Hell, under the right circumstances, I would write spamming software, even though the very idea makes me sick. I am a family man. I have a wife and daughter to take care of. My first responsibility is to them. "Social responsibility" doesn't even come close. If I had to choose between buying food and paying rent for my family or being socially responsible - fuck society.
Hell under the right circumstances, I would fly a plane into WTC, even though the very idea makes me sick. I am a Jihad man. I have an army and religion to take care of. My first responsibility is to them. "Social responsibility" doesn't even come close. If I had to choose between fighting Jihad by becoming a martyr or being socially responsible - fuck society.
As anedcotal evidence, look at the reigons of the world where software piracy is rampant. A lack of adherence to accepted practices goes hand in hand with piracy, does it not? WHy does piracy flourish in some areas while remaining an underground black market in others? The answer seems purely obvious to me...
I disagree with this however. Software piracy would be more rampant in the US if the Judges didn't lock up every little HaXoR, just look at burning DiVX's in the US.
It seems to me that among most American (Both N. and S.) and European system administrators and programmers, the issue of workplace ethic is well known, and adhered to fervently. Unix administrators in particular, put a great deal of emphasis on accountability, responsibility, and appropriate conduct. However, in the past decade or so i've been working in this industry, the unspoken code of honor and commonality of ethics abruptly ends when dealing with eastern European, Asian, and African programmers/administrators.
It's just a different type of ethics. In India "repairing" something means that you fix it, and then if it catches fire after a month then well, it's destined to happen. Thank you Mr. Engineer for increasing its life by one month. Whereas in the US/Europe you would be sue the Engineer for malpractice.
The reasons for this are completely cultural -- They have nothing to do with race.
You are correct. A baby of Indian origin brought up in the States is taight to value life, his parents stop at STOP signs so the baby learns this behaviour because it is the culture of Americans to always stop at STOP signs, and smirk at anyone that doesn't. This is learnt such that when a young child is with someone that runs STOP signs, even if the child has no idea what a STOP sign actually is, the child will feel uncomfortable.
In India and other countries traffic rules in general don't exist, or are placed in the same cateory as the "don't download mp3s" or pr0n rule. The children learn this, together with the more subtle "primal objectives" values of "get the job done no matter what, use string to tie the engine to the aircraft if you have to, just get it flying, worry about the consequences later". After all if your next meal isn't guaranteed, that's a pretty strong disincentive from thinking too far ahead. A bit like working while someone has a gun to your head - you're gonna cut corners.
Only a well-travelled man can have the insight to say what you've said <<Parent>>
-Whatever gets the job done right, regardless of how much time it takes.
True, although American managers and MBAs try to force software people to override these instincts of making software robust. Same as the architects of WTC overrided Empire-State building robust construction methodologies in favour of cheaper, more profit-maximising WTC central-core-outer-shell construction methodologies.
Indian programmers... write half-assed code, cut corners, and cover up mistakes.
If you're talking about the best of the best, this is true. Of course both America and India are full of IT people that don't know their Redhat from their Windows. The elite-class coders brought up in India do inherently cut more corners than their American counterparts. And American managers force them to cut corners more aggressively (as they are taught to speed up American programmers, Indian programmers on the other hand need slowing down).
An American programmer goes nuts trying to work within a group of Indian programmers who in his mind "write half-assed code, cut corners, and cover up mistakes."
Meanwhile, an Indian programmer goes nuts trying to work within a group of American programmers, who in his mind are slow, lazy and underproductive team members.
*True*, I've seen this first hand when I visited India, especially true in Muslim countries (OK, to be PC countries where majority of people just happen to be Muslim). Here in England it took the Titanic. The whole establishment said it was indestructible then BOOM, there went the reputation of the civil engineers and builders. The whole of England looked up at them as if they were Gods, the constructors of bridges and ships. They had fallen off that pedestal. Laws were brought in about building codes. Here we still haven't recovered from that, people still wear seat belts, and builders still are forced to follow building codes.
In India after the Bhopal disaster, were new enforced laws brought into existence that would prevent a repeat? No. That BP/Amoco gas pipe that everyone in Nigeria was told NOT TO GO NEAR. What happened? Boom and lots of people died. Quoting,
There have been similar incidents in other parts of Africa. More than 30 Kenyans died in July as they collected petrol from an overturned tanker lorry. In Cameroon, about 120 died as they gathered fuel at the scene of a railway accident.
Did I miss something, or have the scenes from Mad Max with the fuel shortages become reality? To give a more measurable indication of this, third world driving is world famous, neither the right nor the left side is reserved for cars driving in a particular direction. Instead vehicles are just grateful that a road exists at all and drive in a haphazard way. If you watch Lonely Planet on the Discovery Travel & Leisure channel you will see that head-on collisions occur far more than any other in all countries except developed ones. Here are some statistics (scroll down to automobiles). From this same source, I quote,
Ferries in places like Bangladesh, Haiti, The Philippines and Hong Kong have had major disasters from capsizing due to overloading and collision. In roughly an eight-year period, there were more than 360 ferry boat accidents killing 11,350 people.
There is a basic lack of awareness and a fundamental difference in culture. Many Americans look upon the Chinese eating dogs and horses as disgusting and thus nobody on this planet can approach this subject with a truly open mind, except God. Is it so difficult to believe that Indian programmers can have different primal objectives than American coders? After all American cars are (or at least were) constructed for luxury, Japanese cars have a fundamental shift in construction methodologies and objectives towards reliability and modular construction.
Like in the US, if you picked up a dog and ripped his heart out in the mall everyone would be like "Oh my God!" but if you do it in a market in China/India it's, well, it's like pointing out that the sky is blue. This lack of respect for animal life and human life (road crash statistics) is indicative of the peoples' thinking. Anyone says, "but eberybody is different" is wrong to some degree. There's always some level of conformity. Even a staunch anarchist in the US can drive, he doesn't "disobey" red lights all the time and "ignore" stop signs all the time. A true anarchist would sit at the roadside and throw roadkill at passing vehicles, would piss in the middle of the freeway stopping all the cars, would attack a drive-thru bank with a sledgehammer, would walk in the street with a long knife in his hand, would throw a lit cigarrete on the floor at the gas station so he doesn't have to pay for his gas, etc.
I could fill this post with my personal experiences whilst visiting India e.g. electrician "If it catchs fire, then I give you half your money back and I fix it". Suffice it to say that look at my website to see the conditions your Indian software is written under. Notice the walls inside the houses - no wallpaper, shredded paint. But that's normal and natural, npbody notices it, it doesn't occur to them, just as making dangerous shortcuts whilst designing & coding don't occur to them. Same as that lost puppy look that you get when you tell a newbie that his PC has been fried because he opened an email with an attachment. He then says "What's an attachment" the thought never occurs, same as nobody *demands* to look at a company's balance sheet in the middle of a job interview. Read this to find out what these countries are actually like. No marketing trash. News like this happens all the time. I mean skyscrapers collapse by themselves all the time - they don't need Osama binLaden.
You took the easy way out. Quitting is a last resort.
As a previous poster put it, staying with a company malicously and sabotage their code (they are paying you to wreck their company). Then when they fire you, tell the BSA that they are running illegal software (my friend did that, he got a bounty plus revenge plus his other friend got a "software auditing" job at that same company - LOL!). Read Sun Tzu's The Art of War. There are far subtler things that you can do than ploughing a plane into WTC. Tell the police and EFF about the fact that they altered the policy with incorrect notification, and invite the people that wrote angry letters to participate in a class action lawsuit (dangle the carrot in front of them). Then screw them with any official bodies, e.g. report Doctor malpractice to the American Medical Association, report teachers as being child molestors, this'll bring a whole pile of trouble on their heads regardless of whether they're innocent or guilty. Get the company's customer list and start rumours that this is a great conspiracy, "They started Phase 1 by releasing customer personal data - you are next, then our suppliers. This is what they're going to do - yada yada. I'm an anonymous whistleblower" (embedding a lie within a truth makes the lie more convincing). Remember Star Wars: Phantom Menace, "he is a good man, but is mired by baseless allegations of corruption". You must make these baseless allegations.
Blowing your top and quitting in protest strips you of the most powerful weapons you possess. This is why coders keep getting manipulated. We simply can't get things done and don't know how the world actually works compared to sales people and marketing people. Companies know that if they piss of sales and marketing, they'll have the company on its knees within days.
Remember: subterfuge, subterfuge, subterfuge. Of course keep it as anonymous as possible, don't get slapped with libel or lander charges.
search on monster or dice. When I last did a search to see what was out there, it showed 24 jobs in my area
Wrong! Most of these aren't REAL jobs. The Manager walks in, says, "Why is this software project 6 months behind schedule?", Head Developer replies, "Uhhhh because of my/. posting... No scrub that, because uhhhh we have a shortage of talent according to the ITAA", Manager says, "Well put some job ads out", Head Developer replies, "Mmmmmmmkay" and puts out an ad for "C++ developer required" BUT nobody can get that job because the job is fake.
Add to this HR doesn't want to get fired, in my last company they were emailing *themselves* to make them look busy. HR puts out fake ads, does some interviews and then rejects everyone, just to make themselves look busy. They don't want to lose their jobs either.
Most business programming projects (that I have seen in 10+ years of experience) do not have well-defined, stable requirements.
LOL! True. My latest contract was some guy saying, "Can you fix my computer" and a few weeks later it turned into an 18-month contract (finishing now) to build him a full-blown CRM system. Talk about change of specification, sheesh. I'm not complaining though.
So why then do IT workers earn 50%-100% more than other technical fields? The bubble has burst and I think IT workers will have to take there place in the line of under-valued scientist/engineers/technicians.
You aren't an immigrant if you aren't going to stay. It is harder to stay if you aren't legally allowed to stay. The Irish immigrants are still here, they didn't stay for six years and then get sent home by the government. The experience of the current sojourners in the body shops is more similar to the Chinese, who were brought over here by moneyed interests so they could be exploited, not out of any concern for their welfare. Harsh laws were created to prevent them from permanently emigrating, but when they were useful to the big railroads they were brought over as sojourners.
Hmm interesting, but how can a democratically elected Government possibly do that? Surely it's against The Constitution somewhere, unless they're banging H-1Bs over the head with citizenship requirements (resulting in them being an exception to the Constitution). Maybe this sets a precedent in future that will make the US more like Space:Above and Beyond where to become a citizen, even if you're born in the US you have to have served in the Army for 6 years or something stupid like that.
The people who set up the original H1-B program set it up so the workers were indentured servants - they couldn't switch companies, if they displeased the boss in any way they were fired and had to go back to their home country within a week
Agreed. This was unfair.
Immigration programs designed to screw over domestic workers do create racism. We do not have open borders - we have a very specific immigration law with H1-B tailored to screw over the IT workers in this country. I guess in your mind, anyone who doesn't allow Microsoft, Intel and so forth through their lobbying arm, the ITAA, write the immigration laws in this country is a "KKK racist".
I'm talking about the H-1Bs already in this country, they should have greater rights and also be free to set their own prices. You're creating confrontation between us where there is none. I've seen these big companies, especially Intel treat even American employees like trash. If you'd like to know my real views on this, then read this previous post of mine. Forcing H-1Bs into "special contracts" of slavery is unacceptable.
This is whether the citizens of this democratic republic are the ones who write the immigration laws, or whether corporations (who I'm sure have the *best* intentions and concern for everyone) will write them. Anyone who isn't on their knees in submission to the corporations is a KKK racist.
I regard "green card" as more American than American pie, and today's more lax H-1B as a "green card via corporate sponsorship". What I was *really* objecting to was the suggestion that a union be formed of American workers only that represents "kill the H-1B program" people and thus implying "kill the green card". I say that H-1B workers MUST be included in any association that is formed. Many of these H-1Bs will get green cards sooner or later, and you DO NOT want them to be pissed off with America for constantly wanting to throw them out of America and excluding them from unions.
So H-1Bs now drive around in nice cars, I'm glad for them that they've managed to improve their lot in life. Pissing them off and excluding them as "non-Americans" same as the Blacks were is simply inviting further Al-Qaeda activity. When the Blacks wanted equal rights and the same jobs, the incumbent population didn't want their jobs taken away. Well, they had to just live with having their jobs taken away. The price of not doing so was the destruction of American conscience and freedom of the people. People got pissed off at the Corporations for not absorbing the Blacks whilst maintaining their incumbent workforce. Same with these H-1Bs. I admit that the H-1B before enslaved people to a company, but now the rules are a lot more relaxed and I'm happy for them. They even took my last job, but I don't hold a grudge. Saying "Oh sweatshops are bad" and then bitch when those workers come to America and work under American working conditions is hypocritical.
Good IT people can always find jobs, but with less demand companies won't be willing to pay them more money to separate them from the idiots. Good IT people will get paid less
How do you measure "Good IT person". You can hire the best double-CS with an IQ of 180, put him on a crap project and watch the whole thing burn and trash his resume. You can hire the worst dumb MCSE, put him on a simple project that he can handle (sysadmin at small company with established and stable zero-maintenance linux network) and he can thrive and his resume will look better than the really intelligent guy's one.
In terms of coding, the dumb MCSE guy wouldn't be able to do something but would become best buddies with management by talking about NFL or whatever and thus get a good resume and good projects turned his way that he'll get his friends to do. The intelligent guy would be troubled by the constant pressure to perform well and would screw up, management tells him to do something so he does it in a roundabout comlicated way using C++/Java instead of just plugging it into Micro$oft Excel or Micro$oft Access, and thus he would get fired. Intelligent people need closer management. However if he worked in R&D at a top-notch lab he'd be a fish-in-the-water. So back to your point, "What is a good IT person" how can you possibly measure that?
As far as the ITAA report which said IT jobs will grow - bullshit! The ITAA is the *enemy* folks, they're the ones who lobbied to bring in hundreds of thousands of H1B's...
The Programmers Guild is the best organization I've seen of this type
Look at the conditions these people live with, half of them live in the middle of the God damn jungle (I have visited myself).
Indian coders are coders nontheless, so you will have to be racist like the KKK and exclude the H-1Bs from your "union" if you'd like to keep it in line with your current intentions. This way the H-1Bs won't be able to put forward their side of the story - being poor immigrants like countless waves of immigrants before to the US, (the Irish, etc.) except many of these H-1Bs are BRILLIANT graduates from IIT (equivalent to Berkeley CS) so they get paid a little more than the previous waves of immigrants. These H-1Bs are PEOPLE, just like us. I find it racist and personally insulting that you would put your own financial gain ahead of their civil liberties.
I find it *IRONIC* that all these people on/. go on about Rights, the Constitution the GPL, and the ideals of Free Software, and yet are willing to *TRAMPLE* on the rights of H-1B workers from a poor country. This convinces me that/. people are NOT the nice geeky idealistic "freedom, rights, free the PGP, publicise DeCSS" people that you make yourselves out to be. Shame on you all for talking about H-1B people like they are trash. How dare you.
people are smiling and just accepting that this is the market and super-genius, hard workers like them will not be unemployed (although their salary will be cut and they'll go from working 60-hour weeks with 24/7 oncall to 65-hour weeks
These super-genius people remind me of that saying, I can't remember it exactly so here goes, "They came after the Jews, I was not a Jew, they came after the criminals, I was not a criminal, they came after the Catholics, I was not a catholic, they came for the Protestants, I was not a protestant, they came for the US C++/Java coders, I was a l33t hAxOrS not just some coder, they came for the l33t hAxOrS replacing them with Indian and Chinese l33t hAxOrS. Then it was too late."
Dude, if there's no recovery soon (as has been promised again and again for the last 2 years - same during the great depression of the 50's) then your post suggesting programmers should give sexual favours (gimme some Java baby, yeah, yeah, oh yeah) is not a joke.
I'd say the IT world is shedding the cruft. I hope I'm not cruft.
Sorry dude, but it's not your decision. Even the best kernel-hacker class coders get fired and on welfare because "management says downsize the department" and there is no way for an average hiring manager to tell this person's resume apart from the other ones with 10 qualifications for a dime e.g. MCSE, CCNA, ECDL, IRC-expert, ICQ-expert, AoL-certified professional web designer, Hershey-certified computing "taste" professional, Nestle-certified profit-maximising-employee.
How long before these good Indian developers start wanting more money because the are "worth" it?
Not true. If you actually look at this "meager" salary, in India in terms of purchasing power and translating to the US it's equivalent to >>$100,000 per year. These guys live good. Of course being a technologically slightly less advanced place computer equipment, televisions, microwaves and cars are expensive, but in 50 years when these are established industries they won't be any more. In terms of food, building construction/maintenance, and schooling it's definitely >>$100,000 to them. Poverty levels are so high in India that almost every middle-class person has a servant/slave for $10/month actual rupee-to-dollar or $200/month rupee-purchasingpower-to-dollar-purchasingpower.
Besides if India becomes expensive, they'll outsource to China. Globalisation baby - C++ and Java sweatshops (by American workers standards)
Well, for one thing I'd consider the source. The ITAA has a vested interest in hyping industry growth
True, they're still going on about how *right now* there's a massive shortage of skilled IT workers. A top-end CS from Harvard/MIT/Berkeley apparantly doesn't count as "skilled enough". WTF? Explains why the CS courses at these places have less than half the number of applicants than before (from my AC academic contacts). Even if a recovery of this scale occurs, how could anyone know that these jobs won't be outsourced to India? Next ITAA will say, "Everyone with >15 years Java experience can get jobs easily", yeah right, except that the only one person with this qualification is the CEO of Sun.
Reminds me of Star Trek Voyager when Janeway could see through most BS, except when an alien with a grudge built her a super-fast quantum slipstream starship that could bring her home in a few months, she believed that it was true *because she wanted to*. ITAA speaks more trash than that "Merrill Lynch analyst" that comes on Bloomberg everyday. I mean what the heck does he analyse? It's written on his face that all of his buddies have been fired, he hasn't just because he's on the TV.
science, fighting uphill against religion every step of the way
I don't think so, the minority of people follow religions well, another minority not at all (murderers, etc.) and the majority warp the religion to suit their own culture. Like binLaden, the Koran is not a hostile book, and yet he warps it to his own wishes. Whenever a protestant King/Queen took over from a catholic King/Queen (or vice versa) the first thing they did was massacre the people loyal to the other religion. Thus the small differences between Catholics and Protestants was dwarfed by the breaching of the Ten Commandments, the BASIC TENETS of Christianity. WTF? The religion was warped into their own beliefs. Any religion that's (like this) too good and restrictive for people to actually follow is at least written by a nice clever guy, and is thus advice worth following.
Imagine starting a "linux religion" and converting people to it. This could solve open source's problems of repetition and duplication (like KDE/Gnome) if people are *forced* to follow it. The religion has commandments, e.g.
"Thou shalt not author viruses,
Thou shalt not code applications which run as root unnecessarily, Thou shalt not write scripts that takes arbitrary commands (e.g. bad Perl cgi, shell scripting in emails), l33t hAxOr shalt not say RTFM without at least verifying that a manual exists., Upon 70% of users of a software stating that an equivalentish duplicate exists, thou shalt choose by users' vote which system survivies and becomes a standard (e.g. KDE/Gnome) and which one is absorbed into it. You will follow these commandments or be excommunicated into Micro$oft land etc."
how difficult it is for a new theory to gain acceptance in the scientific community when it flies in the face of a long-established theory
Hmmmm, like homeopathic medicine. Take a sugar pill no matter what ailment you have. The very thought can cure anyone. What was that new research that the scientific community tried to killed about H2O having the ability to form lattices of introduced molecules or something?
Isn't TIME a part of the equatoin that makes up our universe? So if our universe ceased to exist, would time cease as well?
Ouch- that's giving me a headache...
Not necessarily, if you ask google about M-Theory, the superstring dimenisional collision that causes Universes to be built won't necessarily destroy time at the end because....
Uhhhh finishing the above sentence will put me out of my depth. Any takers?
They've lost touch with what Slashdot is supposed to be. News for nerds. Lately, any news item with the phrase "free speech" gets posted on the front page. Even when it's not nerd-related at all. Slashdot seems to be turning into some kind of refuge for tree-hugging hippie-commie bastards. Slashdot is becoming much more political and much less technical
Due to the tech slowdown, and many technical/. posters losing their jobs/flippin' burgers, it's not surprising that the number of technical posts has decreased.
When you're on welfare, being an ardent supporter of aggressive capitalism with a "can't pay for health insurance? Then DIE, it's evolution, get over it" attitude is quite difficult.
The precedent whereby the Rights given to individuals are extended to corporations (set by that Judge I don't remember the name of) must be reversed.
It's true that even poor countries have currency and thus capitalism, however globalisation does not allow small companies (10 employees or less) to make greater profits from this strategy, instead large corporations benefit as they form a monopsony which allows them to extort these poor poor people. This distortion of capitalism is a monstrosity that forces the poorest people in the world to lower their prices sometimes below cost price (sweatshops), so that the megacorporations can make the profit on their supply chain. The working conditions are apalling, it's true that many children have arms severed whilst working in sweatshops. The sad thing is that if the business goes, they will be even poorer. Therefore the very rich get richer.
The Governments of poor nations tend to be Oligarchies making it easy for megacorporations to manipulate the Government. This effect is even apparent here in the Enron scandal.
Instead of arguing over globalisation from a top-down perspective, a bottom-up perspective is more revealing. Under Communism, a 15-20 year old Russian citizen automatically gets a car and flat, free of cost. This person is free to pursue his own activities - fine arts, philosophy, reading, going out with friends. Problem: Communist politics allowed tyrannical and oppressive regimes to persist due to the large amount of control given to them. Under democracy this political tyranny is far less likely to exist. Under the free market it's transferred to corporate entities e.g. record distributors suing Napster akin to horse-and-cart taxis trying to make petrol engines illegal 100 years ago. Under this free market the same 15-20 year old will be working nights for some avaricious affluent Manager in some fish and chip shop to pay his rent (Central London houses are $600,000 to buy - out of reach) and then watch TV where he will see product advertisements so that he can squander his hard-earned cash. When his friend buys the latest car using money that's stolen/earned unconscionably, this chap will feel jealousy and greed - the fiery emotions at capitalism's heart, in breach of the wise Christian commandment, "Thou shalt not covet what thy neighbour has" with equivalent statements in almost every other world religion. Then some parents *seem* surprised when they find out their children are troublemakers. Case in point: The BBC (a pseudo-governmental organisation that everyone pays for via "TV tax" and thus is free of shareholder/advertiser-slavery) hosting intelligent discussions about capitalism, whereas other channels just air ignorant shows and movies to get the maximum advertising dollar./. is similar to the BBC in this way (because it's free)
Why are there so few goods that are "Made in Ethiopia" or "Made in Ghana" - why are the international trade barriers so unfairly high? Why did the IMF award a massive loan to (I think) Malaysia when they knew the Government was corrupt - perhaps they knew that once a better Government was elected to take their place that the country would still have to repay the loan with interest that was squandered and embezzled, effectively economically enslaving an entire nation of hundreds of millions of people.
I put it to you that only influential people (rich/political mix that the Enron scandal shows are corrupt enough to shred their papers and where the price of having a conscience is having a bullet in your head) set these policies in breach of what the public wants - making us a failing democracy. Nobody has enough time to vote for the right party because they are too busy working, earning money to spend on rent/mortgages and products that only their own greed (and advertising) dictates that they must buy; from the overworked 20 year old flippin' burgers whilst his Manager makes the real money and so the cycle is complete. The power of elected politicians is replaced by Managers and their own avaricious wishes. Do we wish these Managers that enslave our young children and pay them a pittance for the "privilege" of a roof over their heads to do the same to Ethiopians? A new kind of war - a hundred managers instead of a million imperialist soldiers, a victory indeed. It is time that companies stop abusing the "Developed-world hand-me-downs" culture where if a car pollutes too much, or if the pesticide DDT causes cancer then simply sell it to India or some other developing country. Companies seldom give anything to these countries, usually only taking their natural resources, so perhaps they should be grateful for these dangerous technologies. Saudi Arabia has the correct technique for dealing with this - since companies don't do them favours, then they won't do companies favours - therefore all copyrights and patents are null and void there, which many foreign legislative arms find to be a commercial threat.
Supreme Court, please reverse the precedent where corporate entities have the same protections as individuals.
Part numbers are meaningless. The part can be the same, but as another poster on this topic states
"They spray a different lubricant onto SCSI platters than on IDE"
Can you find the part number of the lubricant? Can you find the part number of the advanced QA testing? Does the part number change when a platter too defective for SCSI is installed into IDE? Do platters with many defects get a different part number? Can you see the part number of the GMR head?
I remember seeing posted on/. in the past 9 months that Compaq servers were sold with IDE hard drives that had the same part numbers as the retail ones, but were "especially built". When these disks were replaced with the retail version (with the same part number) they dropped like flies. Do 20% defective platters have the same part number as 0% defective platters? No, just put the defective platter into an IDE drive and remap the defective sectors, why would companies embarass themselves by putting a different part number. They used to write defective sectors on the top of old, old drives, and you had to tell the BIOS about these when you installed the drive, but then people just bought the drives with least defective sectors (stupid). So now they hide this. Same part number, dude.
Very well, read this and jump to the Conclusions at the bottom. I'm pretty sure that a platter can get 250 Celsius transients (at which point it becomes a supercooled liquid) upon head crash (platter irregularity or pinpoint contamination causing high friction) or a long read over the same track (e.g. reading then re-reading then dual-ECC then quad-ECC on yet another pass).
Slashdot Mirror
Can this be used for mind control? "Relax, now repeat after me - Al Qaeda is good, Bush is bad"
Sound familiar?
Nice.
In India and other countries traffic rules in general don't exist, or are placed in the same cateory as the "don't download mp3s" or pr0n rule. The children learn this, together with the more subtle "primal objectives" values of "get the job done no matter what, use string to tie the engine to the aircraft if you have to, just get it flying, worry about the consequences later". After all if your next meal isn't guaranteed, that's a pretty strong disincentive from thinking too far ahead. A bit like working while someone has a gun to your head - you're gonna cut corners.
Only a well-travelled man can have the insight to say what you've said <<Parent>>
True, although American managers and MBAs try to force software people to override these instincts of making software robust. Same as the architects of WTC overrided Empire-State building robust construction methodologies in favour of cheaper, more profit-maximising WTC central-core-outer-shell construction methodologies.If you're talking about the best of the best, this is true. Of course both America and India are full of IT people that don't know their Redhat from their Windows. The elite-class coders brought up in India do inherently cut more corners than their American counterparts. And American managers force them to cut corners more aggressively (as they are taught to speed up American programmers, Indian programmers on the other hand need slowing down).In India after the Bhopal disaster, were new enforced laws brought into existence that would prevent a repeat? No. That BP/Amoco gas pipe that everyone in Nigeria was told NOT TO GO NEAR. What happened? Boom and lots of people died. Quoting,
Did I miss something, or have the scenes from Mad Max with the fuel shortages become reality? To give a more measurable indication of this, third world driving is world famous, neither the right nor the left side is reserved for cars driving in a particular direction. Instead vehicles are just grateful that a road exists at all and drive in a haphazard way. If you watch Lonely Planet on the Discovery Travel & Leisure channel you will see that head-on collisions occur far more than any other in all countries except developed ones. Here are some statistics (scroll down to automobiles). From this same source, I quote,
There is a basic lack of awareness and a fundamental difference in culture. Many Americans look upon the Chinese eating dogs and horses as disgusting and thus nobody on this planet can approach this subject with a truly open mind, except God. Is it so difficult to believe that Indian programmers can have different primal objectives than American coders? After all American cars are (or at least were) constructed for luxury, Japanese cars have a fundamental shift in construction methodologies and objectives towards reliability and modular construction.Like in the US, if you picked up a dog and ripped his heart out in the mall everyone would be like "Oh my God!" but if you do it in a market in China/India it's, well, it's like pointing out that the sky is blue. This lack of respect for animal life and human life (road crash statistics) is indicative of the peoples' thinking. Anyone says, "but eberybody is different" is wrong to some degree. There's always some level of conformity. Even a staunch anarchist in the US can drive, he doesn't "disobey" red lights all the time and "ignore" stop signs all the time. A true anarchist would sit at the roadside and throw roadkill at passing vehicles, would piss in the middle of the freeway stopping all the cars, would attack a drive-thru bank with a sledgehammer, would walk in the street with a long knife in his hand, would throw a lit cigarrete on the floor at the gas station so he doesn't have to pay for his gas, etc.
I could fill this post with my personal experiences whilst visiting India e.g. electrician "If it catchs fire, then I give you half your money back and I fix it". Suffice it to say that look at my website to see the conditions your Indian software is written under. Notice the walls inside the houses - no wallpaper, shredded paint. But that's normal and natural, npbody notices it, it doesn't occur to them, just as making dangerous shortcuts whilst designing & coding don't occur to them. Same as that lost puppy look that you get when you tell a newbie that his PC has been fried because he opened an email with an attachment. He then says "What's an attachment" the thought never occurs, same as nobody *demands* to look at a company's balance sheet in the middle of a job interview. Read this to find out what these countries are actually like. No marketing trash. News like this happens all the time. I mean skyscrapers collapse by themselves all the time - they don't need Osama binLaden.
As a previous poster put it, staying with a company malicously and sabotage their code (they are paying you to wreck their company). Then when they fire you, tell the BSA that they are running illegal software (my friend did that, he got a bounty plus revenge plus his other friend got a "software auditing" job at that same company - LOL!). Read Sun Tzu's The Art of War. There are far subtler things that you can do than ploughing a plane into WTC. Tell the police and EFF about the fact that they altered the policy with incorrect notification, and invite the people that wrote angry letters to participate in a class action lawsuit (dangle the carrot in front of them). Then screw them with any official bodies, e.g. report Doctor malpractice to the American Medical Association, report teachers as being child molestors, this'll bring a whole pile of trouble on their heads regardless of whether they're innocent or guilty. Get the company's customer list and start rumours that this is a great conspiracy, "They started Phase 1 by releasing customer personal data - you are next, then our suppliers. This is what they're going to do - yada yada. I'm an anonymous whistleblower" (embedding a lie within a truth makes the lie more convincing). Remember Star Wars: Phantom Menace, "he is a good man, but is mired by baseless allegations of corruption". You must make these baseless allegations.
Blowing your top and quitting in protest strips you of the most powerful weapons you possess. This is why coders keep getting manipulated. We simply can't get things done and don't know how the world actually works compared to sales people and marketing people. Companies know that if they piss of sales and marketing, they'll have the company on its knees within days.
Remember: subterfuge, subterfuge, subterfuge. Of course keep it as anonymous as possible, don't get slapped with libel or lander charges.
Score: -1, Malicous, cunning, caniving, grazing legality.
Add to this HR doesn't want to get fired, in my last company they were emailing *themselves* to make them look busy. HR puts out fake ads, does some interviews and then rejects everyone, just to make themselves look busy. They don't want to lose their jobs either.
The $15,000 chemical engineer. *sigh*
So H-1Bs now drive around in nice cars, I'm glad for them that they've managed to improve their lot in life. Pissing them off and excluding them as "non-Americans" same as the Blacks were is simply inviting further Al-Qaeda activity. When the Blacks wanted equal rights and the same jobs, the incumbent population didn't want their jobs taken away. Well, they had to just live with having their jobs taken away. The price of not doing so was the destruction of American conscience and freedom of the people. People got pissed off at the Corporations for not absorbing the Blacks whilst maintaining their incumbent workforce. Same with these H-1Bs. I admit that the H-1B before enslaved people to a company, but now the rules are a lot more relaxed and I'm happy for them. They even took my last job, but I don't hold a grudge. Saying "Oh sweatshops are bad" and then bitch when those workers come to America and work under American working conditions is hypocritical.
You can hire the best double-CS with an IQ of 180, put him on a crap project and watch the whole thing burn and trash his resume.
You can hire the worst dumb MCSE, put him on a simple project that he can handle (sysadmin at small company with established and stable zero-maintenance linux network) and he can thrive and his resume will look better than the really intelligent guy's one.
In terms of coding, the dumb MCSE guy wouldn't be able to do something but would become best buddies with management by talking about NFL or whatever and thus get a good resume and good projects turned his way that he'll get his friends to do. The intelligent guy would be troubled by the constant pressure to perform well and would screw up, management tells him to do something so he does it in a roundabout comlicated way using C++/Java instead of just plugging it into Micro$oft Excel or Micro$oft Access, and thus he would get fired. Intelligent people need closer management. However if he worked in R&D at a top-notch lab he'd be a fish-in-the-water. So back to your point, "What is a good IT person" how can you possibly measure that?
Indian coders are coders nontheless, so you will have to be racist like the KKK and exclude the H-1Bs from your "union" if you'd like to keep it in line with your current intentions. This way the H-1Bs won't be able to put forward their side of the story - being poor immigrants like countless waves of immigrants before to the US, (the Irish, etc.) except many of these H-1Bs are BRILLIANT graduates from IIT (equivalent to Berkeley CS) so they get paid a little more than the previous waves of immigrants. These H-1Bs are PEOPLE, just like us. I find it racist and personally insulting that you would put your own financial gain ahead of their civil liberties.
I find it *IRONIC* that all these people on /. go on about Rights, the Constitution the GPL, and the ideals of Free Software, and yet are willing to *TRAMPLE* on the rights of H-1B workers from a poor country. This convinces me that /. people are NOT the nice geeky idealistic "freedom, rights, free the PGP, publicise DeCSS" people that you make yourselves out to be. Shame on you all for talking about H-1B people like they are trash. How dare you.
(No, I'm not a H-1B myself)
Dude, if there's no recovery soon (as has been promised again and again for the last 2 years - same during the great depression of the 50's) then your post suggesting programmers should give sexual favours (gimme some Java baby, yeah, yeah, oh yeah) is not a joke.
Reminds me of Star Trek Voyager when Janeway could see through most BS, except when an alien with a grudge built her a super-fast quantum slipstream starship that could bring her home in a few months, she believed that it was true *because she wanted to*. ITAA speaks more trash than that "Merrill Lynch analyst" that comes on Bloomberg everyday. I mean what the heck does he analyse? It's written on his face that all of his buddies have been fired, he hasn't just because he's on the TV.
Imagine starting a "linux religion" and converting people to it. This could solve open source's problems of repetition and duplication (like KDE/Gnome) if people are *forced* to follow it. The religion has commandments, e.g.
Uhhhh finishing the above sentence will put me out of my depth. Any takers?
When you're on welfare, being an ardent supporter of aggressive capitalism with a "can't pay for health insurance? Then DIE, it's evolution, get over it" attitude is quite difficult.
It's true that even poor countries have currency and thus capitalism, however globalisation does not allow small companies (10 employees or less) to make greater profits from this strategy, instead large corporations benefit as they form a monopsony which allows them to extort these poor poor people. This distortion of capitalism is a monstrosity that forces the poorest people in the world to lower their prices sometimes below cost price (sweatshops), so that the megacorporations can make the profit on their supply chain. The working conditions are apalling, it's true that many children have arms severed whilst working in sweatshops. The sad thing is that if the business goes, they will be even poorer. Therefore the very rich get richer.
The Governments of poor nations tend to be Oligarchies making it easy for megacorporations to manipulate the Government. This effect is even apparent here in the Enron scandal.
Instead of arguing over globalisation from a top-down perspective, a bottom-up perspective is more revealing. Under Communism, a 15-20 year old Russian citizen automatically gets a car and flat, free of cost. This person is free to pursue his own activities - fine arts, philosophy, reading, going out with friends. Problem: Communist politics allowed tyrannical and oppressive regimes to persist due to the large amount of control given to them. Under democracy this political tyranny is far less likely to exist. Under the free market it's transferred to corporate entities e.g. record distributors suing Napster akin to horse-and-cart taxis trying to make petrol engines illegal 100 years ago. Under this free market the same 15-20 year old will be working nights for some avaricious affluent Manager in some fish and chip shop to pay his rent (Central London houses are $600,000 to buy - out of reach) and then watch TV where he will see product advertisements so that he can squander his hard-earned cash. When his friend buys the latest car using money that's stolen/earned unconscionably, this chap will feel jealousy and greed - the fiery emotions at capitalism's heart, in breach of the wise Christian commandment, "Thou shalt not covet what thy neighbour has" with equivalent statements in almost every other world religion. Then some parents *seem* surprised when they find out their children are troublemakers. Case in point: The BBC (a pseudo-governmental organisation that everyone pays for via "TV tax" and thus is free of shareholder/advertiser-slavery) hosting intelligent discussions about capitalism, whereas other channels just air ignorant shows and movies to get the maximum advertising dollar. /. is similar to the BBC in this way (because it's free)
Why are there so few goods that are "Made in Ethiopia" or "Made in Ghana" - why are the international trade barriers so unfairly high? Why did the IMF award a massive loan to (I think) Malaysia when they knew the Government was corrupt - perhaps they knew that once a better Government was elected to take their place that the country would still have to repay the loan with interest that was squandered and embezzled, effectively economically enslaving an entire nation of hundreds of millions of people.
I put it to you that only influential people (rich/political mix that the Enron scandal shows are corrupt enough to shred their papers and where the price of having a conscience is having a bullet in your head) set these policies in breach of what the public wants - making us a failing democracy. Nobody has enough time to vote for the right party because they are too busy working, earning money to spend on rent/mortgages and products that only their own greed (and advertising) dictates that they must buy; from the overworked 20 year old flippin' burgers whilst his Manager makes the real money and so the cycle is complete. The power of elected politicians is replaced by Managers and their own avaricious wishes. Do we wish these Managers that enslave our young children and pay them a pittance for the "privilege" of a roof over their heads to do the same to Ethiopians? A new kind of war - a hundred managers instead of a million imperialist soldiers, a victory indeed. It is time that companies stop abusing the "Developed-world hand-me-downs" culture where if a car pollutes too much, or if the pesticide DDT causes cancer then simply sell it to India or some other developing country. Companies seldom give anything to these countries, usually only taking their natural resources, so perhaps they should be grateful for these dangerous technologies. Saudi Arabia has the correct technique for dealing with this - since companies don't do them favours, then they won't do companies favours - therefore all copyrights and patents are null and void there, which many foreign legislative arms find to be a commercial threat.
Supreme Court, please reverse the precedent where corporate entities have the same protections as individuals.
I remember seeing posted on /. in the past 9 months that Compaq servers were sold with IDE hard drives that had the same part numbers as the retail ones, but were "especially built". When these disks were replaced with the retail version (with the same part number) they dropped like flies. Do 20% defective platters have the same part number as 0% defective platters? No, just put the defective platter into an IDE drive and remap the defective sectors, why would companies embarass themselves by putting a different part number. They used to write defective sectors on the top of old, old drives, and you had to tell the BIOS about these when you installed the drive, but then people just bought the drives with least defective sectors (stupid). So now they hide this. Same part number, dude.
Very well, read this and jump to the Conclusions at the bottom. I'm pretty sure that a platter can get 250 Celsius transients (at which point it becomes a supercooled liquid) upon head crash (platter irregularity or pinpoint contamination causing high friction) or a long read over the same track (e.g. reading then re-reading then dual-ECC then quad-ECC on yet another pass).