If you're a coder, and have never used CVS, try it. It's absolutely lovely. "Oh, introduced a bug there...let's just diff against a known good version." "Oh, it looks like *Bob* was the one to commit that broken code." "Why did I add *that* code? Let me check my CVS log..."
Yeah, there are probably things about CVS that could be better. But if you've never used it, and aren't already using a competitor, it's really good.
Transmeta's chips run cool. Not a big deal to many people who grew up on vacuum cleaners inside their computers, but many Mac aficionados know how much having a very quiet computer can mean.
There's a lot of applications that just don't *need* a ton of CPU time, but longevity and the ability to not have failure-prone and noisy fans in a device is worthwhile.
I don't see why this is so bad. If I get a laptop in the near future (think I finally settled on a new desktop instead this year), it's going to be a Lifebook. Why? The things *get* a ton of battery life (17 hrs spec, 10 hrs under load).
Back when I was in HS, the school bought some (disgustingly pricy) IBM boxes running Surepath that didn't have a hardware password reset (or at least IBM claimed that you couldn't).
I hate internal modems. You can't kill the power to 'em or get decent diagnostics on 'em easily. I've always purchased external modems, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
"I've recently started working for a company who has decided that viral marketing is The Way Forwards. I've got mixed feelings about this...
You *may* have just started, but after posting material criticizing your company to Slashdot, I'm dubious that you're going to keep your employment long...
Given the number of Slashdot readers constantly complaining about being out of work, I expect that a pretty good way to generate a hell of a lot of resume submissions is to mention a job opening on Slashdot.
I've found that face to face time really is valuable -- especially for hashing out new ideas. If you're deciding on architecture, even a phone conference really isn't all that great. I also really think that periodic meetings (weekly?) face to face are a better idea than trying to do things electronically.
I think that a lot of this stems from two main reasons:
a) if you're throwing out ideas very quickly, the higher bandwidth of speech than typing can be helpful (even phones are, at least for me, much more difficult to understand than right-here spoken words).
b) There are some major impediments to the equivalent of quick diagram sketches or showing things visually. First, the computer has piss-poor input devices for producing a quick sketch -- mice are really, really slow compared to a pen. Second, there isn't a overwhelmingly popular, universal, cross-platform system for collaborating and sharing sketches and bits of information, though there have been a lot of stabs at it. Third, the bandwidth used in sketching can be a bit of an issue if one of your users is on a low bandwidth connection like a modem. I've seen some research work done at Bell Labs and Carnegie Mellon University on software to rapidly develop rough 3d models. It's nice, but it's nowhere near what you can accomplish with a pen, a piece of paper for 2d or clay for 3d.
OTOH, while this varies from project to project, during the actual coding or debugging process, I've seen no problems with simply using text and working remotely. As a matter of fact, it's often easier to share information, since you're copy-pasting errors or other information back and forth. It's a bit disappointing that the most popular messaging protocols suck (Jabber's the most popular one I know of that's actually well-designed), but IM client + shared network filesystem + available phone works pretty well, in practice.
After all, take a look at Linux...
Also, a minor benefit of increasing the cost of communication between developers is that it tends to improve modularity -- each developer goes more out of his way to ensure that his code is robust in handling errors in the other developers' code.
I'm not sure if you're looking for a joystick or a gamepad, but if you want a gamepad, Gravis puts out some very inexpensive (seen 'em from $9 to $19) gamepads under the "Gamepad Pro" brand. They also "act as joysticks" with an attachment, but doing so gives you a pretty crummy joystick.
Anyway, these things are shaped like Playstation controllers. They're a little less nice -- not rubberized, lighter, and have an annoying habit of favoring diagonals over vertical/horizontal directions, but they're lightweight and durable as *hell*. I've stepped on/put my chair on/dropped/put in boxes my two ones more times than I can remember, and they just keep on chugging away.
Playstation controllers are actually not that expensive, but then you have to get an adapter...
Joe Blow: "Why, look at that there NASA! It do take up all those vauuuuable dollurs that could be used ta fight terrorists and blow up them there Irakis! Yessir, I don't want none of my money payin' for them eggheads!"
I kind of think Kennedy's legacy of spending money on science and work that will benefit mankind in the long run is dead. Instead, we've got traditional Bush warhawking. Yahoo!
No kidding? AOLServer is open-source? I always figured it was some closed, propriatary thing, but it's free and Free, according to sourceforge. Son of a gun.
AOL's products kind of suck, but unlike MS they can't (or don't) force you to interact with them. So, yeah, I suppose I like AOL more than MS.
Granted, I prefer AOL/TW to MS, but that's more because (a) I feel that the first is less competent from a business standpoint, and I'd like to have competition, and (b) AOL/TW is smaller than MS (disgusting as that is).
AOL is not simply being a "nice guy" in buying ICQ, Mozilla, and Winamp, though you're right that they fund Moz development. They're fighting for control of the Internet instant-messaging market, which would put them in an incredibly powerful position of control -- essentially the dominant "telecom" provider of the future. ICQ is a smart move for them to make, because it lets them consolidate the two leading messaging clients under their control (damn few people use MSN Messenger or Yahoo). TW is a media distribution company, and MS has control over Media Player, and would like nothing more than to exercise said control to attack competitors (as they have with other monopolies and competitors in the past). Winamp helps nullify that. Finally, the same goes for IE and Mozilla -- AOL is *the* big ISP, and being at the mercy of MS's potentially auto-updated web browser is a scary thing for them. Mozilla helps them quite a bit.
Again, that doesn't mean that AOL is to be hated and despised -- I think that they're a lot less dangerous than MS -- just that they're certainly looking out for #1 in these purchases.
It could be that (I'm not following the case) the Elcommsoft people are making a claim that the DMCA is a bogus piece of legislation or something. While I certainly feel for them, the job of the jury is not to evaluate the worth of the DMCA (I know someone's going to bring up jury nullification here, but that's insanely rare). The judge may be trying to prevent Elcommsoft from moving the emphasis from their guilt under the existing, passed-into-legislation law (which is what is at issue) to whether that law is just or constitutional or something (which is for the Supreme Court to decide, not the jury).
This definitely is not true -- I've moved libraries from the system dir to the app dir and run apps, when two apps dislike each other's version of a library.
Second, this linking (as, I suspect, most apps use, for convenience) is load-time, not run-time. Most people are not going to screw with LoadLibrary() when they can have the loader handle things for them perfectly well. There's no call an app can use to check the libraries, because by the time it's making calls, it's already linked.
And I was thinking more along the lines of more-traditional spyware than CD player stuff.
Sure, it's not so much this particular case or you, but the whole trend of treating people who have purchasing power specially came from somewhere -- it's because it's cheaper to bias the person with purchasing power to buy a product (we get to keep having the salmon lunches?) than to cut the prices on the products.
I mean, they do stuff like this for a reason -- it's profitable for them.
The worst cases of monentary allocation come in those few cases when a company can disalign an employee's interests from those strict interests of the company. One of these ways is by pampering the person making buying decisions.
Another way -- take the "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" line. (Obviously, this applies to lots more instances than MS, but this one hits close to home for me) If there's a cheaper, better alternative out there, it might be a good idea for the company to look into. It might be the best thing out there. But the manager's interests have become disaligned from those of the company, because he could potentially be on the chopping block if something goes wrong *and* he's doing something from the rest of the pack. If some crucial vendor two years later says "we don't support Mac OS" or Linux, or HPUX or whatever, he's going to be the scapegoat. OTOH, if he just does what everyone else is doing, regardless of whether it's what's best for his company, he's doing a much better job of maintaining his own job security.
I believe besides perks and job security issues are the biggest ways vendors can go after people with purchasing authority, but there are probably others.
Now, you may not have been influenced, but there are definitely people who *are* being influenced by this sort of thing. And that's what I hate. The whole concept of wining and dining a business partner is a small-scale form of this, but it's as accepted a form of bribery in business as "campaign contributions" are in politics.
Whenever people are making sub-optimal decisions locally on a massive scale, society as a whole suffers. I pay more for things.
When we are hired, "they" want us to believe that bonus is part of the compensation, which is why they don't give us a bigger salary.
Bush would also like you to believe that his energy initiatives are for the good of everyone. You aren't required to buy into anyone's stories. If someone tells you "you can get big bonuses", take that at face value -- you may well *not* get any bonus at all.
What exactly is a table for, if not page layout? As far as I can see, the only purpose of a table is to define the physical relationship of different pieces of content.
Tables do have that attribute, mostly because it's very difficult for a browser to do much else with them.
Tables are the proper way to present an "array" of information. The table paradigm *does* happen to let the designer specify the ordering of columns, for example. Some sacrifices have to be made to allow joined cells.:-) But there really is nothing preventing web browser designers from allowing users to reorder columns from the specified order, as long as they don't have joined cells. This could be a useful feature if you only care about, say, three numbers (car price, name, and top speed), and want to move those columns in a big table to the far left of the table for easy comparison.
So in this case, I'm not defining physical relationship of different pieces of content -- tables were just a convenient way to embed that information and provide a "suggested" viewing order.:-)
MSDN says that PATH is searched well after the others.
There is a quite possible exploit, though...we just need an unregistered library that's been dumped in the system or windows dir that a trusted app links against.
The linking search order for unregistered libraries is:
1) executable dir. This is safe -- we assume that the admin set up this system so that the user doesn't have write perms here. 2) The current directory -- that's going to tear things. All we have to do is leave a modified unregistered dll in the current dir, and execute a trusted app using its full path from there. *That* will link against the evil code and get full network access unless the ZA people are doing a lot more loader-level crap that I'd suspect they are. 3, 4, 5)...
Who at Microsoft came up with the idea of using the *current directory* before the system dir and windows dir, anyway? I can't think if any scenerio where that would be particularly justified...
To be fair, that probably means that most users are just going to click "OK" when they see a dialog, but arguing that ZA will be hampered by limited exposure isn't reasonable.
And given that spyware is seen as one of the few avenues of profit for some types of software...well, there's certainly the incentive.
Modify PATH to be prefixed with directory foo, owned by you. Drop that modified msvcrt.dll into said directory. Execute a trusted app, which uses the original binary. One way or another, it's going to be possible to force ZA to deal with libraries. This is actually easier than the first thing I suggested.
Ooogh. I always seem to dislike the ideals of both the left and right wings...unions and religious nuts. Ick.
The calculating view: Nothing your employer never gives you is a gift. It is compensation for services rendered or incentive cultivation of good will.
[shrug] Sure, and if you look at some of my other posts in this story (like the HR department being happy to drop you like a hot potato), you'll see that I agree. "Gift" works well for illustrating the degree of expectation that one should have for a bonus, though.
Either way, the employer deducts it and the employee is taxed on it, with certain minor exceptions for gifts worth less than $25 and the like.
This is criticism of some sort of business-centric government, I'm assuming, since you're taking the "left wing" approach? Nah. There's no conspiracy. If a bonus is beneficial to you, you can afford to make a larger, flashier bonus.
According to the IRS, employer-to-employee gifts simply don't happen, and I don't think we should be any less stoic.
As I said, I don't consider it truly a gift, but from the employee's point of view, that's the degree of reliability that should be assigned. And whatever the IRS wants to classify something as has little bearing on what it actually is -- there's too much money involved in bonuses for the IRS not to have fun regulating things.
As for bonuses being per se gratuitous, that's not so perhaps because the popular understanding of bonus bridges over into year-end compensation. An incentive bonus between employers and employees as an express or implied part of the work relationship can not be withheld on caprice -- it's merely delayed compensation. Entitlement to a future bonus may be valid even post-termination: employers sometimes illegally fire employees to avoid paying benefits.
Sure. And while I'm sure it's happened at some point, I've never heard of a Christmas bonus (particularly for any specific amount) being granted either expressly or implied.
In short, in some cases the expectation of bonus is morally justified
Come on, now. A *moral* justification? You're opening a can of worms -- are *your* morals the same as others?
in more severe cases it may be a legally actionable entitlement
You still need to provide your "express or implied part of the work relationship" element.
In rare cases the discriminatory or abritrary administration of a bonus system may also be illegal (racist, sexist, and so on).
True (though that complaint is ridiculously overused in the United States), but that doesn't really have bearing on what we're talking about here -- a doll instead of a fat cash bonus.
But I digress because of the compulsion to be thorough. My philosophical advice: Remember, it's not a gift, it's compensation.
It's an incentive, but not an agreed-upon form of compensation.
Your comment is a reflection of the unfortunate and legally inaccurate attitude that employers are doing you a favor by giving you a job, bonuses, and so on -- while also acting as though employment contracts were negotiated among equals. Which is it?
I do not agree. A favor of giving you a job? They're trying to maximize their own bottom line...and the same goes for bonuses. You can't reasonably have extrapolated to this degree simply from my use of the word "gift".
Sure, and you may also deserve that bonus coming.
Do you "deserve" it? I see the moral can o' worms coming again. "Deserving" something is a wonderful tool to use in an argument, because it's so fantastically ill-defined, and because people tend to have fairly self-centric views on what is "deserved". Wendy and Miki may both feel that they "deserve" the big, orange _____, and there is no resolution to the problem that doesn't leave one feeling that she's been stiffed.
What the writer apparently feels is a moral betrayal./me grins. That isn't much of a justification. Tell me, how many people here feel that you're "paid enough" for your work? Or perhaps you feel that you're "overpaid" for your work? I think that few people would say this -- most people I've talked to feel that their talents are underappreciated. Yet, when the plumber comes to fix your flooding living room, don't you get a nagging feel that *he* is "overpaid"? Morality is a wonderfully distorted thing that you can use to support almost any argument. The Crusades were supported on moral grounds. Tell me, without using vague moral arguments, why it is reasonable, or a good idea, for this person to *expect* that bonus?
If it looks likely this crap will continue regardless of work performance, I'd recommend updating the resume.
Oh, criminy. You're willing to say this without knowing what his salary and benefits *already* are?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're a coder, and have never used CVS, try it. It's absolutely lovely. "Oh, introduced a bug there...let's just diff against a known good version." "Oh, it looks like *Bob* was the one to commit that broken code." "Why did I add *that* code? Let me check my CVS log..."
Yeah, there are probably things about CVS that could be better. But if you've never used it, and aren't already using a competitor, it's really good.
I haven't been a fan of CUPS -- lprng or other alternatives might be a better choice.
joint owned copyright
I think it should be "trademark"...
You could call it "iBuy" or "eBuy"!
If it's available and you want to spend the money. And you don't mind being at the mercy of a single monopoly that frequently likes port-blocking. :-)
Transmeta's chips run cool. Not a big deal to many people who grew up on vacuum cleaners inside their computers, but many Mac aficionados know how much having a very quiet computer can mean.
There's a lot of applications that just don't *need* a ton of CPU time, but longevity and the ability to not have failure-prone and noisy fans in a device is worthwhile.
I don't see why this is so bad. If I get a laptop in the near future (think I finally settled on a new desktop instead this year), it's going to be a Lifebook. Why? The things *get* a ton of battery life (17 hrs spec, 10 hrs under load).
Back when I was in HS, the school bought some (disgustingly pricy) IBM boxes running Surepath that didn't have a hardware password reset (or at least IBM claimed that you couldn't).
His bones lengthened *14 inches* in 12 months? You're full of it.
I hate internal modems. You can't kill the power to 'em or get decent diagnostics on 'em easily. I've always purchased external modems, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
"I've recently started working for a company who has decided that viral marketing is The Way Forwards. I've got mixed feelings about this...
You *may* have just started, but after posting material criticizing your company to Slashdot, I'm dubious that you're going to keep your employment long...
Given the number of Slashdot readers constantly complaining about being out of work, I expect that a pretty good way to generate a hell of a lot of resume submissions is to mention a job opening on Slashdot.
I've found that face to face time really is valuable -- especially for hashing out new ideas. If you're deciding on architecture, even a phone conference really isn't all that great. I also really think that periodic meetings (weekly?) face to face are a better idea than trying to do things electronically.
I think that a lot of this stems from two main reasons:
a) if you're throwing out ideas very quickly, the higher bandwidth of speech than typing can be helpful (even phones are, at least for me, much more difficult to understand than right-here spoken words).
b) There are some major impediments to the equivalent of quick diagram sketches or showing things visually. First, the computer has piss-poor input devices for producing a quick sketch -- mice are really, really slow compared to a pen. Second, there isn't a overwhelmingly popular, universal, cross-platform system for collaborating and sharing sketches and bits of information, though there have been a lot of stabs at it. Third, the bandwidth used in sketching can be a bit of an issue if one of your users is on a low bandwidth connection like a modem. I've seen some research work done at Bell Labs and Carnegie Mellon University on software to rapidly develop rough 3d models. It's nice, but it's nowhere near what you can accomplish with a pen, a piece of paper for 2d or clay for 3d.
OTOH, while this varies from project to project, during the actual coding or debugging process, I've seen no problems with simply using text and working remotely. As a matter of fact, it's often easier to share information, since you're copy-pasting errors or other information back and forth. It's a bit disappointing that the most popular messaging protocols suck (Jabber's the most popular one I know of that's actually well-designed), but IM client + shared network filesystem + available phone works pretty well, in practice.
After all, take a look at Linux...
Also, a minor benefit of increasing the cost of communication between developers is that it tends to improve modularity -- each developer goes more out of his way to ensure that his code is robust in handling errors in the other developers' code.
I'm not sure if you're looking for a joystick or a gamepad, but if you want a gamepad, Gravis puts out some very inexpensive (seen 'em from $9 to $19) gamepads under the "Gamepad Pro" brand. They also "act as joysticks" with an attachment, but doing so gives you a pretty crummy joystick.
Anyway, these things are shaped like Playstation controllers. They're a little less nice -- not rubberized, lighter, and have an annoying habit of favoring diagonals over vertical/horizontal directions, but they're lightweight and durable as *hell*. I've stepped on/put my chair on/dropped/put in boxes my two ones more times than I can remember, and they just keep on chugging away.
Playstation controllers are actually not that expensive, but then you have to get an adapter...
Joe Blow: "Why, look at that there NASA! It do take up all those vauuuuable dollurs that could be used ta fight terrorists and blow up them there Irakis! Yessir, I don't want none of my money payin' for them eggheads!"
I kind of think Kennedy's legacy of spending money on science and work that will benefit mankind in the long run is dead. Instead, we've got traditional Bush warhawking. Yahoo!
they made a nice open-source webserver
No kidding? AOLServer is open-source? I always figured it was some closed, propriatary thing, but it's free and Free, according to sourceforge. Son of a gun.
AOL's products kind of suck, but unlike MS they can't (or don't) force you to interact with them. So, yeah, I suppose I like AOL more than MS.
Granted, I prefer AOL/TW to MS, but that's more because (a) I feel that the first is less competent from a business standpoint, and I'd like to have competition, and (b) AOL/TW is smaller than MS (disgusting as that is).
AOL is not simply being a "nice guy" in buying ICQ, Mozilla, and Winamp, though you're right that they fund Moz development. They're fighting for control of the Internet instant-messaging market, which would put them in an incredibly powerful position of control -- essentially the dominant "telecom" provider of the future. ICQ is a smart move for them to make, because it lets them consolidate the two leading messaging clients under their control (damn few people use MSN Messenger or Yahoo). TW is a media distribution company, and MS has control over Media Player, and would like nothing more than to exercise said control to attack competitors (as they have with other monopolies and competitors in the past). Winamp helps nullify that. Finally, the same goes for IE and Mozilla -- AOL is *the* big ISP, and being at the mercy of MS's potentially auto-updated web browser is a scary thing for them. Mozilla helps them quite a bit.
Again, that doesn't mean that AOL is to be hated and despised -- I think that they're a lot less dangerous than MS -- just that they're certainly looking out for #1 in these purchases.
It could be that (I'm not following the case) the Elcommsoft people are making a claim that the DMCA is a bogus piece of legislation or something. While I certainly feel for them, the job of the jury is not to evaluate the worth of the DMCA (I know someone's going to bring up jury nullification here, but that's insanely rare). The judge may be trying to prevent Elcommsoft from moving the emphasis from their guilt under the existing, passed-into-legislation law (which is what is at issue) to whether that law is just or constitutional or something (which is for the Supreme Court to decide, not the jury).
Go figure.
This definitely is not true -- I've moved libraries from the system dir to the app dir and run apps, when two apps dislike each other's version of a library.
Second, this linking (as, I suspect, most apps use, for convenience) is load-time, not run-time. Most people are not going to screw with LoadLibrary() when they can have the loader handle things for them perfectly well. There's no call an app can use to check the libraries, because by the time it's making calls, it's already linked.
And I was thinking more along the lines of more-traditional spyware than CD player stuff.
Sure, it's not so much this particular case or you, but the whole trend of treating people who have purchasing power specially came from somewhere -- it's because it's cheaper to bias the person with purchasing power to buy a product (we get to keep having the salmon lunches?) than to cut the prices on the products.
I mean, they do stuff like this for a reason -- it's profitable for them.
The worst cases of monentary allocation come in those few cases when a company can disalign an employee's interests from those strict interests of the company. One of these ways is by pampering the person making buying decisions.
Another way -- take the "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" line. (Obviously, this applies to lots more instances than MS, but this one hits close to home for me) If there's a cheaper, better alternative out there, it might be a good idea for the company to look into. It might be the best thing out there. But the manager's interests have become disaligned from those of the company, because he could potentially be on the chopping block if something goes wrong *and* he's doing something from the rest of the pack. If some crucial vendor two years later says "we don't support Mac OS" or Linux, or HPUX or whatever, he's going to be the scapegoat. OTOH, if he just does what everyone else is doing, regardless of whether it's what's best for his company, he's doing a much better job of maintaining his own job security.
I believe besides perks and job security issues are the biggest ways vendors can go after people with purchasing authority, but there are probably others.
Now, you may not have been influenced, but there are definitely people who *are* being influenced by this sort of thing. And that's what I hate. The whole concept of wining and dining a business partner is a small-scale form of this, but it's as accepted a form of bribery in business as "campaign contributions" are in politics.
Whenever people are making sub-optimal decisions locally on a massive scale, society as a whole suffers. I pay more for things.
When we are hired, "they" want us to believe that bonus is part of the compensation, which is why they don't give us a bigger salary.
Bush would also like you to believe that his energy initiatives are for the good of everyone. You aren't required to buy into anyone's stories. If someone tells you "you can get big bonuses", take that at face value -- you may well *not* get any bonus at all.
What exactly is a table for, if not page layout? As far as I can see, the only purpose of a table is to define the physical relationship of different pieces of content.
:-) But there really is nothing preventing web browser designers from allowing users to reorder columns from the specified order, as long as they don't have joined cells. This could be a useful feature if you only care about, say, three numbers (car price, name, and top speed), and want to move those columns in a big table to the far left of the table for easy comparison.
:-)
Tables do have that attribute, mostly because it's very difficult for a browser to do much else with them.
Tables are the proper way to present an "array" of information. The table paradigm *does* happen to let the designer specify the ordering of columns, for example. Some sacrifices have to be made to allow joined cells.
So in this case, I'm not defining physical relationship of different pieces of content -- tables were just a convenient way to embed that information and provide a "suggested" viewing order.
MSDN says that PATH is searched well after the others.
There is a quite possible exploit, though...we just need an unregistered library that's been dumped in the system or windows dir that a trusted app links against.
The linking search order for unregistered libraries is:
1) executable dir. This is safe -- we assume that the admin set up this system so that the user doesn't have write perms here.
2) The current directory -- that's going to tear things. All we have to do is leave a modified unregistered dll in the current dir, and execute a trusted app using its full path from there. *That* will link against the evil code and get full network access unless the ZA people are doing a lot more loader-level crap that I'd suspect they are.
3, 4, 5)...
Who at Microsoft came up with the idea of using the *current directory* before the system dir and windows dir, anyway? I can't think if any scenerio where that would be particularly justified...
Yes, but some ISPs have started bundling ZA.
To be fair, that probably means that most users are just going to click "OK" when they see a dialog, but arguing that ZA will be hampered by limited exposure isn't reasonable.
And given that spyware is seen as one of the few avenues of profit for some types of software...well, there's certainly the incentive.
Fair enough -- I haven't used ZA.
Try this, though.
Modify PATH to be prefixed with directory foo, owned by you. Drop that modified msvcrt.dll into said directory. Execute a trusted app, which uses the original binary. One way or another, it's going to be possible to force ZA to deal with libraries. This is actually easier than the first thing I suggested.
Here, the left wing can give the right a drubbing
/me grins. That isn't much of a justification. Tell me, how many people here feel that you're "paid enough" for your work? Or perhaps you feel that you're "overpaid" for your work? I think that few people would say this -- most people I've talked to feel that their talents are underappreciated. Yet, when the plumber comes to fix your flooding living room, don't you get a nagging feel that *he* is "overpaid"? Morality is a wonderfully distorted thing that you can use to support almost any argument. The Crusades were supported on moral grounds. Tell me, without using vague moral arguments, why it is reasonable, or a good idea, for this person to *expect* that bonus?
Ooogh. I always seem to dislike the ideals of both the left and right wings...unions and religious nuts. Ick.
The calculating view: Nothing your employer never gives you is a gift. It is compensation for services rendered or incentive cultivation of good will.
[shrug] Sure, and if you look at some of my other posts in this story (like the HR department being happy to drop you like a hot potato), you'll see that I agree. "Gift" works well for illustrating the degree of expectation that one should have for a bonus, though.
Either way, the employer deducts it and the employee is taxed on it, with certain minor exceptions for gifts worth less than $25 and the like.
This is criticism of some sort of business-centric government, I'm assuming, since you're taking the "left wing" approach? Nah. There's no conspiracy. If a bonus is beneficial to you, you can afford to make a larger, flashier bonus.
According to the IRS, employer-to-employee gifts simply don't happen, and I don't think we should be any less stoic.
As I said, I don't consider it truly a gift, but from the employee's point of view, that's the degree of reliability that should be assigned. And whatever the IRS wants to classify something as has little bearing on what it actually is -- there's too much money involved in bonuses for the IRS not to have fun regulating things.
As for bonuses being per se gratuitous, that's not so perhaps because the popular understanding of bonus bridges over into year-end compensation. An incentive bonus between employers and employees as an express or implied part of the work relationship can not be withheld on caprice -- it's merely delayed compensation. Entitlement to a future bonus may be valid even post-termination: employers sometimes illegally fire employees to avoid paying benefits.
Sure. And while I'm sure it's happened at some point, I've never heard of a Christmas bonus (particularly for any specific amount) being granted either expressly or implied.
In short, in some cases the expectation of bonus is morally justified
Come on, now. A *moral* justification? You're opening a can of worms -- are *your* morals the same as others?
in more severe cases it may be a legally actionable entitlement
You still need to provide your "express or implied part of the work relationship" element.
In rare cases the discriminatory or abritrary administration of a bonus system may also be illegal (racist, sexist, and so on).
True (though that complaint is ridiculously overused in the United States), but that doesn't really have bearing on what we're talking about here -- a doll instead of a fat cash bonus.
But I digress because of the compulsion to be thorough. My philosophical advice: Remember, it's not a gift, it's compensation.
It's an incentive, but not an agreed-upon form of compensation.
Your comment is a reflection of the unfortunate and legally inaccurate attitude that employers are doing you a favor by giving you a job, bonuses, and so on -- while also acting as though employment contracts were negotiated among equals. Which is it?
I do not agree. A favor of giving you a job? They're trying to maximize their own bottom line...and the same goes for bonuses. You can't reasonably have extrapolated to this degree simply from my use of the word "gift".
Sure, and you may also deserve that bonus coming.
Do you "deserve" it? I see the moral can o' worms coming again. "Deserving" something is a wonderful tool to use in an argument, because it's so fantastically ill-defined, and because people tend to have fairly self-centric views on what is "deserved". Wendy and Miki may both feel that they "deserve" the big, orange _____, and there is no resolution to the problem that doesn't leave one feeling that she's been stiffed.
What the writer apparently feels is a moral betrayal.
If it looks likely this crap will continue regardless of work performance, I'd recommend updating the resume.
Oh, criminy. You're willing to say this without knowing what his salary and benefits *already* are?