hours worked per year by worker have increased in the three-digit level. The economy has been in a sandrap for three years.
I guess Safire is telling us we should stop and think about how "great" it was
Being an American worker, I consider the activity of the CIA during the Cold War to be a tragedy. Not just out of guilt, but because I feel much of it went against the interest of workers like myself. I certainly don't see myself "winning" anything by the collapse of the USSR, with it's 0% unemployment rate and lack of poverty, although America's idle class may have, and I don't see the US as some white knight saving the world. I don't see the USSR as a white knight either - even considering their hostility to the idle class, the communists demanded control over workers as well - starting with Kronstadt, Trotsky's war against Makhno, betraying the Spanish revolution not to mention what happened after the Cold War started. I see two countries who did what they did to serve their own ruling classes.
What did the US do to help win the Cold War? First of all, it's always mentioned in US schools or corporate media how the Russians occupied Eastern Europe with it's armies. What's not mentioned is that the US occupied Western Europe with it's armies. Until 1956 in France, the communist party (PCF) was the most popular party in elections. In Italy the communist party was so popular the US had to result in subterfuge and election tampering to keep Italy from going communist. In fact Italy was the main focus of the Cold War starting with Truman, and as late as 1976 communists were winning over one third of the vote, and coming in
The US said it had to do this because of the USSR. The US idle class said they would not have foreign bases if not for the USSR. Yet the USSR collapses and - nothing changes. The US continues with it's military bases and personnel on over half the countries on earth, military spending stays near cold war levels, billions go to Colombia to put down worker movements there, or Israel to pay for the Palestinian occupation. In fact, the US doesn't have the USSR to check it's power any more so it becomes even more bold since it has unilateral power. Nothing could prove the premise of the cold war was a lie like the actions of the US elite post-Cold War, who are making war on the world. Now they say they are against "terrorism" which apparently means anyone who does not like US troops in their country (Osama Bin Laden), and doesn't like having the US idle class take over the land and natural resources and exporting the profits back to the US. It should be noted of course that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are old friends of the US elite who armed them during the 1980's, even though they had the same disregard for human life back then as they do now. If they didn't, the US ruling class would have never supported them.
How has this helped American workers? Not at all - blue collar jobs were shipped out for decades, and now white collar jobs are being shipped out. Mexicans and H1-Bs are imported for the jobs that are left. The US economy has been stagnating since the late 1960's (albeit a bump in the late 1990's) with a tepid growth of production while the rest of the world has been catching up - the EU's GDP rivaling the US's and Japan and the Asian tigers as well with China growing 8% a year or so. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 35 years ago. Hours worked per year by worker have increased in the three-digit level. The economy has been in a sandrap for three years.
I guess Safire is telling us we should stop and think about how "great" it was that "we" "won" the Cold War. That before the decade of rest before the US has gone once again into a permanent warlike state like Orwell describes in 1984, this time a "war on terrorism". I'm sorry, but I look back at things such as Safire boss Nixon's support of the democratically elected government of Chile overthrow, replaced by a bloody tyrant, as a tragedy, not as something to celebrate. And 35 years later US workers are worse off, although the very small wealthy elite on the very top who are perhaps S
Except over the past three years, the employers of IT workers have been laying off and cutting wages left and right. IT unemployment over the past three years compared to the previous three years have been quite high. The owners of the means of production have blocked many people from "applying their skills" with their permission in order to try to generate profit for those owners. What avenue of pursuit would you suggest to those who just graduated with a computer science degree, when companies are not hiring?
Yes. As the article said, even the NSA realizes that it being too "in-bred" is a problem for it's effectiveness. Other than the Jonathan Pollards of the world, many of the people who join US intelligence services do so because they have a desire to work to further that which is in the so-called "US national interest". This already is somewhat self-selecting, but the process goes on further to where you discard certain elements, so you have mostly people of the same ideological bent. For example, they might tend to have seen anything happening in the world that is not almost totally aligned with US business interest as being part of a worldwide communist conspiracy intent at deceiving and destroying them. There are some who say the Red Scare in the 1950's throwing out non-John Birch types from intelligence agencies led to lots of intelligence failures, such as misreading a lot about Vietnam (like that the Vietnamese may have been more nationalists than fighting for some worldwide communist cause), distrusting that a Sino-Soviet split existed as "communist tricks", overestimating the USSR's economy and military, overreacting and pushing Cubans, Nicaraguans and others into the arms of the USSR, and so forth. In other words, they tend to have a warped view of the world, never helpful when gathering intelligence, e.g. trying to present a clear, correct, accurate picture of what's going on in the world. Think of the problems this has caused - they were so scared of Afghanistan of all places falling into the hands of the USSR that they funded, trained and armed the Taliban along with what would become Al Queda.
One of the most important attribute of a force's strength is not the force itself but fear of the force. It behooves the intelligence services to make people think they are all-powerful, all-seeing and all-knowing, but they are not. In reality, they are ideologically fanatical, to their detriment, and often staggeringly incompetent.
This is Economics 101. Everyone from Jack Welch to Karl Marx has noted the problem with capitalism is overproduction - more commodities are created then are consumed. We've just witnessed this - a ton of fiber optic cables were laid, until the point where no one was able to consume that much of that commodity, then there was a "crisis" (recession). Of course fiber optic cables are just one of the examples of a variety of commodities that was recently overproduced. Virtually every economic theory floating out there, from monetarism to Marxism to Keynesianism to "rational expectations" recognizes this happening, although their reasons why it happens and what to do about it differ.
Lots of engineers I know who have not studied economics and have only a layperson's understanding of it, said that the high wages paid to people who wrote HTML during "the bubble", the amount of fiber optic cable laid, the millions paid for the rights to the name whatever.com, the high stock prices and so on and so forth "made no sense" and was not "economically correct", as if we had a normal working overall system and a few people had made a mistake. As if the system itself functioned fine by itself, and under the rules it operates by, but that things went wrong due to the greed/stupidity of some individuals. This requires a faith in the current economic system on the level of a religious devotion however - the people running the economy are human and make mistakes, sometimes large ones. And sometimes it's apparent they don't know what is going on, and even bring into question if they ever did know what's going on (like in the Depression). In the twentieth century, "capitalism" underwent two major changes in relations to the government - the Depression brought into the forefront the ideas of Keynes and changed the system. Slowdown in economic growth and stagflation brought forth the ideas of the monetarists like Milton Friedman in the 1970's - staglation was fixed (but the slowdown in economic growth didn't, it was very tepid from the early 1970's to mid 1990's compared to the decades beforehand).
Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, JM Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are chronologically some of the most important economic thinkers starting from the 18th century. Now that things are in the dumper, I've been reading more of the modern economists who have a more dismal than rosy view of things, like Paul Krugman and article writers for Monthly Review. The market crashed in early 2000 and things are still crappy, which doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of whatever we're doing now, nor of what we've been doing in the years previous to now.
Just as in normal chess, we have to break down the computer game into three parts, and then subparts
Begin with the end, the endgame. The end of the endgame rather. This (the end of the endgame) the computer does play perfectly. It's skill keeps improving as the tables come out - three pieces left on the board, four pieces left on the board, five pieces, six pieces...and I see this continuing. So the computer is increasingly perfect in this respect.
Opening - the computer can't innovate yet (although it can be used to help in innovation), but it does have an up-to-date opening book, and will play as good an opening as has ever been played by the best players.
This leaves the middle game (which also expands somewhat to the end of the opening and beginning of the ending). In this the computer plays tactically better than the human.
So we have (end) endings, which are played perfectly, openings, which, discounting an innovative new opening, it plays as well as the best players up to today have ever played, and it is probably tactically better in the middle game. So where does that leave the chess grandmaster? Well, the old tried and true innovation in an opening can always work - it's helped human top players beat other human top players. Barring an innovative new opening, that leaves strategy, specifically, middle game strategy. There are some things computers have always been bad at such as gauging the importance of passed pawns, playing closed games and so forth. That is the method the computer can be beat with currently. I don't think it will last forever though, in the next few decades I think it will become more and more rare for a human to beat a computer, it being more likely that there will be a draw, or even a loss.
I have been following Freenet and Freenet development for some time, and I have always undesrtood that Freenet is in the process of development. What is Freenet's version number? Is it 1 or above? No, it is 0.
Linux was at version 0.x from 1991 until 1994 when version 1.0 was released. I remember people using Linux 0.x in 1994 though (and 1995, 1996), sometimes in a production capacity, although I'm sure caveats would have recommended against it. In fact, was Linux version 1.0 ready to be used in a production environment with no worries? Not really (I remember my 1.x server getting the "ping of death" and going down, among other things). Freenet was released in 1999. When it goes to version 1.x, that's when I'll expect a more production-oriented p2p network. But Ian does not feel it is ready, and I tend to agree. Linux was very complex, but it did have many other OS's to compare with, it was not totally groundbreaking and revolutionary (although it partly was). Freenet is forging a new path, thus takes more time.
Why? Because I did check Google and Freshmeat (do people still use Tucows?). For one thing, as I said in the article, MUDs are somewhat obsolete in the face of MMORPGs like Everquest. I know ZMud is a decent client, but it is not free as in beer or speech, after a 30-day trial it conks out. As far as Google, it recently discontinued archival of the
rec.games.mud groups, so that answers that question for one.
Theoretically, I could have downloaded 30 MUD clients, many wanting me to download PERL for Windows, or TCL/TK for Windows, or GNOME for Windows, or whatever, just to look at it, but I figured I would ask here. Have people here rallied around a Windows MUD client that is free as in beer and as in speech, that doesn't need a normal user to download Cygwin, TCL/TK, PERL and so forth for Windows, compile it and so forth, that is still actively updated? If so, I haven't seen it. That confirms my suspicion - that there is no good, free (as in beer and speech) MUD client for Windows, or at least one that you can download that doesn't require you to transmogrify your Windows box into a UNIX - I'm better off just using a UNIX then anyway.
You're assuming that anyone using Google or Freshmeat will find what they're looking for. I didn't. So now I'm asking as a last resort, before I possibly even begin writing one (that is beer and speech free) myself, if I have the spare time to do such a thing.
If you look at all professions, the workers usually come together in some form or another, be it in a professional association like the ABA or AMA, or a union like CWA or SAG. Employers come together as well, in organizations from the Chamber of Commerce, to NAM, to the ITAA.
This survey shows everything that's wrong with the IT profession. Salary surveys should be done by IT workers for IT workers. What the hell is Sun doing in this survey? Sun is a member of the ITAA, an employer association which is an advocate of off-shoring IT; bringing in hundreds of thousands of people with H1-B and L-1 visas every year, despite the downturn; lobbies in Congress for laws to strip IT workers of overtime pay, or to screw over independent contractors, and so on and so forth. Considering this, it seems Sun has economic interests directly opposite of IT workers.
Sun's direct involvement means this survey is a crock of doo-doo. And organizations like SAGE, IEEE and so forth are in the same boat with a load of corporate sponsorship. Do the employers like Sun, IBM and Intel let the workers run their associations like the ITAA? Hell no. Do real professionals, like doctors and lawyers let other people run their own professional associations? No again. Yet companies who belong to associations doing PR and lobbying day and night to offshore jobs, bring in cheaper, foreign workers in droves, kill overtime provisions and do virtually everything to make us work longer hours for less seem to be perfectly accepted in cooperation with SAGE, the IEEE and so forth. This is because SAGE, IEEE and other such organizations are not professional associations like other professions have - no profession is so stupid to let that happen. That's why they go to Congress and have laws passed and done awway with that have the effect on lowering our pay and there is virtually no association on the other side that fights that. Despite the fact that every other group in the world, from lawyers to doctors to auto workers to retirees to everyone has people in Congress fighting for their economic interests.
Dump these phony, employer-controlled so-called professional associations like SAGE and the IEEE and look for some real ones like these:
You can choose between these two, depending on whether you think the solution to the problem is a
union or a
professional association.
Honestly, virtually all R&D in this country is financed by the government, usually by the military (often using defense contractors in the process).
Internet? Yes.
Aerospace technology for Boeing aircraft? R&D paid for by Pentagon defense contracts.
Biotech, pharmaceuticals? Basic research funded by government.
I've become interested in this topic recently...very little of R&D can not be traced back to the government. The one big private sector R&D success that towers above all others is Bell Labs - transistors, UNIX, C, you name it. But they were a government-granted monopoly!
It's interesting because the economy really goes along on GDP growth, and that is mainly pushed by R&D leading to increased productivity. And the source of this is almost always the government, and usually through the military.
You can't really seperate yourself from the world. Problems in the real world carry over to the Internet. Thus you have spam, viruses and the like. But there are antibodies to these things - anti-spam measures are much better than they were a few years ago for instance.
I remember when the Internet was mostly Universities (and some military sites). The Internet as I knew it died to a great extent then. It used to be where it seemed virtually everyone on the Internet was fairly intelligent, which is not the case now.
What the net will be like depends on you. If no one had ever written GPL'd software, or put up home pages, or mailing lists, or blogs, the Internet would look very different now. It is also affected by the larger society as well, and positive and negative developments in that effect it, and vice versa.
One of the main methods for employers to extract surplus labor value (e.g. profit) from you is to make you work longer. Of course you can get that extra work done - if you work an hour later. Or come in on the weekend. Or do it from home. Like you said "in this economy, where jobs are tough to come by, [you] don't want to be seen as the impediment to getting things done".
There really is no answer, as this sort of thing is a naturally occurring force "in this economy"...you probably meant by that your attitude of laxity as being caused by the recent crisis (recession), although in reality it is due to the economy as a whole, in all periods.
But anyhow, usually when I start a job I generally take on all work initially, so that people's first impression will be that I'm not a "slacker". Then as stuff starts piling up I start being selective. For example, currently two people in a department give me things to do - one always goes the extra mile before handing it off, gives me all the information beforehand and so forth, the other will escalate anything immediately, gives me crappy information and so forth. So what I do is the first guy I always do what he wants right away, and the second guy I blow off or tell him I'm busy or tell him to do the groundwork himself. I also prioritize what I do - usually what the boss asks for, and what will keep me from getting headaches get first priority. Also, if something looks like a lot of work, I tell them, and since fires come up I give a longer estimate than it would be.
The ITAA helped cancel overtime pay for IT workers so this has sure helped out in them paying less and more IT people being unemployed. Now you can have 2 overworked, 60 hours a week programmers instead of 3 40 hour a week programmers. Hooray for capitalism, it's doing such a wonderful job - that's why the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was thirty years ago. As hours per year has risen by a three digit number. And so forth - the long-term trend doesn't look good. The only solution really is to check out Washtech/CWA or the Progammers Guild and fight it out with the ITAA.
Where do the idle rich get their money? How do the Hilton sisters get so much money to go out on the town? Where did Andrew Luster get the money to go partying and then fly off to Mexico? Certainly not from working. That's not how the 43% of Forbes 400 richest Americans got on that list - they inherited their way *directly* onto it. Where does their money come from? They take it from workers creating wealth - workers go into work, transform raw materials into more valuable commodities through their labor, and the heir takes a portion of that and goes and spend it however they want. You hear a lot about how we go out and work so our tax dollars can be spent on people on welfare not working in the corporate media, but how often do they talk about how we work so profits taken from the wealth we create goes to feed some idle class heir who has never worked a day in his life? Rarely, if ever.
Keynes said that if the economy is in the dumper, one way to get the economy moving again is by the government spending money (that people with capital don't want to invest). FDR tried this during the Depression but there was enormous resistance by the wealthy to the socialistic programs - then WWII came about and government spending went to the then nascent armaments industry - which had less resistance from the wealthy, since it was coming directly from them. Since WWII, a lot of money has been pumped into the economy through the defense industry, and fat defense contracts have paid for everything from R&D that created the Internet, to technology used by Boeing from to build non-military jets. The government is pumping money into the economy by this method - the downside is it is a "trickle down" way of doing it, sort of like the current tax cuts skewed towards the wealthy, thus the idle rich will see a lot more money than workers.
It's the job of your ISP to secure themselves, and to secure their network, and to contact law enforcement if they desire to. You want to do secure transactions, and don't trust your transport, thus you were unaffected by this when you wanted to do your secure transaction. If you don't like how your ISP is botched up, switch to an ISP with security. I can see dropping a courtesy note to the ISP informing them of the problem, but I can't see calling up the FBI, NIPC because you are the customer of an ISP that was hacked. Don't you have any better things to do? I work at an ISP and are scanned all of the time. I don't send messages to CERT or the NIPC or FBI though...if I made a call to law enforcement every time we were port scanned I'd be on the phone all day. I'm really not that concerned that there are people who want to make a use of capital that is unauthorized by the capital owners and their flunkies, and I'm definitely concerned enough to waste my time calling every spook in the book to report this UNAUTHORIZED USE OF CAPITAL!!!! Geez, even the FBI blew you off, that's pretty funny... what do you want, a junior G-man badge? Your ISP doesn't really give a shit either from what is sounds like. Isn't this telling you something? You sound pretty anal-retentive to me. If Phish starts touring again, why don't you go down there and try to spot people toking...you can write it all down on a little pad and deposit it at your local precinct.
Yes this definitely exists in the industry. I'm 29 so it hasn't affected me that much yet, but I'm certainly aware of it, especially from observing the (few) older IT people working. It doesn't matter if it's "illogical" or not, it's a reality and one we have to deal with. In many industries, there is seniority, the workers are organized and they have gotten pensions from the company - how many IT workers nowadays are getting pensions? The process is burn them out while they're young and throw them away basically. They say things like "you can be in management" - but, besides many people do not want to be managers and would rather work, if you have managers managing 4-5 people, it's obvious that only one of those 4-5 people is going to be a manager, what happens to the other 75-80%?
Many of you agree with me, and the important thing at this moment in time is not convincing other IT workers we are right. Not by any means, it's largely a waste of time. What we have to be doing now is finding each other, and organize together, then, collectively, we can present a message from IT workers to IT workers who have a different opinion, and more importantly, that larger body who is indifferent, one reason for their indifference being that they have not been presented with a point of view looking at the things that should be worried about and fought against (and things to fight for) collectively, as an organization, like the ITAA, high H1-B caps, section 1706 of IRS tax code, FLSA being destroyed and so on. The employers are organized and well-funded within the ITAA, and has had many successes, we should be organized to. They're smart enough to organize together, we should be smart and organize as well.
I don't think we're forced into any pre-built mode of organization - we should be building organizations as we see fit. Perhaps organize as doctors do in the AMA and lawyers in the ABA. Perhaps organize in unions like actors in SAG, or technical professionals do in the council of technical unions, CESO. CESO is very interesting, it started in the late 1960's out of a similar downturn to nowadays, except back then it was the aerospace bubble bursting, not the Internet one. Then there's the Programmers Guild, or groups primarily concentrated on lowering the H1-B cap. In fact, Programmers Guild meetings have seen a jump in attendance recently. I could mention IEEE and the like, but they're pretty pathetic, read around how their officers pulled the plug on H1-B measures at the behest of their corporate sponsors. One of the largest reasons this "profession" is in the mess it is is because unlike real professionals like doctors (AMA) and lawyers (ABA), there is no real professional association working for them (for actors I guess it would be SAG, which is a union - the important thing about unions is they do collective bargaining, e.g. wages are not bargained for on an individual basis. People always talk like that lowers wages, but the reverse is true if you look at any statistics - a heavily unionized industry even raises wages for non-unionized people in their industry). I should add I am in facor of more organization, period, and am unconcerned with the form it takes - in fact I'm glad we have all stripes of organizations competing for membership, from the somewhat conservative but effective Programmers Guild type organizations, through the Washtech/CWA type unions, on to the really radical IWW IU 560. You don't like unions? Join the Programmer's Guild. You want a union? Hook up with Washtech/CWA (or Cyberlodge/IAMAW). I support all of these, I just think we need more organized programmers/admin to combat the evil Intel/IBM/Microsoft organizations like the ITAA
Things are so crappy I really don't fucking want to hear from assholes full of hubris with their heads up their bosses ass talking about "merit" and how they're the world's greatest programmer. Fuck them. I'm working right now, but I am unhappy with what I am making, in fact, wages in IT
RSI (carpal tunnel) is not something that hits you right away, like cigarette smoking it takes years for the symptoms to develop. And like cigarette smoking, there are a lot of people who have a financial interest in courts NOT considering this a safety hazard, in the case of RSI, often an occupational safety hazard. In fact, millions have been spent in lobbying to prevent RSI from being considered an occupation safety hazard. So I take everything I hear with a grain of salt. Frankly, I am rather cynical, and know that objectivity goes out the window when people are spending millions to counter something, especially if those millions come from well-heeled corporations, and the opposition are just regular people. A very large percentage of the hardcore computer people I know have RSI, some of it to an almost crippling extent. I myself have been typing on computers since I got a Commodore 64 in the early 1980's, and by the mid-late 1990's I was experiencing massive RSI pain. But I did the mouse switch, breaks, stretches and other stuff. Aside from many of my friends, I know the author of Netscape for UNIX and Mozilla, Jamie Zawinski, suffers from RSI, to the point that he wrote X-windows programs telling him when to give his wrists a break.
I am very suspicious of these so-called independent studies in terms of things where big money is being thrown around. I've just seen this scenario play out too many times before - and since I know many long time computer users who have RSI, including myself, it makes me doubly suspicious that it is just a coincidence that our wrists hurt, just like it's a coincidence that so many smokers die of lung cancer.
From the article:
According to the (U.S.) National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, a 2001 study conducted by the Mayo Clinic also found that heavy computer use â" up to seven hours a day â" did not increase the userâ(TM)s risk of developing the injury.
Ah seven hours at a keyboard is "heavy computer use". Lucky none of us ever has to work seven hours a day at a keyboard! If you look over the past century or two, they said cigarette smoking was not harmful (and in front of Congress a few years ago, all the heads of tobacco companies swore under oath that they didn't believe smoking cigarettes was harmful). They said going down into the mines without safety equipment was not harmful, and that the miners all getting "black lung" was just a coincidence. And so on and so forth - when money's at stake, a full scale propaganda and legal war will be waged to show that there is no problem. Only when we have organizations like the Programmers Guild, IEEE, CWA and whatnot funding their own studies will we really start knowing what the real deal on RSI is. And also remember RSI is not just computer people, manufacturers deal with another form of RSI and they lobby, get bogus studies and so forth for that as well. Don't believe the hype!
This is like saying the younger you start smoking the more likely you are to have problems. One of the key words in RSI is R - repetitive, the more you do something the worse it gets.
Reading through the comments here, there seems to be two types, ones telling you to consider things on the basis of fear, and ones giving other advice.
What you've really done is formed a union or basis for a union, though that word has a specific bureaucratic meaning in the U.S. Some people here have said it might be bad form to just say screw you and leave. Perhaps, if you're all together on this, perhaps you should approach your employers and tell them what you're unhappy with and what you want - no unpaid overtime or oncall, and in terms of being treated like dirt, perhaps more control over your work and some type of grievance procedure. If you're so sick of it you feel you just want to leave, just demand exactly what you all want and don't give in, then they can't say you just walked out - they just didn't pay attention to your demands.
Some people have said the job market is bad. It wouldn't be if more people did this - 2 people working 60 hour weeks without overtime pay is the same as 3 people working 40 hour weeks - they've put someone out of work with their lack of value for their time. But in terms of that, if one of you walks out you are easily replaced - if all of you threaten to walk out, or strike or whatnot at once, then that becomes less so - all of a sudden you become on more equal footing with the company. It depends on the situation, but in many cases something like a strike is exactly equal - you are hurt by not getting a paycheck, but the company operating without an IT department, or with IT scabs who have no idea what they're doing.
Decades ago, when people were treated like garbage, had work dumped on them and were told to work 60 hour weeks and be oncall 24/7, they used to do what you're doing almost naturally. That's why things didn't go to garbage. This is supposed to be a white collar profession for pete's sake. Half the people here are telling you to consider only the things that go wrong, that you should live like a coolie. It's a disgusting mentality that's crept in - be a man, especially if you're under 35 and don't have kids. I can see people in bad spots (H1-Bs, big families with little savings) being fearful, but if you're a 23 year old programmer, being a patsy for some company owner who is squeezing you dry is insane.
There are also other tactics that have been mentioned here like a "slow down". There are all kind of tactics like this, it's unfortunate that the community is so weak that it is difficult to learn things like this. It's helpful to all of us when people in your situation can talk to other IT workers and get some good ideas and community support. The employers sure as hell do it with organizations like the ITAA, that's one of the reasons we're in the boat we're in. There are organizations like the Programmers Guild and Washtech and so forth.
Have some backbone! In solidarity there's strength. If you're all together you DEFINITELY have leverage over the company. That's one thing the company and people of a certain mindset want to convince you of - they are all-powerful, you are weak and scared. Bullshit. In Europe, they are putting through crap people don't like with pensions and guess what - 80% of the workers in the country are going on strike. You can be certain Faux News doesn't cover that story - it might give people ideas. And guess what - the government and people pushing for that junk back off. That's why they have education systems where they don't have to import 1 million H1-Bs because supposedly there's not enough educated people in the US to do the IT jobs. When those European workers walk out of their jobs en masse, all of a sudden the shoe's on the other foot - the rich, and the bosses and the owners, and the government can't do a damn thing, THEY'RE the ones shaking in their boots - not the workers. What are the bosses going to do, fire all of the workers in the country? The reality is that the people who do the work in the company are the ones with all of the power, the owners and managers have po
I also saw some place where you mentioned the should use round-robin DNS for the tracker host to "scale". This isn't a good solution though, as any network engineer who runs a large internet accessible website will tell you. Cachine of DNS records make round-robin not as effective as it needs to be.
How would caching effect round-robin DNS in a negative way? Statistically, odds are that you will get an even distribution among sites that are caching - if 50% of cachers go to site 1 and 50% of cachers go to site 2, and everyone else flips around more, what's the problem?
Seeing conspiracies everywhere, I've always suspected F5 and Cisco's LocalDirector division put out FUD on round-robin DNS to drive people to their products. There is sometimes a need for such accurate load balancing, but most of the time I saw big money paid for load balancing it was totally unnecessary.
In my experience, hardware problems are more often the cause of crashes (which I define as the machine is inaccessible, except perhaps from a console) than software problems, at least with UNIX. I've worked at facilities from a handful of machines to thousands of machines over the past few years. Usually hardware problems are what cause the crashes - a hard drive goes bad, a processor goes bad (I recall one model of Sun CPU's that had a penchant for crapping out), a memory board goes bad, a network card or host bust adapter goes bad and so forth.
It's abnormal, especially if you have a good network monitoring system, for software, either the kernel or running processes, to cause things to crash. In my experience, 99% (maybe 100%) of the time this is due to processes causing disk, memory, or processor (or network) to get filled up, eventually crashing the system. If you have a decent network monitoring system and enough administrator person-hours to deal with it, you will rarely have problems on this side.
My previous job was at a Fortune 100 company where I was part of a team that administered thousands of machines, and I would say it takes being in a large environment like that to realize that hardware crashes occur a lot more often then software crashes, and software crashes are usually avoidable. In fact, hardware crashes are usually avoidable as well - unimportant development boxes were usually the only things that crashed due to disks or processors or network cards failing. A critical heavy-duty production machine would often be running on a Sun Enterprise 6500 with a RAID disk array, multiple processors, multiple network cards, and besides all that a spare 6500 with the same setup just sitting there on a veritas cluster server, waiting for the other machine to fail so it could kick in. That's pretty good hardware redundancy, and there is no real "crashing", just replacement of disks that go bad for which RAID5 automatically kicked the data to spare disks and so forth
There is a common enemy for all hardware crashes in all environments, no matter how small or deep the pockets of the company - heat. Servers piled on top of one another, row on row, cabinet to cabinet, can generate a lot of heat. And no matter where I go the cooling always seems to be inadequate, even in places with deep pockets. If the room is hot, the cabinet is hotter, the machine is even hotter, and the processor is hotter still. I had a machine room once where the temperature kept building and building and building, until suddenly in the space of one or two days, over half of the hard drives in the room crapped out. If your machines are having hardware problems, go around and feel if it is hot anywhere in your cabinets, and wherever it is hot put a thermometer there. However much the temperature is, remember that the processor is hotter, and that it is probably even hotter if it is in a cabinet and you later close the cabinet.
Scientists persecuted in the West
on
Krawtchouk's Mind
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Wilhelm Reich, a student of Freud's, died in an American prison. He was put there due to his research into energy forms. The government also burned his research!
Plenty of American scientists have been persecuted for political reasons, including Oppenheimer, as well as many lesser known ones. Despite being an American, I find it hypocritical that people find a desire to bash the USSR for things the US did as well. Like decry people killed in the early days of the USSR when the US wiped out most of the Indians here, as well as however many Africans were dumped overboard after being packed in like sardines on slave ships. Or remember persecuted scientists in the Soviet Union, when there were persecuted scientists in the United States. I think it would be better to focus on people in Kansas and wherever else in the US that want to burn biology books and replace them with the book of Genesis. Americans have been brainwashed by anti-Bolshevist propaganda since 1917, and had ugly incidents from their past like the Bonus March absent from the history books (except history books like A People's History of the United States), or even incidents of working class power and solidarity (like the San Francisco general strike). I'm not a Marxist-Leninist by any means, but this tendency among the right to try to revive the USSR from the dead to bash it again while trying to whitewash the American ruling classes history is lame, and I don't feel it serves working class Americans like myself.
I was reading Paul Krugman (the economist) recently and he talked about how Asimov's idea of psychohistory mesmerized him at a young age, to the point of being a history major - but then he realized if you really wanted to use mathematics to model human behavior, economics was one of the best ways to go. Krugman is a liberal, and praises liberal economic policies. He also has some positive things to say about conservative economicists like Milton Friedman and their ideas. But he calls economic ideas to the right of them (supply siders) kooks, and Marxist economic ideas to the left of him kooky as well. He goes into a lot of detail about why supply side ideas are bad, but very little about Marxist economic ideas. There is a logical coherence to this - supply side ideas have been put into policy at various times since Reagan took office, while Marxist economic ideas are not even that influential in Chinese society any more. I suspect Krugman knows very little about Marxist economic ideas although he bashes Marxist economics all the time. Which is ironic because....psychohistory is Marxism! Or I've always considered it as Asimov's parody of the Marxist idea of historical materialism. In the 21st century, especially in the United States, people don't know the first thing about Marxian ideas, except that the USSR and China embraced them, and that in those countries ownership of capital was in the hands of the government, not the capitalist class. But I guess in New York City's Jewish community in the early 20th century, these kinds of ideas circulated around and I'm sure Asimov was familiar with some of these Marxian concepts.
Marx was a philosopher, a historian and an economist. As far as this is concerned, it is Marx the historian we are concerned with. Marx had an idea called historical materialism, which was very much like psychohistory - that there is a scientifically identifiable march of history. He saw society as moving through stages - slave states (like the Roman Empire, or the early US), feudalism (like medieval Europe), and capitalism (a new system borne not long before Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations). He saw workers moving from being slaves to serfs/peasants to proletariat wage slaves. He saw the next stage as socialism, the workers seizing the means of production and the state for their own use, and then the stage past socialism, communism, where the main dictum would be "from each according to ability, to each according to need", where there would be no nation-states any more and so forth.
Anyhow, I haven't read The Foundation trilogy for a while but it would be interesting to see what I get different from it now that I know some more about socialism than I did then. For example, when I first watched the movie Spartacus directed by Stanley Kubrick, I though it was a good movie by Kubrick about gladiators with Kirk Douglass and Laurence Olivier. But with a more full perspective, I can see what a radical movie, with radical ideas spoken by characters, that Dalton Trumbo wrote - I think the radicalness of it is missed by a lot of people since they're not waving red flags and so forth, they're just speaking English. Anyway it's interesting.
As a footnote, I'm aware of Marx's historical materialism but that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it. Marx's ideas started being put into practice in 1917 - and five years later, Mussolini marched on Rome, the beginnings of fascism in Europe. From the 1930's through 1950's, a lot of leftists - Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt school, asked themselves - what happened? Why didn't Marxism work the way we thought it would? This doesn't just mean what was wrong with the Soviet Union, but why didn't Marx predict a fascist movement coming into existence, largely as a counter-force against socialism (sort of similar to the Jesuits and counter-reformation springing into existence not that long after Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenburg church). This is
Slashdot Mirror
What did the US do to help win the Cold War? First of all, it's always mentioned in US schools or corporate media how the Russians occupied Eastern Europe with it's armies. What's not mentioned is that the US occupied Western Europe with it's armies. Until 1956 in France, the communist party (PCF) was the most popular party in elections. In Italy the communist party was so popular the US had to result in subterfuge and election tampering to keep Italy from going communist. In fact Italy was the main focus of the Cold War starting with Truman, and as late as 1976 communists were winning over one third of the vote, and coming in less than 5% behind the Christian Democrats (center-right) in Italy. The US ruling class supported the Spanish dictatorship because resistance continued even after the civil war was lost. Stalin agreed to not interfere with Greece, yet the resistance there to English/US meddling was so great that the US had to militarily take over the country and supprot dictators there as well. Not to mention the dictators and attacks on popular movements the US supported in Latin America, Asia, Africa and so forth.
The US said it had to do this because of the USSR. The US idle class said they would not have foreign bases if not for the USSR. Yet the USSR collapses and - nothing changes. The US continues with it's military bases and personnel on over half the countries on earth, military spending stays near cold war levels, billions go to Colombia to put down worker movements there, or Israel to pay for the Palestinian occupation. In fact, the US doesn't have the USSR to check it's power any more so it becomes even more bold since it has unilateral power. Nothing could prove the premise of the cold war was a lie like the actions of the US elite post-Cold War, who are making war on the world. Now they say they are against "terrorism" which apparently means anyone who does not like US troops in their country (Osama Bin Laden), and doesn't like having the US idle class take over the land and natural resources and exporting the profits back to the US. It should be noted of course that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are old friends of the US elite who armed them during the 1980's, even though they had the same disregard for human life back then as they do now. If they didn't, the US ruling class would have never supported them.
How has this helped American workers? Not at all - blue collar jobs were shipped out for decades, and now white collar jobs are being shipped out. Mexicans and H1-Bs are imported for the jobs that are left. The US economy has been stagnating since the late 1960's (albeit a bump in the late 1990's) with a tepid growth of production while the rest of the world has been catching up - the EU's GDP rivaling the US's and Japan and the Asian tigers as well with China growing 8% a year or so. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 35 years ago. Hours worked per year by worker have increased in the three-digit level. The economy has been in a sandrap for three years.
I guess Safire is telling us we should stop and think about how "great" it was
What did the US do to help win the Cold War? First of all, it's always mentioned in US schools or corporate media how the Russians occupied Eastern Europe with it's armies. What's not mentioned is that the US occupied Western Europe with it's armies. Until 1956 in France, the communist party (PCF) was the most popular party in elections. In Italy the communist party was so popular the US had to result in subterfuge and election tampering to keep Italy from going communist. In fact Italy was the main focus of the Cold War starting with Truman, and as late as 1976 communists were winning over one third of the vote, and coming in The US said it had to do this because of the USSR. The US idle class said they would not have foreign bases if not for the USSR. Yet the USSR collapses and - nothing changes. The US continues with it's military bases and personnel on over half the countries on earth, military spending stays near cold war levels, billions go to Colombia to put down worker movements there, or Israel to pay for the Palestinian occupation. In fact, the US doesn't have the USSR to check it's power any more so it becomes even more bold since it has unilateral power. Nothing could prove the premise of the cold war was a lie like the actions of the US elite post-Cold War, who are making war on the world. Now they say they are against "terrorism" which apparently means anyone who does not like US troops in their country (Osama Bin Laden), and doesn't like having the US idle class take over the land and natural resources and exporting the profits back to the US. It should be noted of course that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are old friends of the US elite who armed them during the 1980's, even though they had the same disregard for human life back then as they do now. If they didn't, the US ruling class would have never supported them.
How has this helped American workers? Not at all - blue collar jobs were shipped out for decades, and now white collar jobs are being shipped out. Mexicans and H1-Bs are imported for the jobs that are left. The US economy has been stagnating since the late 1960's (albeit a bump in the late 1990's) with a tepid growth of production while the rest of the world has been catching up - the EU's GDP rivaling the US's and Japan and the Asian tigers as well with China growing 8% a year or so. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 35 years ago. Hours worked per year by worker have increased in the three-digit level. The economy has been in a sandrap for three years.
I guess Safire is telling us we should stop and think about how "great" it was that "we" "won" the Cold War. That before the decade of rest before the US has gone once again into a permanent warlike state like Orwell describes in 1984, this time a "war on terrorism". I'm sorry, but I look back at things such as Safire boss Nixon's support of the democratically elected government of Chile overthrow, replaced by a bloody tyrant, as a tragedy, not as something to celebrate. And 35 years later US workers are worse off, although the very small wealthy elite on the very top who are perhaps S
Except over the past three years, the employers of IT workers have been laying off and cutting wages left and right. IT unemployment over the past three years compared to the previous three years have been quite high. The owners of the means of production have blocked many people from "applying their skills" with their permission in order to try to generate profit for those owners. What avenue of pursuit would you suggest to those who just graduated with a computer science degree, when companies are not hiring?
Labor has not been a commodity in the US since 1865, labor-time is a commodity.
One of the most important attribute of a force's strength is not the force itself but fear of the force. It behooves the intelligence services to make people think they are all-powerful, all-seeing and all-knowing, but they are not. In reality, they are ideologically fanatical, to their detriment, and often staggeringly incompetent.
Lots of engineers I know who have not studied economics and have only a layperson's understanding of it, said that the high wages paid to people who wrote HTML during "the bubble", the amount of fiber optic cable laid, the millions paid for the rights to the name whatever.com, the high stock prices and so on and so forth "made no sense" and was not "economically correct", as if we had a normal working overall system and a few people had made a mistake. As if the system itself functioned fine by itself, and under the rules it operates by, but that things went wrong due to the greed/stupidity of some individuals. This requires a faith in the current economic system on the level of a religious devotion however - the people running the economy are human and make mistakes, sometimes large ones. And sometimes it's apparent they don't know what is going on, and even bring into question if they ever did know what's going on (like in the Depression). In the twentieth century, "capitalism" underwent two major changes in relations to the government - the Depression brought into the forefront the ideas of Keynes and changed the system. Slowdown in economic growth and stagflation brought forth the ideas of the monetarists like Milton Friedman in the 1970's - staglation was fixed (but the slowdown in economic growth didn't, it was very tepid from the early 1970's to mid 1990's compared to the decades beforehand).
Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, JM Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are chronologically some of the most important economic thinkers starting from the 18th century. Now that things are in the dumper, I've been reading more of the modern economists who have a more dismal than rosy view of things, like Paul Krugman and article writers for Monthly Review. The market crashed in early 2000 and things are still crappy, which doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of whatever we're doing now, nor of what we've been doing in the years previous to now.
Begin with the end, the endgame. The end of the endgame rather. This (the end of the endgame) the computer does play perfectly. It's skill keeps improving as the tables come out - three pieces left on the board, four pieces left on the board, five pieces, six pieces...and I see this continuing. So the computer is increasingly perfect in this respect.
Opening - the computer can't innovate yet (although it can be used to help in innovation), but it does have an up-to-date opening book, and will play as good an opening as has ever been played by the best players.
This leaves the middle game (which also expands somewhat to the end of the opening and beginning of the ending). In this the computer plays tactically better than the human.
So we have (end) endings, which are played perfectly, openings, which, discounting an innovative new opening, it plays as well as the best players up to today have ever played, and it is probably tactically better in the middle game. So where does that leave the chess grandmaster? Well, the old tried and true innovation in an opening can always work - it's helped human top players beat other human top players. Barring an innovative new opening, that leaves strategy, specifically, middle game strategy. There are some things computers have always been bad at such as gauging the importance of passed pawns, playing closed games and so forth. That is the method the computer can be beat with currently. I don't think it will last forever though, in the next few decades I think it will become more and more rare for a human to beat a computer, it being more likely that there will be a draw, or even a loss.
Linux was at version 0.x from 1991 until 1994 when version 1.0 was released. I remember people using Linux 0.x in 1994 though (and 1995, 1996), sometimes in a production capacity, although I'm sure caveats would have recommended against it. In fact, was Linux version 1.0 ready to be used in a production environment with no worries? Not really (I remember my 1.x server getting the "ping of death" and going down, among other things). Freenet was released in 1999. When it goes to version 1.x, that's when I'll expect a more production-oriented p2p network. But Ian does not feel it is ready, and I tend to agree. Linux was very complex, but it did have many other OS's to compare with, it was not totally groundbreaking and revolutionary (although it partly was). Freenet is forging a new path, thus takes more time.
David Bradley, I give you a three finger salute. Microsoft, I salute you as well, minus two fingers.
Theoretically, I could have downloaded 30 MUD clients, many wanting me to download PERL for Windows, or TCL/TK for Windows, or GNOME for Windows, or whatever, just to look at it, but I figured I would ask here. Have people here rallied around a Windows MUD client that is free as in beer and as in speech, that doesn't need a normal user to download Cygwin, TCL/TK, PERL and so forth for Windows, compile it and so forth, that is still actively updated? If so, I haven't seen it. That confirms my suspicion - that there is no good, free (as in beer and speech) MUD client for Windows, or at least one that you can download that doesn't require you to transmogrify your Windows box into a UNIX - I'm better off just using a UNIX then anyway.
You're assuming that anyone using Google or Freshmeat will find what they're looking for. I didn't. So now I'm asking as a last resort, before I possibly even begin writing one (that is beer and speech free) myself, if I have the spare time to do such a thing.
This survey shows everything that's wrong with the IT profession. Salary surveys should be done by IT workers for IT workers. What the hell is Sun doing in this survey? Sun is a member of the ITAA, an employer association which is an advocate of off-shoring IT; bringing in hundreds of thousands of people with H1-B and L-1 visas every year, despite the downturn; lobbies in Congress for laws to strip IT workers of overtime pay, or to screw over independent contractors, and so on and so forth. Considering this, it seems Sun has economic interests directly opposite of IT workers.
Sun's direct involvement means this survey is a crock of doo-doo. And organizations like SAGE, IEEE and so forth are in the same boat with a load of corporate sponsorship. Do the employers like Sun, IBM and Intel let the workers run their associations like the ITAA? Hell no. Do real professionals, like doctors and lawyers let other people run their own professional associations? No again. Yet companies who belong to associations doing PR and lobbying day and night to offshore jobs, bring in cheaper, foreign workers in droves, kill overtime provisions and do virtually everything to make us work longer hours for less seem to be perfectly accepted in cooperation with SAGE, the IEEE and so forth. This is because SAGE, IEEE and other such organizations are not professional associations like other professions have - no profession is so stupid to let that happen. That's why they go to Congress and have laws passed and done awway with that have the effect on lowering our pay and there is virtually no association on the other side that fights that. Despite the fact that every other group in the world, from lawyers to doctors to auto workers to retirees to everyone has people in Congress fighting for their economic interests.
Dump these phony, employer-controlled so-called professional associations like SAGE and the IEEE and look for some real ones like these:
You can choose between these two, depending on whether you think the solution to the problem is a union or a professional association.
Honestly, virtually all R&D in this country is financed by the government, usually by the military (often using defense contractors in the process). Internet? Yes. Aerospace technology for Boeing aircraft? R&D paid for by Pentagon defense contracts. Biotech, pharmaceuticals? Basic research funded by government. I've become interested in this topic recently...very little of R&D can not be traced back to the government. The one big private sector R&D success that towers above all others is Bell Labs - transistors, UNIX, C, you name it. But they were a government-granted monopoly! It's interesting because the economy really goes along on GDP growth, and that is mainly pushed by R&D leading to increased productivity. And the source of this is almost always the government, and usually through the military.
I remember when the Internet was mostly Universities (and some military sites). The Internet as I knew it died to a great extent then. It used to be where it seemed virtually everyone on the Internet was fairly intelligent, which is not the case now.
What the net will be like depends on you. If no one had ever written GPL'd software, or put up home pages, or mailing lists, or blogs, the Internet would look very different now. It is also affected by the larger society as well, and positive and negative developments in that effect it, and vice versa.
There really is no answer, as this sort of thing is a naturally occurring force "in this economy"...you probably meant by that your attitude of laxity as being caused by the recent crisis (recession), although in reality it is due to the economy as a whole, in all periods.
But anyhow, usually when I start a job I generally take on all work initially, so that people's first impression will be that I'm not a "slacker". Then as stuff starts piling up I start being selective. For example, currently two people in a department give me things to do - one always goes the extra mile before handing it off, gives me all the information beforehand and so forth, the other will escalate anything immediately, gives me crappy information and so forth. So what I do is the first guy I always do what he wants right away, and the second guy I blow off or tell him I'm busy or tell him to do the groundwork himself. I also prioritize what I do - usually what the boss asks for, and what will keep me from getting headaches get first priority. Also, if something looks like a lot of work, I tell them, and since fires come up I give a longer estimate than it would be.
The ITAA helped cancel overtime pay for IT workers so this has sure helped out in them paying less and more IT people being unemployed. Now you can have 2 overworked, 60 hours a week programmers instead of 3 40 hour a week programmers. Hooray for capitalism, it's doing such a wonderful job - that's why the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was thirty years ago. As hours per year has risen by a three digit number. And so forth - the long-term trend doesn't look good. The only solution really is to check out Washtech/CWA or the Progammers Guild and fight it out with the ITAA.
Where do the idle rich get their money? How do the Hilton sisters get so much money to go out on the town? Where did Andrew Luster get the money to go partying and then fly off to Mexico? Certainly not from working. That's not how the 43% of Forbes 400 richest Americans got on that list - they inherited their way *directly* onto it. Where does their money come from? They take it from workers creating wealth - workers go into work, transform raw materials into more valuable commodities through their labor, and the heir takes a portion of that and goes and spend it however they want. You hear a lot about how we go out and work so our tax dollars can be spent on people on welfare not working in the corporate media, but how often do they talk about how we work so profits taken from the wealth we create goes to feed some idle class heir who has never worked a day in his life? Rarely, if ever.
Keynes said that if the economy is in the dumper, one way to get the economy moving again is by the government spending money (that people with capital don't want to invest). FDR tried this during the Depression but there was enormous resistance by the wealthy to the socialistic programs - then WWII came about and government spending went to the then nascent armaments industry - which had less resistance from the wealthy, since it was coming directly from them. Since WWII, a lot of money has been pumped into the economy through the defense industry, and fat defense contracts have paid for everything from R&D that created the Internet, to technology used by Boeing from to build non-military jets. The government is pumping money into the economy by this method - the downside is it is a "trickle down" way of doing it, sort of like the current tax cuts skewed towards the wealthy, thus the idle rich will see a lot more money than workers.
It's the job of your ISP to secure themselves, and to secure their network, and to contact law enforcement if they desire to. You want to do secure transactions, and don't trust your transport, thus you were unaffected by this when you wanted to do your secure transaction. If you don't like how your ISP is botched up, switch to an ISP with security. I can see dropping a courtesy note to the ISP informing them of the problem, but I can't see calling up the FBI, NIPC because you are the customer of an ISP that was hacked. Don't you have any better things to do? I work at an ISP and are scanned all of the time. I don't send messages to CERT or the NIPC or FBI though...if I made a call to law enforcement every time we were port scanned I'd be on the phone all day. I'm really not that concerned that there are people who want to make a use of capital that is unauthorized by the capital owners and their flunkies, and I'm definitely concerned enough to waste my time calling every spook in the book to report this UNAUTHORIZED USE OF CAPITAL!!!! Geez, even the FBI blew you off, that's pretty funny... what do you want, a junior G-man badge? Your ISP doesn't really give a shit either from what is sounds like. Isn't this telling you something? You sound pretty anal-retentive to me. If Phish starts touring again, why don't you go down there and try to spot people toking...you can write it all down on a little pad and deposit it at your local precinct.
Many of you agree with me, and the important thing at this moment in time is not convincing other IT workers we are right. Not by any means, it's largely a waste of time. What we have to be doing now is finding each other, and organize together, then, collectively, we can present a message from IT workers to IT workers who have a different opinion, and more importantly, that larger body who is indifferent, one reason for their indifference being that they have not been presented with a point of view looking at the things that should be worried about and fought against (and things to fight for) collectively, as an organization, like the ITAA, high H1-B caps, section 1706 of IRS tax code, FLSA being destroyed and so on. The employers are organized and well-funded within the ITAA, and has had many successes, we should be organized to. They're smart enough to organize together, we should be smart and organize as well.
I don't think we're forced into any pre-built mode of organization - we should be building organizations as we see fit. Perhaps organize as doctors do in the AMA and lawyers in the ABA. Perhaps organize in unions like actors in SAG, or technical professionals do in the council of technical unions, CESO. CESO is very interesting, it started in the late 1960's out of a similar downturn to nowadays, except back then it was the aerospace bubble bursting, not the Internet one. Then there's the Programmers Guild, or groups primarily concentrated on lowering the H1-B cap. In fact, Programmers Guild meetings have seen a jump in attendance recently. I could mention IEEE and the like, but they're pretty pathetic, read around how their officers pulled the plug on H1-B measures at the behest of their corporate sponsors. One of the largest reasons this "profession" is in the mess it is is because unlike real professionals like doctors (AMA) and lawyers (ABA), there is no real professional association working for them (for actors I guess it would be SAG, which is a union - the important thing about unions is they do collective bargaining, e.g. wages are not bargained for on an individual basis. People always talk like that lowers wages, but the reverse is true if you look at any statistics - a heavily unionized industry even raises wages for non-unionized people in their industry). I should add I am in facor of more organization, period, and am unconcerned with the form it takes - in fact I'm glad we have all stripes of organizations competing for membership, from the somewhat conservative but effective Programmers Guild type organizations, through the Washtech/CWA type unions, on to the really radical IWW IU 560. You don't like unions? Join the Programmer's Guild. You want a union? Hook up with Washtech/CWA (or Cyberlodge/IAMAW). I support all of these, I just think we need more organized programmers/admin to combat the evil Intel/IBM/Microsoft organizations like the ITAA
Things are so crappy I really don't fucking want to hear from assholes full of hubris with their heads up their bosses ass talking about "merit" and how they're the world's greatest programmer. Fuck them. I'm working right now, but I am unhappy with what I am making, in fact, wages in IT
I am very suspicious of these so-called independent studies in terms of things where big money is being thrown around. I've just seen this scenario play out too many times before - and since I know many long time computer users who have RSI, including myself, it makes me doubly suspicious that it is just a coincidence that our wrists hurt, just like it's a coincidence that so many smokers die of lung cancer.
From the article:
Ah seven hours at a keyboard is "heavy computer use". Lucky none of us ever has to work seven hours a day at a keyboard! If you look over the past century or two, they said cigarette smoking was not harmful (and in front of Congress a few years ago, all the heads of tobacco companies swore under oath that they didn't believe smoking cigarettes was harmful). They said going down into the mines without safety equipment was not harmful, and that the miners all getting "black lung" was just a coincidence. And so on and so forth - when money's at stake, a full scale propaganda and legal war will be waged to show that there is no problem. Only when we have organizations like the Programmers Guild, IEEE, CWA and whatnot funding their own studies will we really start knowing what the real deal on RSI is. And also remember RSI is not just computer people, manufacturers deal with another form of RSI and they lobby, get bogus studies and so forth for that as well. Don't believe the hype!
This is like saying the younger you start smoking the more likely you are to have problems. One of the key words in RSI is R - repetitive, the more you do something the worse it gets.
What you've really done is formed a union or basis for a union, though that word has a specific bureaucratic meaning in the U.S. Some people here have said it might be bad form to just say screw you and leave. Perhaps, if you're all together on this, perhaps you should approach your employers and tell them what you're unhappy with and what you want - no unpaid overtime or oncall, and in terms of being treated like dirt, perhaps more control over your work and some type of grievance procedure. If you're so sick of it you feel you just want to leave, just demand exactly what you all want and don't give in, then they can't say you just walked out - they just didn't pay attention to your demands.
Some people have said the job market is bad. It wouldn't be if more people did this - 2 people working 60 hour weeks without overtime pay is the same as 3 people working 40 hour weeks - they've put someone out of work with their lack of value for their time. But in terms of that, if one of you walks out you are easily replaced - if all of you threaten to walk out, or strike or whatnot at once, then that becomes less so - all of a sudden you become on more equal footing with the company. It depends on the situation, but in many cases something like a strike is exactly equal - you are hurt by not getting a paycheck, but the company operating without an IT department, or with IT scabs who have no idea what they're doing.
Decades ago, when people were treated like garbage, had work dumped on them and were told to work 60 hour weeks and be oncall 24/7, they used to do what you're doing almost naturally. That's why things didn't go to garbage. This is supposed to be a white collar profession for pete's sake. Half the people here are telling you to consider only the things that go wrong, that you should live like a coolie. It's a disgusting mentality that's crept in - be a man, especially if you're under 35 and don't have kids. I can see people in bad spots (H1-Bs, big families with little savings) being fearful, but if you're a 23 year old programmer, being a patsy for some company owner who is squeezing you dry is insane.
There are also other tactics that have been mentioned here like a "slow down". There are all kind of tactics like this, it's unfortunate that the community is so weak that it is difficult to learn things like this. It's helpful to all of us when people in your situation can talk to other IT workers and get some good ideas and community support. The employers sure as hell do it with organizations like the ITAA, that's one of the reasons we're in the boat we're in. There are organizations like the Programmers Guild and Washtech and so forth.
Have some backbone! In solidarity there's strength. If you're all together you DEFINITELY have leverage over the company. That's one thing the company and people of a certain mindset want to convince you of - they are all-powerful, you are weak and scared. Bullshit. In Europe, they are putting through crap people don't like with pensions and guess what - 80% of the workers in the country are going on strike. You can be certain Faux News doesn't cover that story - it might give people ideas. And guess what - the government and people pushing for that junk back off. That's why they have education systems where they don't have to import 1 million H1-Bs because supposedly there's not enough educated people in the US to do the IT jobs. When those European workers walk out of their jobs en masse, all of a sudden the shoe's on the other foot - the rich, and the bosses and the owners, and the government can't do a damn thing, THEY'RE the ones shaking in their boots - not the workers. What are the bosses going to do, fire all of the workers in the country? The reality is that the people who do the work in the company are the ones with all of the power, the owners and managers have po
I also saw some place where you mentioned the should use round-robin DNS for the tracker host to "scale". This isn't a good solution though, as any network engineer who runs a large internet accessible website will tell you. Cachine of DNS records make round-robin not as effective as it needs to be. How would caching effect round-robin DNS in a negative way? Statistically, odds are that you will get an even distribution among sites that are caching - if 50% of cachers go to site 1 and 50% of cachers go to site 2, and everyone else flips around more, what's the problem? Seeing conspiracies everywhere, I've always suspected F5 and Cisco's LocalDirector division put out FUD on round-robin DNS to drive people to their products. There is sometimes a need for such accurate load balancing, but most of the time I saw big money paid for load balancing it was totally unnecessary.
It's abnormal, especially if you have a good network monitoring system, for software, either the kernel or running processes, to cause things to crash. In my experience, 99% (maybe 100%) of the time this is due to processes causing disk, memory, or processor (or network) to get filled up, eventually crashing the system. If you have a decent network monitoring system and enough administrator person-hours to deal with it, you will rarely have problems on this side.
My previous job was at a Fortune 100 company where I was part of a team that administered thousands of machines, and I would say it takes being in a large environment like that to realize that hardware crashes occur a lot more often then software crashes, and software crashes are usually avoidable. In fact, hardware crashes are usually avoidable as well - unimportant development boxes were usually the only things that crashed due to disks or processors or network cards failing. A critical heavy-duty production machine would often be running on a Sun Enterprise 6500 with a RAID disk array, multiple processors, multiple network cards, and besides all that a spare 6500 with the same setup just sitting there on a veritas cluster server, waiting for the other machine to fail so it could kick in. That's pretty good hardware redundancy, and there is no real "crashing", just replacement of disks that go bad for which RAID5 automatically kicked the data to spare disks and so forth
There is a common enemy for all hardware crashes in all environments, no matter how small or deep the pockets of the company - heat. Servers piled on top of one another, row on row, cabinet to cabinet, can generate a lot of heat. And no matter where I go the cooling always seems to be inadequate, even in places with deep pockets. If the room is hot, the cabinet is hotter, the machine is even hotter, and the processor is hotter still. I had a machine room once where the temperature kept building and building and building, until suddenly in the space of one or two days, over half of the hard drives in the room crapped out. If your machines are having hardware problems, go around and feel if it is hot anywhere in your cabinets, and wherever it is hot put a thermometer there. However much the temperature is, remember that the processor is hotter, and that it is probably even hotter if it is in a cabinet and you later close the cabinet.
Plenty of American scientists have been persecuted for political reasons, including Oppenheimer, as well as many lesser known ones. Despite being an American, I find it hypocritical that people find a desire to bash the USSR for things the US did as well. Like decry people killed in the early days of the USSR when the US wiped out most of the Indians here, as well as however many Africans were dumped overboard after being packed in like sardines on slave ships. Or remember persecuted scientists in the Soviet Union, when there were persecuted scientists in the United States. I think it would be better to focus on people in Kansas and wherever else in the US that want to burn biology books and replace them with the book of Genesis. Americans have been brainwashed by anti-Bolshevist propaganda since 1917, and had ugly incidents from their past like the Bonus March absent from the history books (except history books like A People's History of the United States), or even incidents of working class power and solidarity (like the San Francisco general strike). I'm not a Marxist-Leninist by any means, but this tendency among the right to try to revive the USSR from the dead to bash it again while trying to whitewash the American ruling classes history is lame, and I don't feel it serves working class Americans like myself.
Marx was a philosopher, a historian and an economist. As far as this is concerned, it is Marx the historian we are concerned with. Marx had an idea called historical materialism, which was very much like psychohistory - that there is a scientifically identifiable march of history. He saw society as moving through stages - slave states (like the Roman Empire, or the early US), feudalism (like medieval Europe), and capitalism (a new system borne not long before Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations). He saw workers moving from being slaves to serfs/peasants to proletariat wage slaves. He saw the next stage as socialism, the workers seizing the means of production and the state for their own use, and then the stage past socialism, communism, where the main dictum would be "from each according to ability, to each according to need", where there would be no nation-states any more and so forth.
Anyhow, I haven't read The Foundation trilogy for a while but it would be interesting to see what I get different from it now that I know some more about socialism than I did then. For example, when I first watched the movie Spartacus directed by Stanley Kubrick, I though it was a good movie by Kubrick about gladiators with Kirk Douglass and Laurence Olivier. But with a more full perspective, I can see what a radical movie, with radical ideas spoken by characters, that Dalton Trumbo wrote - I think the radicalness of it is missed by a lot of people since they're not waving red flags and so forth, they're just speaking English. Anyway it's interesting.
As a footnote, I'm aware of Marx's historical materialism but that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it. Marx's ideas started being put into practice in 1917 - and five years later, Mussolini marched on Rome, the beginnings of fascism in Europe. From the 1930's through 1950's, a lot of leftists - Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt school, asked themselves - what happened? Why didn't Marxism work the way we thought it would? This doesn't just mean what was wrong with the Soviet Union, but why didn't Marx predict a fascist movement coming into existence, largely as a counter-force against socialism (sort of similar to the Jesuits and counter-reformation springing into existence not that long after Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenburg church). This is