It is not a fact by any definition of the word "fact". It may be a popular opinion, but that is not a fact. Calling it a "fact" hurts your chance of having your opinion heard
There are people who think that the US Army is in Iraq because they make an easier target for terrorists than American citizens. That's tough on the army, but they're better equipped to deal with that than the average citizen.
The above opinion is not a fact either. It's just an opinion.
There are people of good conscience who think that the current course of events, though unhappy, is the best path. We are dealing with a world that contains complicated threats and situations. To think that there are black and white cans that you can put every event into is ridiculous. Consider the following statements:
I always vote [Democrat | Republican]
[Ted Kennedy | George Bush] is like Hitler
The U.S. Government has absolutely no right to [be in Iraq | legislate gun control]
I don't understand how anyone can be [liberal | conservative]
If you believe any one of those 8 statements, you're part of the extremist problem. There are MORE than 2 sides to every issue. People who want to limit your choices to either Bush is good or bad are simplifying things for their own manipulative purposes. It's not all black and white. Everyone's shit stinks. If support everything the Bush administration does, you're not paying attention. If you think the Bush administration has no rationalization for it's actions, again, you're not paying attention. To imply that Bush is actively working to ruin the country is as ridiculous as claiming that Bush is the messiah.
The facts are that there are people of good conscience on BOTH sides of the aisle. Both parties are working to prevent people of good conscience from coming together and working together, because they think compromise weakens the party.
I'd rather see the rhetoric turned down and the responsibility turned up.
The Cat v. Mouse battle is not a good analogy here -- a better one is the age old battle between armor and warhead. As soon as new armour comes out, a new weapon comes out. This will conclude in the same way the battle between sword and armor ended -- with the ultimate evolution in a killing blade and method of swordplay -- the rapier (and its derivatives, the sabre and smallsword), and fencing. The rapier (in the hands of an expert) was so fast and applied such pressure at the point that it could puncture any armor that had joints. It was so light that the unarmoured duelist could easily avoid the swings of a man in mail. The only armor that could stop the ultimate sword was too cumbersome to be of any use to the wearer, and a duelist wearing armour and wielding a heavier sword tired so quickly that an adroit fencer could win any contest of individuals.
DRM will meet the same fate. Better armor, then better weapons in a cycle till the ultimate blade comes to pass.
Win for apple, loss for the consumer. Once again I find me self being a mac lover who hates apple. *sigh* Jobs has done us no favors my conceding to a blatantly obvious patent. The one thing I hope that comes out of this is some other company decides to fight creatiev and wins, and then Apple will have paid that $$$ for nothing.
If I see a resume with a BS in CS, MS in CS and no Ph.D I'm going to ask about it -- and I'm already thinking "Either failed out of the Ph.D program, or couldn't hack it in the real world, so went back to school." Ask anyone who's been working in a job where they USE their CS degree, and ask which was more value in the real world -- 2 years of work, or 2 years of education pursuing a masters. As you learned in your first Data Structures and Algorithms class:
I leave the rest of the programing and variable assignments as an exercise for those with more education
The Value Of The Web Arguement
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I asked a Macromedia/Adobe Flash Evangelist recently why they have not yet implemented a toggle for flash like the Firefox Extension, so that users could chose to turn flash on for one page and off for another (or possibly even more granular if you wished). He told me flat out "because then our customers wouldn't like it because it would be too easy for you to avoid their ads. We want you to have a "one or the other" choice -- either all Flash or none. We think the quality of good/userful/entertaining flash out there is what makes Flash an attractive advertizing platform. If you could pick and choose what you saw, Flash would be just another rich media option on the web."
I found his honesty refreshing. And I see his point -- if you could easily pick and chose flash (as I do with the FF Flashblock extension) you'd probably never see a flash ad. I was surfing on a friends computer (on IE even) and his web experience SUCKS. Flash ads everywhere, they make noise without permission, they are...ummm...FLASHY. And irritating. I honestly don't know how people get around with flash enabled all the time. For me if the choice is as he put it -- either no flash, or flash with no control over it, I'll take no flash.
It's silly for us to get into the arguement over whether or not content on the web should be free or supported by advertisments, because neither of us will affect the other's opinion. I don't block every ad, but if one annoys me, I do block it. I think the ad companies have the right to try to show me ads, and I have the right to try to block the ones that annoy me. So for me, I'll never consider flash an option until users have the ability to selectively choose what pages are allowed to run flash, and which flash apps are allowed to run on a given page.
Also for everyone in my company, because I block.swf at the router
The report of my death was an exageration -- Mark Twain
I know that the the Ubuntu numbers that are usually reported are silly, because they are based on Distrowatch, which as 10 year Linux user, was a site I had never been to before questioning the Ubuntu installation numbers, and being refered there.
I also know that you have no interest in getting into a "measuring" contest -- because fedora is not about that. BUT if it were about that -- what do you think is a good way to measure "popularity" of a distro? Any numbers that say that DSL is more popular that Debian, automatically get's questioned in my book. Don't get me wrong, I love DSL, and Debian and even Distrowatch -- I'm just not ready to believe that what is being reported is an accurate representation of who's running what.
Ok, not forever. Just as long as people continue to blame all Jews for the actions of a few.
I think the continual hatred of Jews comes from the fact that Jews always resist tyranny, and every tyrant that rises up has come into conflict with Jewish people who refuse to cow tow. Jews dogmatically tolerate other religions, and expect others to be tolerant of theirs. Jews believe that all people are created equal, and feel that they are obligated to stand up human rights. Thus if you want to impose your beliefs on someone else, you're going to come into conflict with Jewish people. And those people in power can only perpetuate and enhance their power at the expense of others, they do what they can to eliminate opposition.
Yah. Perhaps the best solution is to discredit ALL religions. Seriously. Maybe sensible people need to start taking the fight to the intolerant, and opposing all religiions that preach intolerance. When I tell Christians that their religions specifically states that non-christians are condemned to hell, they don't believe me. When I show them John 3:18, they say "well that's not what I beleive." But when I tell them by saying they are Xtians, that they are supporting intolerance, they don't understand what I mean.
I can assure you that most people here don't know the difference between Jews and Israel
Wow. You're saying people who commit hate crimes are ignorant? SHUT UP!!!
I really think that the anti-semitist card has been used for far too long already. Hitler did a horrible crime against Jews but Israel shouldn't use that to gain political advantage any more
Israel is NOT using that for political advantage. They are merely acknowledging the reality that given the opportunity, someone will again try to exterminate Jews. You'll be hard pressed to find a century where that hasn't happened. Israel represents people saying "We will no longer leave our security in the hands of others, and we will hold people accountable for the actions of their neighbors." And given the fact that the Holocaust happened once, they are forever allowed to feel that way.
Instead of "desktop app wannabe, AJAX, JS UI pieces of crap" try substituting the phrase "thin client." For a LONG time people have been talking about thin clients as the future. With the extreme difficulty for the average user of keeping a machine virus/spyware free, there is an obvious huge benefit to moving most application remote. You may not like the methodology of Writely, but I truly believe thin is in.
We have a large computer lab at the university, and we used to keep windows on the machines, but the machines kept going to shit. Because I'm a dick, I recently removed the hard drives, put an ubuntu CD in every machine, and required all the students to have flash drives (we sell 128M drives for $5.00 in the lab too). Works great, and best of all, we encourage the students to take the PC's home, and they do! (though I wish that they would tell us first). The machines run flawlessly, the students have web access to their email, and firefox, open office and a few other things built in. We use Terminal Services to allow the students to access the PC only apps that a few of them need. As more and more IT departments waste more and more time dealing with dumb consumers, I can see dumb terminals becoming a standard.
I have found Venkman to be pretty useful for Javascript debugging, though it's certainly not as great as java/c/c++ debuggers. I have also found, that with a little bit of experience in using Venkman, it's easy to write code that Venkman will debug well. The problem most people have with javascript (imho) is that they are either cutting and pasting the code, or just plugging things in as an after thought. If people applied "best practices" when coding their javascript -- and assumed that it would have to be maintained by someone else -- javascript would be alot mroe readable and a lot more debugable and alot more popular. I must admit I've seen some horrendous javascript in our code reviews -- and I always send it back with the admonishment "comment more, enable more debuging messages and reformat the code to make it more human readable." It isn't that javascript debugging is useless, it's that 99% of the people writing javascript have never written code to any sort of standard. Javascript gets a bad rap because of all the bad js coders out there. Well formed javascript written by conscientious developers is not that hard to debug/maintain.
And, it IS design view. The browser as thin client is everything to us.
...Again, if FF can't beat IE6, how can they expect to beat IE7?...
That's like saying 199 Million years ago "If mammals have not become the dominant species on the planet in the 1 million years they've been around, they never will. The Dinosaur's have too much of an advantage"
Open protocols are good for open source. Gaim and Adium are my prefered clients on linux and mac respectively, but I use yahoo messenger on windows, and I like *some* of the bells and whistles. I certainly enjoy the integration with Yahoo music.
It would be nice to see there be some official standards of a chat protocol. The thing that is in the way of us achieving of truly open chat is the fact that the account providers think they "own" the users -- which is why they are possesive about them. Not sure how to get around that either.
That's not true any more -- OEM manufacturers can build firefox (or any other software they want) into their windows builds without fearing retribution from MSFT. That's what the anti-trust thing was all about.
And the last time I was at MicroCenter (a large computer chain) in Boston, a local entrepeneur (kid had to be 14) was distributing for free a CD with FireFox, Open Office, SpyBot, Gimp and Trillian (I told him Trillian wasn't open) on it -- as well as html document that had a link in it to his Amazon donation page, where he was asking for $2.50 which seemed pretty reasonable to me. I asked him about his traffic, and he said he passes out about 200 CD's a day on Saturday and Sunday. Obviously he must have access to a multiple image burner to crank out volume like that (or he was pulling my leg), but seems like a good way to make a bit of $$$ for a kid, and at the same time help spread the love
Safari pisses me off though because lack of design mode is a major flaw, but one that is obviously fixable. I'm an ardent mac supporter, but the long and slow response to this makes me feel like Apple is sticking it to us (the mac faithful) because they can -- they know they've got a captive audience.
I've taken the Writely path now -- we (my company) no longer support Safari on our web applications -- we just can't. And I don't see us ever going back to that when we can code to one standard -- Firefox -- and have it work everywhere.
So I agree with you -- thanks Mozilla, and thanks OSS for having projects in which the developers are responsive to the customers needs. If I need something I can sponser someone to make an extension or tweak. We've done that several times with Thunderbird, we have some custom work we paid for in a few other OSS projects that went back to the community.
So I'm in the weird position of being a mac lover and an apple hater. Which is weird, but I think some people will know what I'm saying. Apple has contributed back where they've been required, but with the promotion of DRMs, ITunes, etc, they're not really an ally of Open Source, except in that they see OSS as an ally of convenience against MSFT. If there were now Microsoft, Apple would be doing exactly the same things MSFT has done.
...Now, there's really no reason for anybody to use Open Office...
I couldn't decide if you were trolling or not, but I'll assume not in deference to your relatively low userid.
No reason? How about price? How about working on older platforms? How about wanting stuff in ODF now? I actually see it just the opposite. Now there's no reason to store a document in any format OTHER than ODF -- regardless of your editor. Which is awesome. You want to use MS Office? Party On Wayne! You want to use Open Office? Party On Garth! Either way, anyone will be able to read/open/work on your documents. Cool.
The problem is that although https can mask what you are retrieving, it does not mask where you are retrieving it from. Let's face it -- they really want to know who's downloading those illegal movie/music files.
I know that people can use proxy servers, but it's just one more layer of crap we have to go through. I almost hope that Net Neutrality threats DO force google et. al to create their own network of high powered open access wireless availability.
well, sending your RESUME in odf might also get you hired if you send it to the right place -- and at my VERY large company (60k+ employees) we only accept resumes in.txt or.rtf or.pdf format. Emails with a.doc attachments sent to jobs@ourdomain.com bounce back with that message. We also list that very clearly on the web page.
I'm not saying be a complete nazi about it, and I'm not advocating doing anything as stupid as sending your resume in a format someone might NOT be able to read (which includes Word IMHO). I'm saying that on occasion, you should consider if you can "help the cause" by sending out a document in odf.
The point is that once it has become an issue, it will always be considered as an alternative -- much like the spread of Firefox. Even if odf fails in Germany (which I'm not conceding yet btw), fails in Massachussetts, fails in Argentina, etc etc, one day it will succeed somewhere.
What's really needed here is more than just a top level city/state/country decision. How many people are using odf in their daily lives? What killed WordPerfect was that they could not open Word Documents. Try sending out a few odf's every now and then and do YOUR part to show that it is being used. When you get the email back saying that it could not be opened, you'll have your OpenOffice and Open Document speech all ready to go. "Open Office opens all MSFT documents PLUS odf and does x y and z!"
I work for another giant healthcare company, and I can tell you that where HIPPA is making a huge difference for us is in firings. We've let go MANY people that we'd wanted to fire for various reasons, but it's hard to fire people -- especially those who manage to be incompetent at everything except know how to fight to keep their job. Previously, even when we had a "zero tolerance for errors" (something you'd want at a hospital no?) we still could not fire people who made repeated mistakes without going through a HUGE long drawn out process.
Now, 2 HIPPA violations, and you can fire anyone.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to fire people, and I'm not looking for a reason. But it's nice now to have a tool that shears past union complaints etc. And in talking to colleagues, they have expressed to me that HIPPA has been a godsend for them too in trimming off legacy employees who were not able to function in a modern environment, but were too "senior" to release just for being technically incompetant.
In re-reading before posting, the above sounds cold. I suppose it is, but I'm just talking about the difference that HIPPA has made for us. And great employees don't get dismissed for HIPPA violations, but in a time and place when noone can be fired with out a preponderance of evidence of incompetance, this is a nice loophole.
Slashdot Mirror
There are people who think that the US Army is in Iraq because they make an easier target for terrorists than American citizens. That's tough on the army, but they're better equipped to deal with that than the average citizen.
The above opinion is not a fact either. It's just an opinion.
that's brilliantly put. I agree governmental reform is overdue. I just wish I thought it actually might. Maybe I'll see you in New Hampshire.
If you believe any one of those 8 statements, you're part of the extremist problem. There are MORE than 2 sides to every issue. People who want to limit your choices to either Bush is good or bad are simplifying things for their own manipulative purposes. It's not all black and white. Everyone's shit stinks. If support everything the Bush administration does, you're not paying attention. If you think the Bush administration has no rationalization for it's actions, again, you're not paying attention. To imply that Bush is actively working to ruin the country is as ridiculous as claiming that Bush is the messiah.
The facts are that there are people of good conscience on BOTH sides of the aisle. Both parties are working to prevent people of good conscience from coming together and working together, because they think compromise weakens the party.
I'd rather see the rhetoric turned down and the responsibility turned up.
The Cat v. Mouse battle is not a good analogy here -- a better one is the age old battle between armor and warhead. As soon as new armour comes out, a new weapon comes out. This will conclude in the same way the battle between sword and armor ended -- with the ultimate evolution in a killing blade and method of swordplay -- the rapier (and its derivatives, the sabre and smallsword), and fencing. The rapier (in the hands of an expert) was so fast and applied such pressure at the point that it could puncture any armor that had joints. It was so light that the unarmoured duelist could easily avoid the swings of a man in mail. The only armor that could stop the ultimate sword was too cumbersome to be of any use to the wearer, and a duelist wearing armour and wielding a heavier sword tired so quickly that an adroit fencer could win any contest of individuals.
DRM will meet the same fate. Better armor, then better weapons in a cycle till the ultimate blade comes to pass.
And then we'll move on to guns.Win for apple, loss for the consumer. Once again I find me self being a mac lover who hates apple. *sigh* Jobs has done us no favors my conceding to a blatantly obvious patent. The one thing I hope that comes out of this is some other company decides to fight creatiev and wins, and then Apple will have paid that $$$ for nothing.
I asked a Macromedia/Adobe Flash Evangelist recently why they have not yet implemented a toggle for flash like the Firefox Extension, so that users could chose to turn flash on for one page and off for another (or possibly even more granular if you wished). He told me flat out "because then our customers wouldn't like it because it would be too easy for you to avoid their ads. We want you to have a "one or the other" choice -- either all Flash or none. We think the quality of good/userful/entertaining flash out there is what makes Flash an attractive advertizing platform. If you could pick and choose what you saw, Flash would be just another rich media option on the web."
I found his honesty refreshing. And I see his point -- if you could easily pick and chose flash (as I do with the FF Flashblock extension) you'd probably never see a flash ad. I was surfing on a friends computer (on IE even) and his web experience SUCKS. Flash ads everywhere, they make noise without permission, they are ...ummm...FLASHY. And irritating. I honestly don't know how people get around with flash enabled all the time. For me if the choice is as he put it -- either no flash, or flash with no control over it, I'll take no flash.
It's silly for us to get into the arguement over whether or not content on the web should be free or supported by advertisments, because neither of us will affect the other's opinion. I don't block every ad, but if one annoys me, I do block it. I think the ad companies have the right to try to show me ads, and I have the right to try to block the ones that annoy me. So for me, I'll never consider flash an option until users have the ability to selectively choose what pages are allowed to run flash, and which flash apps are allowed to run on a given page.
Also for everyone in my company, because I block .swf at the router
HOLD Dammit! I bought at the IPO. If I'm suffering, everyone else should too.
I know that the the Ubuntu numbers that are usually reported are silly, because they are based on Distrowatch, which as 10 year Linux user, was a site I had never been to before questioning the Ubuntu installation numbers, and being refered there.
I also know that you have no interest in getting into a "measuring" contest -- because fedora is not about that. BUT if it were about that -- what do you think is a good way to measure "popularity" of a distro? Any numbers that say that DSL is more popular that Debian, automatically get's questioned in my book. Don't get me wrong, I love DSL, and Debian and even Distrowatch -- I'm just not ready to believe that what is being reported is an accurate representation of who's running what.
I think the continual hatred of Jews comes from the fact that Jews always resist tyranny, and every tyrant that rises up has come into conflict with Jewish people who refuse to cow tow. Jews dogmatically tolerate other religions, and expect others to be tolerant of theirs. Jews believe that all people are created equal, and feel that they are obligated to stand up human rights. Thus if you want to impose your beliefs on someone else, you're going to come into conflict with Jewish people. And those people in power can only perpetuate and enhance their power at the expense of others, they do what they can to eliminate opposition.
Yah. Perhaps the best solution is to discredit ALL religions. Seriously. Maybe sensible people need to start taking the fight to the intolerant, and opposing all religiions that preach intolerance. When I tell Christians that their religions specifically states that non-christians are condemned to hell, they don't believe me. When I show them John 3:18, they say "well that's not what I beleive." But when I tell them by saying they are Xtians, that they are supporting intolerance, they don't understand what I mean.
Wow. You're saying people who commit hate crimes are ignorant? SHUT UP!!!
I really think that the anti-semitist card has been used for far too long already. Hitler did a horrible crime against Jews but Israel shouldn't use that to gain political advantage any more
Israel is NOT using that for political advantage. They are merely acknowledging the reality that given the opportunity, someone will again try to exterminate Jews. You'll be hard pressed to find a century where that hasn't happened. Israel represents people saying "We will no longer leave our security in the hands of others, and we will hold people accountable for the actions of their neighbors." And given the fact that the Holocaust happened once, they are forever allowed to feel that way.
what you wrote is completely untrue. I have marked you as a fudder
We have a large computer lab at the university, and we used to keep windows on the machines, but the machines kept going to shit. Because I'm a dick, I recently removed the hard drives, put an ubuntu CD in every machine, and required all the students to have flash drives (we sell 128M drives for $5.00 in the lab too). Works great, and best of all, we encourage the students to take the PC's home, and they do! (though I wish that they would tell us first). The machines run flawlessly, the students have web access to their email, and firefox, open office and a few other things built in. We use Terminal Services to allow the students to access the PC only apps that a few of them need. As more and more IT departments waste more and more time dealing with dumb consumers, I can see dumb terminals becoming a standard.
I have found Venkman to be pretty useful for Javascript debugging, though it's certainly not as great as java/c/c++ debuggers. I have also found, that with a little bit of experience in using Venkman, it's easy to write code that Venkman will debug well. The problem most people have with javascript (imho) is that they are either cutting and pasting the code, or just plugging things in as an after thought. If people applied "best practices" when coding their javascript -- and assumed that it would have to be maintained by someone else -- javascript would be alot mroe readable and a lot more debugable and alot more popular. I must admit I've seen some horrendous javascript in our code reviews -- and I always send it back with the admonishment "comment more, enable more debuging messages and reformat the code to make it more human readable." It isn't that javascript debugging is useless, it's that 99% of the people writing javascript have never written code to any sort of standard. Javascript gets a bad rap because of all the bad js coders out there. Well formed javascript written by conscientious developers is not that hard to debug/maintain.
And, it IS design view. The browser as thin client is everything to us.
I'll test it out -- but it's probably 2 years too late for me. If safari "just works" I may remove it from our "not supported" list though.
That's like saying 199 Million years ago "If mammals have not become the dominant species on the planet in the 1 million years they've been around, they never will. The Dinosaur's have too much of an advantage"
Open protocols are good for open source. Gaim and Adium are my prefered clients on linux and mac respectively, but I use yahoo messenger on windows, and I like *some* of the bells and whistles. I certainly enjoy the integration with Yahoo music.
It would be nice to see there be some official standards of a chat protocol. The thing that is in the way of us achieving of truly open chat is the fact that the account providers think they "own" the users -- which is why they are possesive about them. Not sure how to get around that either.
That's not true any more -- OEM manufacturers can build firefox (or any other software they want) into their windows builds without fearing retribution from MSFT. That's what the anti-trust thing was all about.
And the last time I was at MicroCenter (a large computer chain) in Boston, a local entrepeneur (kid had to be 14) was distributing for free a CD with FireFox, Open Office, SpyBot, Gimp and Trillian (I told him Trillian wasn't open) on it -- as well as html document that had a link in it to his Amazon donation page, where he was asking for $2.50 which seemed pretty reasonable to me. I asked him about his traffic, and he said he passes out about 200 CD's a day on Saturday and Sunday. Obviously he must have access to a multiple image burner to crank out volume like that (or he was pulling my leg), but seems like a good way to make a bit of $$$ for a kid, and at the same time help spread the love
Safari pisses me off though because lack of design mode is a major flaw, but one that is obviously fixable. I'm an ardent mac supporter, but the long and slow response to this makes me feel like Apple is sticking it to us (the mac faithful) because they can -- they know they've got a captive audience.
I've taken the Writely path now -- we (my company) no longer support Safari on our web applications -- we just can't. And I don't see us ever going back to that when we can code to one standard -- Firefox -- and have it work everywhere.
So I agree with you -- thanks Mozilla, and thanks OSS for having projects in which the developers are responsive to the customers needs. If I need something I can sponser someone to make an extension or tweak. We've done that several times with Thunderbird, we have some custom work we paid for in a few other OSS projects that went back to the community.
So I'm in the weird position of being a mac lover and an apple hater. Which is weird, but I think some people will know what I'm saying. Apple has contributed back where they've been required, but with the promotion of DRMs, ITunes, etc, they're not really an ally of Open Source, except in that they see OSS as an ally of convenience against MSFT. If there were now Microsoft, Apple would be doing exactly the same things MSFT has done.I couldn't decide if you were trolling or not, but I'll assume not in deference to your relatively low userid.
No reason? How about price? How about working on older platforms? How about wanting stuff in ODF now? I actually see it just the opposite. Now there's no reason to store a document in any format OTHER than ODF -- regardless of your editor. Which is awesome. You want to use MS Office? Party On Wayne! You want to use Open Office? Party On Garth! Either way, anyone will be able to read/open/work on your documents. Cool.
how is THIS not well known? MSFT blows. Thanks for the great tip
The problem is that although https can mask what you are retrieving, it does not mask where you are retrieving it from. Let's face it -- they really want to know who's downloading those illegal movie/music files. I know that people can use proxy servers, but it's just one more layer of crap we have to go through. I almost hope that Net Neutrality threats DO force google et. al to create their own network of high powered open access wireless availability.
I'm not saying be a complete nazi about it, and I'm not advocating doing anything as stupid as sending your resume in a format someone might NOT be able to read (which includes Word IMHO). I'm saying that on occasion, you should consider if you can "help the cause" by sending out a document in odf.
What's really needed here is more than just a top level city/state/country decision. How many people are using odf in their daily lives? What killed WordPerfect was that they could not open Word Documents. Try sending out a few odf's every now and then and do YOUR part to show that it is being used. When you get the email back saying that it could not be opened, you'll have your OpenOffice and Open Document speech all ready to go. "Open Office opens all MSFT documents PLUS odf and does x y and z!"
I work for another giant healthcare company, and I can tell you that where HIPPA is making a huge difference for us is in firings. We've let go MANY people that we'd wanted to fire for various reasons, but it's hard to fire people -- especially those who manage to be incompetent at everything except know how to fight to keep their job. Previously, even when we had a "zero tolerance for errors" (something you'd want at a hospital no?) we still could not fire people who made repeated mistakes without going through a HUGE long drawn out process.
Now, 2 HIPPA violations, and you can fire anyone.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to fire people, and I'm not looking for a reason. But it's nice now to have a tool that shears past union complaints etc. And in talking to colleagues, they have expressed to me that HIPPA has been a godsend for them too in trimming off legacy employees who were not able to function in a modern environment, but were too "senior" to release just for being technically incompetant.
In re-reading before posting, the above sounds cold. I suppose it is, but I'm just talking about the difference that HIPPA has made for us. And great employees don't get dismissed for HIPPA violations, but in a time and place when noone can be fired with out a preponderance of evidence of incompetance, this is a nice loophole.