It's because the 1 1/2 per hour bounus is still not enough to reduce the work week to 40 hours. Insurance and liability all figure to almost another full paycheck per worker nowdays....getting off for the extra 1/2 pay is dirt cheap. That hour is only 1/3 the cost of your normal 40! The normal unions have been accepting this as a means to keep their benifits status by keeping their workforce down and raising productivity every year to make up for inflation of everything else. The productivity number for those "lazy" UAW workers are consistantly double digits for the last dozen years...benifits go down because the malpractice lawyers are eating it all.
The backlash I see when this gets thru is that the courts will *hopefully* fall back to the workers' right to only make contracts for 40 hours a week defined as normal. When there's a large influx of new disgruntled people recently exempted, the lawsuits are bound to start flying...and that benifits ALL salary workers. It's something that's needed to be done for a long time and hasn't, that the work week needs to be set at 40 hours...once the courts see how abused it really is and how wide spread it is they WILL act. Think of it this way, it's finally giving the managers enough rope to hang themselves with...sometimes you gotta give a little slack so they can really screw up and still not gain anything except pissed off workers!!!
We're not complaining your not rich...just neither are we!!!
Like they said above if median household income is only $41k/yr and about 50% or better have two jobs then the pay for ONE worker still works out to about that $27k number...or they make average $13.50 and get $41 thru OT.
In very real terms, if you live outside the megacities and make more than $40/year individually you ARE rich...even compared to your fellow Americans! We haven't begun to explore the 50% of FULL TIME WORKING ADULTS making LOWER than said average. Often TWO of their wages will NEVER add up to the average HOUSEhold income!!! all the politicians pride themselves on all the 8-10 per hour jobs they "bring home" working as some sub-supplier for auto parts...The jobs that don't even get insurance...but they're really great...yeah, whatever...Now realize that the $200k+/yr crowd thinks $75k/yr is just too much to pay for workers...watch that average drop a full 20% if the labor rules change!!!
Actually in michigan last year [where I'm at] average manufacturing pay was about $512/week that was pulled from reported weekly unemployment qualified wages I believe. Including OT and with all those really good auto jobs to throw the curve. That comes out to $30k/year...WITH OT.. as average!!! For example that includes lots of $12/hour workers [$25/k year] working 50+ per week just to make that average pay...
in a nutshell if you make over $30k per year you ARE RICH in America!!!!
They raised the minimum...from about $7.50 to $11 per hour for salary. Yes, there are McManagers out there working 60 hours for the minimum $250/week!!! they moved minimum pay up to $450/week for salary. Unfortunately, tied to the same bill is the rule changes for the rest of us...pretty much everybody over $27.50 as well as many of the IT professionals are all being cut out of OT...also this appears to be aimed at many engineering techs and tool n' die type guys too by lowering the education requirements...so much for those guy who got 20+ years designing circuts or tooling for assembly lines. Those are the guys who make $30+ per hour...and earn every dime of it!!!
I'm not worried though, the backlash will actually be GOOD for the country. We've grown to accustom to working lots of OT instead of balancing our budgets. Once we all get used to the new lower salary, we'll have more freedom to work for the GOOD employers that don't make us work 60 hours a week! Or, we'll be able to take a better job that was formerly lower pay doing something we like better... Point is that without OT, in a few years nobody will want to work OT anymore...and they can't fire us ALL!!!
Yep you got it, those darn blue collar folk are bleeding businesses dry! of course the reason everybody pays that much OT is that it's still CHEAPER for business than hiring another guy with benifits for a straight forty.
now they're complaining about OT 'hurting' american companies...but of course the hours won't be going down. Oh well, looks like those tech unions will make a comback real soon now...because contracts trump the law. speaking of, how many people have employment contracts in place that already define OT rules for you personally? Hopefully, the state level labor boards will be on spot about this and hold employeers to their end of already made contracts...or at least require paid unemployment for those workers that can't afford to keep the jobs... after all, OT counts for wages and a 20% cut you don't have to accept for most state's unemployment...why wouldn't that apply in the case of any changes?
you're right it's about PRIORITIES rather than mental inflexiblity. Once you have kids, taking care of them, visting school plays and all that stuff is a little more important than the weekly "death march". Actually, I work for a place that just tired of kids...they were actually looking for somebody over 25 so they'd be stable and reliable rather than a hot shot kids that want to miss half a week of work and play video games.
Personally, I find being young is an attitude...I bet there are a lot of 40+ guys here who whould get along just fine with the younger folks...and even teach you a thing or two!!! One of the things is that people have certian qualities that they need for job 'compatibility' and they change throughout your lifetime as you grow as a person and have verying responsibilities. That's something that many career 'analysts' as well as business MBAs simply aren't taught...."everybody's gotta want the money all the time"...NOT! I had the privilage to work at a company that had lots of older workers and treated them very well...older people may not be as buzzword compliant, but they add a lot of stability to the work flow by catching fatal project errors in the planning stage...heck, they'll force the planning stages simply because they've got bingo at 6:30 and plan to be there. But that "on task" -ness is what makes them efficent and not HAVE to work 60 hours to make up for it!!!
Americans are the most productive workers in the world...they're just not cheap. We work the longest hours outside the third world and have the least benifits of the "civilized" [read Japan/Europe] world.
The real issue is that american managers see outsourcing as the "magic bullet" because the workers are lower paid so they can have more. Having dealt with comparing a factory I was at to the overseas equivelant, they hire nearly double the staff with more managers to do the same job as we do here. The real issue is american management not workers. Even the dreaded UAW is pretty p-whipped nowdays. Even with the Unions BEGGING to work longer hours for less benifts and pay the american management culture still can't make profits due to sucky business decisions trying to make Lots of profits instead of steady ones. That's why all the growing manufacturing companies are run by the Japaneese. Not because they're neccessarily any better, but because they stick to their management plan and company standards long enough to realize the payout in loyal customers AND employees...something american companies still don't get.
You do got a great point there. When was the last time CEOs sat down and PLANNED anything with all the players then did it? At my last job it seemed the companies owner prided himself on giving the least possible notice...and wondered why stuff didn't work out. He actually mocked me in front of the whole office for "planning" too much ahead unlike my boss who simply worked 80 hour weeks to please his whims...
the only thing Real has to offer is so sell-out to apple. They've already jumped into bed with MS in the past buy allowing MS to put their codex into Windowa media player. Jobs can't take the chance of that happening again!
The only way I could see Apple dealing with them on iTunes or iPod is if Apple bought them outright... Unfortunately, Real doesn't have anything to offer to customers to stay in the game. MS has Windows, and Apple has iPod... Real has none of that. The only "advantage" to including real would be using none iTMS sources for music and not using iTunes to play it! Now if they did something useful like made a full featured Linux/*nix player that could play all the DRM stuff legally they could make a killing... They gotta find some leverage...
Actually budget isn't really a problem so much as the congress using them to make profit rather than reinvesting money in the department to do their jobs. They pull a huge percent [like 50%+] of the application money OUT of the PTO for other stuff. They should be leaving more money in and paying everybody more money and expecting more through examinations.
Of course that's the game...business men fund the politicians and pay the taxes. So the PTO is viewed as a govt "service" to help the business make more money...it's not about the individual inventors, but about keeping the corps fed.
But many of the older patents were decided on that alone. The telephone is a key patent decided by it's working. Bell was the first one to get an offical public demonstration done and the paperwork turned in so he got the patent even though the other guy had working protypes, he didn't have it "offical" in time.
Frankly, it's a good cause for more limited times on Patents and Copyrights. If you reduce the time for them to something reasonable...like 7 years instead of 20 that would capture 90% of the profits by the winner while getting the stuff out to everybody sooner. People tend to forget that the monopoly IS the reward. It's payment for publishing your work to the Library of Congress for everybody to see. It's not any kind of personal "right" it's a govt "lottery" to encourage innovation.
So this really doesn't matter much. almost all home users use some kind of telcom line...so dial up or DSL is already paid for unless they start splitting hairs over types of service. internal one-site business lans were never a function of telcos...there were AS400 Twinax and Token rings back in 85 to use as examples.
Businesses might have trouble with certian lines, but I can't see what. Leased lines are thru the phone company, Cable broadband is thru the cable company tied to TV service, even WANs like T1 and OC92 are still tied to phone services.
It's the lack of personal income tax to blame. They're expecting to fund the state off the tourists...but with the economic downturn not many people are vacationing...hence the need for "chicken" taxes...similar to the old days when the Noble used to charge taxes "just because". They're poor and have to keep inventing stuff to tax so they create taxes on phones, merchandizing fixtures, and other stuff that business primarily have so the serfs don't have to be bothered with paying their own way. It's cheap for seniors, but the only jobs for working folk are all low wage "tourist" jobs.
WE use 100GB/260 compressed AIT3 tapes at work and get them for less than $60 each...the catch is that the cheapest AIT3 drive on Pricewatch [not a great source of info, but just for kix] is nearly $2000! The seek time would also be [hopefully?] much lower. The problem with tapes being the need to wait at least 5 minutes to restore ANY single file. In an IT setting that's OK, we don't want restoring backups to be TOO easy, but for home or AV uses not having to spend time restoring back to a HDD will make all the difference.
I'd say they have a 6month to 1 year window to make this thing fly. Unless somebody comes out with double-sided, double-layered, blue-laser DVD rewritables very soon they have a short-term leg up on a good solution because it's fast enough to actually work directly from as well without the wait and burn steps.
How long until somebody ports Knoppix to one of these? Actually That's a great idea for a university setting. 35GB is more than enough for most applications...even dumping DV tapes.
Like another poster pointed out though...all the cool uses are NOT in windows or USB2.... Now one of these that could connect directly via Firewire without a PC to devices such as a DV camera or directly to a network could be cool...
I could swear there was something like this for VHS cams back 5-8 years ago when they first got popular. Only it was curved like a bow so the center of gravity was directly below your hand so it didn't wear you out. It used the batteries as counterweights. That's probably the $600 "cheap" one's he's talking about.
Really, It's all about Center-of-gravity. The key is to move the CG as low as possible to make a stable pendalum, with as much mass as possible to increase inertia and reduce jitters. These have been around for a while...
Saying it like that is probably what weirds people out..it's not "loud" enough for how big and fast moving it is. A big part of trainn "noise" is the clackity-clack of the wheels, the rumble of the ground etc...Mag-lev trains probably don't have the same non-audible cues.
You'd be surprised how much you develop a "pavalov's" type reaction to the sounds around you. I know from being a tech on machinery that you can often "hear" a machine problem from subtle changes if it's even slightly out of calibration... People are tuned to react a certian way near trains/ hearing trains... it spooks them.
if Win98 is already considered obsolete, and win ME will be gone in another year at best. Meaning that "all" MS oses is really only Win2K & XP right now!
The problem with the USA is that it's not a "Christian" country... For a matter of fact it was deliberately purposed NOT to be!!! The people who wrote the Constitution were considered amoral heritics by the Churches of the time. They knew specificly what they DIDN'T want. At the time they wrote the Constitution, Maryland was "professionally" Cathloic, Pennsylvania "Quaking" from "friends" and Virginia still had the offical Church of England. They forcebly MADE these states give up many of their "religous sponsored" laws to get into the US of A!!!
In other news, the Pledge of Aligence was written 100 years ago WITHOUT the words "Under God" and wouldn't have been sanctioned by the congress of the time if it had had them!
What's happening is that the "Right" has used the laws of the land to oppress the "left" for so long that those people have put in hard work to gain political position and demand not just satisfaction, but glorification that the "right" once had for the Church. The problem is that Americans don't really believe in freedom for everybody. They believe in freedom to do what I want, to see what I want, hear what I want and also the freedom to not have to see anything I might not like... the rest of you'alls freedom be damned!!!
IBM's been doing it for years with their server software. They simply run the key script against the packages before they burn it.
Now they could have Key-specific files that only work with YOUR key. They could even use your key as the encryption seed if they wanted...it'd add an extra minute?
They could even put the machines on line and get the keys in real time! Then the stuff on the machine would be useless to theives.
yep but it's a free market and they're always be somebody that "swears" by stuff like that! Actually this would hurt somebody like Softkey because they're basicly providing the same service...but on shelves.
Software now is all about who you know. There really is a lot of great stuff out there by independants but it's too hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. Perhaps a "top 10" rating system!!!
Better yet, grandma gets the whole package...but wants to do specific stuff with her machine. Now the sales guy can pull up some of the very nice shareware stuff out there and charge Grandma and extra $20-30 for great software that she will use rather than overpriced "professional" software she doesn't need.
Of course, you could have precompiled Gentoo CD's already! just pick your hardware config and burn a custom CD for your system...bonus points if you are able to search the web for those hard to find drivers!!!
When will iTunes start selling shareware apps. There's lots of stuff that's $20-30 that really should be $10-25 in the shareware world. Unfortunately, it requires $30 to simply cover the labor of burning discs and mailing them out until you get to 10,000's of units. Also, iTunes has tracking of what you buy...so you can get it again and keep track of moving it between machines...
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The backlash I see when this gets thru is that the courts will *hopefully* fall back to the workers' right to only make contracts for 40 hours a week defined as normal. When there's a large influx of new disgruntled people recently exempted, the lawsuits are bound to start flying...and that benifits ALL salary workers. It's something that's needed to be done for a long time and hasn't, that the work week needs to be set at 40 hours...once the courts see how abused it really is and how wide spread it is they WILL act. Think of it this way, it's finally giving the managers enough rope to hang themselves with...sometimes you gotta give a little slack so they can really screw up and still not gain anything except pissed off workers!!!
Like they said above if median household income is only $41k/yr and about 50% or better have two jobs then the pay for ONE worker still works out to about that $27k number...or they make average $13.50 and get $41 thru OT.
In very real terms, if you live outside the megacities and make more than $40/year individually you ARE rich...even compared to your fellow Americans! We haven't begun to explore the 50% of FULL TIME WORKING ADULTS making LOWER than said average. Often TWO of their wages will NEVER add up to the average HOUSEhold income!!! all the politicians pride themselves on all the 8-10 per hour jobs they "bring home" working as some sub-supplier for auto parts...The jobs that don't even get insurance...but they're really great...yeah, whatever...Now realize that the $200k+/yr crowd thinks $75k/yr is just too much to pay for workers...watch that average drop a full 20% if the labor rules change!!!
in a nutshell if you make over $30k per year you ARE RICH in America!!!!
I'm not worried though, the backlash will actually be GOOD for the country. We've grown to accustom to working lots of OT instead of balancing our budgets. Once we all get used to the new lower salary, we'll have more freedom to work for the GOOD employers that don't make us work 60 hours a week! Or, we'll be able to take a better job that was formerly lower pay doing something we like better... Point is that without OT, in a few years nobody will want to work OT anymore...and they can't fire us ALL!!!
now they're complaining about OT 'hurting' american companies...but of course the hours won't be going down. Oh well, looks like those tech unions will make a comback real soon now...because contracts trump the law. speaking of, how many people have employment contracts in place that already define OT rules for you personally? Hopefully, the state level labor boards will be on spot about this and hold employeers to their end of already made contracts...or at least require paid unemployment for those workers that can't afford to keep the jobs... after all, OT counts for wages and a 20% cut you don't have to accept for most state's unemployment...why wouldn't that apply in the case of any changes?
Personally, I find being young is an attitude...I bet there are a lot of 40+ guys here who whould get along just fine with the younger folks...and even teach you a thing or two!!! One of the things is that people have certian qualities that they need for job 'compatibility' and they change throughout your lifetime as you grow as a person and have verying responsibilities. That's something that many career 'analysts' as well as business MBAs simply aren't taught...."everybody's gotta want the money all the time"...NOT! I had the privilage to work at a company that had lots of older workers and treated them very well...older people may not be as buzzword compliant, but they add a lot of stability to the work flow by catching fatal project errors in the planning stage...heck, they'll force the planning stages simply because they've got bingo at 6:30 and plan to be there. But that "on task" -ness is what makes them efficent and not HAVE to work 60 hours to make up for it!!!
The real issue is that american managers see outsourcing as the "magic bullet" because the workers are lower paid so they can have more. Having dealt with comparing a factory I was at to the overseas equivelant, they hire nearly double the staff with more managers to do the same job as we do here. The real issue is american management not workers. Even the dreaded UAW is pretty p-whipped nowdays. Even with the Unions BEGGING to work longer hours for less benifts and pay the american management culture still can't make profits due to sucky business decisions trying to make Lots of profits instead of steady ones. That's why all the growing manufacturing companies are run by the Japaneese. Not because they're neccessarily any better, but because they stick to their management plan and company standards long enough to realize the payout in loyal customers AND employees...something american companies still don't get.
I think i was gone a week after that comment!
The only way I could see Apple dealing with them on iTunes or iPod is if Apple bought them outright... Unfortunately, Real doesn't have anything to offer to customers to stay in the game. MS has Windows, and Apple has iPod... Real has none of that. The only "advantage" to including real would be using none iTMS sources for music and not using iTunes to play it! Now if they did something useful like made a full featured Linux/*nix player that could play all the DRM stuff legally they could make a killing... They gotta find some leverage...
I managed on a 1GHz T Celeron, 512 ram, & radeon 9500pro...but it was only barely playable. I'll have to try it on the 3GHz at work with 1G of ram!!!
Of course that's the game...business men fund the politicians and pay the taxes. So the PTO is viewed as a govt "service" to help the business make more money...it's not about the individual inventors, but about keeping the corps fed.
Frankly, it's a good cause for more limited times on Patents and Copyrights. If you reduce the time for them to something reasonable...like 7 years instead of 20 that would capture 90% of the profits by the winner while getting the stuff out to everybody sooner. People tend to forget that the monopoly IS the reward. It's payment for publishing your work to the Library of Congress for everybody to see. It's not any kind of personal "right" it's a govt "lottery" to encourage innovation.
Businesses might have trouble with certian lines, but I can't see what. Leased lines are thru the phone company, Cable broadband is thru the cable company tied to TV service, even WANs like T1 and OC92 are still tied to phone services.
It's the lack of personal income tax to blame. They're expecting to fund the state off the tourists...but with the economic downturn not many people are vacationing...hence the need for "chicken" taxes...similar to the old days when the Noble used to charge taxes "just because". They're poor and have to keep inventing stuff to tax so they create taxes on phones, merchandizing fixtures, and other stuff that business primarily have so the serfs don't have to be bothered with paying their own way. It's cheap for seniors, but the only jobs for working folk are all low wage "tourist" jobs.
I'd say they have a 6month to 1 year window to make this thing fly. Unless somebody comes out with double-sided, double-layered, blue-laser DVD rewritables very soon they have a short-term leg up on a good solution because it's fast enough to actually work directly from as well without the wait and burn steps.
Like another poster pointed out though...all the cool uses are NOT in windows or USB2 .... Now one of these that could connect directly via Firewire without a PC to devices such as a DV camera or directly to a network could be cool...
Really, It's all about Center-of-gravity. The key is to move the CG as low as possible to make a stable pendalum, with as much mass as possible to increase inertia and reduce jitters. These have been around for a while...
You'd be surprised how much you develop a "pavalov's" type reaction to the sounds around you. I know from being a tech on machinery that you can often "hear" a machine problem from subtle changes if it's even slightly out of calibration... People are tuned to react a certian way near trains/ hearing trains... it spooks them.
if Win98 is already considered obsolete, and win ME will be gone in another year at best. Meaning that "all" MS oses is really only Win2K & XP right now!
But Jessica Alba would be good too.
Sarah Michell Geller?....Melissa Hannigan..hahaha
The problem with the USA is that it's not a "Christian" country... For a matter of fact it was deliberately purposed NOT to be!!! The people who wrote the Constitution were considered amoral heritics by the Churches of the time. They knew specificly what they DIDN'T want. At the time they wrote the Constitution, Maryland was "professionally" Cathloic, Pennsylvania "Quaking" from "friends" and Virginia still had the offical Church of England. They forcebly MADE these states give up many of their "religous sponsored" laws to get into the US of A!!!
In other news, the Pledge of Aligence was written 100 years ago WITHOUT the words "Under God" and wouldn't have been sanctioned by the congress of the time if it had had them!
What's happening is that the "Right" has used the laws of the land to oppress the "left" for so long that those people have put in hard work to gain political position and demand not just satisfaction, but glorification that the "right" once had for the Church. The problem is that Americans don't really believe in freedom for everybody. They believe in freedom to do what I want, to see what I want, hear what I want and also the freedom to not have to see anything I might not like... the rest of you'alls freedom be damned!!!
Now they could have Key-specific files that only work with YOUR key. They could even use your key as the encryption seed if they wanted...it'd add an extra minute?
They could even put the machines on line and get the keys in real time! Then the stuff on the machine would be useless to theives.
Software now is all about who you know. There really is a lot of great stuff out there by independants but it's too hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. Perhaps a "top 10" rating system!!!
Of course, you could have precompiled Gentoo CD's already! just pick your hardware config and burn a custom CD for your system...bonus points if you are able to search the web for those hard to find drivers!!!
When will iTunes start selling shareware apps. There's lots of stuff that's $20-30 that really should be $10-25 in the shareware world. Unfortunately, it requires $30 to simply cover the labor of burning discs and mailing them out until you get to 10,000's of units. Also, iTunes has tracking of what you buy...so you can get it again and keep track of moving it between machines...