Yes, fine... there are some people working in every company that probably shouldn't be there. That still doesn't change the fact that loyalty does NOT exist in American business (or business in most other countries). It is a business relationship, pure and simple. I show up for work and do my job. I recieve compensation from my employer for doing said job. End of story.
The fact of the matter is, there are exceptions to the rule... but you cannot, should not, under any circumstances assume that they will apply to you. If your boss, or his/her boss, or anyone else up the chain will gain something by canning you (bonus, keep their job, raise, etc) they will do it. Yes, they may feel bad about it. So what, you are still out of work and trying to pay your rent.
Wake up, smell the hot beverage of your choice, and get deprogrammed from all the BS that you were taught in school. This is the real world ace and you had better figure out how it works. Cause right now... you are in serious denial.
Let's switch anologies here for a second. This might make it all a lot simpler...
Different chip architectures carry out a different number of instructions per clock cycle. And, different chip architectures require different numbers of operations to be performed to complete an instruction execution. In the case of the G4 VS PIII, this mean that a G4 at a given clock speed is comparable in performance with to a PIII running at about 1.8 times the Mhz.
But that sort of thing doesn't work well in commercials. So Intel's marketing department hit on a wonderful notion... since they are the processor that most people use, forget all the details and just tell people about clock speed. After all, when you are talking about chips w/ the same or similar architechture, it is a viable quick and dirty way to compare performance.
So, going back to the car analogy... Yes, I understand that your engine revs to 9000RPM, but I still think you'll find mine to be more powerful. Your 1.8 Liter 4 revs to 9000RPM, and my 8 Liter V10 only revs to 7000, but c'mon;-)
Of course, in addition to the excellent points made by Zogger, I'd like to point out how useless this law is as it relates to the real issue
For every company falling under this law's jurisdiction that is large enough to have an IT staff and its own servers, there are probably 100 that buy shared hosting and shopping cart services from 3rd party vendors. So, in those much more prevalent situations, who is responsible for notifying the end customer? Is it the server farm owner, the server farm customer, or even better yet, the data center professional services organization that maintains the server farm for the server farm company? In other words, if the highly paid leeches (read - legislators) actually meant to provide some sort of protection. They have failed miserably. If they meant to make a few points w/ constituents w/o actually doing anything productive, they hit the nail on the head.
So in short, the law is so vague, that it will surly be "modded out of existence" by the courts the first time there is a challenge. And the whole exercise will have only cost CA taxpayers a few million dollars by the time it is all over. What a deal!
You make some excellent points. I think one of the most salient is your comment about the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I agree with you 100% regarding fact that nobody is guaranteed a right to home ownership as part of the constitution;-) And you got me on this one. it was an over-simplification
However, it was my intention to illustrate that we as individuals sometimes find ourselves in untenable financial situations. And because of the hiring practices of many companies in our industry we are left between the proverbial "rock and a hard place". Granted, this is sometimes due to our own financial incompetence, but often it is due to circumstances outside of our control. And while you are correct that unionization may not be the answer to the problems introduced by these employment practices, it might be.
If we as sys admins, coders, and network engineers can help each other by bargaining collectively, why not? And I'm serious here. I would like to know what folks on Slashdot feel is the down side on this one? I know there are many potential pitfalls, but do we really think that there is no possible way to perform collective bargaining and have a positive outcome for those of us "in the trenches"?
Ok, I'll take you up on your suggestion - "Always consider the source!"
Your arguments are entirely specious, and you are doing exactly what you are accusing the article of doing. You infer that the factual information put forth in the article about "this poor guy's plight" and the "evil feudalistic business practices" are incorrect, but you don't provide any proof to back it up. So, at this point, I think many of us will choose to believe the article's statements of fact until they are proved to be inaccurate. Personally, I've witnessed this type of thing numerous times over the 15 years I've worked in the tech industry in Silicon Valley, so I'm taking it at face value.
You also point out that we live in a FREE country. The idea that I don't HAVE to sign a contract if I don't want too doesn't logically follow. If the only employment offer I have requires me to sign a contract that I don't agree with, and my only other choice is losing my home to foreclosure, I would call that being forced to sign under duress. And it happens all the time. Does that mean we don't live in a free country? No, it doesn't. Does that mean we are sometimes forced to due something we don't want to do? Yes, it does. But living in a free country also means that we have the rare opportunity to change our plight by righting injustices.
Why would participating in collective bargaining to level the playing field against large companies necessarily be a bad thing? The American Medical Association does it. Various bar associations do it. I'm just asking;-)
You have a point about not accepting the terms of employment if you don't like them... right up to the point where you have to choose between paying your rent or living in a cardboard box in the alley behind the bar.
It has been discussed before on Slashdot, but I feel the need to bring it up again. This is a perfect example of why there should be a union for tech workers. The fact that employers continue to treat tech workers in this manner, even though these are the highly skilled people who create and maintain the products they sell, is ample proof that the balance of power is distinctly "off kilter".
Folks, this is the grownup example of the school bully forcing a geek to do his homework. This is all about power, and who has it. Since the tech industry managment has proven that they can't be trusted not to abuse it, maybe its time to take some of it away from them.
You've hit the nail on the head. As the story points out, many people find a job with a company directly, and then are pointed to the contract agency by the companies HR department. Not to be too cynical here, but MANY of these agencies exist simply to handle the paperwork and make it 'nice and legal' for companies to avoid paying benefits and dealing with the other headaches of having full-time employees in their production hierarchy.
Thank you for your kind offer, but it has been long enough now without any other problems that I don't feel I need to pursue the issue.
BTW - I was serious that I didn't mean to offend. I was trying to point out that even though your company sounds like they are very careful about how they control information, that seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Cheers
Re:I work for a "Risk Management" company..
on
Databases and Privacy
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Not to offend, but... GIVE ME A FSCKING BREAK
Now, lets talk about how it works in the real world. I wanted a copy of my credit report, so I tried using www.freecreditreport.com (it's not really free, but hey, good marketing). When I submitted my request and tried to set up my account, I was given an error that my password was incorrect. Now, never having set up an account, I thought "hey, this is odd". So I called their 800 number and promptly found out that I did indeed have an account. After about 5 minutes of social engineering, I had the e-mail address that was associated with "my" account. Low and behold, it belonged to a guy that had received a copy of my rental application (yes it is legal for him to get a credit report, but not by impersonating me).
So, I said to the helpful young man on the phone "you've given my information to someone impersonating me". His response, and that of his supervisor was to tell me I should go file a police report. When I asked if they would take any action, the answer was a very resounding "NO".
So, I called back a few minutes later, with my new-found e-mail address and talked to another helpful gentleman whom I convinced to change the password and e-mail address on the account so that the previous dirt-bag would be locked out.
That is how things work in the real world. The companies who compile/manage/sell this information do not give a flying-frig about access control as long as money changes hands along with the data. If someone wants your info, and they have your name and a few other facts... they can get all the juicy stuff w/in about half an hour. Your only protection is the sheer volume of bio-mass that makes up the target group.
As you have already figured out, you are absolutely right about the ability to mount user home directories on the network using AFP or NFS. And I agree with you, it works great. But...
The big difference between this and MS Roaming Profiles is that in the MS solution, a user can log into their system when it is not network attached and still have their home directory, settings and cache files available. This appears to be what Apple may offer in Panther. If this is the case, then this functionality becomes usable for portable systems.
Let's deal with "roaming home directories" for a moment. As another reader pointed out, this feature has been around since NT4 (maybe even sooner). But you left out a few of the niggling details that make it a "less than ideal solution".
To have a roaming profile, what MS calls roaming home directory, you must authenticate into a domain and have a domain controller available. This is fine in a corporate environment, but most Windows users (other than my esteemed colleagues here on Slashdot) wouldn't know what those terms mean, let alone how to implement them. Then there is the matter of how roaming profiles are actually implemented. When you log onto a system, your home directory, preferences, registry settings, and everything else that makes up your profile is copied from a Windows share to your local host. And when you log off, it is copied back to that share. Notice, I didn't say changes were copied. That's right Sparky, the WHOLE thing gets copied back to the server. And the next time you log on, it does it all over again. Now considering how things like Outlook OST files tend to get large, or as we in the industry like to say, "F*$&@%G HUGE", that means that you get to slog this data back and forth across your network each time a user logs on/off their system. Now, do that for a 5000 user company. Have fun.
So, apple has the opportunity here to do it MUCH better. After all, when you only have to aim as high as "I think I'll just copy everything on my computer every time I log on/off", its pretty easy. So yeah, maybe they will "leapfrog".
So, how long after you recieved the "sad Mac" screen was it that you realized you needed to "stop using" your Mac? I know you said "soon", but did that mean you sat there fruitlessly trying to move them mouse and ckick on the keyboard for a half an hour before you gave up?
Yup, that was the first one, and then there were the cards. Once apple added a card bus (NuBus, then later PCI) there were several PC-on-card products that shared the disk, video hardware, etc. Apple even sold one of their own, a 486 board that worked in the 6100/7100/8100 series systems. This allowed you to switch systems w/ a key combo and shared the contents of the clipboard as well. It worked pretty good, but was a little pricey.
Now for the real fun. Apple still has machines in R&D running hardware that supports both their OS and Windows in a similar multi-board type system. This allows Windows to run on Apple HW w/o SW emulation. There is a some abstraction layer code that lets the windowing system interoperate like rootless X11 in Jaguar. Of course, the question is, does the market want this, and in the end would it help Apple. Until someone decides that those questions have been answered appropriatly, don't expect to see these systems emerge from R&D.
So, you didn't read the article? If you did, you really missed the point.
The point was, middle/high school for the most part is more like prison than a learning environment. And whether you are unpopular, or popular, the social heiarchy that is created is for the most part pointless and cruel. If you did read the article and missed this point, then I'll assume that you aren't a nerd, a nerd would have been 'smart' enough to grok this.
So, that being said, in the real world it comes down to this... you can make friends and avoid hassles w/o too much problem. The sample size is large enough, and the police don't tolerate adults shoving other adults into lockers. Suggestion though, instead of slamming people for whining about their treatement, why don't you try taking your own advice and stop slamming people to make yourself feel more important. - Peace
Well, I'm no fan of M$ (I'm typing this on a G4 laptop runing Jaguar 10.2.4). But in all seriousness, you aren't getting the point. Unless you lock the BIOS/Firmware, I can boot your machine w/ a CD and get to all your files. This is true on LINUX, SOLARIS, Mac OS and ALL versions of Windows.
It really comes down to the fact that M$ has done a VERY poor job of telling non-technical end users that their systems aren't secure. They create silly login screens like we saw in Win 95 & 98 that lead people to think their system is secure when it is not. EXAMPLE: If I sell you a lock that doesn't, and I don't mention that fact to you, I'm doing you a diservice. - I'm Out -
You have hit upon a very important point... Motiviation. Privately held companies are usually in business for long-term growth and profitability. MANY publicly held companies are no longer motivated by these goals. The people in charge are looking soley to stock value as their compensation. This wouldn't be so bad if they were planning to be with the company for several decades, but in most cases they are looking at terms of 2 to 5 years. This means they institue a "rape and pillage" business plan that makes the stock go up in the short term but leaves the company on life-support after they have left.
If you doubt these facts, take a look at the current stories about accounting scandals, corporate fraud, etc.
Based on the comments so far (and boy are there a lot of them) it appears that a lot of folks are so wrapped up in the emotional rhetoric and calling each other Marxist or Capitalist that they have lost track of the fundamental issue... Their betterment through the betterment of others.
Spurious arguments put forth so far,
1. Working in a job doing "insert low paying, dangerous job here" really sucks. Therefore, you shouldn't desire/try to improve your working conditions because your job is better.
- This is a spurious. It's ok to want to improve your condition, and just because someone else has a lousy job doesn't mean you have to have one as well.
2. Employers (read bosses) make more than me, and that is (insert bad or good based on your side of the argument), so I should (make more money or be damn happy I have a job).
- Again, unrelated. It's ok to want to improve your salary, working conditions. It's also ok to be happy you have a job.
So, if you improve your situation, does it mean that you have to do it to the detriment of others? Not necessarily. Does it help to have some leverage? Absolutely.
So... Union. Most of the folks posting have immediately jumped to images of factory workers sitting at sewing machines or pouring molten steel. Yes, there are unions who represent those workers. There are also unions that represent Airline Pilots, and even Doctors. Yes, the AMA is a trade union.
It is very simple... Currently, US companies have carte blanch towards their IT workers and programmers. They can hire and fire at will. They can readily violate the laws of the land regarding labor with no consequences, because they have made it clear that anyone who wants to raise the issue will shortly be unemployed. They lay off employees to remove their benefits and bonuses, and then rehire them as contractors w/o benefits. They require them to work extra hours, but restrict them from reporting this time with threat of termination. I'm sure many of the readers here can add their own examples.
So, what to do about this? There are several possibilities, but in my opinion a union is probably a good one.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact of the matter is, there are exceptions to the rule... but you cannot, should not, under any circumstances assume that they will apply to you. If your boss, or his/her boss, or anyone else up the chain will gain something by canning you (bonus, keep their job, raise, etc) they will do it. Yes, they may feel bad about it. So what, you are still out of work and trying to pay your rent.
Wake up, smell the hot beverage of your choice, and get deprogrammed from all the BS that you were taught in school. This is the real world ace and you had better figure out how it works. Cause right now... you are in serious denial.
Different chip architectures carry out a different number of instructions per clock cycle. And, different chip architectures require different numbers of operations to be performed to complete an instruction execution. In the case of the G4 VS PIII, this mean that a G4 at a given clock speed is comparable in performance with to a PIII running at about 1.8 times the Mhz.
But that sort of thing doesn't work well in commercials. So Intel's marketing department hit on a wonderful notion... since they are the processor that most people use, forget all the details and just tell people about clock speed. After all, when you are talking about chips w/ the same or similar architechture, it is a viable quick and dirty way to compare performance.
So, going back to the car analogy... Yes, I understand that your engine revs to 9000RPM, but I still think you'll find mine to be more powerful. Your 1.8 Liter 4 revs to 9000RPM, and my 8 Liter V10 only revs to 7000, but c'mon ;-)
For every company falling under this law's jurisdiction that is large enough to have an IT staff and its own servers, there are probably 100 that buy shared hosting and shopping cart services from 3rd party vendors. So, in those much more prevalent situations, who is responsible for notifying the end customer? Is it the server farm owner, the server farm customer, or even better yet, the data center professional services organization that maintains the server farm for the server farm company? In other words, if the highly paid leeches (read - legislators) actually meant to provide some sort of protection. They have failed miserably. If they meant to make a few points w/ constituents w/o actually doing anything productive, they hit the nail on the head.
So in short, the law is so vague, that it will surly be "modded out of existence" by the courts the first time there is a challenge. And the whole exercise will have only cost CA taxpayers a few million dollars by the time it is all over. What a deal!
My simulated brain hurts, I gotta go.
However, it was my intention to illustrate that we as individuals sometimes find ourselves in untenable financial situations. And because of the hiring practices of many companies in our industry we are left between the proverbial "rock and a hard place". Granted, this is sometimes due to our own financial incompetence, but often it is due to circumstances outside of our control. And while you are correct that unionization may not be the answer to the problems introduced by these employment practices, it might be.
If we as sys admins, coders, and network engineers can help each other by bargaining collectively, why not? And I'm serious here. I would like to know what folks on Slashdot feel is the down side on this one? I know there are many potential pitfalls, but do we really think that there is no possible way to perform collective bargaining and have a positive outcome for those of us "in the trenches"?
Your arguments are entirely specious, and you are doing exactly what you are accusing the article of doing. You infer that the factual information put forth in the article about "this poor guy's plight" and the "evil feudalistic business practices" are incorrect, but you don't provide any proof to back it up. So, at this point, I think many of us will choose to believe the article's statements of fact until they are proved to be inaccurate. Personally, I've witnessed this type of thing numerous times over the 15 years I've worked in the tech industry in Silicon Valley, so I'm taking it at face value.
You also point out that we live in a FREE country. The idea that I don't HAVE to sign a contract if I don't want too doesn't logically follow. If the only employment offer I have requires me to sign a contract that I don't agree with, and my only other choice is losing my home to foreclosure, I would call that being forced to sign under duress. And it happens all the time. Does that mean we don't live in a free country? No, it doesn't. Does that mean we are sometimes forced to due something we don't want to do? Yes, it does. But living in a free country also means that we have the rare opportunity to change our plight by righting injustices.
Why would participating in collective bargaining to level the playing field against large companies necessarily be a bad thing? The American Medical Association does it. Various bar associations do it. I'm just asking ;-)
It has been discussed before on Slashdot, but I feel the need to bring it up again. This is a perfect example of why there should be a union for tech workers. The fact that employers continue to treat tech workers in this manner, even though these are the highly skilled people who create and maintain the products they sell, is ample proof that the balance of power is distinctly "off kilter".
Folks, this is the grownup example of the school bully forcing a geek to do his homework. This is all about power, and who has it. Since the tech industry managment has proven that they can't be trusted not to abuse it, maybe its time to take some of it away from them.
You've hit the nail on the head. As the story points out, many people find a job with a company directly, and then are pointed to the contract agency by the companies HR department. Not to be too cynical here, but MANY of these agencies exist simply to handle the paperwork and make it 'nice and legal' for companies to avoid paying benefits and dealing with the other headaches of having full-time employees in their production hierarchy.
BTW - I was serious that I didn't mean to offend. I was trying to point out that even though your company sounds like they are very careful about how they control information, that seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Cheers
Now, lets talk about how it works in the real world. I wanted a copy of my credit report, so I tried using www.freecreditreport.com (it's not really free, but hey, good marketing). When I submitted my request and tried to set up my account, I was given an error that my password was incorrect. Now, never having set up an account, I thought "hey, this is odd". So I called their 800 number and promptly found out that I did indeed have an account. After about 5 minutes of social engineering, I had the e-mail address that was associated with "my" account. Low and behold, it belonged to a guy that had received a copy of my rental application (yes it is legal for him to get a credit report, but not by impersonating me).
So, I said to the helpful young man on the phone "you've given my information to someone impersonating me". His response, and that of his supervisor was to tell me I should go file a police report. When I asked if they would take any action, the answer was a very resounding "NO".
So, I called back a few minutes later, with my new-found e-mail address and talked to another helpful gentleman whom I convinced to change the password and e-mail address on the account so that the previous dirt-bag would be locked out.
That is how things work in the real world. The companies who compile/manage/sell this information do not give a flying-frig about access control as long as money changes hands along with the data. If someone wants your info, and they have your name and a few other facts... they can get all the juicy stuff w/in about half an hour. Your only protection is the sheer volume of bio-mass that makes up the target group.
And of course, 500 Dave Nelsons CAN be wrong!
I can say it no better than Benjamin Franklin - "those who are willing to trade liberty for security deserve neither".
The big difference between this and MS Roaming Profiles is that in the MS solution, a user can log into their system when it is not network attached and still have their home directory, settings and cache files available. This appears to be what Apple may offer in Panther. If this is the case, then this functionality becomes usable for portable systems.
- Peace
To have a roaming profile, what MS calls roaming home directory, you must authenticate into a domain and have a domain controller available. This is fine in a corporate environment, but most Windows users (other than my esteemed colleagues here on Slashdot) wouldn't know what those terms mean, let alone how to implement them. Then there is the matter of how roaming profiles are actually implemented. When you log onto a system, your home directory, preferences, registry settings, and everything else that makes up your profile is copied from a Windows share to your local host. And when you log off, it is copied back to that share. Notice, I didn't say changes were copied. That's right Sparky, the WHOLE thing gets copied back to the server. And the next time you log on, it does it all over again. Now considering how things like Outlook OST files tend to get large, or as we in the industry like to say, "F*$&@%G HUGE", that means that you get to slog this data back and forth across your network each time a user logs on/off their system. Now, do that for a 5000 user company. Have fun.
So, apple has the opportunity here to do it MUCH better. After all, when you only have to aim as high as "I think I'll just copy everything on my computer every time I log on/off", its pretty easy. So yeah, maybe they will "leapfrog".
- Peace
Of course, the old joke in the Win 3.1 days was that while the Mac used a wristwatch for a wait cursor, Windows had an hour glass. Think about it.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist...
Now for the real fun. Apple still has machines in R&D running hardware that supports both their OS and Windows in a similar multi-board type system. This allows Windows to run on Apple HW w/o SW emulation. There is a some abstraction layer code that lets the windowing system interoperate like rootless X11 in Jaguar. Of course, the question is, does the market want this, and in the end would it help Apple. Until someone decides that those questions have been answered appropriatly, don't expect to see these systems emerge from R&D.
So in short... move along, nothing to see here ;-)
The point was, middle/high school for the most part is more like prison than a learning environment. And whether you are unpopular, or popular, the social heiarchy that is created is for the most part pointless and cruel. If you did read the article and missed this point, then I'll assume that you aren't a nerd, a nerd would have been 'smart' enough to grok this.
So, that being said, in the real world it comes down to this... you can make friends and avoid hassles w/o too much problem. The sample size is large enough, and the police don't tolerate adults shoving other adults into lockers. Suggestion though, instead of slamming people for whining about their treatement, why don't you try taking your own advice and stop slamming people to make yourself feel more important. - Peace
It really comes down to the fact that M$ has done a VERY poor job of telling non-technical end users that their systems aren't secure. They create silly login screens like we saw in Win 95 & 98 that lead people to think their system is secure when it is not. EXAMPLE: If I sell you a lock that doesn't, and I don't mention that fact to you, I'm doing you a diservice. - I'm Out -
If you doubt these facts, take a look at the current stories about accounting scandals, corporate fraud, etc.
I'm out.
Based on the comments so far (and boy are there a lot of them) it appears that a lot of folks are so wrapped up in the emotional rhetoric and calling each other Marxist or Capitalist that they have lost track of the fundamental issue... Their betterment through the betterment of others. Spurious arguments put forth so far, 1. Working in a job doing "insert low paying, dangerous job here" really sucks. Therefore, you shouldn't desire/try to improve your working conditions because your job is better. - This is a spurious. It's ok to want to improve your condition, and just because someone else has a lousy job doesn't mean you have to have one as well. 2. Employers (read bosses) make more than me, and that is (insert bad or good based on your side of the argument), so I should (make more money or be damn happy I have a job). - Again, unrelated. It's ok to want to improve your salary, working conditions. It's also ok to be happy you have a job. So, if you improve your situation, does it mean that you have to do it to the detriment of others? Not necessarily. Does it help to have some leverage? Absolutely. So... Union. Most of the folks posting have immediately jumped to images of factory workers sitting at sewing machines or pouring molten steel. Yes, there are unions who represent those workers. There are also unions that represent Airline Pilots, and even Doctors. Yes, the AMA is a trade union. It is very simple... Currently, US companies have carte blanch towards their IT workers and programmers. They can hire and fire at will. They can readily violate the laws of the land regarding labor with no consequences, because they have made it clear that anyone who wants to raise the issue will shortly be unemployed. They lay off employees to remove their benefits and bonuses, and then rehire them as contractors w/o benefits. They require them to work extra hours, but restrict them from reporting this time with threat of termination. I'm sure many of the readers here can add their own examples. So, what to do about this? There are several possibilities, but in my opinion a union is probably a good one.