I noticed some funkiness with SLOCCount recently, as well.
I was asked by the CEO of the company to estimate the worth of my recent efforts (6 weeks of 100+ hours) had we sourced the application to somebody like IBM or CA or some other "Solutions Provider".
The numbers for the 6 weeks wort of work came out at 3.75 man years, 4 person team, development costs of something like $1.5 million. In my experience, the larger the team, the more accurate SLOCCount becomes.
Of course, since the estimates were way over the top, I decided to forward them on, explaining that I used some NASA/IBM methodlogy to arrive at the numbers, and I needed a raise.:)
Not so. See the response to number 4 for the reason.
This is also a bad thing, due to an unexpected interaction with reason number four on the list. Being "paid a LOT more than minimum wage" is a liability. The liability usually presents itself when deadlines are short... Who am I kidding; it's ever-present. The "We pay you x-dollars a year to work, not see your family" stick comes out continuously.
2. They usually get to work in a climate controlled office.
Yes, surrounded by flickering flourescent lights that are in perfect sync with the 1994 60-Hz monitor that won't be replaced because of budgetary concerns.
Not to mention the lack of windows looking out to that place you go between work and home. I've heard of some mythical thing called the "Sun", but I haven't seen it in years.
3. They usually get to sit down.
And my back is just as jacked up as if I got to stand all day. Sitting for 15 hours straight is just as bad for you as standing for the same time. Especially with the $9.00 chairs bought from the OSHA repossesion sale.
4. They generally don't have to punch a time clock.
This is the worst part of things. We tend to look at the time clock as an evil object meant to shackle us to work; in reality it's the label of "salaried employee" that really binds. How I long for the "I'm on overtime in 10 minutes" stick to parry the "you can't leave until it's done" thrust from management.
Standard work-weeks are based on a 5-day, 8-hour schedule. 40 hours per week, in other words. When punching a time clock, at least here in the US, more than 40 hours per pay period will yield this mythical thing called "time-and-a-half." As a salaried employee, I have no idea what this actually is.
Minimum wage is $5.15 per hour (Federal standard, slightly higher in some States), yielding an annual salary of $10,712 for 2080 hours of work per year. This yields 6556 hours of "time off" for an individual punching the clock.
In my area of the country, the average IT salary is $41,000 per year, or roughly $19.71 per hour based on a 40-hour work week. With the tech market as down as it is right now, I know very few people who work less than a 50 hour week; make the work week 2600 hours and move the hourly wage down to $15.77. Construction pays $18 per hour and has a standard 40-hour work week because of the clock punching.
Now, work for a company who's in perpetual "crunch mode" because of shoddy management, or malicious managers who take the attitude of "I own your ass", and a 100-hour work week is not uncommon. This brings the hour total to 5200 per year, leaving just 1356 hours of personal "time off" and an hourly wage of $7.88. Granted, the $41,000 is still paid, but I use up $20,000 of that (at least) to pay somebody else to do things like clean the house, mow the lawn or whatever else has to be done because "I'll lose my job if this doesn't get done." Funny, those people I pay punch a clock...
6 months of this, and I'm pining for two minimum wage jobs; I'd have a lot more "free time" and actually be paid by the clock.
Before you press the "flame button", keep in mind that, no matter where you work, it sucks. The only person happy with a job is the one who just left. And the job that he's happy with is the one that was less shitty than the current one.
It's a no win situation and until you get to the point of making "immaginary" salaries (think 7 digits), you expenditures always equal your income plus $40.
Well put. I, too, was in the area during that time.
I was at Florence and Normandy several weeks after everything calmed down and some guy who owned a shop around there looked at me and uttered words I'll never forget: "Even dogs don't shit in their own food dish."
The campaign managers are in charge of national security in much the same way that you're in charge of putting the dishes away at my house.
That's like walking into a drug company convention and exclaiming "We let these salespeople do surgery?"
Come the fuck on; he's running for President, not applying for a job as a system administrator, security consultant, or even an MCSE.
If you were talking foreign policy, domestic policy or something that a potential POTUS would be responsible for, fine. But the stuff was ripped off from a campaign office by a rock through the window.
I'm just sick to death of both sides screaming "This is what we want?" at every little fucking thing that comes up from break-ins to which campign offical is involved in what 527 group.
Find some fucking issues that matter, figure out where Kerry and Bush have different ideas on how to handle the issues, and make your choice on how well their views match with yours.
If "got campaign headquarters broken into" is top on the public list to vote Kerry instead of Bush, we are indeed in deep shit.
...He can withhold your last paycheck, your accrued holiday.
I had somebody try this on me once and discussed the issue with a friend who's an HR manager. It seems that withholding paychecks and accrued pay is against Federal labor laws. You don't want to screw with them.
They have to take you to civil court to get you to pay them back for any damages you might have caused.
He can track you down at your new job and spill the beans to your new boss. If you do something illegal, he can call in the police. Or much, much worse!
Depends on where you live. If you're in a 'right to work' state, this is grounds for some serious law suits. And an ass whoopin.
Even if you weren't in a Right to Work state, this is usually not acceptable. From what I recall, even on reference checks, the only things you can really reveal about a former employee are their hire dates, salary and whether they're elligable for rehire.
Depending on what's said, and how much proof they have, you could also slap them with libel or slander.
Your company can't take any legal action against you because of this. You didn't degrade the network nor the hardware. You didn't hurt anyone. But they will have to tidy up:)
Actually, they can take legal action. Criminal legal action, at that. Any damage done to the machines would count as vandalism; over a certain threshhold of monetary damage and the action moves into felony range.
There are also laws on the books regarding not only relieving one's self in public, but you could probably fit excreta into the definition of hazardous or medical waste; certainly improper disposal laws would apply in this case.
Finally, if somebody happens to walk in during the... er... process of elimination, it's called indecent exposure. Were he to be convicted of that last count, it means manditory registration as a sex offender.
As fun as it might sound, I wouldn't consider it worth the risks.
hmm... sounds like exactly the arguement that kept reardon's steel from being used for such a long time... if you can create a more powerful, more versatile system and have the know-how to handle it, then do it. oh well, who is john gault?
I can see where you'd get the impression, but I don't really agree. In the story, we have a steel that's vastly superior to everything else on the market, yet isn't used because of political reasons. That's not the case with my statment: if I have, say, an Oracle database, and Oracle says they'll support only RedHat, it makes horrible business sense for me to run it on Debian or Gentoo or Slackware. To tie it into the story, if Reardon Metal was only suitable for building highrises, the decision not to use it in railroad construction would have been based on business and safety reasons, not political leanings.
The original poster alluded to the need to run IBM applications like DB2 and WebSphere. Were he running Apache and Postgres, by all means, use whatever distro fits best within the organization. But it makes perfect fiscal sense to stick to a distribution that your vendor specifies, if only to remove from them the ability to cry "Not supported!" when something goes wrong.
personally, i see a place for highly commercial distributions like Windows XP combined with distributions such as Debian or one of it's offshoots. now, having 30 different distro's in the workplace would, of course, be overkill. But let's never abandon the advantages of newer & possibly more powerful systems. [The rest I believe I addressed in the paragraph, above.]
We agree here. In fact, I'm migrating our systems off of an NT, Oracle and SQL Server platform specifically for this reason. Duplicate hardware was shown (in internal testing) to perform much better when running Linux instead of 2K Advanced Server. And since we're using Postgres as the new back end, we can get a support contract that covers the database, not the particular distribution and application combination.
And, to tie it back into the first paragraph, my cost outlay in software licenses was exactly zero, leaving me some $100,000 in spare capitol to sink into staff and hardware next year.
We work with what's supported when it comes to commercial applications. If I'm paying for support on particular distributions, those are what I will use for production systems. If you worked for me, I'd be telling you to forget it unless you were able to get my current support contract modified to support, as fully as the currently supported distributions, whatever you wanted to run, without additional cost.
As a manager, there is no amount of arguing you could do to convince me to use anything but the supported operating systems. The reason is simple: I don't want a vendor to be able to shift the blame for their software breaking to my tech staff and tell us to support it ourselves.
That being said, have you checked out apt-rpm? I've used it in several RedHat shops and I have to say, I really like it.
Sad... I just finished with one of the three machines I have to fix a few minutes ago.
Thousands of suspicious cookies and malware spotted by Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy, several trojans and 4 or 5 keyloggers.
When I told him what all of this stuff does, he turned to me and said: "Do you think this is related to the house the bank said I bought in Colorado?"
Turns out this guy's had every credit card number stolen, his SSN, all three of his bank account numbers and all of that.
I wish I had known before I started working on the box, as I would have saved the hard drive and just given him a new one. I did take a 'dd' image of it, but from a forensic standpoint when going to the police, I doubt they'll be able to use it.
In fact, I've got three machines in my office right now from adults that I've got to fix. They've all responded with variations of "You mean they update the software and I don't have to pay for it?" when I asked when the last time they ran Windows Update.
I guess I just don't understand how somebody can see all of the identity theft, worm, trojan horse, and phishing scam stories in the news and still think they're perfectly safe.
I guess it comes down to this: extremism on one side are met with equal or greater extremism on the other side.
It's kind of sad, really, when all reasonability (reasonablness, reasonableism?:) goes out the window for these strongly worded and enforced policies. I'm not saying that the IOC is strongly enforcing, but just the message reeks of the bullshit "zero tolerance" policies that are oh-so-popular today.
The net effect is to swing responses in polar opposition to the stated policy and have the situation continue to build until you have RIAA-esque sue-fests. It's kind of sad.
One 30 second clip? Nothing. Everyone in Athens with a camcorder uploading their feeds live on the web? Suddenly NBC's contract is worthless. They have to draw the line somewhere.
I don't really think that's the case, actually. There's something to be said for professional cameramen shooting the action, with professional directors making all of the cut decisions. Some of the commentators are worthless, but that's beside the point.
There's a certain appeal to be able to watch snippets and think "Wow, [insert your favorite athlete here] shot this right after winning the medal in..." That appeal kind of disappears when you have 6000 different videos, all shot by anonymous fans who somehow think that the Olympics should be presented with Blair Wich camera work.
There should be balance, not a line in the sand. After all, the IOC and NBC would have nothing from these events if it weren't from the athletes; the least they can do is allow them to post stuff about the events without having to worry about some sort of recrimination.
Looking at the whole situation, I think I'm objecting to the percieved shift in focus of the Olympics. I have fond memories of them as a child, watching athletes compete and realizing that the world got together 1 year out of 4 and played games together.
The way the IOC runs things didn't get much publicity before about 1996 and the more I hear about them, the more I start to wonder how they're different from the NBA or MLB organizations. College sports have been pushing into this nebulous territory for years.
I guess it's just a let down to see something you thought was done for the sake of sport move into the realm of profiteering.
I also gotta say that it's nice to see some people on/. who can actually discuss and debate instead of insult and flame...
It never says anything about when the blog was started, merely its purpose.
Granted. I suppose one of the athletes could set one up and try it out. I suspect that the IOC would come down hard on whomever did that, however, citing "suspicous timing" of the creating of the website. Then again, they might not; there's no way of knowing until somebody tries it.
And are you seriously saying blogs that were not created for a specific event are practically non-existent?
No, not at all. That was kind of my point, actually. I must have not articulated my thoughts clearly.
What I meant to imply was that it is fairly common to hop over to BlogSpot or Blogger or anywhere else and set up a special-purpose blog for just about any reason. I suspect that pleanty of people involved with the Olympics have set up special weblogs to post about the trials, the training, and the events.
With the rules, as given by CNN, it's not clear whether this would qualify as a "personal web page" or not, since the subject matter would deal specifically with an individual's Olympic live. Again, just speculation, but I think the IOC would rule that it was not a personal site since the sole content was Olympic in nature.
Non-profit doesn't mean they cannot bring in money to pay for the events. All those security guards are not working for free.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the IOC make the host country and city pay for things like security? I lived just to the west of the shooting range that was set up for the 1984 Olympics. I remember a friend of my parents who was an off-duty cop working security for the event who laughed about how his paycheck was signed by the same person who signed his normal payroll, just under a different department.
I'm really curious now what the IOC actually takes care of and what the host country eats. I do know that infrastructure projects like new statiums (or is it "stadia"?) and mass-transit systems are the responsibility of the host country. I'll have to Google it and see...
My main reason for railing against the IOC is this: what's the harm done if we get a 30-second movie from the perspective of somebody walking in the parade instead of a statium-mounted camera. Heck, I'd even pay for a documentary-style DVD with all of the athlete's footage on it, as long as it wasn't forced from their possession. I'm sure the IOC could, in turn, afford to buy the movies from the athletes for a couple of thousand dollars and everybody would be happy.
In reading the article, though, I came to the conclusion that the difference between Largely and totally is minute in this case.
It seems that they can only post text to a personal website that they had set up prior to going to the Olympics... So, say you wanted to create a one-time Blog as a diary of the events of the games, you can't.
Likewise, only pictures from "accredited journalists" can be posted on the Athelet's sites. So, say Mom takes a picture of you marching in the opening ceremonies and you want to post it. Unless Mom works for the Associated Press or some other news organization, no dice.
I wonder what the process is to become accredited? Surely it's not a journalism degree; I know of very few photographers who went to the trouble of getting a journalisim degree. Perhaps the IOC has some sort of program for it?
The IOC is supposed to be a nonprofit organization to keep the "Olympic Movement" alive. If they'd like to turn into a professional sports organization like MLB or the NFL, then by all means do it.
But until that time, they really should be taken to task for behaving like every other professional sports organization while claiming to strive to keep the Olympic ideals.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed some funkiness with SLOCCount recently, as well.
I was asked by the CEO of the company to estimate the worth of my recent efforts (6 weeks of 100+ hours) had we sourced the application to somebody like IBM or CA or some other "Solutions Provider".
The numbers for the 6 weeks wort of work came out at 3.75 man years, 4 person team, development costs of something like $1.5 million. In my experience, the larger the team, the more accurate SLOCCount becomes.
Of course, since the estimates were way over the top, I decided to forward them on, explaining that I used some NASA/IBM methodlogy to arrive at the numbers, and I needed a raise. :)
I'd go as far as to say it's the same with many salaried positions these days, not jus those on the managerial side of things.
It's always the same, though, as the job market shifts to an employer's market instead of an employee's market.
Not so. See the response to number 4 for the reason.
This is also a bad thing, due to an unexpected interaction with reason number four on the list. Being "paid a LOT more than minimum wage" is a liability. The liability usually presents itself when deadlines are short... Who am I kidding; it's ever-present. The "We pay you x-dollars a year to work, not see your family" stick comes out continuously.
Yes, surrounded by flickering flourescent lights that are in perfect sync with the 1994 60-Hz monitor that won't be replaced because of budgetary concerns.
Not to mention the lack of windows looking out to that place you go between work and home. I've heard of some mythical thing called the "Sun", but I haven't seen it in years.
And my back is just as jacked up as if I got to stand all day. Sitting for 15 hours straight is just as bad for you as standing for the same time. Especially with the $9.00 chairs bought from the OSHA repossesion sale.
This is the worst part of things. We tend to look at the time clock as an evil object meant to shackle us to work; in reality it's the label of "salaried employee" that really binds. How I long for the "I'm on overtime in 10 minutes" stick to parry the "you can't leave until it's done" thrust from management.
Standard work-weeks are based on a 5-day, 8-hour schedule. 40 hours per week, in other words. When punching a time clock, at least here in the US, more than 40 hours per pay period will yield this mythical thing called "time-and-a-half." As a salaried employee, I have no idea what this actually is.
Minimum wage is $5.15 per hour (Federal standard, slightly higher in some States), yielding an annual salary of $10,712 for 2080 hours of work per year. This yields 6556 hours of "time off" for an individual punching the clock.
In my area of the country, the average IT salary is $41,000 per year, or roughly $19.71 per hour based on a 40-hour work week. With the tech market as down as it is right now, I know very few people who work less than a 50 hour week; make the work week 2600 hours and move the hourly wage down to $15.77. Construction pays $18 per hour and has a standard 40-hour work week because of the clock punching.
Now, work for a company who's in perpetual "crunch mode" because of shoddy management, or malicious managers who take the attitude of "I own your ass", and a 100-hour work week is not uncommon. This brings the hour total to 5200 per year, leaving just 1356 hours of personal "time off" and an hourly wage of $7.88. Granted, the $41,000 is still paid, but I use up $20,000 of that (at least) to pay somebody else to do things like clean the house, mow the lawn or whatever else has to be done because "I'll lose my job if this doesn't get done." Funny, those people I pay punch a clock...
6 months of this, and I'm pining for two minimum wage jobs; I'd have a lot more "free time" and actually be paid by the clock.
Before you press the "flame button", keep in mind that, no matter where you work, it sucks. The only person happy with a job is the one who just left. And the job that he's happy with is the one that was less shitty than the current one.
It's a no win situation and until you get to the point of making "immaginary" salaries (think 7 digits), you expenditures always equal your income plus $40.
Well put. I, too, was in the area during that time.
I was at Florence and Normandy several weeks after everything calmed down and some guy who owned a shop around there looked at me and uttered words I'll never forget: "Even dogs don't shit in their own food dish."
I missed the joke; sorry.
You must be trolling.
The campaign managers are in charge of national security in much the same way that you're in charge of putting the dishes away at my house.
That's like walking into a drug company convention and exclaiming "We let these salespeople do surgery?"
Come the fuck on; he's running for President, not applying for a job as a system administrator, security consultant, or even an MCSE.
If you were talking foreign policy, domestic policy or something that a potential POTUS would be responsible for, fine. But the stuff was ripped off from a campaign office by a rock through the window.
I'm just sick to death of both sides screaming "This is what we want?" at every little fucking thing that comes up from break-ins to which campign offical is involved in what 527 group.
Find some fucking issues that matter, figure out where Kerry and Bush have different ideas on how to handle the issues, and make your choice on how well their views match with yours.
If "got campaign headquarters broken into" is top on the public list to vote Kerry instead of Bush, we are indeed in deep shit.
Personally, I'm ageorged...
Start a management tradition...
Pick up a copy of "The One Minute Manager."
Heh. Exactly. The phrase "not elilgible for rehire" has become recognized as "run screaming from that one" in the HR world...
Scary, you have the lingo down a little too well for the typical techie. :)
I had somebody try this on me once and discussed the issue with a friend who's an HR manager. It seems that withholding paychecks and accrued pay is against Federal labor laws. You don't want to screw with them.
They have to take you to civil court to get you to pay them back for any damages you might have caused.
Even if you weren't in a Right to Work state, this is usually not acceptable. From what I recall, even on reference checks, the only things you can really reveal about a former employee are their hire dates, salary and whether they're elligable for rehire.
Depending on what's said, and how much proof they have, you could also slap them with libel or slander.
Actually, they can take legal action. Criminal legal action, at that. Any damage done to the machines would count as vandalism; over a certain threshhold of monetary damage and the action moves into felony range.
There are also laws on the books regarding not only relieving one's self in public, but you could probably fit excreta into the definition of hazardous or medical waste; certainly improper disposal laws would apply in this case.
Finally, if somebody happens to walk in during the... er... process of elimination, it's called indecent exposure. Were he to be convicted of that last count, it means manditory registration as a sex offender.
As fun as it might sound, I wouldn't consider it worth the risks.
Thanks, I really needed that laugh...
Ok, I'll bite... :)
I can see where you'd get the impression, but I don't really agree. In the story, we have a steel that's vastly superior to everything else on the market, yet isn't used because of political reasons. That's not the case with my statment: if I have, say, an Oracle database, and Oracle says they'll support only RedHat, it makes horrible business sense for me to run it on Debian or Gentoo or Slackware. To tie it into the story, if Reardon Metal was only suitable for building highrises, the decision not to use it in railroad construction would have been based on business and safety reasons, not political leanings.
The original poster alluded to the need to run IBM applications like DB2 and WebSphere. Were he running Apache and Postgres, by all means, use whatever distro fits best within the organization. But it makes perfect fiscal sense to stick to a distribution that your vendor specifies, if only to remove from them the ability to cry "Not supported!" when something goes wrong.
We agree here. In fact, I'm migrating our systems off of an NT, Oracle and SQL Server platform specifically for this reason. Duplicate hardware was shown (in internal testing) to perform much better when running Linux instead of 2K Advanced Server. And since we're using Postgres as the new back end, we can get a support contract that covers the database, not the particular distribution and application combination.
And, to tie it back into the first paragraph, my cost outlay in software licenses was exactly zero, leaving me some $100,000 in spare capitol to sink into staff and hardware next year.
Hrm... Did he want linear non-linear editing, linear linear editing, non-linear linear editing or non-linear non-linear editing?
We work with what's supported when it comes to commercial applications. If I'm paying for support on particular distributions, those are what I will use for production systems. If you worked for me, I'd be telling you to forget it unless you were able to get my current support contract modified to support, as fully as the currently supported distributions, whatever you wanted to run, without additional cost.
As a manager, there is no amount of arguing you could do to convince me to use anything but the supported operating systems. The reason is simple: I don't want a vendor to be able to shift the blame for their software breaking to my tech staff and tell us to support it ourselves.
That being said, have you checked out apt-rpm? I've used it in several RedHat shops and I have to say, I really like it.
Troll? He's correct.
Sad... I just finished with one of the three machines I have to fix a few minutes ago.
Thousands of suspicious cookies and malware spotted by Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy, several trojans and 4 or 5 keyloggers.
When I told him what all of this stuff does, he turned to me and said: "Do you think this is related to the house the bank said I bought in Colorado?"
Turns out this guy's had every credit card number stolen, his SSN, all three of his bank account numbers and all of that.
I wish I had known before I started working on the box, as I would have saved the hard drive and just given him a new one. I did take a 'dd' image of it, but from a forensic standpoint when going to the police, I doubt they'll be able to use it.
Now for the next two.
I thought exactly the same thing.
In fact, I've got three machines in my office right now from adults that I've got to fix. They've all responded with variations of "You mean they update the software and I don't have to pay for it?" when I asked when the last time they ran Windows Update.
I guess I just don't understand how somebody can see all of the identity theft, worm, trojan horse, and phishing scam stories in the news and still think they're perfectly safe.
Reread the line above... Nowhere does it say that it drops the temperature to 30 F, but that it drops the temperature by 30 F.
There's a big difference between a relative change and an absolute change.
I nominate Tim Burton, personally.
I guess it comes down to this: extremism on one side are met with equal or greater extremism on the other side.
It's kind of sad, really, when all reasonability (reasonablness, reasonableism? :) goes out the window for these strongly worded and enforced policies. I'm not saying that the IOC is strongly enforcing, but just the message reeks of the bullshit "zero tolerance" policies that are oh-so-popular today.
The net effect is to swing responses in polar opposition to the stated policy and have the situation continue to build until you have RIAA-esque sue-fests. It's kind of sad.
I don't really think that's the case, actually. There's something to be said for professional cameramen shooting the action, with professional directors making all of the cut decisions. Some of the commentators are worthless, but that's beside the point.
There's a certain appeal to be able to watch snippets and think "Wow, [insert your favorite athlete here] shot this right after winning the medal in..." That appeal kind of disappears when you have 6000 different videos, all shot by anonymous fans who somehow think that the Olympics should be presented with Blair Wich camera work.
There should be balance, not a line in the sand. After all, the IOC and NBC would have nothing from these events if it weren't from the athletes; the least they can do is allow them to post stuff about the events without having to worry about some sort of recrimination.
Looking at the whole situation, I think I'm objecting to the percieved shift in focus of the Olympics. I have fond memories of them as a child, watching athletes compete and realizing that the world got together 1 year out of 4 and played games together.
The way the IOC runs things didn't get much publicity before about 1996 and the more I hear about them, the more I start to wonder how they're different from the NBA or MLB organizations. College sports have been pushing into this nebulous territory for years.
I guess it's just a let down to see something you thought was done for the sake of sport move into the realm of profiteering.
I also gotta say that it's nice to see some people on /. who can actually discuss and debate instead of insult and flame...
Granted. I suppose one of the athletes could set one up and try it out. I suspect that the IOC would come down hard on whomever did that, however, citing "suspicous timing" of the creating of the website. Then again, they might not; there's no way of knowing until somebody tries it.
No, not at all. That was kind of my point, actually. I must have not articulated my thoughts clearly.
What I meant to imply was that it is fairly common to hop over to BlogSpot or Blogger or anywhere else and set up a special-purpose blog for just about any reason. I suspect that pleanty of people involved with the Olympics have set up special weblogs to post about the trials, the training, and the events.
With the rules, as given by CNN, it's not clear whether this would qualify as a "personal web page" or not, since the subject matter would deal specifically with an individual's Olympic live. Again, just speculation, but I think the IOC would rule that it was not a personal site since the sole content was Olympic in nature.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the IOC make the host country and city pay for things like security? I lived just to the west of the shooting range that was set up for the 1984 Olympics. I remember a friend of my parents who was an off-duty cop working security for the event who laughed about how his paycheck was signed by the same person who signed his normal payroll, just under a different department.
I'm really curious now what the IOC actually takes care of and what the host country eats. I do know that infrastructure projects like new statiums (or is it "stadia"?) and mass-transit systems are the responsibility of the host country. I'll have to Google it and see...
My main reason for railing against the IOC is this: what's the harm done if we get a 30-second movie from the perspective of somebody walking in the parade instead of a statium-mounted camera. Heck, I'd even pay for a documentary-style DVD with all of the athlete's footage on it, as long as it wasn't forced from their possession. I'm sure the IOC could, in turn, afford to buy the movies from the athletes for a couple of thousand dollars and everybody would be happy.
In reading the article, though, I came to the conclusion that the difference between Largely and totally is minute in this case.
It seems that they can only post text to a personal website that they had set up prior to going to the Olympics... So, say you wanted to create a one-time Blog as a diary of the events of the games, you can't.
Likewise, only pictures from "accredited journalists" can be posted on the Athelet's sites. So, say Mom takes a picture of you marching in the opening ceremonies and you want to post it. Unless Mom works for the Associated Press or some other news organization, no dice.
I wonder what the process is to become accredited? Surely it's not a journalism degree; I know of very few photographers who went to the trouble of getting a journalisim degree. Perhaps the IOC has some sort of program for it?
The IOC is supposed to be a nonprofit organization to keep the "Olympic Movement" alive. If they'd like to turn into a professional sports organization like MLB or the NFL, then by all means do it.
But until that time, they really should be taken to task for behaving like every other professional sports organization while claiming to strive to keep the Olympic ideals.
We could link http://www.athens2004.com/ to ridiculous repressive bastards...
Not that it would do much, but it'd be fun!