Or you work as a gov't contractor and NEVER get laid off to foriegn outsourcing. My job's secure until I decide to leave. You either change to meet today's business, or you get left behind.
Yeah, right. Unless the administration cuts the budget for the department you're contracted to, or the contract gets awarded to another company on the recompete. I've seen it happen. You'll have to be a government employee before your job is safe.
Excellent points. To which I would like to add a thought originally put forth by Byron Cosby in a letter to Computerworld concerning Alexander Hamilton's Report on the Subject of Manufactures.
To paraphrase Hamilton, it is necessary for a nation to keep all industries which are essential for security, independence, or the general well being within the national borders.
He goes further about having varied industry so that each may able to find his place, but it's a long read. Excerpts
1. One does not need to go to an expensive college or a college at all to learn IT skills.
One does not need to go to college to become educated in any field. However, most employers want to see that degree before they will hire you in any given field.
3. There IS a shortage of GOOD IT workers. GOOD ones. Not ones who have never really used a computer before in their life yet just last week got their MCSE certification.
Its not an economic fantasy, but reality. A reality you MUST accept or be left behind.
There is no shortage. The unemployment rate for engineers is over 8%. I recently saw several "GOOD", experienced, well-educated software engineers laid off. Even the ITAA, the industry's mouthpiece, has stopped spouting their bogus claims of a labor shortage. You are the one with a fantasy. The only people still claiming a shortage are trying to justify their unwarranted positions.
We can bitch louder than they can. IT people need to realize they've been overpaid for some time due to worker shortage, and India/China have taken care of that. If IT workers expected the same pay as other people with similar education, there wouldn't be as much as an incentive to offshore.
Fine. You seem just the person to answer a question I've had for some time. Why don't companies simply refuse to pay any more than a certain amount for IT work? There are no IT labor unions to go on strike. There are plenty of out-of-work people who would jump at most any job offer. Perhaps it is because offshoring is more of a PR thing than a real benefit to the company?
Now, there may be a chicken and egg problem here as prices halving may mean revenue for workers halves so they don't get the opportunity to buy twice as much, but as long as there is lag (caused by savings substituting income in the short-term or severance pay) in the equation lower prices mean demand for more products, more employment, more production, more consumption.
Where is the logic in that? First, marginal reductions in costs by offshoring don't result in lower prices - they result in bigger bonuses for company executives. Bank of America (that's a joke), GE, IBM, and Microsoft have not reduced prices. Second, when people lose their jobs to offshoring, the don't go on consumption binges; they do their best to stop spending.
I don't know how many times I've said this, but I served eight years in Federal prison and the incidence of rape is much lower than the news media (including/.) would have you believe (at least if you're over forty and not terribly attractive...heh, heh).
Well, thanks for dashing our hopes about the future of the SCO executives.
The COO (boss's boss's boss) came to the organization late in the game, and changed the rules. (from in-house to outsourced)
First, you need to realize it has little to do with you personally. The CxO has to justify his stock options and bonuses by "outsourcing" some work because that is what the financial press it praising. Since the IT portion is what he understands the least and is reported most in the press, it is what he will outsource first. He has no clue, he's just doing what MBAs do to get ahead by following the trend of other clueless CxOs. Don't take it personally, just slap the SOB with a baseball bat on your way out. (Just kidding about the bat, use a clue bat instead.)
If MS ever kills the firewall market it is likely to sound like Tinkerbell and fairydust (or some other unbelievable phenomenon.
I dunno. Doesn't anyone else find it weird that Microsoft is starting to imitate third-party firewall and anti-virus software functions that protect Microsoft product users from the results of using Microsoft products? When MS puts the others out of business, then MS will have a true protection racket. Who would know more about protecting against possible exploits than the company that produces them? Get XP-Secure for only $400 more!
most people probably feel they really should "use em or lose em" with the mod points and worry more about using them then modding where needed. . . i have a feeling they add to the top posts already modded up.
That's obvious. Look at all the early posts that are modded +5. That being said, it only applies to some moderators. I often have one or two mod points that expire because I didn't find something worth modding up - I rarely mod down. Apparently it's a problem with a lot of moderators who really should select that *unwilling to moderate* box.
I think up-modding and down-modding should be based on powers of two. One positive vote increases the base score by one point, it takes two more votes to increase the score again, four to increase the score yet again, and so on. The same could hold true for down-modding. It would be just as easy to sort by score and give a boost to the best comments, but it would also put slow down the effect of rushing to say something funny first.
So would your system exempt +Funny comments from having karma reduced when down-modded, since +Funny mods no longer add karma? Personally, I enjoy the jokes, puns, and satire on Slashdot, and I think it will be a far duller place when the jokers are silenced. Perhaps the +Funny mod should just be changed to -Funny and achieve the desired effect immediately? Then we can all have a focused, somber discussion while wearing our hair shirts and chanting (approved chants only, please).
So, if there were no Mandrake it would be neccessary to create one!
Or if it went under, we'd just need to find someone else to pick it up and maintain it? After all, their Linux business has always been solid. They are still paying for the crack-induced visions of a previous (and short-lived) *world-class* management (corporate raiders).
The only "major" difference I noted between RH and Mandrake is that my scrolling mouse does not work in Mandrake, but does work on RedHat.
During the installation, if you select a scrolling mouse, there is an instruction to use the scroll wheel (the message should probably be much larger than it is). If you don't use the wheel at that point, the mouse won't work correctly. I've used three different scrolling meese (IBM, Logitech, and Compaq) on two very different machines using the last two versions of Mandrake with no problem.
If they were to show a trade secret, then it wouldn't be protected any more.
How can you have a "secret" that has been shown to the entire world? Everyone who has a copy of the 2.4 kernel source can see these so-called secrets. The formula for Coke is a trade-secret. If anyone ever publishes it, it will no longer be a secret - trade or otherwise. This idea that SCO can keep publicly available code a trade secret by not telling anyone which part is the secret makes no sense at all. They can try to sue IBM for an alleged contract violation, but they can't make every Linux user have a sudden memory loss.
I haven't heard of anything that ISS can do that can't be done in the shuttle. It's a foothold in space but what good is it?
Are you seriously suggesting doing a Mars mission via Earth launch? Complete with return reentry vehicles and all? That is so Apollo. Get a grip on the big picture. It's the foothold that is important. It's what we have been hoping for. Duh.
What has the shuttle program gotten us but dead astronauts, a few satilites and vital data on ants sorting tiny scrwes in space?
That might have been interesting if you had compared the number of dead test pilots to dead astronauts, but I doubt the numbers would support your point. What the shuttle got us was the ISS. Whether it was more political than physical is another debate. We have to learn to walk before we can run. You sound like the guy who wants to build a top-fuel go-kart.
It's certainly possible, and NASA may even be thinking about it. But every EVA raises the overall risk and cost of the mission. Even if it's something NASA eventually goes with, it's not as simple and straightforward a solution as the OP implied. And repairs in space are tricky, to say the least. If a spacewalk did find damage, there's a good chance that there would be nothing the astronauts could do about it.
Yes, I see your point, but one of the recent things released from NASA was an idea for a repair kit. Another point was that if the crew knew damage had occurred, they could change the reentry maneuver to lower the heat or redirect it to another side of the craft. The shuttle had already descended to a point nearing California (almost home) before it broke up. I have no idea how realistic the ideas are, but if I were up there (and I really would like to be), I would like to have the choice to do something, no matter how low-chance, about my impending fate. It's better to have too much information than not enough.
Also, astronauts train for EVA's by repetition. They practice the same procedure, whether it's screwing in a single bolt on a malfunctioning satellite or replacing the Hubble's lenses, hundreds of times. Everything is choreographed to leave as little room for screwups as possible.
Then perhaps the training needs to be changed to include visual inspections. Looking over a wing should be far easier than repairing a satellite. An exterior examination during every mission does not seem unreasonable for our highly trained space travelers. If a tethered astronaut makes a navigation mistake, what's the problem?
Actually, this week the Supreme Court basically said that the 1st amendment could be thrown out the Window. The new campaign finance reform law (i.e. - the incumbent protection act) was upheld.
I admit to having mixed feelings about the ruling, but commercial speech is not the same as free speech. The ruling does not stop the soft-money folks from taking their soapbox to a park and promoting their candidate as loudly as they can. Our real problem is that we have the best government that money can buy.
I thought that interstate commerce could not be interfered with by states...that only the Feds could do this.
So you've never seen a state trooper lightening the wallet of an interstate trucker? Or a state charging "use tax" on something purchased out of state? Interstate commerce laws don't give you the right to violate state laws. I'm sure someone will point out an instance where I'm wrong - go for it.:)
The grandparent was trying to point out that Microsoft is not the only group that does things monolithically -- KDE and Gnome are monolithic also. It had nothing to do with technical literacy or available power.
The OP clearly stated that the UNIX "many small tools" argument didn't apply to people using a graphical desktop like KDE. I use KDE, and the tools are readily available, completely effective, and I use them all the time from a console window (which works just fine, unlike the crippled *DOS prompt*). IM6100's remark about being monolythic [sic] was an afterthought - I suggest you go back and read the comment again.
. . . but I can see how somebody using precident to create a new law would be a problem.
No, it's not about using precedent, judicial activism is about creating new law by REINTERPRETING existing laws based on the judge's opinion of what the lawmakers intended.
I think there is a thin line to be walked when balancing the original intent of, say, the founding fathers, and the needs of the present society, particularly when there's a good two centuries between them.
I have to disagree. The line is not thin at all. The founders provided the best framework for a government that I've seen (admittedly, politics for me is an interest, not a study). They explicitly denied certain powers to the central government with good reason. The intervening centuries have not changed those reasons.
In the here and now, though, society is different enough that people like Benjamin Franklin wouldn't even recognize the society they had built. . . So, the original execution of the copyright legislation simply does not serve its purpose in the early 21st century.
Franklin was a printer who published many things without permission. I think the founders understood copyright well and understood that it should be very limited, as it was before recent legislation.
The intent of encouraging intellectual growth remains intact, but the change in society requires a change in legislation to ensure that the original intention is met.
I don't think it does. The original intent was *limited* protection, not *eternal* protection. Again, the original intent has been subverted.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you work as a gov't contractor and NEVER get laid off to foriegn outsourcing. My job's secure until I decide to leave. You either change to meet today's business, or you get left behind.
Yeah, right. Unless the administration cuts the budget for the department you're contracted to, or the contract gets awarded to another company on the recompete. I've seen it happen. You'll have to be a government employee before your job is safe.
Excellent points. To which I would like to add a thought originally put forth by Byron Cosby in a letter to Computerworld concerning Alexander Hamilton's Report on the Subject of Manufactures.
To paraphrase Hamilton, it is necessary for a nation to keep all industries which are essential for security, independence, or the general well being within the national borders.
He goes further about having varied industry so that each may able to find his place, but it's a long read. Excerpts
1. One does not need to go to an expensive college or a college at all to learn IT skills.
One does not need to go to college to become educated in any field. However, most employers want to see that degree before they will hire you in any given field.
3. There IS a shortage of GOOD IT workers. GOOD ones. Not ones who have never really used a computer before in their life yet just last week got their MCSE certification.
Its not an economic fantasy, but reality. A reality you MUST accept or be left behind.
There is no shortage. The unemployment rate for engineers is over 8%. I recently saw several "GOOD", experienced, well-educated software engineers laid off. Even the ITAA, the industry's mouthpiece, has stopped spouting their bogus claims of a labor shortage. You are the one with a fantasy. The only people still claiming a shortage are trying to justify their unwarranted positions.
We can bitch louder than they can. IT people need to realize they've been overpaid for some time due to worker shortage, and India/China have taken care of that. If IT workers expected the same pay as other people with similar education, there wouldn't be as much as an incentive to offshore.
Fine. You seem just the person to answer a question I've had for some time. Why don't companies simply refuse to pay any more than a certain amount for IT work? There are no IT labor unions to go on strike. There are plenty of out-of-work people who would jump at most any job offer. Perhaps it is because offshoring is more of a PR thing than a real benefit to the company?
Now, there may be a chicken and egg problem here as prices halving may mean revenue for workers halves so they don't get the opportunity to buy twice as much, but as long as there is lag (caused by savings substituting income in the short-term or severance pay) in the equation lower prices mean demand for more products, more employment, more production, more consumption.
Where is the logic in that? First, marginal reductions in costs by offshoring don't result in lower prices - they result in bigger bonuses for company executives. Bank of America (that's a joke), GE, IBM, and Microsoft have not reduced prices. Second, when people lose their jobs to offshoring, the don't go on consumption binges; they do their best to stop spending.
I don't know how many times I've said this, but I served eight years in Federal prison and the incidence of rape is much lower than the news media (including /.) would have you believe (at least if you're over forty and not terribly attractive...heh, heh).
Well, thanks for dashing our hopes about the future of the SCO executives.
The COO (boss's boss's boss) came to the organization late in the game, and changed the rules. (from in-house to outsourced)
First, you need to realize it has little to do with you personally. The CxO has to justify his stock options and bonuses by "outsourcing" some work because that is what the financial press it praising. Since the IT portion is what he understands the least and is reported most in the press, it is what he will outsource first. He has no clue, he's just doing what MBAs do to get ahead by following the trend of other clueless CxOs. Don't take it personally, just slap the SOB with a baseball bat on your way out. (Just kidding about the bat, use a clue bat instead.)
If MS ever kills the firewall market it is likely to sound like Tinkerbell and fairydust (or some other unbelievable phenomenon.
I dunno. Doesn't anyone else find it weird that Microsoft is starting to imitate third-party firewall and anti-virus software functions that protect Microsoft product users from the results of using Microsoft products? When MS puts the others out of business, then MS will have a true protection racket. Who would know more about protecting against possible exploits than the company that produces them? Get XP-Secure for only $400 more!
Never buy another Microsoft OS.
It has served me well since Windows 95.
most people probably feel they really should "use em or lose em" with the mod points and worry more about using them then modding where needed. . . i have a feeling they add to the top posts already modded up.
That's obvious. Look at all the early posts that are modded +5. That being said, it only applies to some moderators. I often have one or two mod points that expire because I didn't find something worth modding up - I rarely mod down. Apparently it's a problem with a lot of moderators who really should select that *unwilling to moderate* box.
I think up-modding and down-modding should be based on powers of two. One positive vote increases the base score by one point, it takes two more votes to increase the score again, four to increase the score yet again, and so on. The same could hold true for down-modding. It would be just as easy to sort by score and give a boost to the best comments, but it would also put slow down the effect of rushing to say something funny first.
So would your system exempt +Funny comments from having karma reduced when down-modded, since +Funny mods no longer add karma? Personally, I enjoy the jokes, puns, and satire on Slashdot, and I think it will be a far duller place when the jokers are silenced. Perhaps the +Funny mod should just be changed to -Funny and achieve the desired effect immediately? Then we can all have a focused, somber discussion while wearing our hair shirts and chanting (approved chants only, please).
So, if there were no Mandrake it would be neccessary to create one!
Or if it went under, we'd just need to find someone else to pick it up and maintain it? After all, their Linux business has always been solid. They are still paying for the crack-induced visions of a previous (and short-lived) *world-class* management (corporate raiders).
The only "major" difference I noted between RH and Mandrake is that my scrolling mouse does not work in Mandrake, but does work on RedHat.
During the installation, if you select a scrolling mouse, there is an instruction to use the scroll wheel (the message should probably be much larger than it is). If you don't use the wheel at that point, the mouse won't work correctly. I've used three different scrolling meese (IBM, Logitech, and Compaq) on two very different machines using the last two versions of Mandrake with no problem.
If they were to show a trade secret, then it wouldn't be protected any more.
How can you have a "secret" that has been shown to the entire world? Everyone who has a copy of the 2.4 kernel source can see these so-called secrets. The formula for Coke is a trade-secret. If anyone ever publishes it, it will no longer be a secret - trade or otherwise. This idea that SCO can keep publicly available code a trade secret by not telling anyone which part is the secret makes no sense at all. They can try to sue IBM for an alleged contract violation, but they can't make every Linux user have a sudden memory loss.
Great idea! We'll send a bunch of cats to Iraq!
Where do I donate? That useless animal knocked over the Christmas tree again.
I haven't heard of anything that ISS can do that can't be done in the shuttle. It's a foothold in space but what good is it?
Are you seriously suggesting doing a Mars mission via Earth launch? Complete with return reentry vehicles and all? That is so Apollo. Get a grip on the big picture. It's the foothold that is important. It's what we have been hoping for. Duh.
And you would replace the installation and construction platform (the shuttle) for the ISS with . . . ?
What has the shuttle program gotten us but dead astronauts, a few satilites and vital data on ants sorting tiny scrwes in space?
That might have been interesting if you had compared the number of dead test pilots to dead astronauts, but I doubt the numbers would support your point. What the shuttle got us was the ISS. Whether it was more political than physical is another debate. We have to learn to walk before we can run. You sound like the guy who wants to build a top-fuel go-kart.
It's certainly possible, and NASA may even be thinking about it. But every EVA raises the overall risk and cost of the mission. Even if it's something NASA eventually goes with, it's not as simple and straightforward a solution as the OP implied. And repairs in space are tricky, to say the least. If a spacewalk did find damage, there's a good chance that there would be nothing the astronauts could do about it.
Yes, I see your point, but one of the recent things released from NASA was an idea for a repair kit. Another point was that if the crew knew damage had occurred, they could change the reentry maneuver to lower the heat or redirect it to another side of the craft. The shuttle had already descended to a point nearing California (almost home) before it broke up. I have no idea how realistic the ideas are, but if I were up there (and I really would like to be), I would like to have the choice to do something, no matter how low-chance, about my impending fate. It's better to have too much information than not enough.
Also, astronauts train for EVA's by repetition. They practice the same procedure, whether it's screwing in a single bolt on a malfunctioning satellite or replacing the Hubble's lenses, hundreds of times. Everything is choreographed to leave as little room for screwups as possible.
Then perhaps the training needs to be changed to include visual inspections. Looking over a wing should be far easier than repairing a satellite. An exterior examination during every mission does not seem unreasonable for our highly trained space travelers. If a tethered astronaut makes a navigation mistake, what's the problem?
Actually, this week the Supreme Court basically said that the 1st amendment could be thrown out the Window. The new campaign finance reform law (i.e. - the incumbent protection act) was upheld.
I admit to having mixed feelings about the ruling, but commercial speech is not the same as free speech. The ruling does not stop the soft-money folks from taking their soapbox to a park and promoting their candidate as loudly as they can. Our real problem is that we have the best government that money can buy.
Kilgore was later heard to say, "I love the smell of spam in the morning!".
Mmm, me too. Cubed and fried with scrambled eggs. That's probably more than you wanted to know - sorry.
I thought that interstate commerce could not be interfered with by states...that only the Feds could do this.
So you've never seen a state trooper lightening the wallet of an interstate trucker? Or a state charging "use tax" on something purchased out of state? Interstate commerce laws don't give you the right to violate state laws. I'm sure someone will point out an instance where I'm wrong - go for it. :)
The grandparent was trying to point out that Microsoft is not the only group that does things monolithically -- KDE and Gnome are monolithic also. It had nothing to do with technical literacy or available power.
The OP clearly stated that the UNIX "many small tools" argument didn't apply to people using a graphical desktop like KDE. I use KDE, and the tools are readily available, completely effective, and I use them all the time from a console window (which works just fine, unlike the crippled *DOS prompt*). IM6100's remark about being monolythic [sic] was an afterthought - I suggest you go back and read the comment again.
. . . but I can see how somebody using precident to create a new law would be a problem.
No, it's not about using precedent, judicial activism is about creating new law by REINTERPRETING existing laws based on the judge's opinion of what the lawmakers intended.
I think there is a thin line to be walked when balancing the original intent of, say, the founding fathers, and the needs of the present society, particularly when there's a good two centuries between them.
I have to disagree. The line is not thin at all. The founders provided the best framework for a government that I've seen (admittedly, politics for me is an interest, not a study). They explicitly denied certain powers to the central government with good reason. The intervening centuries have not changed those reasons.
In the here and now, though, society is different enough that people like Benjamin Franklin wouldn't even recognize the society they had built. . . So, the original execution of the copyright legislation simply does not serve its purpose in the early 21st century.
Franklin was a printer who published many things without permission. I think the founders understood copyright well and understood that it should be very limited, as it was before recent legislation.
The intent of encouraging intellectual growth remains intact, but the change in society requires a change in legislation to ensure that the original intention is met.
I don't think it does. The original intent was *limited* protection, not *eternal* protection. Again, the original intent has been subverted.