in Michigan we have a "no swearing" law and from time to time it gets used. It hasn't ever got far enough thru courts to actually get overturned, but usually it gets far enough to punsish somebody because it's only $100 or 30 days in jail. They had to be very careful when it was written to include the protection of "women and children".. because disallowing adult men to swear at each other would be a first amendment violation! I've though this would be a great way to make a woman-free, child-free club by having a "swearing club" where men could exercise their freedom of speech... either courts would have to allow discrimination or they'd have to overturn the swearing ordinance!
Turn it around though. The bridge is painted BECAUSE it is useful to many people, so it can't be allowed to fall in to disrepair. And the cost of repainting the bridge is far less than trying to find land and money to build a whole new one every few years.
This is where proprietary software breaks down, because we've gotten to the point that upgrades cost nearly the same as the full versions, and don't provide sufficiently big enough advances...they only seem to keep the company in business because they have copyright. Take for instance the yearly Autocad or Adobe updates that are far out of hand on the utility/cost curve.
do we avoid the Q: drive as the "queer drive"...(opposed to strange or charmed... not homosexual) or are you making an IBM joke that on IBM systems you never name anything with a Q because it's "special".
correct, I do remember something in Michigan or at the Fed level about just that. To allow such alternative work structures they wanted to redefine overtime as 80 hours in 14 days rather than 40 hours in 7 days. I don't remember if it went thru or not. The alternative is where it ends up slightly shorter than 80 hours to keep the pay the same.. you get 45 hours one week and 32 the next and the difference is the OT pay from the 5 hours before equaling a regular 80 hour pay.
typically those working 2-3 jobs are because those 2-3 only add up to 60 or so.. scattered around weird hours so that the 2-3 employers don't have to pay benefits and the employees are always sick from undisciplined sleep schedules. But hey if we take all those new "service" jobs everybody brags about and divide by 2/3 we'll have the actual number of people being employed.
I think the poster is talking about salary/office positions, where there is a set amount of work to be done and an hour extra a day would add real work time versus a whole extra day when you have to have meetings, phone interruptions, lunch, naps, breaks, etc. If you figure taking all that into account you only get 4-6 hours of real nose to the wheel work in office/technical positions... that's why so many IT people like to work over.. because the interruptions go away and they can get all the work they need in. Hence a 9/36 actually nets the company 1 hour of "real" work per day that would be filed until tomorrow, so the 4 hours "lost" is really a wash because you'd lose Friday to all that other stuff distracting from work. And the company gets to keep the office close 1 day saving on utilities/janitorial/etc.
but that's the catch. "Freebis" like Sharepoint tie Server, AD, SQL, and Exchange together in a way that simply can't be migrated to OSS. Sure it can be replicated, but you would have to rebuild everything done before to move off it. There are dozens of other MS products that tied in a similar manner. Not bad products, but the combine products can't be got away from easily.
because "teachers" really do get it nearly free... or at least not under per-pupil costs. Of course Universities pay big money in the name of "piracy" for site licensing.. but that goes under the IT or legal funds, not "teachers" funds.... see the difference.
Like the Forrester survey below this article, people use Microsoft software out of habit, not even because they like it. For most people, using even MS Word is really hard, and re-learning it is even worse. MS knows Linux or Mac is better but as long as they keep the price of upgrades less than the price to go some place else, and the pain of upgrades less than the pain of learning Linux they will keep their customers from sheer bureaucratic inertia.
exactly, the company I worked for, which doesn't even place in US steel production, had anti-competition investigation nearly started back when fuel prices and metals price went sky high 7-8 years ago. Because they were so specialized they could nearly "write their own ticket" and get price increases from customers to match the prices they paid out... while automotive customers were demanding all their other suppliers cut prices 5-10% simply because THEY could get away with it.
"monopoly" is about your position of power in regard to the customer, not the actual market share involved.
Considering CEOs of GM and Ford are in charge of companies that rank above the populace and wealth of many nations in the UN private air travel isn't that big a deal. They're time to the company is worth tens of thousands of dollars...more than any congresscritter's waiting at a public airport is a real waste of financial resources.
of course it was news and every news channel was lined up outside the president's office to hear what he had to say.
EBS is for things like Katrina, so that the station owners can leave their radio/TV stations running until they stop working, but the government can still use them to notify the public of emergency conditions, and what to do.
it's just a matter of having the official keys anyway. The FCC mandated a few years ago that all the EBS systems in radio and TV are able to be remotely activated, and I'd assume that channel can also upload broadcasts. The monthly test you see done is a firing of the remote key, not a test at the station, I'd assume any aircraft for the chief executive would have this capability built in.
When I worked for a small company it was good to do everything and you get to learn a lot of different things.
I agree, bosses have great contempt for IT people because they have to pay more for them than regular staff. They don't like IT because we know all sorts of technical stuff they don't and they figure we'll go "BOHF" and hold their data hostage for raises. Bosses at small companies don't want to involve you in planning ahead. Hence they want to make the decisions and tell you what to do.. they see their only IT person as the "IT guy" not "Director of IT" and see no value in your opinion.
I'd say right after accounting and legal, IT is at the top of things that get out-of-control for small business owners quickly.. before they've learned to manage their employees and not babysit every operation.
exactly, most IT staff is treated like hourly staff... except for pay. In many places they expect 8-5 service every day, or when any other department is working extra... and IT is expected to still do their other work when it doesn't conflict "with the needs of the company" i.e. weekends and holidays, because that's "professional".
d) other things that are more important. Working in manufacturing, we never get downtime, even when we ask. An hour of factory time is measured in $10's of thousands of dollars. That means IT by definition gets tablescraps for things like backups/upgrades or other changes simply because it's not that important. Hence all the "real" work gets planned for weekends and holidays.
Of course, good planning makes things go faster and with less staff. It still sucks to the one guy there when every body else is home.
the first "network" I remember being on back in 92-93 was at my community college. They had rows of Mac SEs daisy-chained with Apple serial bus to hard drives at the end controlled by something bigger. It was quite slick for it's time...
In the north heating is mandatory... walls and pipes on outside/basement walls will crack if you try to go much below 50 degrees on the thermostat. That creates serious damage and wears the house out faster. (that's why foreclosed houses even in nice places deteriorate so quickly) AC for the summer is something that has actually gotten worse that heat in the winter..something that's pointing out these problems sooner. AC uses electricity and heat uses gas directly piped in. We get asked to curb our steel mill usage in the late summer, not the winter.
I didn't consider climate control because new systems have been getting better every year for some time and it's a large business expense so efficiency is a high priority. I put a new furnace in a few years back that keeps my house feeling "warmer" at a lower temperature and saves 30% off the cubic feet used per month versus the years before. Then prices rose 15% the next winter.. oh well.
Sad to say many, many places in the USA up to the 1950's only got hospitals if somebody rich built them or a church society founded them. That's why so many have big names or Saint.. attached to them, even ones that are now "public".
So where in your neighborhood do we put the new 600 acre coal fired electric plant? Everybody uses the government to keep them from putting power plants in there backyard, therefor the government needs to get involved in utility waste. Refrigerators were the worst manageable offenders in most people's houses. Next up was home appliances.. ovens, ranges, microwaves, dishwashers, clothes washer & dryers.
Next up is home electronics. Most slashdotters probably have more electricity on their bill from "idle" electronics than lightbulbs by this point. Cell/ipod/battery chargers always plugged in, TVs that such juice on standby, computers always on.. not to mention the pile of routers, switches, cable modems, cable boxes, DVRs, etc, etc all running at half power all the time. It's killing the electric company because they can't do repairs and updates at traditional times because these "vampires" keep a constant load on the system.. even when you're on vacation.
Electric companies figure they can grab a 10-15% reduction if these devices are curbed.. that means building fewer ozone-depleting power plants!!
this is like the coat check at the theatre taking all the coats... then burning them because they felt like it. Sure they store your coat for "free" so you don't have to take it in the theatre, but indemnity is different from knowingly doing damage. in this case AOL promised to hold people's data for when people wanted it. Like the coat check people, they can say you have 24 hours after the show ends to get your stuff or whatever, but they can't just trash it whenever they want. AOL can't decide on a whim to close the service and not allow the people keeping data one last chance to get it back.
AOL CHOOSE to do this. Back to the coat room, indemnity doesn't apply when the usher lights your coat on fire in front of the manager. AOL promised to hold something valuable, even though they have indemnity they still can't knowingly wipe it out... that's entirely different.
indemity only applies to "accidents" involving some people. In this case they knew they were closing the service and choose not to give enough warning and consideration to the data they were holding.
The question to ask is what is the value of the data to the customers versus the value of giving proper warning (not maintaining indefinitely or anything stupid like that). I'd venture the value of the materials they promised to hold is vastly larger than the value of notification.
Going back to my coat check example. They operate on much the same rules.. the little tag says they make no guarantees... if they misplace MY coat or it gets dirty they aren't going to clean it for me. If they take all the coats before the end of the show and set them on fire on purpose, somebody is going to jail. Even if there was no guarantee on the safety of MY coat, the collective amount of coats and number of people involved makes it the courts problem... or we can dispense with the courts like everybody says and just send a few hundred of the angriest customers to the company to beat them up, after all, why should the government interfere then?
this is more like the coat check or auto valet in a theatre. They do a service of holding your coat for a gratuity. If they suddenly ran off with ALL the coats, or decided to damage them people would go to jail, even though people "gave" the coats to them because the coats have value. One coat misplaced or damaged is not criminal, but purposefully damaging many would be.
The online services are holding something that doesn't belong to them. They can hide behind contract legalese to a point but planned en masse things shutdowns that wipe out hundreds of thousands of people's data should have some protection for the owners of the data.
two issues, first online services are generally using your very access to generate some kind of revenue, so why you pay no dollars, you still perform searches and post data that they gain financial benefit from. Second, they have invited you to their servers and promised to store your stuff. In the real world if you promised to hold something in your garage for somebody you can't just toss it on cleanup day without contacting the owner in some fashion.
In this case they invited people to use their servers as a free backup spot. The purpose was for backup.. to delete the data en masse without giving people reasonable notice and time to retrieve it is similar to asking somebody to store their stuff in your garage then putting it in your next garage sale without telling them first. In real space their are definite rules for accountability of other people's stuff.. even if you're holding it for free. Data has considerable value and those rules haven't been determined yet.
Slashdot Mirror
in Michigan we have a "no swearing" law and from time to time it gets used. It hasn't ever got far enough thru courts to actually get overturned, but usually it gets far enough to punsish somebody because it's only $100 or 30 days in jail. They had to be very careful when it was written to include the protection of "women and children" .. because disallowing adult men to swear at each other would be a first amendment violation! I've though this would be a great way to make a woman-free, child-free club by having a "swearing club" where men could exercise their freedom of speech... either courts would have to allow discrimination or they'd have to overturn the swearing ordinance!
Turn it around though. The bridge is painted BECAUSE it is useful to many people, so it can't be allowed to fall in to disrepair. And the cost of repainting the bridge is far less than trying to find land and money to build a whole new one every few years.
This is where proprietary software breaks down, because we've gotten to the point that upgrades cost nearly the same as the full versions, and don't provide sufficiently big enough advances...they only seem to keep the company in business because they have copyright. Take for instance the yearly Autocad or Adobe updates that are far out of hand on the utility/cost curve.
do we avoid the Q: drive as the "queer drive"...(opposed to strange or charmed... not homosexual) or are you making an IBM joke that on IBM systems you never name anything with a Q because it's "special".
correct, I do remember something in Michigan or at the Fed level about just that. To allow such alternative work structures they wanted to redefine overtime as 80 hours in 14 days rather than 40 hours in 7 days. I don't remember if it went thru or not. The alternative is where it ends up slightly shorter than 80 hours to keep the pay the same.. you get 45 hours one week and 32 the next and the difference is the OT pay from the 5 hours before equaling a regular 80 hour pay.
most offices deal on a two week pay period (or semi monthly) already. so this is just rearranging hours.
why is "more money for more work" such a taboo? really?
typically those working 2-3 jobs are because those 2-3 only add up to 60 or so.. scattered around weird hours so that the 2-3 employers don't have to pay benefits and the employees are always sick from undisciplined sleep schedules. But hey if we take all those new "service" jobs everybody brags about and divide by 2/3 we'll have the actual number of people being employed.
I think the poster is talking about salary/office positions, where there is a set amount of work to be done and an hour extra a day would add real work time versus a whole extra day when you have to have meetings, phone interruptions, lunch, naps, breaks, etc. If you figure taking all that into account you only get 4-6 hours of real nose to the wheel work in office/technical positions... that's why so many IT people like to work over.. because the interruptions go away and they can get all the work they need in. Hence a 9/36 actually nets the company 1 hour of "real" work per day that would be filed until tomorrow, so the 4 hours "lost" is really a wash because you'd lose Friday to all that other stuff distracting from work. And the company gets to keep the office close 1 day saving on utilities/janitorial/etc.
Don't use your "fair use" with people that will break the law! Simple.
but that's the catch. "Freebis" like Sharepoint tie Server, AD, SQL, and Exchange together in a way that simply can't be migrated to OSS. Sure it can be replicated, but you would have to rebuild everything done before to move off it. There are dozens of other MS products that tied in a similar manner. Not bad products, but the combine products can't be got away from easily.
because "teachers" really do get it nearly free... or at least not under per-pupil costs. Of course Universities pay big money in the name of "piracy" for site licensing.. but that goes under the IT or legal funds, not "teachers" funds.... see the difference.
Like the Forrester survey below this article, people use Microsoft software out of habit, not even because they like it. For most people, using even MS Word is really hard, and re-learning it is even worse. MS knows Linux or Mac is better but as long as they keep the price of upgrades less than the price to go some place else, and the pain of upgrades less than the pain of learning Linux they will keep their customers from sheer bureaucratic inertia.
exactly, the company I worked for, which doesn't even place in US steel production, had anti-competition investigation nearly started back when fuel prices and metals price went sky high 7-8 years ago. Because they were so specialized they could nearly "write their own ticket" and get price increases from customers to match the prices they paid out... while automotive customers were demanding all their other suppliers cut prices 5-10% simply because THEY could get away with it.
"monopoly" is about your position of power in regard to the customer, not the actual market share involved.
Considering CEOs of GM and Ford are in charge of companies that rank above the populace and wealth of many nations in the UN private air travel isn't that big a deal. They're time to the company is worth tens of thousands of dollars...more than any congresscritter's waiting at a public airport is a real waste of financial resources.
of course it was news and every news channel was lined up outside the president's office to hear what he had to say.
EBS is for things like Katrina, so that the station owners can leave their radio/TV stations running until they stop working, but the government can still use them to notify the public of emergency conditions, and what to do.
it's just a matter of having the official keys anyway. The FCC mandated a few years ago that all the EBS systems in radio and TV are able to be remotely activated, and I'd assume that channel can also upload broadcasts. The monthly test you see done is a firing of the remote key, not a test at the station, I'd assume any aircraft for the chief executive would have this capability built in.
excellent point of view.
When I worked for a small company it was good to do everything and you get to learn a lot of different things.
I agree, bosses have great contempt for IT people because they have to pay more for them than regular staff. They don't like IT because we know all sorts of technical stuff they don't and they figure we'll go "BOHF" and hold their data hostage for raises. Bosses at small companies don't want to involve you in planning ahead. Hence they want to make the decisions and tell you what to do.. they see their only IT person as the "IT guy" not "Director of IT" and see no value in your opinion.
I'd say right after accounting and legal, IT is at the top of things that get out-of-control for small business owners quickly.. before they've learned to manage their employees and not babysit every operation.
exactly, most IT staff is treated like hourly staff... except for pay. In many places they expect 8-5 service every day, or when any other department is working extra... and IT is expected to still do their other work when it doesn't conflict "with the needs of the company" i.e. weekends and holidays, because that's "professional".
d) other things that are more important. Working in manufacturing, we never get downtime, even when we ask. An hour of factory time is measured in $10's of thousands of dollars. That means IT by definition gets tablescraps for things like backups/upgrades or other changes simply because it's not that important. Hence all the "real" work gets planned for weekends and holidays.
Of course, good planning makes things go faster and with less staff. It still sucks to the one guy there when every body else is home.
the first "network" I remember being on back in 92-93 was at my community college. They had rows of Mac SEs daisy-chained with Apple serial bus to hard drives at the end controlled by something bigger. It was quite slick for it's time...
In the north heating is mandatory... walls and pipes on outside/basement walls will crack if you try to go much below 50 degrees on the thermostat. That creates serious damage and wears the house out faster. (that's why foreclosed houses even in nice places deteriorate so quickly) AC for the summer is something that has actually gotten worse that heat in the winter..something that's pointing out these problems sooner. AC uses electricity and heat uses gas directly piped in. We get asked to curb our steel mill usage in the late summer, not the winter.
I didn't consider climate control because new systems have been getting better every year for some time and it's a large business expense so efficiency is a high priority. I put a new furnace in a few years back that keeps my house feeling "warmer" at a lower temperature and saves 30% off the cubic feet used per month versus the years before. Then prices rose 15% the next winter.. oh well.
Sad to say many, many places in the USA up to the 1950's only got hospitals if somebody rich built them or a church society founded them. That's why so many have big names or Saint.. attached to them, even ones that are now "public".
So where in your neighborhood do we put the new 600 acre coal fired electric plant? Everybody uses the government to keep them from putting power plants in there backyard, therefor the government needs to get involved in utility waste. Refrigerators were the worst manageable offenders in most people's houses. Next up was home appliances.. ovens, ranges, microwaves, dishwashers, clothes washer & dryers.
Next up is home electronics. Most slashdotters probably have more electricity on their bill from "idle" electronics than lightbulbs by this point. Cell/ipod/battery chargers always plugged in, TVs that such juice on standby, computers always on.. not to mention the pile of routers, switches, cable modems, cable boxes, DVRs, etc, etc all running at half power all the time. It's killing the electric company because they can't do repairs and updates at traditional times because these "vampires" keep a constant load on the system.. even when you're on vacation.
Electric companies figure they can grab a 10-15% reduction if these devices are curbed.. that means building fewer ozone-depleting power plants!!
this is like the coat check at the theatre taking all the coats... then burning them because they felt like it. Sure they store your coat for "free" so you don't have to take it in the theatre, but indemnity is different from knowingly doing damage. in this case AOL promised to hold people's data for when people wanted it. Like the coat check people, they can say you have 24 hours after the show ends to get your stuff or whatever, but they can't just trash it whenever they want. AOL can't decide on a whim to close the service and not allow the people keeping data one last chance to get it back.
AOL CHOOSE to do this. Back to the coat room, indemnity doesn't apply when the usher lights your coat on fire in front of the manager. AOL promised to hold something valuable, even though they have indemnity they still can't knowingly wipe it out... that's entirely different.
indemity only applies to "accidents" involving some people. In this case they knew they were closing the service and choose not to give enough warning and consideration to the data they were holding.
The question to ask is what is the value of the data to the customers versus the value of giving proper warning (not maintaining indefinitely or anything stupid like that). I'd venture the value of the materials they promised to hold is vastly larger than the value of notification.
Going back to my coat check example. They operate on much the same rules.. the little tag says they make no guarantees... if they misplace MY coat or it gets dirty they aren't going to clean it for me. If they take all the coats before the end of the show and set them on fire on purpose, somebody is going to jail. Even if there was no guarantee on the safety of MY coat, the collective amount of coats and number of people involved makes it the courts problem... or we can dispense with the courts like everybody says and just send a few hundred of the angriest customers to the company to beat them up, after all, why should the government interfere then?
this is more like the coat check or auto valet in a theatre. They do a service of holding your coat for a gratuity. If they suddenly ran off with ALL the coats, or decided to damage them people would go to jail, even though people "gave" the coats to them because the coats have value. One coat misplaced or damaged is not criminal, but purposefully damaging many would be.
The online services are holding something that doesn't belong to them. They can hide behind contract legalese to a point but planned en masse things shutdowns that wipe out hundreds of thousands of people's data should have some protection for the owners of the data.
two issues, first online services are generally using your very access to generate some kind of revenue, so why you pay no dollars, you still perform searches and post data that they gain financial benefit from. Second, they have invited you to their servers and promised to store your stuff. In the real world if you promised to hold something in your garage for somebody you can't just toss it on cleanup day without contacting the owner in some fashion.
In this case they invited people to use their servers as a free backup spot. The purpose was for backup.. to delete the data en masse without giving people reasonable notice and time to retrieve it is similar to asking somebody to store their stuff in your garage then putting it in your next garage sale without telling them first. In real space their are definite rules for accountability of other people's stuff.. even if you're holding it for free. Data has considerable value and those rules haven't been determined yet.