I started job searching in January so I could move out of a bad situation start-up and within 3 weeks had 2 offers and 3 more companies wanting 2nd interviews.
Look at the medical industry, its the only sector not being pummeled right now, although I'm sure it will get hit. The Nashville TN area has about 40-50 developer jobs in that area right now. Although the job I accepted was through a recruiter, 3 of the other 4 were direct postings from careerbuilder, dice and linkedin, all permanent. There are a ton of contract and contract to hire jobs out there too, if you get in bed with the right recruiters.
So there are jobs out there, in the right sectors and the right regions.
They are not a monopoly provider and are making huge margins - right now. However huge margins now != huge margins in 2-4 years where I see the brand being sold to a competetor for next to nothing as the brand withers due to bad quality and high prices. So the top dogs at the company and corporate parent will make some cash, they rest will be laid off.
reducing costs means that products are provided at a reduced cost as well
Obviously you have never worked in an American Manufacturing facility. The one I just left had a goal to outsource 40-50% of all the parts made in the product, but still kept increasing prices several times a year. So costs were down, but prices are up.
Now lets break that down because the selling price is not 100% related the cost to produce. Related items
bad quality parts = higher warranty, more inspectors, lawsuits, customer concessions = higher price - about 10-15% of the outsourced parts we received were crap
poor shipping schedules = inventory runouts = higher price -order 100 parts due today needed for tomorrow's production cycle - 2 weeks late, shut down line or order it domestically usually at an inflated price
poor shipping schedules = higher inventory = higher price - cannot run Just In Time manufacturing if you cannot control the supply chain or have no faith in supply chain meaning you carry more safety stock and there is a cost associated with storage
piss off domestic suppliers = higher costs = higher price - when you pull parts from a good domestic supplier for an outsourced one, they will jack up prices on other parts with them or charge premiums if you need a special expedited order (see item 2&3)
Unrelated items
transportation costs = higher costs = higher price - freight charges are constantly going up driving up product prices
So what have we learned? Outsourcing jobs / parts doesn't equal better prices for the customer. Typically outsourcing parts and jobs is number reported on a spreadsheet to corporate to meet the corporate goals of maximizing shareholder value and ensuring bonuses of executive staff. But in reality, it can have an opposite effect if it is done to strictly meet said number. Plus you may have customer backlash (see the beatings Dell gets on customer support) which may reduce sales which can drive prices in either direction depending on the fickle consumer.
SOX has become revenue stream for auditing firms. They took a very simple law (about 2 pages) that is as you stated "The basics of SOX is that your CEO must sign that the proper controls are in place to ensure that all changes made to production systems that affect the reporting of financial information are approved changes." and turned it into a complex cash cow.
My company's parent company has several internal corporate auditors on staff that are extremely computer illiterate. They basically take what the external auditors say to do make us produce documentation for it. However, the auditing firms have made the requirements overly complex and the corporate guys don't understand the technology to know what really makes sense or not.
Case in point, our corporate guy decided that only 2 of the 4 admins at our company need admin access in the mrp system. So he directed one of the dedicated mrp people to remove my access. Now I can no longer unlock user accounts, etc., so my ability to help the company has been reduced. No where in the SOX law does it say that you can only have 2 people with admin rights. So where does the corporate guy get that impression --- from the auditing firm. I have since got my rights back due to confronting him if he could point out exactly where in the SOX law it says that only 2 people can have admin rights. He couldn't, and only said that [unnamed auditing company] said that was the right way.
As long as the external auditing companies make up the rules on what is covered and what is not, we will continue feeding the auditing company's cash cow called SOX.
I don't see how restricting access to verizon.com on my LAN equipment is any different than them trying to restrict google on their equipment. My dept pays for the T1 plus all the wiring plus all the routers, switches, hubs and maintenance. Verizon owns a section of the infrastructure outside my control, but my company owns from the road to the PC. Maybe I'll see if they want to pay per hit from my company's T1.
Plus I'll recommend any Verizon cell phones be transferred to T-mobile or another provider.
The only way to stop this idiocy is to hurt the company in the pocketbook. If they think they can make $X million by charging content providers, it's our duty as consumers to make sure that it costs them $X*2 million in business.
If they are able to make that additional cash from Google & MS, soon won't be enough. Next they are going to start charging everyone, not just the big boys. And that my friend, hurts my company's bottom line for each web site we host. Don't think for a minute that they will be satisfied until everyone pays them the extortion fees.
So bottom line, I can lay out a business case for restricting access to verizon.com plus transferring all cell phones because their business practices will eventually have a negative impact on the company. No unauthorized changes here, all by the book.
Since I control my company's DNS, I'm not sure that I want Verizon or AT&T to continue to have a free lunch on my LAN. I'm going to re-direct them to 127.0.0.1 so their internet traffic isn't getting a free ride on my network equipment.
I'm sure there are other net admins that can do this as well. Maybe if we block 25% of their web hits, they might see how incredibly stupid this line of thinking is.
The Due Diligence and negotiations of aquisitions can sometimes take many months / years to complete. Just because it recently leaked doesn't mean that they haven't been in discussions since February.
I'm still putting on my tin-foil hat and uninstalling their spyware application as we speak.
You make very valid points and I would take this thought one step further and add federal health care to the list of things that the government should stay out of. I live in Tennessee where for the last decade or so, we have been toying with state funded healthcare called "Tenncare". Tenncare has been wrought with
- fraud- dead people, people from border states, and illegals getting benefits
- dirty politicians who "consult" with Tenncare contractors for legislation- State Senator John Ford has made a ton of money "consulting" with Tenncare contractors. Incidentally, he was just arrested for taking bribes to push corporate sponsored legislation
- lawsuits- a local ACLU type firm has made a ton of money suing for additional benefits and are partially responsible for spiraling costs
- total mis-management of funds- bad prescription drug policies, etc.
Tenncare has almost bankrupted the state as it has grown to the biggest line item in the state's budget. It has gotten so bad that our Democrat governor is trying to actually reduce the program.
So your point about why VOIP is cheaper than POTS has special meaning to me as I have seen first hand how a government program with the best intentions has spiraled into a gaping money pit that the tax-payers have to foot the bill for.
So, giving away something at a loss to drive competition out of business is illegal
Sort of like MS taking a loss on the X-Box to drive competition out the market? Sounds like when MS does it, it's OK, but when someone does it against MS, it's illegal?
My multi-billion dollar parent company has special Dell pricing supposedly using volume buying as way to reduce per unit costs. However, I can configure the exact machine with the "discount pricing" and as a Joe User and the Joe User beats the "discount pricing" sometime as much as $200 a pop. When we brought this up to our Dell rep, we were informed that it wasn't comparing apples to apples even thought the machines and configuration are exactly the same.
So, I buy Toshiba laptops and HP desktops from CDW and save a ton of money and get more bang in the box.
So while Dell is telling me an apple isn't an apple, when I can clearly tell it's an apple, I'm buying oranges that taste better anyway.
They say that spam accounts for so much lost productivity, but they fail to mention that spam has spawned a whole new race of products and services that keep people employed. The Anti-Spam industry is thriving and contributing to world economic growth.
That's like saying crime is good becuase it keeps cops employed, or that terrorism is good because it keeps the military employed. The point that is missing, is that the net cost of crime, terrorism, and spam typically is greater than the economics of the industries spawned to combat them.
Yeah, I know, comparing spam to terrorism is a bit of a stretch, but I think the point is valid.
Actually, we have online banking, application based banking as well as phone banking. I find the application based more powerful to categorize spending, build budgets, track spending habits, integrate with federal and state tax packages, etc. It also allows downloads of multiple accounts like savings, checking, credit cards, etc. into a single package with one click. This type of functionality gives me a quick net worth and cross account charting without having to log into 4-5 sites everyday. If all I was doing was paying bills, then online or direct transfer would be the right call.
I can't speak for how the American banks stack up with European banks, but I can do everything I need plus a lot of crap I don't with Quicken. I don't think the desire for more functionality and a single front-end interface necessarily translates into assuming the American banking system is a fairly bit behind those in use in other parts of the world.
And Tecmo Bowl on the NES and Super Tecmo Bowl on the sNES.
Thoese were the days when you could play a football game without having to learn 100 different combo's to pass and catch. Sure, the graphics were cheese, but they were fun.
Could the burial stones be fakes -- absolutely. And you are correct, they do not constitute scientific evidence of
man-dinosaur co-existence. But they are one of many pieces of evidence that are not factored into evolutional theory.
Why do you insist that science behave in an unscientific manner (e.g., accept claims without asking for proof,
or accept a supernatural explanation for natural phenomenon)?
Do you really hate science that much?
I do not hate science, but rather enjoy provable and repeatable science. However, the theory of evolution is neither provable or repeatable.
Here are some issues I have with the theory of evolution: 1. The creation of the universe
Evolution must start with the creation of the universe to be relevant. Most popular theories are based on a "Big Bang" or
expanding universe premise. This theory states that there was some amount of super dense matter that imploded/exploded and
began the universe. However, the First Law of
Thermodynamics states that neither energy or matter can be created or destroyed (e=MC2). If e=MC2 is true, then where did
the original matter come from? Did it just exist or was it created?
2. Gender
Assuming #1 doesn't matter, and evolutionary theory is true, where all living things started from single cell organisms that
reproduced asexually, where did gender come from? If evolution takes the best traits of previous incarnations and passes them
forward, why would something as inefficient as gender evolve?
Excerpt from
The Origin of Gender
and Sexual Reproduction [Part I]
By Bert Thompson, Ph.D. and Brad Harrub, Ph.D.
Biology texts are quick to illustrate amoebas evolving into intermediate organisms, which then conveniently give rise to
amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and, eventually, humans. Yet, interestingly, we never learn exactly when (or how!) independent
male and female species "evolved." Somewhere along this evolutionary path, both males and females were required in order to
ensure the procreation that was necessary to further the existence of a particular species. But how do evolutionists explain
this? When pressed to answer questions such as, "Where did males and females actually come from?," or "What is the evolutionary
origin of sex?," evolutionists become as silent as the tomb in which they have laid this perennial problem. How is it that, at
one point in time, "nature" was able to evolve a female member of a species that produces eggs and is internally equipped to
nourish a growing embryo, while at the same time evolving a male member that produces motile sperm cells? And, further, how is
it that these gametes (eggs and sperm) conveniently "evolved" so that they each contain half the normal chromosome number of
somatic (body) cells?
3. Fossil Records for all other species
Assuming all species evolved, shouldn't there be fossil records of the other animal's evolution?
4. Flowers
Assuming all vegetation as well as animals evolved, why do many plants require insects for pollination? Does this mean that all flowering plants
evolved after insects appeared? If so, why evolve into such an inefficient type of reproduction?
These are some of many questions that I do not believe can be answered through evolutionist theory without some sort of leap of
faith that 1. Matter existed for the Big Bang, 2. A male and female version of every species evolved at relatively the same
time, 3. Fossils are too hard to find to prove everything, and 4. evolution doesn't always produce the most efficient species
(Natural Selection). So by having faith in these things kind of turns evolution
Publish the evidence in Science or Nature with your evidence to support your theories
I cannot tell you if the discovery was published in Science or Nature, but if they are not, it furthers my point that evidence that doesn't match the theory can be disregarded in evolutionist science. Plus we all know that just because it's published (Piltdown man) in a science magazine means it's real.
Correct, but finding evidence of a trilobites in a human sandal fossil and human footprints embedded in 250-million-year-old coal veins bring up interesting points on why the evolution theory does not change to meet the found facts, but rather the facts are discarded becuase they don't fit the theory. If a physicist threw out facts, he would be ripped apart, but evolutionists are given a free ride to say and do whatever matches their flawed theory.
The Internet Explorer URL for your Search Assistant is attempting to be changed from http://www.google.com/ie to http://ie.search.msn.com/{SUB_RFC1766}/srchasst/sr chcust.htm.
So this is how they are going to promote their new search engine.
"So then what happened to all the evil fish of the world?"
The flood was not intended to wipe out "evil fish" (or bears, tigers,etc), but to wipe out wicked men who turned thier back on God (like the ACLU). The animals of the world were not created with souls or free will like man, therefore play their role as God intended, being neither good or evil, but being part of the fragile eco-system on earth.
"Hmm... damn that loophole"
Not a loophole, just a poor undestanding of the Biblical Flood.
"United States has been shooting itself in the foot by denying a greater role for traditional allies like France and Germany and for international institutions like the United Nations"
The US taxpayers and coallition nations are footing the bill for the reconstruction, but France and Germany are paying nothing. They do not deserve to get any reconstuction contracts. They did not get involved with the war because of the financial ties they had with Saddam. They did not get involved with the peacekeeping. Now that there is money to be had, they are all in.... I don't think so. Bush is 100% right in freezing them out.
"Saddam Hussein's capture is nothing more than a media distraction to redirect the U.S. public from the Bush administration's foreign policy failures."
I'm gonna have to call a bit fat BULLS..T on that. Saddam's capture / removal from power is what our troops are over there doing. It has nothing to do with the media, but removing a rich dictator with a strong hatred of the US and the means to do something about it. I'm pretty sure you are not privy to all the US intelligence on the ties between Saddam and al Quaida, but common enemies make strange bedfellows.
Slashdot Mirror
I started job searching in January so I could move out of a bad situation start-up and within 3 weeks had 2 offers and 3 more companies wanting 2nd interviews.
Look at the medical industry, its the only sector not being pummeled right now, although I'm sure it will get hit. The Nashville TN area has about 40-50 developer jobs in that area right now. Although the job I accepted was through a recruiter, 3 of the other 4 were direct postings from careerbuilder, dice and linkedin, all permanent. There are a ton of contract and contract to hire jobs out there too, if you get in bed with the right recruiters.
So there are jobs out there, in the right sectors and the right regions.
They are not a monopoly provider and are making huge margins - right now. However huge margins now != huge margins in 2-4 years where I see the brand being sold to a competetor for next to nothing as the brand withers due to bad quality and high prices. So the top dogs at the company and corporate parent will make some cash, they rest will be laid off.
Now lets break that down because the selling price is not 100% related the cost to produce.
Related items
-
bad quality parts = higher warranty, more inspectors, lawsuits, customer concessions = higher price - about 10-15% of the outsourced parts we received were crap
-
poor shipping schedules = inventory runouts = higher price -order 100 parts due today needed for tomorrow's production cycle - 2 weeks late, shut down line or order it domestically usually at an inflated price
-
poor shipping schedules = higher inventory = higher price - cannot run Just In Time manufacturing if you cannot control the supply chain or have no faith in supply chain meaning you carry more safety stock and there is a cost associated with storage
-
piss off domestic suppliers = higher costs = higher price - when you pull parts from a good domestic supplier for an outsourced one, they will jack up prices on other parts with them or charge premiums if you need a special expedited order (see item 2&3)
Unrelated items-
transportation costs = higher costs = higher price - freight charges are constantly going up driving up product prices
So what have we learned? Outsourcing jobs / parts doesn't equal better prices for the customer. Typically outsourcing parts and jobs is number reported on a spreadsheet to corporate to meet the corporate goals of maximizing shareholder value and ensuring bonuses of executive staff. But in reality, it can have an opposite effect if it is done to strictly meet said number. Plus you may have customer backlash (see the beatings Dell gets on customer support) which may reduce sales which can drive prices in either direction depending on the fickle consumer.SOX has become revenue stream for auditing firms. They took a very simple law (about 2 pages) that is as you stated "The basics of SOX is that your CEO must sign that the proper controls are in place to ensure that all changes made to production systems that affect the reporting of financial information are approved changes." and turned it into a complex cash cow.
My company's parent company has several internal corporate auditors on staff that are extremely computer illiterate. They basically take what the external auditors say to do make us produce documentation for it. However, the auditing firms have made the requirements overly complex and the corporate guys don't understand the technology to know what really makes sense or not.
Case in point, our corporate guy decided that only 2 of the 4 admins at our company need admin access in the mrp system. So he directed one of the dedicated mrp people to remove my access. Now I can no longer unlock user accounts, etc., so my ability to help the company has been reduced. No where in the SOX law does it say that you can only have 2 people with admin rights. So where does the corporate guy get that impression --- from the auditing firm. I have since got my rights back due to confronting him if he could point out exactly where in the SOX law it says that only 2 people can have admin rights. He couldn't, and only said that [unnamed auditing company] said that was the right way.
As long as the external auditing companies make up the rules on what is covered and what is not, we will continue feeding the auditing company's cash cow called SOX.
I don't see how restricting access to verizon.com on my LAN equipment is any different than them trying to restrict google on their equipment. My dept pays for the T1 plus all the wiring plus all the routers, switches, hubs and maintenance. Verizon owns a section of the infrastructure outside my control, but my company owns from the road to the PC. Maybe I'll see if they want to pay per hit from my company's T1.
Plus I'll recommend any Verizon cell phones be transferred to T-mobile or another provider.
The only way to stop this idiocy is to hurt the company in the pocketbook. If they think they can make $X million by charging content providers, it's our duty as consumers to make sure that it costs them $X*2 million in business.
If they are able to make that additional cash from Google & MS, soon won't be enough. Next they are going to start charging everyone, not just the big boys. And that my friend, hurts my company's bottom line for each web site we host. Don't think for a minute that they will be satisfied until everyone pays them the extortion fees.
So bottom line, I can lay out a business case for restricting access to verizon.com plus transferring all cell phones because their business practices will eventually have a negative impact on the company. No unauthorized changes here, all by the book.
Since I control my company's DNS, I'm not sure that I want Verizon or AT&T to continue to have a free lunch on my LAN. I'm going to re-direct them to 127.0.0.1 so their internet traffic isn't getting a free ride on my network equipment. I'm sure there are other net admins that can do this as well. Maybe if we block 25% of their web hits, they might see how incredibly stupid this line of thinking is.
The Due Diligence and negotiations of aquisitions can sometimes take many months / years to complete. Just because it recently leaked doesn't mean that they haven't been in discussions since February.
I'm still putting on my tin-foil hat and uninstalling their spyware application as we speak.
You make very valid points and I would take this thought one step further and add federal health care to the list of things that the government should stay out of. I live in Tennessee where for the last decade or so, we have been toying with state funded healthcare called "Tenncare". Tenncare has been wrought with
- fraud- dead people, people from border states, and illegals getting benefits
- dirty politicians who "consult" with Tenncare contractors for legislation- State Senator John Ford has made a ton of money "consulting" with Tenncare contractors. Incidentally, he was just arrested for taking bribes to push corporate sponsored legislation
- lawsuits- a local ACLU type firm has made a ton of money suing for additional benefits and are partially responsible for spiraling costs
- total mis-management of funds- bad prescription drug policies, etc.
Tenncare has almost bankrupted the state as it has grown to the biggest line item in the state's budget. It has gotten so bad that our Democrat governor is trying to actually reduce the program.
So your point about why VOIP is cheaper than POTS has special meaning to me as I have seen first hand how a government program with the best intentions has spiraled into a gaping money pit that the tax-payers have to foot the bill for.
Sort of like MS taking a loss on the X-Box to drive competition out the market? Sounds like when MS does it, it's OK, but when someone does it against MS, it's illegal?
see:
c id=11771868
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140551&
Let the Burninating Commence!
I've seen the same type of thing ...
My multi-billion dollar parent company has special Dell pricing supposedly using volume buying as way to reduce per unit costs. However, I can configure the exact machine with the "discount pricing" and as a Joe User and the Joe User beats the "discount pricing" sometime as much as $200 a pop. When we brought this up to our Dell rep, we were informed that it wasn't comparing apples to apples even thought the machines and configuration are exactly the same.
So, I buy Toshiba laptops and HP desktops from CDW and save a ton of money and get more bang in the box.
So while Dell is telling me an apple isn't an apple, when I can clearly tell it's an apple, I'm buying oranges that taste better anyway.
That's like saying crime is good becuase it keeps cops employed, or that terrorism is good because it keeps the military employed. The point that is missing, is that the net cost of crime, terrorism, and spam typically is greater than the economics of the industries spawned to combat them.
Yeah, I know, comparing spam to terrorism is a bit of a stretch, but I think the point is valid.
Actually, we have online banking, application based banking as well as phone banking. I find the application based more powerful to categorize spending, build budgets, track spending habits, integrate with federal and state tax packages, etc. It also allows downloads of multiple accounts like savings, checking, credit cards, etc. into a single package with one click. This type of functionality gives me a quick net worth and cross account charting without having to log into 4-5 sites everyday. If all I was doing was paying bills, then online or direct transfer would be the right call.
I can't speak for how the American banks stack up with European banks, but I can do everything I need plus a lot of crap I don't with Quicken. I don't think the desire for more functionality and a single front-end interface necessarily translates into assuming the American banking system is a fairly bit behind those in use in other parts of the world.
And Tecmo Bowl on the NES and Super Tecmo Bowl on the sNES.
Thoese were the days when you could play a football game without having to learn 100 different combo's to pass and catch. Sure, the graphics were cheese, but they were fun.
I do not hate science, but rather enjoy provable and repeatable science. However, the theory of evolution is neither provable or repeatable.
Here are some issues I have with the theory of evolution:
1. The creation of the universe
Evolution must start with the creation of the universe to be relevant. Most popular theories are based on a "Big Bang" or expanding universe premise. This theory states that there was some amount of super dense matter that imploded/exploded and began the universe. However, the First Law of Thermodynamics states that neither energy or matter can be created or destroyed (e=MC2). If e=MC2 is true, then where did the original matter come from? Did it just exist or was it created?
2. Gender
Assuming #1 doesn't matter, and evolutionary theory is true, where all living things started from single cell organisms that reproduced asexually, where did gender come from? If evolution takes the best traits of previous incarnations and passes them forward, why would something as inefficient as gender evolve?
3. Fossil Records for all other species
Assuming all species evolved, shouldn't there be fossil records of the other animal's evolution?
4. Flowers
Assuming all vegetation as well as animals evolved, why do many plants require insects for pollination? Does this mean that all flowering plants evolved after insects appeared? If so, why evolve into such an inefficient type of reproduction?
These are some of many questions that I do not believe can be answered through evolutionist theory without some sort of leap of faith that 1. Matter existed for the Big Bang, 2. A male and female version of every species evolved at relatively the same time, 3. Fossils are too hard to find to prove everything, and 4. evolution doesn't always produce the most efficient species (Natural Selection). So by having faith in these things kind of turns evolution
trilobyte pic 2
Burial Stones pic1
Burial Stones pic 2
Burial Stones pic 3
Burial Stones pic 4
I cannot tell you if the discovery was published in Science or Nature, but if they are not, it furthers my point that evidence that doesn't match the theory can be disregarded in evolutionist science. Plus we all know that just because it's published (Piltdown man) in a science magazine means it's real.
Correct, but finding evidence of a trilobites in a human sandal fossil and human footprints embedded in 250-million-year-old coal veins bring up interesting points on why the evolution theory does not change to meet the found facts, but rather the facts are discarded becuase they don't fit the theory. If a physicist threw out facts, he would be ripped apart, but evolutionists are given a free ride to say and do whatever matches their flawed theory.
Plus the discovery of cave paintings of dinosaurs and pottery with extremely realistic depictions of man and dinosaurs together shoot more holes in the whole evolutiontists timetables.
I don't think Michael Moore could make a movie when there is no truth to distort in an effort to make a very naive and biased political statement.
So this is how they are going to promote their new search engine.
Not a loophole, just a poor undestanding of the Biblical Flood.
Until Firefox can prompt the end user for updates, Joe Six Pack will always be out of date.
And extensions that don't break after each release. After each release so far, I get used to an extension just to have it break on an update.
Amen brother! If I had some Mod Points I'd Mod you up.
The parent post is definately trolling.
I thought the cartoon was funny and equally made light of both candidates.
But the parent is right about one thing: It's not about IP [it's really about money!]
"If you don't live in California, shut up this does not affect you."
If the California legislature can restrict Google's OPTIONAL service, then this does too affect me, a non-Californian.
However, I do agree with your statement "If you do live in California, vote these people out"
The US taxpayers and coallition nations are footing the bill for the reconstruction, but France and Germany are paying nothing. They do not deserve to get any reconstuction contracts. They did not get involved with the war because of the financial ties they had with Saddam. They did not get involved with the peacekeeping. Now that there is money to be had, they are all in
I'm gonna have to call a bit fat BULLS..T on that. Saddam's capture / removal from power is what our troops are over there doing. It has nothing to do with the media, but removing a rich dictator with a strong hatred of the US and the means to do something about it. I'm pretty sure you are not privy to all the US intelligence on the ties between Saddam and al Quaida, but common enemies make strange bedfellows.