I've worked in a variety of IT departments over the past 15 years, and have heard stories about some of the more infamous local ones. I'd say the problems are usually at the top.
I worked for a Fortune 100 financial company about a decade ago which had all kinds of problems. Management and engineering would focus like a laser point in on certain regulations for machines in the giant server room, like that the fiber optic cable be laid out properly, and would flip out if we broke those regulations. Which is fine - but then they'd ignore the fact that the machine room was a bit over room temperature, meaning the surface of CPUs etc. was even hotter, and that this is what was probably causing a significant amount of the hardware failures. Meanwhile they're running around, testing the fiber cables throughput, and making sure they are laid properly, which in the big picture was not much of a problem. I should also point out things were much more hierarchical than in traditional IT departments, many of the engineering staff (with some exceptions) thought it was beneath them to even talk with lower level administrators outside of official channels, or unless there was some real emergency. I brought up the heat of the machine rooms a few times, but since I was relatively low level to the top IT management and engineering heads, I was ignored. It was a strange place in some ways and I didn't want to rock the boat much - I figured, why bother? I mentioned it a few times and didn't have much sway anyhow. To help morale, they had a round of layoffs despite enormous profits, and so after some weeks of worrying about keeping our jobs (and making us think of working elsewhere and pulling our minds from long-term thinking of the infrastructure), we had the workload of our laid off colleagues dumped on us. At one point we had a general meeting in an auditorium and senior IT and especially non-IT management balled us out about all the crashes and instability. Why we were brought in is beyond me - I dealt with crashes, and followed the procedure book to build new servers, I had no input into how to prevent crashes, and my suggestions about lowering the machine room temperature were ignored. So we were yelled at for things we had no authority to have control of, not something uncommon in crappy workplaces.
I'm thinking of women and the workplace, and somewhat tangentially, I went on an interview at Condenet, which handled magazines like Vogue, Brides, Mademoiselle, Allure, Glamour etc. The waiting room for the interview was probably the frilliest, most decorated waiting rooms I've ever been in. The room was filled with beautiful, blonde, well-dressed southern belles and girls from God knows where, also waiting for interviews. I talked to the girl next to me and she said she was interviewing to work at Vogue, where she had always dreamed of working, a Devil-Wears-Prada wannabe. I just wanted to schlep equipment around for whoever, as long as they paid me more than what I was getting at the time. I go into the interview and talk to a well-coifed, middle-aged woman who had never been on the Internet (this was 1997 or so - although many people were on the net by then), and who had absolutely no clue as to what my abilities were other than that I had not yet gotten all the credits for my Bachelors, i.e. did not have a college degree. I guess she deemed I didn't fit into their corporate culture (which I'm sure I didn't) and didn't get a second call. I think this all points to a problem though. Whether or not I could have done a good job, and in a technical sense I'm sure I could have as I performed well at subsequent more difficult jobs, I think I was deserving of talking to an IT person who could actually calibrate my skills. Why bring people in to talk only to non-technical HR people who are shocked you haven't completed your BA (for a then $60,000 a year position), something they could see on your resume or find out over the phone. What kind of people were they ultimately hiring? It's not like the best DBA
Protests have been happening in Saudi Arabia, although I would barely know watching the corporate media in the US. In Qatif, the police open fired on the demonstrators - they have been in fact, slaughtering people there continually. The Saudi police have killed organizers of protests like Abdul-Ahad. Where are the calls for sanctions on Saudi Arabia in the West?
Politicians keep saying there is a threat from radical Islam. Of course, Osama bin Laden, the mujahideen and nascent al Qaeda and Taliban were radical Islamists back when the USA was backing them to overthrow the secular Afghani government. Even before the Russians got involved. Israel complains about Hamas, but Israel used to secretly fund Hamas, as a bulwark against the PLO. And what about support for Saudi Arabia, probably more out there than Iran in terms of Islamic fundamentalism?
If we look at history over the years, up to this very day without change, the west from the 1970s has always backed fundamentalist Islamists, and fought to overthrow secular regimes, of the Nasserite type - secular, with pan-Arab aspirations, talk of sovereignty from western powers and a vaguely socialist platforms, at least back when the Warsaw Pact was around. What governments has the west become involved since 9/11? Iraq, Libya and now Syria - all secular countries. Iraq has gone from a secular country, to one that with US troops on the ground has had its constitution changed to say its Islamic.
The truth is that people like Osama bin Laden were radical Islamists who the US built up and created, and never cared about his terrorists acts against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. They in fact, funded them - flag-wavers like Sylvester Stallone made movies lionizing the Islamic radicals. Secular, pan-Arab followers of Nasser like Qadaffi, Saddam Hussein etc. who were concerned with sovereignty have been the main targets and enemies. We can see what the US has done in Afghanistan to secular regimes, in Iraq which is now Islamic according to its constitution etc. The Saudi government is built up. Yet we are told we have to fear the radical Islamists, although that has been who the US has been supporting up to this day against the secular rulers who want sovereignty.
In my mind, the last real Microsoft innovations that happened were in the year period between late 1995 and early 1996. That is when Windows 95 came out and Windows NT 4.0. Windows 95 had a lot of things going for it - it had Internet capability included, so people didn't have to go through a rigmarole with Hyperterminal to download Trumpet Winsock from somewhere via X-modem. It had a nice, Mac-like GUI. It was nice - they even had Mac-like touches, like hiring Brian Eno to do the sound for when the computer started, a launch campaign with a Rolling Stones sound etc. Insofar as NT 4.0 - it was the first Windows server which wasn't total garbage. I had to administer a NT 3.51 server for a while, to my chagrin. 4.0 wasn't great, but it wasn't complete garbage like previous efforts. NT 4.0 also introduced the Terminal Services Client, later called Remote Desktop.
SQL Server began coming out before any of this. I don't really like Exchange Server or Outlook, but they came out in 1996 and 1997 respectively. What has Microsoft really come out with since then? They completely missed the boat on smartphones and tablets - they are less than 1% market share for both markets. I just finished reading Job's biography - he mentions that Microsoft had been working on tablets forever. He blames their focus on the stylus, and compatibility with the existing Microsoft monopoly, I mean framework, as the drawbacks to it. Microsoft just seems to be unable to anything new. They started by porting an existing product, BASIC. Then they ripped of CP/M - some say in a straight pirate-like fashion. Then they rip off Apple's Mac interface (which Apple themselves ripped off from Xerox). Microsoft is great at copying others ideas and doing all the back end, support, marketing, licensing business stuff, they are not so great at inventing stuff. A then much smaller company like Apple was able to eat their lunch in the tablet and smartphone space. Google bought Android, and helped it grow to where it now owns smartphones, and is doing respectably on tablets, at least more respectably than Microsoft.
Microsoft has just been resting on its monopoly and sitting on its laurels. They put out garbage that technicians hate to use, but are sometimes forced to. With Windows 95, I used to get a CD where I could reinstall Windows if I wanted. Then they started that horrible OEM recover CD, where you couldn't just fresh install Windows like you wanted to - like you can with a CD of Linux or FreeBSD or whatnot. I mean, they took a step backwards, to protect themselves from piracy - a concern people making Debian CD's have no concern about. Other people are out innovating, they are at work crippling your ability to do things you were able to do with previous installations of Windows.
I worked at a Fortune 100 company in a large IT department in a major coastal city. We had some choice in where we worked. I first worked in a group alongside a black guy, who told me he worked in his group because he didn't get along with someone in another group, he was vague about who. I then went to work for that group. I got along with my manager, but he had it in for this black guy from the other group. In fact I would socialize with the manager and co-workers. At the bar, he would sometimes speak disparagingly on Arabs, Muslims, blacks, Mexicans and the like. When there were layoffs, the black guy was let go. He didn't have direct influence over the group, but having one of the managers there against you was certainly not a help. There didn't seem to be a logical reason for the antipathy either. Honestly, I still get along with this former manager, although I don't agree with his thinking in this respect.
I worked at another company, Fortune 1000. I worked alongside a black co-worker, with whom I had a common manager - white, from the Midwest, late 20s. Again, the manager had a lot of antipathy and made life hard for this co-worker, for no reason I could see. I think it's difficult to work in conditions when your manager is against you and is waiting to jump on any error you make (it happened to me once when a new manager wanted to push me out and get his friend in my position, which is a long story itself). Eventually my co-worker left, or was pushed out, or whatever - the co-worker never wanted to talk about it when I spoke with him after.
So from my experience, the racism is usually not from co-workers, or from upper management and HR, who would probably be happy with some functional, if token, black faces. It's usually from lower management types, who in my experience are often a bundle of neuroses and incompetence to begin with.
On another topic, to quote George Jefferson, with enough green you can always get people to forget the black. When the dot-com boom happened years ago, money flowed into the web properties of Vibe magazine, UBO, BET, Black Planet etc. Plenty of companies were interested in reaching the "urban" market. There is even cross-over - plenty of white teens listen to not only Eminem, but black hip-hop artists. I just read a piece in Adweek on how Android had captured the African-American demographic in the US. Of course, this still is a ghettoization of sorts - it really opens up when blacks get venture capital for new chip designs, or software products or the like, not just web and social media properties geared toward the urban market.
Hamas is a political party that was elected by the people of Gaza to represent them. It is also an organization that was secretly funded by Israel (and thus indirectly by the U.S.) for many years, as a bulwark against the PLO. Of course, the PLO was called terrorist as well. It seems like every organization which represents Palestinian people becomes a "terrorist organization" in the eyes of some.
You say Palestine should not enter UNESCO because Hamas is in the Gazan government, and Hamas "supports suicide bombers". Well the Israeli government has Members of the Knesset such as Michael Ben-Ari, who is in the Jewish National Front political party, which supports people like Baruch Goldstein, who walked into a mosque in 1994 and killed 29 people. And which also has supported, and still supports, violent acts of this type. So why isn't Israel thrown out of the UN, if the JNF is part of the government, like Hamas is in Palestine?
And who but the Israeli army rappelled onto boats in international waters carrying food to a besieged Gaza, and began gunning down the ship passengers? Then the army shows pictures of mop handles and knives from the kitchen and says they were attacked. Who are the kill-crazy terrorists? MIT professor, and father of so much of computer language theory Noam Chomsky was in Zionist youth, lived on a kibbutz when he was young, and still says he is a supporter of Israel (if not all its policies) - the Zionists have become so crazy, even he is turned away at the Israeli border. Who are the extremists here? The Israeli PM just went on the news and announced he s building more settlements in the West Bank.
I don't deny Israel has the high ground militarily, but please spare us this phony moral outrage. Not when they're fresh from invading Lebanon for the second time, besieging Gaza and killing people on food aid flotillas, sending government money to build more settlements etc. Aside from Zionist Jews, fundamentalist Christians, and people of the John Bolton mindset, no one supports the misery and slow annihilation the Israelis are performing on the Palestinians.
The answer depends on the size of a company. If you are at a small, cash-strapped company, where more possible server downtime is an OK risk because the company really doesn't have any money, then CentOS may be the best route to take from a business standpoint.
We can get a rough idea of the size of your company from what you said. You said they can afford Red Hat, which would tend it toward a larger company. The company also has a CIO, which also tends it toward the larger. That you have input into the discussion of Red Hat or CentOS, and the CIO is involved in this kind of discussion, and he goes for free over supported as he isn't high on support would be something that would show you are probably not at the largest company.
Shit rolls downhill. There is a tendency of the higher-ups to not want to pay for support, not want to pay for new machines and software updates and the like. Why have 100% patched, supported software and hardware when they can have you running around all weekend trying to fix things and plug leaks when this old, unsupported infrastructure goes down. And then that it went down is your fault - you're supposed to keep the systems running and they did not run.
A CEO or CFO pushing against a CIO and saying lets not buy supported OS software is normal. A CIO should be pushing back and saying, except in extenuating circumstances, every server, every server OS, and certain types of software (Oracle or whatever) running on those servers need to have support. A CIO should be looking out for his infrastructure, his team etc. Weak, incompetent CIOs are the ones who never argue with the CEO and upper management - they say yes to everything top management says, and then run to their team in a panic telling everyone they have to implement the top managements crazy demands. Competent, smart CIOs have a little more backbone, and know when to say yes and when to say no. I have been at many companies over the years, and honestly, the entire company is much better served by a competent CIO who says no to the CEO once in a while, then a weak, incompetent CIO who says yes to the CEO for everything, even when he can't deliver.
A CIO who says something like yours did about OS support is either weak or stupid, or both. Honestly I'd polish my resume, spend more time professionally networking, start going on interviews, and seeing if I could find somewhere better. A CIO who says we just don't have the budget or there's extenuating circumstances or whatever for no OS support might be understandable. What he said is a sign of him/her being weak and incompetent, and you can probably do better. It's also a potential sign of bad times for the company - if your CIO is weak, who else in top/middle management is weak? Why does the CEO allow a weak CIO?
Congratulations to them, they've discovered something Karl Marx talked about when he published Capital in 1867.
What this means is a question of social relations. What it could mean is less working hours for everyone, more vacation time, more time for studying and learning, more time for out-there R&D projects, all the while with ever-increasing wealth. But that would be if social relations were in one parameter. Currently it means mass unemployment, chronic debt crises, and IP patent lawsuits. It means bust and boom cycles where in the late 1990s, Silicon Valley pulled in any kid with a high school diploma interested in IT and had them working 60-70-80 hours for years, before casting them off into long-term unemployment.
Ever-increasing productivity could be something people looked forward to, instead of being something that was a real threat to putting food on their table, as the Luddites who smashed mechanized looms realized. That better productivity winds up harming the majority of people is a contradiction within the current system of production we live under. At some point, these contradictions become too great and the system breaks down, then it needs some major reconfiguring. We already see one thought of how this will be done in the US, with all this talk about privatizing Social Security and privatizing education into charter schools. Of course, there's little discussion of why the US spends so much on military bases in Cuba, or Italy, or Kyrgyzstan. Or why it needs 11 aircraft carriers, when there are only 20 aircraft carriers in the world, and only two countries with more than 1 (Spain and Italy). Aside from minor cuts that's not even a question, it's easier politically to cut money to the majority of old Americans or young Americans than the military empire.
The Time headline says "Muammar Gaddafi Is Dead, Says Libya PM; Tripoli Celebrates". If you read Pravda headlines from the 1980s, 1970s etc., the commissars publishing it would have been ashamed to put a headline like this. I guess not in the US though. It's kind of like that strange 1990 New York Times headline when the FSLN lost in Nicaragua, "Americans United in Joy, But Divided Over Policy." The Reuters headline about this is "Libya's Gaddafi caught hiding like a 'rat'". Headlines like that make me long for the subtlety of Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer.
If Tripoli was to be so celebratory over this, why did it take so long for the rebels to take Tripoli? Why was the bombing of the US, UK, France and so forth needed?
We always hear in the news about how Muslim fanatics are who we should be scared of, but it seems that it's always those Arabs who came to power on secular, pan-Arab nationalist, sort of leftish rhetoric (Mossadegh, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi) who industrialized western countries intervene in to overthrow their governments. We can see the results - Mossadegh was replaced eventually by Islamicized Iran, Iraq went from a secular government to a much more Islamicized one (in its constitution, ruling political parties etc.) under US domination, and now another secular Arab government has fallen at the hands of western intervention and some local myrmidons. Meanwhile the most Islamicized Arab countries like Saudi Arabia are completely protected and supported by the west - including the US military and intelligence helping to brutally put down Arab Spring protests against the dictatorship there, events which were little reported in the corporate press. Even parties like Hamas were originally encouraged and secretly funded by Israel. And of course, Osama bin Laden was financed and armed by the US in the 1970s. Anyone in the Arab world can see how the western countries see their main enemy as Arab secular nationalists. Yet the corporate media in these western countries tries to create fear of the Islamic fundamentalists that these same western countries have worked to develop. The same mass of people who swallow that would easily swallow that "Muammar Gaddafi Is Dead, Says Libya PM; Tripoli Celebrates" and "Libya's Gaddafi caught hiding like a 'rat'" are headlines coming from objective, equanimous news organizations.
I went to Occupy Wall Street in New York, in Liberty Plaza on Thursday night.
You hear in the news media about how the park is not clean. I stood and watched the General Assembly go on for some time - while I was standing there, people with brooms came by every 15 minutes or so. The OWS people are almost overdoing the cleaning in response to the criticism, I've never seen more sweeping and cleaning than I did in the park. So if you hear on Fox News that OWS is not cleaning up after itself - it is just not true. I've never seen a place cleaned so frequently.
When I was there, most of the people were young people - in their late teens and twenties. They were winding down for the night so they were relaxing more. On one end of the park musicians were playing drums and other instruments, and the young people were dancing. Past them were a lot of sleeping bags. Past that people were being fed by a kitchen. They have a media center being run by a portable generator I believe. Past that is the general assembly where they make decisions. There is no loudspeaker so people repeat what the speaker says for those too far away - kind of like in the Life of Brian, but hopefully with more faithful repetition.
I've followed the internal political discussions about the effectiveness of these kinds of things for a long time. One point is it's a demonstration, in the sense of an example. Food is handed out freely, decisions are made through direct democracy in a general assembly, there's a DIY esthetic for everything, in a spirit of cooperation. So a community is created in OWS that is an antithesis to say the Wall Street financial companies - which are in buildings surrounded by semi-conspicuous barriers, behind which are tall office buildings whose entrances have security cameras, security guards and locked security gates, and up the elevator you have people wearing suits (or as fashions change, business casual) in a high-pressure, competitive, cutthroat hierarchy, run for profit. It's creating the new society in the shell of the old, as it's sometimes put
Then there's the other political considerations. Obviously this is inspired by the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt and the Arab spring on one level, and perhaps in some dialectical way the Tea Party as well. In the US in the 1930s there were student organizations, labor organizations, labor political parties and parties courting labor for people to get involved in. Nowadays less than 7% of private workers in the US are in a union. But things have changed in the US as well - in the 1930s Detroit going on strike would be shutting down America's economic engine - nowadays if Detroit went on strike, it would be much more minor of a ripple in the national economy. The UAW threatening to go on strike is much less threatening to the powers that be.
One of the biggest laughs is OWS has not come out with a clear program for the ordinary 99% of us not born with a silver spoon in our mouths, to get us into a better position. Well who out there actually is doing that? The corporate media is completely controlled by billionaires, Congressmen collectively get billions of dollars in campaign contributions, Bill Gates and others are trying to privatize all schools into charter schools. These rich heirs control the media, the government, increasingly the schools, and even churches really. Most importantly of all they control enough capital to effectively control all capital, they control who works, who doesn't, and the offices we go into every day, where our labor is kicked up to these heirs in one form or another by way of a quarterly dividend check. And then the real kicker is these people also effectively control or co-opt the organizations made to check their power - labor-oriented political parties and labor unions. That's why I feel that the OWS general assembly gives voice to my concerns in a way that all the other controlled and coopted organizations out there do not. People generally don't think about these things, but as the unemployment rate drags on at 9%, as the housing market stays sluggish and so on, more people dwell on these things.
Some of my professors use Blackboard for various things - putting out assignments, receiving assignments, putting up Powerpoints of lectures and so forth.
The problem with all of this talk is, what are the motivations to put more things online? I work in IT and I am suspicious. All I see is the US government trying to kill off Pell Grants and student loans, schools cutting library and computer lab hours, raising tuition and the like. "Pay us the same, but now you work from home and do some lessons we drew up online" doesn't sound like anything I'm interested in. If I wanted to do that, I could have just bought all the college textbooks and read them, without going for class or going for a Bachelors.
Professors already put stuff up on Blackboard. Every semester, I'm getting about 32 hours of instruction in each course (although some classes, like science classes with lecture and lab are more hours). Topics being covered in those 32 hours are things such as : databases, theory of computation (P/NP, Turing Machines etc.), data structures and algorithms, as well as courses in languages such as C++ and Java. My data structures and algorithm professor knew his stuff cold, explained it well, and I would have loved to have had 64, or 96 hours of lecture by him. The same with the intermediate C++ professor, who did some algorithm work as well.
This is a time of austerity, budget cuts, and the like. And why is that? People talk about the economy like it's not a thing of human design but something more like the weather, an uncontrollable thing, which on the small micro level it is to an extent, but not on the large macro level - but that's another topic. I view any discussion of this type of thing extra suspicious at these times.
They do not get to vote in the Israeli elections, but, then again, neither do the residents of South Dakota
South Dakota does not have Israeli troops inside of its northern, southern, western, and eastern border, not to mention military bases, roadblocks etc. The West Bank is part of Israel - why are not only Israeli troops, but massive settlements there otherwise? Yet the Arabs in this part of Israel can not vote. Yet the Jews can - even ones who just arrived from Russia and waltz into a government-subsidised West Bank settlement. The Zionists do this, then have the gall to trumpet about how they're a democracy.
My "dispute" is calling Israel a democracy. "Arabs in the west bank are not Israeli citizens, they're a people who live in disputed territories"
Yes, that's the point, Arabs in the west bank do not get to vote or have Israeli citizenship. Ergo, Israel is not a democracy.
If Gaza is not Israel, then why did Israel have commandos with machine guns rappel onto a flotilla boat bringing food to people in Gaza?
As far as the "area under their control", the area in the case of the flotilla raid was international waters. You know, international waters, like where the USS Liberty was when Israel killed 34 of its crew.
It's funny how people sailing on a ship with food in international waters are the ones "agressively awaiting to attack any Israely they see", while the commandos rappelling onto the boat with machine guns (the "any Israelys (sic) they see" I guess) are not the aggressive ones. The Israeli commandos were armed with machine guns, the flotilla passengers were armed with nothing but pieces of wood from the mast and knives they grabbed from the kitchen.
"Israel has strong ties by both Europe and western culture, is run by a real democracy supporting free speech..."
Wow it's great Israel is a democracy. Do the Arabs in the West Bank get to vote in elections?
It's some democracy you have there when only Jews and a few token Arabs in the north can vote. Or where you have to, as of 2010, swear to a loyalty oath in order to vote - unless you're a Jew. You're not that bright spouting this democracy nonsense here - this is not the mass media where that stuff is spouted without question, with the other commissars nodding their head, this is a discussion forum on which you can be challenged.
Hopefully if the other CERN scientists visit Israel by ship, Israel won't have commandos rappel onto the boat and begin machine-gunning the passengers.
South Korea is the free Korea. You know it is free because it has military bases of a foreign nation (the US) which is blessed by God scattered all over it. This law is good because it protects South Korea from the evil North Korea, whose military bases are only staffed by Koreans - they have no foreign military bases protecting their freedom. If South Koreans can go online and criticize the government without entering their national ID number, this might hurt freedom. Some South Korean freedom-haters tried to have elections in 1980. Thankfully, the military government went in and massacred all of these freedom-hating communists. Thankfully, US Ambassador Gleysteen and General Wickham authorized martial law in Gwangju after the massacre, for humanitarian reasons as they put it back then. I know North Korea is the evil Korea and South Korea is the great, freedom loving Korea, with US troops backing it. In fact five years ago, soldiers from the US air base were making friends with the local people in Gwangju. Keep showing those pictures on US TV of North Korean tanks and Kim Jong-Il whenever North Korea is mentioned, propaganda in the GDR was a little more subtle.
Less than 7% of private workers in the US are unionized, yet you see it as a "cartel". Verizon has a monopoly on land lines in the North East and mid-Atlantic (with AT&T and Qwest covering 99% of the rest of the country), yet you don't see that as a cartel. Verizon, Sprint and AT&Tmobile are three companies who also control over 99% of US wireless, yet you don't see them as a cartel. The wealthiest 1% of the country, most of whom inherited all of their wealth, owns the majority of bonds, over 40% of stocks and so forth - but they're not a cartel.
The average, working, wealth-producing person is not cartelized at all in the US. The rich parasite heirs who you worship are who rules the US. One of the reasons the US economy has had sluggish growth for decades, while the second largest economy in the world, China's, has been growing at 10% a year for 30 years. Not much will change in that respect in the US - the mass of boot-lickers like you, along with the fundamentalist crazies, will succeed in holding the US down as the rest of the world passes it by...
This is the worst the Verizon strike-busters could come up with? It perplexes me how many news stories I've read about how "one union picketer even went as far as to instruct his young daughter to stand in front of a Verizon truck to illegally block it". If you watch the video, HE stands in front of the moving truck, which stops. Then she walks over of her own accord. Then the instruction part comes in, he tells her to stand in front of the stopped truck alongside the cameraman who is obviously standing there as well in front of the stopped truck. She holds up her sign, the cameraman films. Then he goes over and yells at the scab who took his job for less than a minute. As happens every time, they then let the trucks go through.
Illegal is a great word. It is illegal to murder and rape. It is also illegal for me to loan one of my DVDs to a friend so that he can copy it to his computer. It is illegal to smoke marijuana. In virtually all industrialized countries but this one, what is illegal is for scabs to replace striking workers. In the good old, God-fearing, Libya-bombing, Iraq-bombing, Afghanistan-bombing USA though, it is illegal for workers to delay scabs from taking their jobs.
Verizon is one of the largest examples of a company which does nothing but profit from its monopolies. It spends tons of money on state and federal lobbying, and has a lock on a portion of wireless wavelength, and an almost total and complete lock on the local loop. The majority of its stock is held by the very wealthiest of Americans (over 40% is held by the wealthiest 1%, and the 51% mark is only slightly larger), and the majority of those people inherited virtually all of their wealth. The majority of the majority owners are heirs who sit on their asses and expropriate dividend checks from not their government-lobbied, government-granted near-monopolies, but the people in this video, the people out there doing all the work and creating all the wealth for the company.
I know the USA is a piece of garbage, ruled by these rich parasite heirs, aside from their religious wacko pals and other assorted asocial Tea Party nuts, so there's not much use getting over-exerted about any of this. The words criminal and illegal really mean nothing here. Before World War I, for workers to form a union in the USA was itself a criminal act. It was illegal. As I said, in other countries, these scabs replacing striking workers is illegal. In the good old USA workers replacing the scabs taking their jobs is illegal. Just like breaking DRM and all the other nonsense. We are all slaves to these rich parasite heirs trying to extract money from their monopolies and the wage slaves they have working for them. It's naturally American to be filled with vitriol and hatred for the average working class Joe standing with his union brothers to try and earn a living wage. Following authority, passively licking the boots of the lazy rich heirs who own the majority of Verizon stock, with Almighty God watching over all is the natural order of things. The reward will be in the "next life".
(and WRT to who references to who owns stocks, is an heir and such, you can consult sources like the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, Forbes 400 richest list and other sources).
I've been working in IT for over 15 years...I have seen blacks in the companies I work at treated unfairly time and time again. The sad truth is the blacks who do well at companies are forced to act a certain way - all the successful ones I know are generally more friendly and jovial than the average white worker, and if some racist crank in some other part of the company says something offbeat about them, they just laugh it off. I see the same situation over and over. The racist crank is usually a middle-aged white guy, whose bonafides the young but educated and talented troops question, but were hired into the startup by the young top management because I guess they (or VC) wants what looks like adult supervision around, which I guess is middle-aged white guys who are perceived to be incompetent. This is probably not helped by the bizarre (often sexually-tinged) racist statements or assumptions you hear through the grapevine that they made - not just about the black and non-white employees, but other non-whites.
Another case I've seen more than once is a black co-worker in my IT group, and a young (late 20s, 30s) white junior manager over us, or perhaps the white junior manager is in a parallel group but has some sway on our group. Whatever the black teammate does, the white manager just seems to have it in for them for no reason. One of these managers I was myself friends with, he had no problems whatsoever going into vivid detail about how he hated Muslims. He also really disliked the black guy in my group, but never really gave a reason why, even when I subtly asked him why he didn't when we were alone drinking a beer at a bar. I didn't really get a real answer. Any IT worker who wants to go into management I have some suspicion of where there head is at anyhow.
I've seen other scenarios where I just didn't know, like someone passed over for promotion at a certain point. What factors went into this? I DON'T count this as definite racism as I don't know what factors went into the decisions, and they may have been completely legitimate. The point is, things work on open and hidden levels, and maybe even unconscious levels. In other words, my point with promotions is, there may be cases of race being a factor that I have not listed, as I don't know whether or not they were.
These are scenarios I saw myself where the racism was fairly obvious. But people are smart nowadays to not be too obvious. It makes me think of what Reagan and Bush aide Lee Atwater said about campaigning politically on race:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it."
This is what happens. The middle-aged incompetent white managers brought into the startups were dumb enough to say racist things out loud. The junior white managers who were on the black guys case for no reason are more subtle, even if one will privately talk about how he hates Muslims (not mentioning blacks though). Then there's people passed over for promotion, where I don't even know what factors went into them - maybe it is a legitimate reason. Things get more and more abstract.
When I was a teenager, there were local black kids interested in computers and computer networks who were as talented and some even more talented than the average white kids who did. While many of their white counterparts easily climbed up the ladder of things, through the educational institutions and then the corporate institutions, of course never having any trouble with local police institutions in the meantime, this just didn't seem to happen for them.
People come home from work, sit down exhausted and turn on sitcoms. Movie produce
Development and administration at Fortune 100 companies in Manhattan is different than any other place I encountered, including other large companies. There is a lot of message-oriented middleware to patch together different systems.
You'd see a lot of strange stuff - a batch job printing from an IBM mainframe would be routed to the Unix print server, and be sent off to a junky old printer in some foreign country. Not always easy to debug when there is a problem.
Where I was, there were a ton of these old programs written in FORTRAN, COBOL and whatnot which had had business logic put in them for decades sitting on these modern IBM mainframes. Some of the business logic within it was probably lost long ago, it all just "worked", with a lot of the output routed to more modern equipment and technology. I guess they figure if anything ever goes wrong, they have almost unlimited money to throw at the problem so they don't worry about it.
You also have things happen. A business group has their developers write some program, it goes production on a machine or two, and then for whatever reason it generates a lot of money. Suddenly you have millions, sometimes even billions of dollars going over one production machine in a day. Everything happens so fast that it was never planned out to be scalable, and the main developer is too busy tweaking the program to make it make more money than to be scalable etc. If you're lucky, its market is closed during the week and you get to work on adding in additional levels of redundancy to the machine which suddenly has billions flowing through it every day. Despite the lack of planning, you better bet people will be flipping out if the machine goes down during the day, and the traders hear that their trades aren't going through due to "computer problems".
At the Fortune 100 financial I was at, Windows was considered a joke. Even the local head of the Windows team admitted that the Unix side was where things were really happening. It was just more flexible, focused on high availability and so on. With Linux coming in so much on the Unix side, that flexibility has only increased. I'm sure whatever RHEL or SUSE edition being run on most servers is so heavily modified internally by the various companies internal engineering teams, that it doesn't look like a RHEL or SUSE anyone here has ever seen. And RHEL and SUSE bend over backwards to get the business - which can be on tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of machines around the world.
The report gives freedom points for various things to determine openness. But what they consider open is up to debate. Android gets 4 points for having a mostly Apache license, which the report considers the "most open". Linux only gets 2 openness points because it is released under the GPL, and the report considers the GPL to only be worthy of half of the points that the Apache license deserves. This methodology is of course, debatable.
I worked for a Fortune 100 financial company in Manhattan. Some of the nastiest people I ever worked with were there. I also never worked anywhere where the company made more clear to me that I was a disposable cog. Not that that isn't the case elsewhere, but management usually tries to at least conceal it. I worked 60 hours a week, including weekends, and I was on the low end compared to others who were working to move up in the hierarchy.
There was a limited and fixed bonus pool, so if you got less money, others got more. I'm sure this was a plan by management - the firm was so wealthy, they felt it better their workers be divided against one another than working together. They did this in a variety of ways - staff versus contractors, contractor firm versus rival contractor firm and so forth. This encouraged people trying to rip one another apart during weekly meetings, code reviews and the like.
The office politics can be strange too. I used to be on conference calls with a programmer with a huge ego, and who people deferred to because the program suite he wrote was important for the firm. The program was shoddy though, it had massive memory leaks and the like. But he and the team under him were able to throw it together quickly and the business people were happy with him so he was a golden boy. It wouldn't have been so bad if he wasn't always denigrating everyone else's work with a holier-than-thou attitude. I wasn't in a position to say anything though. Lots of stuff like this happens. A lot.
It was not all bad. It was a large environment. Stuff I would have done maybe once a year at a smaller company I was doing every day there. I was surrounded by dozens of people who were sharp and knew what they were doing. There was a feeling of camaraderie among some of us. It is hard to explain the change in quality due to the sheer size of the company, with its ability to spend massively if needed.
One thing I will say - unless you are there to work 24/7/365 and try to make it to be one of these "highest paid programmers", there is no reason to be there. Some of my co-workers joined straight of college, which seemed dumb to me. Anyone who takes a job for less than six figures is a fool - if you don't have the skills to make at least $100k, there is no reason to work there. It is not the place to come in at a low level and hang around.
To repeat a point - anyone who takes a job on Wall Street right out of college is a fool. They recruit heavily on campuses for the same reason Microsoft and Intel and Electronic Arts do: so they can take advantage of suckers with no work experience who don't know any better. Thankfully I didn't make this mistake. I was able to put everything I saw there into perspective. Going from college straight to Wall Street as a programmer is a dumb move for most people.
I think most project managers are a waste as well. In a small company it is unneeded. I'm more circumspect to say whether or not they're needed in a big company, but they certainly seem less needed in small, closely connected groups. If you have a big, long project, with people from different divisions doing different things, then yes, a project manager can be helpful. On a small project, with a few people, who work closely already on a variety of things, project managers just tend to get in the way. I don't know how many projects I've been brought into at the last minute because someone quit or whatever, and the PM points to my place on the timeline - I'm already two weeks late in finishing whatever is supposed to be done on the day I'm brought into the project. It's just completely pointless aside from those large collaborations that cross across many people in many different groups at a company.
Obviously Carmack is not the sole fount of creativity in the world. But his output is amazing. I still know people who talk about Commander Keen. As far as Doom, Quake and the like, the market has spoken. I have spent many hours playing Doom and Quake deathmatch. There was a time the Internet component of Doom's deathmatch was seen as innovative. As far as I'm concerned, Doom and Quake set the bar for FPS, the way Age of Empires set the bar for RTS (I'm biased against Starcraft...)
Carmack released id Tech 3's code as GPL. Go look at that code. I spend so much time looking over other people's crappy code. That code looks real nice. I couldn't believe how good the code looked. Clear as a bell what everything does. It's also amazing so little code can do so much in games like OpenArena.
Reading the book Masters of Doom made me admire Carmack all the more as a coder. I don't know who was wrong or right in the office politics with him and Romero at I.D., most people I know who have met Romero say he's a nice guy. But there's no taking away Carmack's technical prowess.
Thalidomide. Asbestos. Lead paint. "More Doctors smoke Camels".
Corporate America doesn't give a damn what garbage it can unload on the public, or how safe it is, as long as it can make a profit. People are smart to be wary. Once bitten, twice shy.
Of course the Wall Street Journal doesn't give a damn either. And of course it will throw mud at the public who show the least bit hesitancy to the garbage Corporate America wants to shovel out, wondering what psychological problems they might have to want a strong, well-funded FDA and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked in a variety of IT departments over the past 15 years, and have heard stories about some of the more infamous local ones. I'd say the problems are usually at the top.
I worked for a Fortune 100 financial company about a decade ago which had all kinds of problems. Management and engineering would focus like a laser point in on certain regulations for machines in the giant server room, like that the fiber optic cable be laid out properly, and would flip out if we broke those regulations. Which is fine - but then they'd ignore the fact that the machine room was a bit over room temperature, meaning the surface of CPUs etc. was even hotter, and that this is what was probably causing a significant amount of the hardware failures. Meanwhile they're running around, testing the fiber cables throughput, and making sure they are laid properly, which in the big picture was not much of a problem. I should also point out things were much more hierarchical than in traditional IT departments, many of the engineering staff (with some exceptions) thought it was beneath them to even talk with lower level administrators outside of official channels, or unless there was some real emergency. I brought up the heat of the machine rooms a few times, but since I was relatively low level to the top IT management and engineering heads, I was ignored. It was a strange place in some ways and I didn't want to rock the boat much - I figured, why bother? I mentioned it a few times and didn't have much sway anyhow. To help morale, they had a round of layoffs despite enormous profits, and so after some weeks of worrying about keeping our jobs (and making us think of working elsewhere and pulling our minds from long-term thinking of the infrastructure), we had the workload of our laid off colleagues dumped on us. At one point we had a general meeting in an auditorium and senior IT and especially non-IT management balled us out about all the crashes and instability. Why we were brought in is beyond me - I dealt with crashes, and followed the procedure book to build new servers, I had no input into how to prevent crashes, and my suggestions about lowering the machine room temperature were ignored. So we were yelled at for things we had no authority to have control of, not something uncommon in crappy workplaces.
I'm thinking of women and the workplace, and somewhat tangentially, I went on an interview at Condenet, which handled magazines like Vogue, Brides, Mademoiselle, Allure, Glamour etc. The waiting room for the interview was probably the frilliest, most decorated waiting rooms I've ever been in. The room was filled with beautiful, blonde, well-dressed southern belles and girls from God knows where, also waiting for interviews. I talked to the girl next to me and she said she was interviewing to work at Vogue, where she had always dreamed of working, a Devil-Wears-Prada wannabe. I just wanted to schlep equipment around for whoever, as long as they paid me more than what I was getting at the time. I go into the interview and talk to a well-coifed, middle-aged woman who had never been on the Internet (this was 1997 or so - although many people were on the net by then), and who had absolutely no clue as to what my abilities were other than that I had not yet gotten all the credits for my Bachelors, i.e. did not have a college degree. I guess she deemed I didn't fit into their corporate culture (which I'm sure I didn't) and didn't get a second call. I think this all points to a problem though. Whether or not I could have done a good job, and in a technical sense I'm sure I could have as I performed well at subsequent more difficult jobs, I think I was deserving of talking to an IT person who could actually calibrate my skills. Why bring people in to talk only to non-technical HR people who are shocked you haven't completed your BA (for a then $60,000 a year position), something they could see on your resume or find out over the phone. What kind of people were they ultimately hiring? It's not like the best DBA
Protests have been happening in Saudi Arabia, although I would barely know watching the corporate media in the US. In Qatif, the police open fired on the demonstrators - they have been in fact, slaughtering people there continually. The Saudi police have killed organizers of protests like Abdul-Ahad. Where are the calls for sanctions on Saudi Arabia in the West?
Politicians keep saying there is a threat from radical Islam. Of course, Osama bin Laden, the mujahideen and nascent al Qaeda and Taliban were radical Islamists back when the USA was backing them to overthrow the secular Afghani government. Even before the Russians got involved. Israel complains about Hamas, but Israel used to secretly fund Hamas, as a bulwark against the PLO. And what about support for Saudi Arabia, probably more out there than Iran in terms of Islamic fundamentalism?
If we look at history over the years, up to this very day without change, the west from the 1970s has always backed fundamentalist Islamists, and fought to overthrow secular regimes, of the Nasserite type - secular, with pan-Arab aspirations, talk of sovereignty from western powers and a vaguely socialist platforms, at least back when the Warsaw Pact was around. What governments has the west become involved since 9/11? Iraq, Libya and now Syria - all secular countries. Iraq has gone from a secular country, to one that with US troops on the ground has had its constitution changed to say its Islamic.
The truth is that people like Osama bin Laden were radical Islamists who the US built up and created, and never cared about his terrorists acts against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. They in fact, funded them - flag-wavers like Sylvester Stallone made movies lionizing the Islamic radicals. Secular, pan-Arab followers of Nasser like Qadaffi, Saddam Hussein etc. who were concerned with sovereignty have been the main targets and enemies. We can see what the US has done in Afghanistan to secular regimes, in Iraq which is now Islamic according to its constitution etc. The Saudi government is built up. Yet we are told we have to fear the radical Islamists, although that has been who the US has been supporting up to this day against the secular rulers who want sovereignty.
In my mind, the last real Microsoft innovations that happened were in the year period between late 1995 and early 1996. That is when Windows 95 came out and Windows NT 4.0. Windows 95 had a lot of things going for it - it had Internet capability included, so people didn't have to go through a rigmarole with Hyperterminal to download Trumpet Winsock from somewhere via X-modem. It had a nice, Mac-like GUI. It was nice - they even had Mac-like touches, like hiring Brian Eno to do the sound for when the computer started, a launch campaign with a Rolling Stones sound etc. Insofar as NT 4.0 - it was the first Windows server which wasn't total garbage. I had to administer a NT 3.51 server for a while, to my chagrin. 4.0 wasn't great, but it wasn't complete garbage like previous efforts. NT 4.0 also introduced the Terminal Services Client, later called Remote Desktop.
SQL Server began coming out before any of this. I don't really like Exchange Server or Outlook, but they came out in 1996 and 1997 respectively. What has Microsoft really come out with since then? They completely missed the boat on smartphones and tablets - they are less than 1% market share for both markets. I just finished reading Job's biography - he mentions that Microsoft had been working on tablets forever. He blames their focus on the stylus, and compatibility with the existing Microsoft monopoly, I mean framework, as the drawbacks to it. Microsoft just seems to be unable to anything new. They started by porting an existing product, BASIC. Then they ripped of CP/M - some say in a straight pirate-like fashion. Then they rip off Apple's Mac interface (which Apple themselves ripped off from Xerox). Microsoft is great at copying others ideas and doing all the back end, support, marketing, licensing business stuff, they are not so great at inventing stuff. A then much smaller company like Apple was able to eat their lunch in the tablet and smartphone space. Google bought Android, and helped it grow to where it now owns smartphones, and is doing respectably on tablets, at least more respectably than Microsoft.
Microsoft has just been resting on its monopoly and sitting on its laurels. They put out garbage that technicians hate to use, but are sometimes forced to. With Windows 95, I used to get a CD where I could reinstall Windows if I wanted. Then they started that horrible OEM recover CD, where you couldn't just fresh install Windows like you wanted to - like you can with a CD of Linux or FreeBSD or whatnot. I mean, they took a step backwards, to protect themselves from piracy - a concern people making Debian CD's have no concern about. Other people are out innovating, they are at work crippling your ability to do things you were able to do with previous installations of Windows.
I worked at a Fortune 100 company in a large IT department in a major coastal city. We had some choice in where we worked. I first worked in a group alongside a black guy, who told me he worked in his group because he didn't get along with someone in another group, he was vague about who. I then went to work for that group. I got along with my manager, but he had it in for this black guy from the other group. In fact I would socialize with the manager and co-workers. At the bar, he would sometimes speak disparagingly on Arabs, Muslims, blacks, Mexicans and the like. When there were layoffs, the black guy was let go. He didn't have direct influence over the group, but having one of the managers there against you was certainly not a help. There didn't seem to be a logical reason for the antipathy either. Honestly, I still get along with this former manager, although I don't agree with his thinking in this respect.
I worked at another company, Fortune 1000. I worked alongside a black co-worker, with whom I had a common manager - white, from the Midwest, late 20s. Again, the manager had a lot of antipathy and made life hard for this co-worker, for no reason I could see. I think it's difficult to work in conditions when your manager is against you and is waiting to jump on any error you make (it happened to me once when a new manager wanted to push me out and get his friend in my position, which is a long story itself). Eventually my co-worker left, or was pushed out, or whatever - the co-worker never wanted to talk about it when I spoke with him after.
So from my experience, the racism is usually not from co-workers, or from upper management and HR, who would probably be happy with some functional, if token, black faces. It's usually from lower management types, who in my experience are often a bundle of neuroses and incompetence to begin with.
On another topic, to quote George Jefferson, with enough green you can always get people to forget the black. When the dot-com boom happened years ago, money flowed into the web properties of Vibe magazine, UBO, BET, Black Planet etc. Plenty of companies were interested in reaching the "urban" market. There is even cross-over - plenty of white teens listen to not only Eminem, but black hip-hop artists. I just read a piece in Adweek on how Android had captured the African-American demographic in the US. Of course, this still is a ghettoization of sorts - it really opens up when blacks get venture capital for new chip designs, or software products or the like, not just web and social media properties geared toward the urban market.
Hamas is a political party that was elected by the people of Gaza to represent them. It is also an organization that was secretly funded by Israel (and thus indirectly by the U.S.) for many years, as a bulwark against the PLO. Of course, the PLO was called terrorist as well. It seems like every organization which represents Palestinian people becomes a "terrorist organization" in the eyes of some.
You say Palestine should not enter UNESCO because Hamas is in the Gazan government, and Hamas "supports suicide bombers". Well the Israeli government has Members of the Knesset such as Michael Ben-Ari, who is in the Jewish National Front political party, which supports people like Baruch Goldstein, who walked into a mosque in 1994 and killed 29 people. And which also has supported, and still supports, violent acts of this type. So why isn't Israel thrown out of the UN, if the JNF is part of the government, like Hamas is in Palestine?
And who but the Israeli army rappelled onto boats in international waters carrying food to a besieged Gaza, and began gunning down the ship passengers? Then the army shows pictures of mop handles and knives from the kitchen and says they were attacked. Who are the kill-crazy terrorists? MIT professor, and father of so much of computer language theory Noam Chomsky was in Zionist youth, lived on a kibbutz when he was young, and still says he is a supporter of Israel (if not all its policies) - the Zionists have become so crazy, even he is turned away at the Israeli border. Who are the extremists here? The Israeli PM just went on the news and announced he s building more settlements in the West Bank.
I don't deny Israel has the high ground militarily, but please spare us this phony moral outrage. Not when they're fresh from invading Lebanon for the second time, besieging Gaza and killing people on food aid flotillas, sending government money to build more settlements etc. Aside from Zionist Jews, fundamentalist Christians, and people of the John Bolton mindset, no one supports the misery and slow annihilation the Israelis are performing on the Palestinians.
The answer depends on the size of a company. If you are at a small, cash-strapped company, where more possible server downtime is an OK risk because the company really doesn't have any money, then CentOS may be the best route to take from a business standpoint.
We can get a rough idea of the size of your company from what you said. You said they can afford Red Hat, which would tend it toward a larger company. The company also has a CIO, which also tends it toward the larger. That you have input into the discussion of Red Hat or CentOS, and the CIO is involved in this kind of discussion, and he goes for free over supported as he isn't high on support would be something that would show you are probably not at the largest company.
Shit rolls downhill. There is a tendency of the higher-ups to not want to pay for support, not want to pay for new machines and software updates and the like. Why have 100% patched, supported software and hardware when they can have you running around all weekend trying to fix things and plug leaks when this old, unsupported infrastructure goes down. And then that it went down is your fault - you're supposed to keep the systems running and they did not run.
A CEO or CFO pushing against a CIO and saying lets not buy supported OS software is normal. A CIO should be pushing back and saying, except in extenuating circumstances, every server, every server OS, and certain types of software (Oracle or whatever) running on those servers need to have support. A CIO should be looking out for his infrastructure, his team etc. Weak, incompetent CIOs are the ones who never argue with the CEO and upper management - they say yes to everything top management says, and then run to their team in a panic telling everyone they have to implement the top managements crazy demands. Competent, smart CIOs have a little more backbone, and know when to say yes and when to say no. I have been at many companies over the years, and honestly, the entire company is much better served by a competent CIO who says no to the CEO once in a while, then a weak, incompetent CIO who says yes to the CEO for everything, even when he can't deliver.
A CIO who says something like yours did about OS support is either weak or stupid, or both. Honestly I'd polish my resume, spend more time professionally networking, start going on interviews, and seeing if I could find somewhere better. A CIO who says we just don't have the budget or there's extenuating circumstances or whatever for no OS support might be understandable. What he said is a sign of him/her being weak and incompetent, and you can probably do better. It's also a potential sign of bad times for the company - if your CIO is weak, who else in top/middle management is weak? Why does the CEO allow a weak CIO?
Congratulations to them, they've discovered something Karl Marx talked about when he published Capital in 1867.
What this means is a question of social relations. What it could mean is less working hours for everyone, more vacation time, more time for studying and learning, more time for out-there R&D projects, all the while with ever-increasing wealth. But that would be if social relations were in one parameter. Currently it means mass unemployment, chronic debt crises, and IP patent lawsuits. It means bust and boom cycles where in the late 1990s, Silicon Valley pulled in any kid with a high school diploma interested in IT and had them working 60-70-80 hours for years, before casting them off into long-term unemployment.
Ever-increasing productivity could be something people looked forward to, instead of being something that was a real threat to putting food on their table, as the Luddites who smashed mechanized looms realized. That better productivity winds up harming the majority of people is a contradiction within the current system of production we live under. At some point, these contradictions become too great and the system breaks down, then it needs some major reconfiguring. We already see one thought of how this will be done in the US, with all this talk about privatizing Social Security and privatizing education into charter schools. Of course, there's little discussion of why the US spends so much on military bases in Cuba, or Italy, or Kyrgyzstan. Or why it needs 11 aircraft carriers, when there are only 20 aircraft carriers in the world, and only two countries with more than 1 (Spain and Italy). Aside from minor cuts that's not even a question, it's easier politically to cut money to the majority of old Americans or young Americans than the military empire.
The Time headline says "Muammar Gaddafi Is Dead, Says Libya PM; Tripoli Celebrates". If you read Pravda headlines from the 1980s, 1970s etc., the commissars publishing it would have been ashamed to put a headline like this. I guess not in the US though. It's kind of like that strange 1990 New York Times headline when the FSLN lost in Nicaragua, "Americans United in Joy, But Divided Over Policy." The Reuters headline about this is "Libya's Gaddafi caught hiding like a 'rat'". Headlines like that make me long for the subtlety of Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer.
If Tripoli was to be so celebratory over this, why did it take so long for the rebels to take Tripoli? Why was the bombing of the US, UK, France and so forth needed?
We always hear in the news about how Muslim fanatics are who we should be scared of, but it seems that it's always those Arabs who came to power on secular, pan-Arab nationalist, sort of leftish rhetoric (Mossadegh, Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi) who industrialized western countries intervene in to overthrow their governments. We can see the results - Mossadegh was replaced eventually by Islamicized Iran, Iraq went from a secular government to a much more Islamicized one (in its constitution, ruling political parties etc.) under US domination, and now another secular Arab government has fallen at the hands of western intervention and some local myrmidons. Meanwhile the most Islamicized Arab countries like Saudi Arabia are completely protected and supported by the west - including the US military and intelligence helping to brutally put down Arab Spring protests against the dictatorship there, events which were little reported in the corporate press. Even parties like Hamas were originally encouraged and secretly funded by Israel. And of course, Osama bin Laden was financed and armed by the US in the 1970s. Anyone in the Arab world can see how the western countries see their main enemy as Arab secular nationalists. Yet the corporate media in these western countries tries to create fear of the Islamic fundamentalists that these same western countries have worked to develop. The same mass of people who swallow that would easily swallow that "Muammar Gaddafi Is Dead, Says Libya PM; Tripoli Celebrates" and "Libya's Gaddafi caught hiding like a 'rat'" are headlines coming from objective, equanimous news organizations.
I went to Occupy Wall Street in New York, in Liberty Plaza on Thursday night.
You hear in the news media about how the park is not clean. I stood and watched the General Assembly go on for some time - while I was standing there, people with brooms came by every 15 minutes or so. The OWS people are almost overdoing the cleaning in response to the criticism, I've never seen more sweeping and cleaning than I did in the park. So if you hear on Fox News that OWS is not cleaning up after itself - it is just not true. I've never seen a place cleaned so frequently.
When I was there, most of the people were young people - in their late teens and twenties. They were winding down for the night so they were relaxing more. On one end of the park musicians were playing drums and other instruments, and the young people were dancing. Past them were a lot of sleeping bags. Past that people were being fed by a kitchen. They have a media center being run by a portable generator I believe. Past that is the general assembly where they make decisions. There is no loudspeaker so people repeat what the speaker says for those too far away - kind of like in the Life of Brian, but hopefully with more faithful repetition.
I've followed the internal political discussions about the effectiveness of these kinds of things for a long time. One point is it's a demonstration, in the sense of an example. Food is handed out freely, decisions are made through direct democracy in a general assembly, there's a DIY esthetic for everything, in a spirit of cooperation. So a community is created in OWS that is an antithesis to say the Wall Street financial companies - which are in buildings surrounded by semi-conspicuous barriers, behind which are tall office buildings whose entrances have security cameras, security guards and locked security gates, and up the elevator you have people wearing suits (or as fashions change, business casual) in a high-pressure, competitive, cutthroat hierarchy, run for profit. It's creating the new society in the shell of the old, as it's sometimes put
Then there's the other political considerations. Obviously this is inspired by the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt and the Arab spring on one level, and perhaps in some dialectical way the Tea Party as well. In the US in the 1930s there were student organizations, labor organizations, labor political parties and parties courting labor for people to get involved in. Nowadays less than 7% of private workers in the US are in a union. But things have changed in the US as well - in the 1930s Detroit going on strike would be shutting down America's economic engine - nowadays if Detroit went on strike, it would be much more minor of a ripple in the national economy. The UAW threatening to go on strike is much less threatening to the powers that be.
One of the biggest laughs is OWS has not come out with a clear program for the ordinary 99% of us not born with a silver spoon in our mouths, to get us into a better position. Well who out there actually is doing that? The corporate media is completely controlled by billionaires, Congressmen collectively get billions of dollars in campaign contributions, Bill Gates and others are trying to privatize all schools into charter schools. These rich heirs control the media, the government, increasingly the schools, and even churches really. Most importantly of all they control enough capital to effectively control all capital, they control who works, who doesn't, and the offices we go into every day, where our labor is kicked up to these heirs in one form or another by way of a quarterly dividend check. And then the real kicker is these people also effectively control or co-opt the organizations made to check their power - labor-oriented political parties and labor unions. That's why I feel that the OWS general assembly gives voice to my concerns in a way that all the other controlled and coopted organizations out there do not. People generally don't think about these things, but as the unemployment rate drags on at 9%, as the housing market stays sluggish and so on, more people dwell on these things.
Some of my professors use Blackboard for various things - putting out assignments, receiving assignments, putting up Powerpoints of lectures and so forth.
The problem with all of this talk is, what are the motivations to put more things online? I work in IT and I am suspicious. All I see is the US government trying to kill off Pell Grants and student loans, schools cutting library and computer lab hours, raising tuition and the like. "Pay us the same, but now you work from home and do some lessons we drew up online" doesn't sound like anything I'm interested in. If I wanted to do that, I could have just bought all the college textbooks and read them, without going for class or going for a Bachelors.
Professors already put stuff up on Blackboard. Every semester, I'm getting about 32 hours of instruction in each course (although some classes, like science classes with lecture and lab are more hours). Topics being covered in those 32 hours are things such as : databases, theory of computation (P/NP, Turing Machines etc.), data structures and algorithms, as well as courses in languages such as C++ and Java. My data structures and algorithm professor knew his stuff cold, explained it well, and I would have loved to have had 64, or 96 hours of lecture by him. The same with the intermediate C++ professor, who did some algorithm work as well.
This is a time of austerity, budget cuts, and the like. And why is that? People talk about the economy like it's not a thing of human design but something more like the weather, an uncontrollable thing, which on the small micro level it is to an extent, but not on the large macro level - but that's another topic. I view any discussion of this type of thing extra suspicious at these times.
They do not get to vote in the Israeli elections, but, then again, neither do the residents of South Dakota
South Dakota does not have Israeli troops inside of its northern, southern, western, and eastern border, not to mention military bases, roadblocks etc. The West Bank is part of Israel - why are not only Israeli troops, but massive settlements there otherwise? Yet the Arabs in this part of Israel can not vote. Yet the Jews can - even ones who just arrived from Russia and waltz into a government-subsidised West Bank settlement. The Zionists do this, then have the gall to trumpet about how they're a democracy.
My "dispute" is calling Israel a democracy. "Arabs in the west bank are not Israeli citizens, they're a people who live in disputed territories" Yes, that's the point, Arabs in the west bank do not get to vote or have Israeli citizenship. Ergo, Israel is not a democracy.
If Gaza is not Israel, then why did Israel have commandos with machine guns rappel onto a flotilla boat bringing food to people in Gaza? As far as the "area under their control", the area in the case of the flotilla raid was international waters. You know, international waters, like where the USS Liberty was when Israel killed 34 of its crew. It's funny how people sailing on a ship with food in international waters are the ones "agressively awaiting to attack any Israely they see", while the commandos rappelling onto the boat with machine guns (the "any Israelys (sic) they see" I guess) are not the aggressive ones. The Israeli commandos were armed with machine guns, the flotilla passengers were armed with nothing but pieces of wood from the mast and knives they grabbed from the kitchen.
Wow it's great Israel is a democracy. Do the Arabs in the West Bank get to vote in elections?
It's some democracy you have there when only Jews and a few token Arabs in the north can vote. Or where you have to, as of 2010, swear to a loyalty oath in order to vote - unless you're a Jew. You're not that bright spouting this democracy nonsense here - this is not the mass media where that stuff is spouted without question, with the other commissars nodding their head, this is a discussion forum on which you can be challenged.
Hopefully if the other CERN scientists visit Israel by ship, Israel won't have commandos rappel onto the boat and begin machine-gunning the passengers.
South Korea is the free Korea. You know it is free because it has military bases of a foreign nation (the US) which is blessed by God scattered all over it. This law is good because it protects South Korea from the evil North Korea, whose military bases are only staffed by Koreans - they have no foreign military bases protecting their freedom. If South Koreans can go online and criticize the government without entering their national ID number, this might hurt freedom. Some South Korean freedom-haters tried to have elections in 1980. Thankfully, the military government went in and massacred all of these freedom-hating communists. Thankfully, US Ambassador Gleysteen and General Wickham authorized martial law in Gwangju after the massacre, for humanitarian reasons as they put it back then. I know North Korea is the evil Korea and South Korea is the great, freedom loving Korea, with US troops backing it. In fact five years ago, soldiers from the US air base were making friends with the local people in Gwangju. Keep showing those pictures on US TV of North Korean tanks and Kim Jong-Il whenever North Korea is mentioned, propaganda in the GDR was a little more subtle.
Less than 7% of private workers in the US are unionized, yet you see it as a "cartel". Verizon has a monopoly on land lines in the North East and mid-Atlantic (with AT&T and Qwest covering 99% of the rest of the country), yet you don't see that as a cartel. Verizon, Sprint and AT&Tmobile are three companies who also control over 99% of US wireless, yet you don't see them as a cartel. The wealthiest 1% of the country, most of whom inherited all of their wealth, owns the majority of bonds, over 40% of stocks and so forth - but they're not a cartel.
The average, working, wealth-producing person is not cartelized at all in the US. The rich parasite heirs who you worship are who rules the US. One of the reasons the US economy has had sluggish growth for decades, while the second largest economy in the world, China's, has been growing at 10% a year for 30 years. Not much will change in that respect in the US - the mass of boot-lickers like you, along with the fundamentalist crazies, will succeed in holding the US down as the rest of the world passes it by...
This is the worst the Verizon strike-busters could come up with? It perplexes me how many news stories I've read about how "one union picketer even went as far as to instruct his young daughter to stand in front of a Verizon truck to illegally block it". If you watch the video, HE stands in front of the moving truck, which stops. Then she walks over of her own accord. Then the instruction part comes in, he tells her to stand in front of the stopped truck alongside the cameraman who is obviously standing there as well in front of the stopped truck. She holds up her sign, the cameraman films. Then he goes over and yells at the scab who took his job for less than a minute. As happens every time, they then let the trucks go through.
Illegal is a great word. It is illegal to murder and rape. It is also illegal for me to loan one of my DVDs to a friend so that he can copy it to his computer. It is illegal to smoke marijuana. In virtually all industrialized countries but this one, what is illegal is for scabs to replace striking workers. In the good old, God-fearing, Libya-bombing, Iraq-bombing, Afghanistan-bombing USA though, it is illegal for workers to delay scabs from taking their jobs.
Verizon is one of the largest examples of a company which does nothing but profit from its monopolies. It spends tons of money on state and federal lobbying, and has a lock on a portion of wireless wavelength, and an almost total and complete lock on the local loop. The majority of its stock is held by the very wealthiest of Americans (over 40% is held by the wealthiest 1%, and the 51% mark is only slightly larger), and the majority of those people inherited virtually all of their wealth. The majority of the majority owners are heirs who sit on their asses and expropriate dividend checks from not their government-lobbied, government-granted near-monopolies, but the people in this video, the people out there doing all the work and creating all the wealth for the company.
I know the USA is a piece of garbage, ruled by these rich parasite heirs, aside from their religious wacko pals and other assorted asocial Tea Party nuts, so there's not much use getting over-exerted about any of this. The words criminal and illegal really mean nothing here. Before World War I, for workers to form a union in the USA was itself a criminal act. It was illegal. As I said, in other countries, these scabs replacing striking workers is illegal. In the good old USA workers replacing the scabs taking their jobs is illegal. Just like breaking DRM and all the other nonsense. We are all slaves to these rich parasite heirs trying to extract money from their monopolies and the wage slaves they have working for them. It's naturally American to be filled with vitriol and hatred for the average working class Joe standing with his union brothers to try and earn a living wage. Following authority, passively licking the boots of the lazy rich heirs who own the majority of Verizon stock, with Almighty God watching over all is the natural order of things. The reward will be in the "next life".
(and WRT to who references to who owns stocks, is an heir and such, you can consult sources like the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, Forbes 400 richest list and other sources).
I've been working in IT for over 15 years...I have seen blacks in the companies I work at treated unfairly time and time again. The sad truth is the blacks who do well at companies are forced to act a certain way - all the successful ones I know are generally more friendly and jovial than the average white worker, and if some racist crank in some other part of the company says something offbeat about them, they just laugh it off. I see the same situation over and over. The racist crank is usually a middle-aged white guy, whose bonafides the young but educated and talented troops question, but were hired into the startup by the young top management because I guess they (or VC) wants what looks like adult supervision around, which I guess is middle-aged white guys who are perceived to be incompetent. This is probably not helped by the bizarre (often sexually-tinged) racist statements or assumptions you hear through the grapevine that they made - not just about the black and non-white employees, but other non-whites.
Another case I've seen more than once is a black co-worker in my IT group, and a young (late 20s, 30s) white junior manager over us, or perhaps the white junior manager is in a parallel group but has some sway on our group. Whatever the black teammate does, the white manager just seems to have it in for them for no reason. One of these managers I was myself friends with, he had no problems whatsoever going into vivid detail about how he hated Muslims. He also really disliked the black guy in my group, but never really gave a reason why, even when I subtly asked him why he didn't when we were alone drinking a beer at a bar. I didn't really get a real answer. Any IT worker who wants to go into management I have some suspicion of where there head is at anyhow.
I've seen other scenarios where I just didn't know, like someone passed over for promotion at a certain point. What factors went into this? I DON'T count this as definite racism as I don't know what factors went into the decisions, and they may have been completely legitimate. The point is, things work on open and hidden levels, and maybe even unconscious levels. In other words, my point with promotions is, there may be cases of race being a factor that I have not listed, as I don't know whether or not they were.
These are scenarios I saw myself where the racism was fairly obvious. But people are smart nowadays to not be too obvious. It makes me think of what Reagan and Bush aide Lee Atwater said about campaigning politically on race:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it."
This is what happens. The middle-aged incompetent white managers brought into the startups were dumb enough to say racist things out loud. The junior white managers who were on the black guys case for no reason are more subtle, even if one will privately talk about how he hates Muslims (not mentioning blacks though). Then there's people passed over for promotion, where I don't even know what factors went into them - maybe it is a legitimate reason. Things get more and more abstract.
When I was a teenager, there were local black kids interested in computers and computer networks who were as talented and some even more talented than the average white kids who did. While many of their white counterparts easily climbed up the ladder of things, through the educational institutions and then the corporate institutions, of course never having any trouble with local police institutions in the meantime, this just didn't seem to happen for them.
People come home from work, sit down exhausted and turn on sitcoms. Movie produce
Development and administration at Fortune 100 companies in Manhattan is different than any other place I encountered, including other large companies. There is a lot of message-oriented middleware to patch together different systems.
You'd see a lot of strange stuff - a batch job printing from an IBM mainframe would be routed to the Unix print server, and be sent off to a junky old printer in some foreign country. Not always easy to debug when there is a problem.
Where I was, there were a ton of these old programs written in FORTRAN, COBOL and whatnot which had had business logic put in them for decades sitting on these modern IBM mainframes. Some of the business logic within it was probably lost long ago, it all just "worked", with a lot of the output routed to more modern equipment and technology. I guess they figure if anything ever goes wrong, they have almost unlimited money to throw at the problem so they don't worry about it.
You also have things happen. A business group has their developers write some program, it goes production on a machine or two, and then for whatever reason it generates a lot of money. Suddenly you have millions, sometimes even billions of dollars going over one production machine in a day. Everything happens so fast that it was never planned out to be scalable, and the main developer is too busy tweaking the program to make it make more money than to be scalable etc. If you're lucky, its market is closed during the week and you get to work on adding in additional levels of redundancy to the machine which suddenly has billions flowing through it every day. Despite the lack of planning, you better bet people will be flipping out if the machine goes down during the day, and the traders hear that their trades aren't going through due to "computer problems".
At the Fortune 100 financial I was at, Windows was considered a joke. Even the local head of the Windows team admitted that the Unix side was where things were really happening. It was just more flexible, focused on high availability and so on. With Linux coming in so much on the Unix side, that flexibility has only increased. I'm sure whatever RHEL or SUSE edition being run on most servers is so heavily modified internally by the various companies internal engineering teams, that it doesn't look like a RHEL or SUSE anyone here has ever seen. And RHEL and SUSE bend over backwards to get the business - which can be on tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of machines around the world.
The report gives freedom points for various things to determine openness. But what they consider open is up to debate. Android gets 4 points for having a mostly Apache license, which the report considers the "most open". Linux only gets 2 openness points because it is released under the GPL, and the report considers the GPL to only be worthy of half of the points that the Apache license deserves. This methodology is of course, debatable.
I worked for a Fortune 100 financial company in Manhattan. Some of the nastiest people I ever worked with were there. I also never worked anywhere where the company made more clear to me that I was a disposable cog. Not that that isn't the case elsewhere, but management usually tries to at least conceal it. I worked 60 hours a week, including weekends, and I was on the low end compared to others who were working to move up in the hierarchy.
There was a limited and fixed bonus pool, so if you got less money, others got more. I'm sure this was a plan by management - the firm was so wealthy, they felt it better their workers be divided against one another than working together. They did this in a variety of ways - staff versus contractors, contractor firm versus rival contractor firm and so forth. This encouraged people trying to rip one another apart during weekly meetings, code reviews and the like.
The office politics can be strange too. I used to be on conference calls with a programmer with a huge ego, and who people deferred to because the program suite he wrote was important for the firm. The program was shoddy though, it had massive memory leaks and the like. But he and the team under him were able to throw it together quickly and the business people were happy with him so he was a golden boy. It wouldn't have been so bad if he wasn't always denigrating everyone else's work with a holier-than-thou attitude. I wasn't in a position to say anything though. Lots of stuff like this happens. A lot.
It was not all bad. It was a large environment. Stuff I would have done maybe once a year at a smaller company I was doing every day there. I was surrounded by dozens of people who were sharp and knew what they were doing. There was a feeling of camaraderie among some of us. It is hard to explain the change in quality due to the sheer size of the company, with its ability to spend massively if needed.
One thing I will say - unless you are there to work 24/7/365 and try to make it to be one of these "highest paid programmers", there is no reason to be there. Some of my co-workers joined straight of college, which seemed dumb to me. Anyone who takes a job for less than six figures is a fool - if you don't have the skills to make at least $100k, there is no reason to work there. It is not the place to come in at a low level and hang around.
To repeat a point - anyone who takes a job on Wall Street right out of college is a fool. They recruit heavily on campuses for the same reason Microsoft and Intel and Electronic Arts do: so they can take advantage of suckers with no work experience who don't know any better. Thankfully I didn't make this mistake. I was able to put everything I saw there into perspective. Going from college straight to Wall Street as a programmer is a dumb move for most people.
I think most project managers are a waste as well. In a small company it is unneeded. I'm more circumspect to say whether or not they're needed in a big company, but they certainly seem less needed in small, closely connected groups. If you have a big, long project, with people from different divisions doing different things, then yes, a project manager can be helpful. On a small project, with a few people, who work closely already on a variety of things, project managers just tend to get in the way. I don't know how many projects I've been brought into at the last minute because someone quit or whatever, and the PM points to my place on the timeline - I'm already two weeks late in finishing whatever is supposed to be done on the day I'm brought into the project. It's just completely pointless aside from those large collaborations that cross across many people in many different groups at a company.
Obviously Carmack is not the sole fount of creativity in the world. But his output is amazing. I still know people who talk about Commander Keen. As far as Doom, Quake and the like, the market has spoken. I have spent many hours playing Doom and Quake deathmatch. There was a time the Internet component of Doom's deathmatch was seen as innovative. As far as I'm concerned, Doom and Quake set the bar for FPS, the way Age of Empires set the bar for RTS (I'm biased against Starcraft...)
Carmack released id Tech 3's code as GPL. Go look at that code. I spend so much time looking over other people's crappy code. That code looks real nice. I couldn't believe how good the code looked. Clear as a bell what everything does. It's also amazing so little code can do so much in games like OpenArena.
Reading the book Masters of Doom made me admire Carmack all the more as a coder. I don't know who was wrong or right in the office politics with him and Romero at I.D., most people I know who have met Romero say he's a nice guy. But there's no taking away Carmack's technical prowess.
Thalidomide. Asbestos. Lead paint. "More Doctors smoke Camels".
Corporate America doesn't give a damn what garbage it can unload on the public, or how safe it is, as long as it can make a profit. People are smart to be wary. Once bitten, twice shy.
Of course the Wall Street Journal doesn't give a damn either. And of course it will throw mud at the public who show the least bit hesitancy to the garbage Corporate America wants to shovel out, wondering what psychological problems they might have to want a strong, well-funded FDA and the like.