From my perspective, it's not about "selling out". Given the offer of that kind of money, I'd have had tar'd the repo up and personally delivered it to Sun within the hour in a set of gilded DVD cases, and I won't begrudge anyone that same choice either. What *is* annoying is the whole "I want to eat my cake and have it too" whining that Monty has been expressing through this whole thing.
They already offer it on a number of platforms, but unfortunately the BlackBerry offerings are for rather ancient devices, and they do charge for them.
How would he claim the money for the financial transaction without pissing off the $government of the country?
Interestingly there was a similar situation that occurred in Celebration, FL not too long ago. Celebration had been given a/16 many years before but had mostly let it lie fallow. Some bright bulb in the community HOA decided that there was money to be made by selling the use of the netblock, and owing to the HOA management's inexperience in regards to such matters, use of the netblock was unwittingly sold to a spam outfit. Before the community could see a dime, people in higher places found out about what was going on and things ended with Celebration having their control of the block revoked owing to the fact that they'd let it sit effectively unused for so many years.
As an American software developer, I've heard similar stories from other European coders, and I'm curious as to why we've not heard of a frantic rush to outsource coding work to India and other Eastern countries like we have in the U.S. It seems that you guys are compensated more generously over there, so one would think there would be an increased pressure to do that. Are there legal restrictions that prevent it, or does it go on and we just don't hear a lot about it?
Another thing that doesn't often get mentioned is how U.S. employers seem to forget how "salary" works. I recently started at a new company, and being inside of their 90-day probationary period, the company policy is that I don't get paid for holidays. The company shut down on Thursday and Friday over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, and so I was not paid for those days even though I'd worked the days in the week prior to those shutdowns. It's actually a violation of federal law (29 CFR 541.602) to do that (unless they want to reclassify me as an hourly), but they seem to not know/care. I'm not pressing the issue right now, but rest assured it will be brought up at a more politically expedient time.
if the law changes to legalize it, the police won't fight back, they're actually quite agnostic towards it.
I disagree - in the U.S. anyway, the War On Drugs(tm) has been a license for the executive branch (including local law enforcement) to expand its power to a degree unprecedented in American history, often by ignoring the law or creatively interpreting it to its own advantage. I somehow doubt they're just going to roll over and give that power (and the money that comes with it) up.
Ohh, Wordperfect! I'm afraid you've got me there, seeing how huge and popular Wordperfect got until it reached the point of market dominance that it's at now...oh wait, that never happened in this universe
Oh great, another kid that's too young to have actually been working in the industry during the time he's trying to lecture me on...
I suspect the *real* reason the Amiga died around the early/mid 90's was that PCs started to get nice 24-bit graphics adapters in usable resolutions that didn't cost an arm and a leg, and didn't give the user a headache from interlace flicker. HAM mode on the Amiga looked okay (at the time), but it really wasn't an acceptable alternative, and Commodore mostly sat around scratching its corporate ass instead of continuing to innovate.
the Amiga was only ever popular among a small, hardcore group of European demoscene programmers
Sure, whatever. Ever hear of a Video Toaster? Amiga also got WordPerfect *well* before Windows did, along with Lightwave 3D and some other apps that are still used to this day.
How would you feel about drug dealers when your child gets addicted to hard drugs because of them ? And eventually your child gets in more trouble and ends up dead ?
Replace "drug dealers" with "liquor stores" and "hard drugs" with "alcohol", and tell us what the difference is, aside from the fact that it's generally easier for kids to get hold of alcohol than pot.
But what is there about the technology that makes PSTN more reliable than IP-based telephony?
It's circuit-switched instead of packet-switched. Aside from any power considerations, your POTS call has a dedicated channel for the duration of the call, the data is not having to compete for time on the wire with your next-door neighbor's torrent download, and you don't have any latency issues. In general, the Internet does remarkably well at handling voice traffic, but the packet-switched nature of the service can result in interruptions when the packets either don't get to the destination, or get there too late. Absent *really* unusual circumstances, that can't happen with circuit-switched services.
They are? The last time I had POTS service (about two years ago), after taxes and fees it was about $30/month for a single line with no additional services and no long distance included. In contrast, I pay $1.49 for my VoIP DID, and 1.4 cents per channel-minute. Most months work out to be around $5.00 or so after all is said and done. Fortunately, reliability has not been a problem for me, but then I keep the cable modem, router, and PBX machine on a decent UPS so power issues aren't a problem unless it's for an extended period of time.
Unless American workers can do the same work as Chinese workers for the same or lower wages, that means that Americans are not as efficient in that sector
Absolute, unadulterated bullshit. What it really means is that living in a first-world country with worker and environmental protections costs more than slave labor.
H1B requires the companies to pay as much to an H1B hire as to an American citizen with the same experience/profile.
Yes, that's what the law requires, but the law isn't enforced to any meaningful degree. There are plenty of companies that pay their H-1Bs as they're supposed to, but there are also plenty that don't. Every company I've worked for that used them also lowballed them and held them in line via restrictive contracts that were prohibitively expensive to break.
As regards skills, my experience is that they're roughly on par with American folks - some are good, and some suck. In particular I've had the pleasure of working with a few guys from Singapore and Sri Lanka that were simply incredible, but I've also dealt with an Indian that thought his shit didn't stink and couldn't do anything at all without explicitly direction on every tiny thing he was to do, and even then the code quality was just abysmal.
Yeah, why would you ever need a legally binding document to be private?
Let's say you're a programmer, and you're hired to write code that implements X algorithm, where said algorithm is a trade secret and is described in an addendum to the contract. Stuff like that happens all the time.
They're not asking for logs, they're demanding the root password; those are two very-different issues entirely.
They already have physical possession of the box and so have the ability to do whatever they want, so I'm not understanding what the hang-up on the root password is. Additionally, if $35 is keeping you from using their KVM, then what's on the box must not be *that* important.
What I'd do: pay the $35, fix the box, buy a machine of my own with an IPMI card in it, and colo it elsewhere.
I used to rent a dedicated server until the provider took too long swapping out a bad CPU fan (yay for ACPI!), which was causing the box to lock up regularly. I ended up buying my own machine and colo'ing it, and the IPMI interface removes the need to worry about all the KVM silliness. It's very comforting knowing that I can bring the machine down to bare metal, format it, and load a new OS on it if necessary from the comfort of my home.
While they knew what happened at the data center as it was later found out they've done similar deeds before they couldn't prove anything.
Seems like it'd be easy to me - ask Flagship what IPs were hosting the illicit Vent servers. *Someone* owns those IPs, and if it wasn't your friend, it would be incumbent upon the owner of those addresses to explain to Flagship how/where those Vent licenses were obtained.
Of course, Flagship has a nice little racket going on with Vent, and I've read they're not the easiest company to deal with.
Every decent colo I've seen has locking cabs, but that's not really providing much security if you're only having a single server hosted. The guy who rents the rack space right above you can still screw up your day unless the DC folks are watching him like a hawk.
I don't really care what Microsoft wants - there are still many, many situations where a command line is much quicker and more efficient than the UI (deleting a thousand files with the same extension, for instance), and Microsoft has failed miserably at providing an adequate shell.
Because the Windows command line blows. There are still plenty of situations where a command line is preferable on Windows, and I'd keep Cygwin on it just to have non-brain-dead command history functionality, if for no other reason.
Over the past decade, some states have carved out special exemptions applicable to information technology workers in their labor laws.
Fortunately that's not a problem here in Florida. We simply don't have any labor laws *at all* worth a damn here. Get screwed by an employer, and pretty much your only recourse is the civil court system if you're paid at all above minimum wage.
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From my perspective, it's not about "selling out". Given the offer of that kind of money, I'd have had tar'd the repo up and personally delivered it to Sun within the hour in a set of gilded DVD cases, and I won't begrudge anyone that same choice either. What *is* annoying is the whole "I want to eat my cake and have it too" whining that Monty has been expressing through this whole thing.
They already offer it on a number of platforms, but unfortunately the BlackBerry offerings are for rather ancient devices, and they do charge for them.
How would he claim the money for the financial transaction without pissing off the $government of the country?
/16 many years before but had mostly let it lie fallow. Some bright bulb in the community HOA decided that there was money to be made by selling the use of the netblock, and owing to the HOA management's inexperience in regards to such matters, use of the netblock was unwittingly sold to a spam outfit. Before the community could see a dime, people in higher places found out about what was going on and things ended with Celebration having their control of the block revoked owing to the fact that they'd let it sit effectively unused for so many years.
Interestingly there was a similar situation that occurred in Celebration, FL not too long ago. Celebration had been given a
As an American software developer, I've heard similar stories from other European coders, and I'm curious as to why we've not heard of a frantic rush to outsource coding work to India and other Eastern countries like we have in the U.S. It seems that you guys are compensated more generously over there, so one would think there would be an increased pressure to do that. Are there legal restrictions that prevent it, or does it go on and we just don't hear a lot about it?
Another thing that doesn't often get mentioned is how U.S. employers seem to forget how "salary" works. I recently started at a new company, and being inside of their 90-day probationary period, the company policy is that I don't get paid for holidays. The company shut down on Thursday and Friday over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, and so I was not paid for those days even though I'd worked the days in the week prior to those shutdowns. It's actually a violation of federal law (29 CFR 541.602) to do that (unless they want to reclassify me as an hourly), but they seem to not know/care. I'm not pressing the issue right now, but rest assured it will be brought up at a more politically expedient time.
Highly doubtful.
if the law changes to legalize it, the police won't fight back, they're actually quite agnostic towards it.
I disagree - in the U.S. anyway, the War On Drugs(tm) has been a license for the executive branch (including local law enforcement) to expand its power to a degree unprecedented in American history, often by ignoring the law or creatively interpreting it to its own advantage. I somehow doubt they're just going to roll over and give that power (and the money that comes with it) up.
Ohh, Wordperfect! I'm afraid you've got me there, seeing how huge and popular Wordperfect got until it reached the point of market dominance that it's at now...oh wait, that never happened in this universe
Oh great, another kid that's too young to have actually been working in the industry during the time he's trying to lecture me on...
I suspect the *real* reason the Amiga died around the early/mid 90's was that PCs started to get nice 24-bit graphics adapters in usable resolutions that didn't cost an arm and a leg, and didn't give the user a headache from interlace flicker. HAM mode on the Amiga looked okay (at the time), but it really wasn't an acceptable alternative, and Commodore mostly sat around scratching its corporate ass instead of continuing to innovate.
the Amiga was only ever popular among a small, hardcore group of European demoscene programmers
Sure, whatever. Ever hear of a Video Toaster? Amiga also got WordPerfect *well* before Windows did, along with Lightwave 3D and some other apps that are still used to this day.
How would you feel about drug dealers when your child gets addicted to hard drugs because of them ? And eventually your child gets in more trouble and ends up dead ?
Replace "drug dealers" with "liquor stores" and "hard drugs" with "alcohol", and tell us what the difference is, aside from the fact that it's generally easier for kids to get hold of alcohol than pot.
But what is there about the technology that makes PSTN more reliable than IP-based telephony?
It's circuit-switched instead of packet-switched. Aside from any power considerations, your POTS call has a dedicated channel for the duration of the call, the data is not having to compete for time on the wire with your next-door neighbor's torrent download, and you don't have any latency issues. In general, the Internet does remarkably well at handling voice traffic, but the packet-switched nature of the service can result in interruptions when the packets either don't get to the destination, or get there too late. Absent *really* unusual circumstances, that can't happen with circuit-switched services.
Plus land lines are dirt cheap
They are? The last time I had POTS service (about two years ago), after taxes and fees it was about $30/month for a single line with no additional services and no long distance included. In contrast, I pay $1.49 for my VoIP DID, and 1.4 cents per channel-minute. Most months work out to be around $5.00 or so after all is said and done. Fortunately, reliability has not been a problem for me, but then I keep the cable modem, router, and PBX machine on a decent UPS so power issues aren't a problem unless it's for an extended period of time.
Unless American workers can do the same work as Chinese workers for the same or lower wages, that means that Americans are not as efficient in that sector
Absolute, unadulterated bullshit. What it really means is that living in a first-world country with worker and environmental protections costs more than slave labor.
You're assuming said companies are actually following the law re: H-1B pay. Lots of them don't.
H1B requires the companies to pay as much to an H1B hire as to an American citizen with the same experience/profile.
Yes, that's what the law requires, but the law isn't enforced to any meaningful degree. There are plenty of companies that pay their H-1Bs as they're supposed to, but there are also plenty that don't. Every company I've worked for that used them also lowballed them and held them in line via restrictive contracts that were prohibitively expensive to break.
As regards skills, my experience is that they're roughly on par with American folks - some are good, and some suck. In particular I've had the pleasure of working with a few guys from Singapore and Sri Lanka that were simply incredible, but I've also dealt with an Indian that thought his shit didn't stink and couldn't do anything at all without explicitly direction on every tiny thing he was to do, and even then the code quality was just abysmal.
Just as a refresher, here's Cohen & Grigsby showing how it's done.
"Our goal is clearly NOT to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker." - Lawrence M. Liebowitz, Marketing VP, Cohen & Grigsby
Yeah, why would you ever need a legally binding document to be private?
Let's say you're a programmer, and you're hired to write code that implements X algorithm, where said algorithm is a trade secret and is described in an addendum to the contract. Stuff like that happens all the time.
They're not asking for logs, they're demanding the root password; those are two very-different issues entirely.
They already have physical possession of the box and so have the ability to do whatever they want, so I'm not understanding what the hang-up on the root password is. Additionally, if $35 is keeping you from using their KVM, then what's on the box must not be *that* important.
What I'd do: pay the $35, fix the box, buy a machine of my own with an IPMI card in it, and colo it elsewhere.
I used to rent a dedicated server until the provider took too long swapping out a bad CPU fan (yay for ACPI!), which was causing the box to lock up regularly. I ended up buying my own machine and colo'ing it, and the IPMI interface removes the need to worry about all the KVM silliness. It's very comforting knowing that I can bring the machine down to bare metal, format it, and load a new OS on it if necessary from the comfort of my home.
We also kept root ssh keys to all of the servers just in case someone wanted to try and be a dick about it.
"PermitRootLogin=0", anyone?
While they knew what happened at the data center as it was later found out they've done similar deeds before they couldn't prove anything.
Seems like it'd be easy to me - ask Flagship what IPs were hosting the illicit Vent servers. *Someone* owns those IPs, and if it wasn't your friend, it would be incumbent upon the owner of those addresses to explain to Flagship how/where those Vent licenses were obtained.
Of course, Flagship has a nice little racket going on with Vent, and I've read they're not the easiest company to deal with.
Every decent colo I've seen has locking cabs, but that's not really providing much security if you're only having a single server hosted. The guy who rents the rack space right above you can still screw up your day unless the DC folks are watching him like a hawk.
That's often the case with my ISP, but not with data center support people, at least in my experience.
I don't really care what Microsoft wants - there are still many, many situations where a command line is much quicker and more efficient than the UI (deleting a thousand files with the same extension, for instance), and Microsoft has failed miserably at providing an adequate shell.
Because the Windows command line blows. There are still plenty of situations where a command line is preferable on Windows, and I'd keep Cygwin on it just to have non-brain-dead command history functionality, if for no other reason.
Over the past decade, some states have carved out special exemptions applicable to information technology workers in their labor laws.
Fortunately that's not a problem here in Florida. We simply don't have any labor laws *at all* worth a damn here. Get screwed by an employer, and pretty much your only recourse is the civil court system if you're paid at all above minimum wage.