Really, at roughly fifty-cents per day, MS Office SPLA fees cost less per employee than the coffee service. You don't even need to get into file conversion costs before it becomes a huge financial risk to switch from anything to anything when user familiarity is at issue. However, as soon as file conversion does become an issue, the cost of converting a single document exceeds the per-user cost per month of the SPLA.
Ugh. I'd love to see everyone move far, far away from Microsoft and start using OpenOffice. I dread the almost daily email containing "can you send that to me in [my favorite version of] Word?" Damn it, now I have to reboot or switch machines, then make sure everything still looks all perty in the latest version of F@$%ing Word because some schmuck can't open a PDF, RTF or Word9x file without having a tantrum. Sadly, large come huge companies just aren't going to risk hundreds to thousands of crying employees sucking up hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars because they're not comfortable with new applications or, indeed, just selecting a different format on the handy drop-down box that might not let you embed every other conceivable piece of trash on the desktop in the document, but works perfectly well enough anyway. Sigh.
A company I worked for a few years back finally migrated from Lotus to MS for their general office apps. It cost in the neighborhood of $15,000 (not including the admin overhead of the project) just to convert one document collection of just a few hundred files to Word from AmiPro, since many of them were full of necessary macros. Rolling out over the entire organization would easily exceed $1M in document conversion costs alone.
The primary concern for such general applications is the lack of training necessary for both existing users and new hires. In that particular case, new hires for five years or more were not coming to the job with knowledge of SmartSuite. Considering the total cost of training 1000 employees for as little as one day each easily exceeds $1M and often to several times as much no matter how you structure the training, such a move made sense even in the relatively short-term.
A move to OpenOffice in such an organization would entail the same conversion cost, the same ongoing training cost over the forseeable future as well as instantaneously over the entire organization, vastly dwarfing any licensing and administrative costs of ownership. Unfortunately, in any large organization, you can't expect thousands of people to just buck-up and wing it with unfamiliar applications and still have a functioning business.
That said, the same organization began the migration process just before Microsoft rolled-out its new and improved subscription licensing, causing a great deal of bad-blood and talk of formally giving them the finger and going back to Lotus or IBM Selectrics if necesary.
Yeah, screw it. I won't be happy until we're all unemployed. I just can't stomach the idea of paying people to live 50% below the poverty line. Let's just get it over with and fire them all so they can just die already and we can get on with spending 45 minutes at the self-scan machine to pay for a box of chiclets. Now, that's what I call progress.
Perhaps because they are they most audacious marketers in the computer industry and, good or bad, they come off as the BMW "ultimate driving machine" of PCs. Maybe it is the annoyingly pretentious attitudes taken by the owners of both products that get so many in a tizzy. In the end, it's just a car and it's just a computer, both of which depreciate with the rapidity of take-out sushi.
On the other hand, no one ever overly scrutinized the marketing of Volvos as appealing to vanity or performance anxiety. Hmmmm...
As handily pointed out in Gattaca, where this law was in place, there are other ways around it. Just like in California where I cannot fire you because you are a single mother black lesbian jew with a physical handicap, but I CAN fire you because you are one of the above who happens to wear really ugly shoes that I can only rid myself of by firing you.
Admittedly, there may be one or two rare cases where someone writes on the pink slip: "you, single mother black lesbian jew with a predisposition for diabetes, are fired." Since most people exclude the portion between the commas, resorting to the more de riguer "you're just fired" these laws are pointless. Proving that you were fired for a specific reason when from all appearances you were fired for no reason at all is for all reasonable purposes impossible.
Just like when auto manufacturers claim "it's the [fastest|most luxurious|most efficient] machine in its class" when basically the class in question is the item itself.
This is not much different from: "(In our opinion) The new G5 is (right now at this moment, which is months before you'll ever see one) the most powerful (aesthetically, socially, computationally -- hell, it's mostly subjective, you decide) machine (compared other products we chose as being prima facie inferior) you can buy (from us)."
Everyone knows what they're saying, except for those who want to believe whatever they read between the lines rather than the obvious message that is simply a variant of "buy this, chicks dig it."
Not that the poster made any wildly paranoid claims. Having read through the entire document, I can't think of a single portal server that wouldn't meet most or all of the claims. I seriously doubt it will stand up to legal challenges, but expect to see quite a few million bucks that would be better spent creating jobs wasted in the courts.
Wow, then the user should be able to get it together in the same amount of time, you know, because it is all set up to be simple... and stuff. Obviously, there are other, ostensibly reasonable, issues involved.
It is not that idea that Macs are hard that is behind a refusal to support them, it is the laundry list of administrative issues behind having personal equipment in the office that is. Will the network backup system work? Probably not. Will the network virus scanning work? Probably not. Do they have disk images ready so when your system is hosed you will be back to work in a reasonable amount of time? Nope. If they use Tivoli or other VNC software for remote admin, will that work? Maybe. Is there any control over installed software? Nope. Is there a huge liability that a user might claim something in the company, be it the power, some virus, the admins themselves destroyed something on the personal computer or the computer itself? Yeah, big time.
Sure, you're not like all the other people. You know how to keep your system clean and manage your own data. You don't install hostile software. You won't sue. Unfortunately, you're the only one who knows if that is true.
The bottom line is that by bringing in personal equipment you are potentially threatening everything in place to ensure business operates with as little interruption and liability as possible. Paranoid? Sure. It is also realistic and common practice in large organizations.
I would expect precisely the same attitude in a company with nothing but Macs on the desktops.
The general rule in most larger organizations I've worked in is if you bring in your personal equipment you support it your damn self, that is if you're even allowed to bring it in the door in the first place. The infinite configurations of a home computer are nearly impossible to support in a corporate environment with any consistency. It's not ignorance keeping them from supporting personal hardware, it is configuration management policies and procedures that are there to ensure the business doesn't come to a complete stand-still because some petulant ignoramus is insisting on doing everything their way even though they haven't the remotest clue HOW to do it their way without wasting everyone else's time. How many OS configurations do you think an IT department should support? One is already a pain in the ass with enough users once anything needs to be changed or upgraded. Most larger IT departments are already dealing with a few flavors of *nix on their severs, plus a few variants of Windows on the desktops. Adding Mac support would not add one, but several OS variants to the mix as well as innumerable hardware and application configurations. It sounds so simple to say "support my Mac," but it just isn't. You don't just "learn mac" or "get a mac guy." There are organizational concerns that make it perfectly reasonable to demand a level of conformity. This "I can't get my randomly configured computer to work, ergo you must be ignorant for not wanting to fix it" is a common point a view that makes me dread working in tech support.
This guy needs to give up his freaking red-swingline-stapler and stop whining.
Modern manufacturing processes are not news to me - I've done my share of time in MQC/QA in biologics and aerospace companies. However, personal tours of Chinese manufacturing plants that highlight the working conditions beyond racism, xenophobia and 'they work cheap' are indeed rare, so by/. standards, this qualifies as interesting enough.
Maybe he meant all literate people know how to make something approximating the first Apple computer, which could have just as effectively been constructed out of macaroni shells and Elmer's glue on construction paper over the "look 'ma, I can hammer on plywood" process chosen for the prototype.
On the contrary, I think most literate people are aware that they are unable to fabricate resin models with frickin' laser beams in their garage and don't fault their 7th grade science teacher for that ignorance.
Last I checked, in Canada and most of Europe the government provides significantly more benefits than what most people receive here and certainly more than in China.
o/~ Blame Canada! Blame Canada! o/~
The San Francisco Fire Department employs 1901 FTEs with a salary and fringe budget of $184M. With 95% of those salaries devoted to the uniformed service and an average salary and benefit package worth $96,000, the SFFD is hardly impoverishing their employees. Where did you get your information, you anonymous coward?
Besides, the "dire needs" of the tech workforce are dire when you define "tech workforce" not just as "$80k per year engineer with $125k in student loans to repay" but also as "$14k per year electronics assembler with a GED."
Sounds alot like stories of factory visits to Czechoslovakia before communism bit the dust where econo-tourists were presented with gleaming factories for PR purposes when the truth was less than sparkling.
In all fairness, this facility, the housing and, relatively speaking, the wages do not appear to differ much from manufacturing working conditions in the United States. A single U.S. electronics fabrication line worker earns about $1000 per month, spends half that on housing and a third on food, leaving $200 or less in the bank for things like paying the utility bills, insurace and transportation. Basically, if you included the same "on-campus housing" model, they'd be slaves.
Manufacturing line worker types of this sort in the United States generally live at or below the federal poverty line, which is significantly less than the statistical poverty line in any major city. A great deal of these manufacturing jobs in California or Texas are filled in precisely the same migrant-worker manner, resulting in well over a $1 billion per month in transfers to Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America by the workers that have, legally and illegally, moved to the U.S. for the purpose of working and sending money home. Of course, some U.S. companies have realized this and set up maquilladoras in northern Mexico so they can pay them less without all those inconvenient OSHA requirements.
Then there is Dell who until very recently used prison labor, which is perfectly legal in this country. Talk about "slave labor" conditions, those workers were paid almost dollar-for-dollar the same as their Chinese counterparts and hey, they had "on-campus" housing too.
I'm all for taking China to task, but let's be real here. The United States is distinctly not a favorable location from which to start pointing fingers on this issue.
I have used a three-panel arc of displays, with a smaller fourth in center-down position dedicated to assorted tails and top, for a couple years at home. With a handful of ssh sessions to servers at work, a development environment, cvs client, browser and API docs open simultaneously, one monitor would mean a huge drop in productivity. I put a keyboard-activated KVM switch to a windows machine on the center monitor so when someone called up with a problem on a windows app, I could switch my main view area without losing track of what was going on with all the other machines and without having to switch keyboards or turn my head. The PHBs at my office slammed two 21" monitors dedicated to separate Windows and Sun machines, which was inconvenient, space wasting given the double-keyboard, double-mouse set-up, and horribly uncomfortable. Needless to say, I preferred working at home.
There simply is no comparison between virtual desktops on any single monitor and a good multi-head setup.
Re:I hate to burst your bubble but...
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Why Only Music?
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So is the prohibition of rape and murder. Any discussion of "freedom" invariably concludes that the the term does not imply a necessary lack of restriction. In fact most would argue that certain restrictions are necessary to avoid limitless tragedies of the commons, for which the whole P2P issue is a textbook example. By equating restriction to "an attack on freedom" you are ignoring the consequences of unlimited freedom, which is not necessarily anarchy, where everyone eventually is worse off.
Ok, so philosophy class is over. The notion that compulsory licensing is inherently unconstitutional flies in the face of the last century of industry practice and media regulation. What do you think radio, television, cable and 'jukebox' distribution models are based on? Voila, compulsory licensing. It is also explicitly allowed as part of the WTO agreements that formed WIPO, notably TRIPS. Sure, there's the chance that laws in place for decades might be unconsitutional, as evidenced by the endless arguments for and against the death penalty or gun ownership, but this is hardly an open-and-shut case of failing consitutional muster.
"The MPAA hasn't provided legitimate alternatives for what consumers want."
Give me a break. The motion picture industry has plenty of valid excuses for any problems in distribution, not the least of which is the massive file sizes in any electronic copy.
That said, you have distribution through purchase for little more and often less than music cds, rental for as little as a dollar, digital satellite and cable with 12 channels of HBO alone often in HDTV and 5.1 surround sound, on-demand pay per view for around three bucks, which you can now pipe via digital cable into a DVD recorder or DVR/TiVO, analog cable, broadcast tv, as well as first-run theater distribution.
There are simply far to many aspects of distribution to start blaming the MPAA because you can't squeeze a full 3000dpi film-resolution 24fps 2 hour flick onto a dial-up internet connection for free or because you have to pay $3.50 for a coke at a theater that made fifty damn cents off your ticket because of a specific studio's royalty scheme. Yes, that spread changes for every studio, the MPAA does NOT set the rates, so stop blaming them because it sounds official just as everyone blames the RIAA for everything because its the only acronym they know.
Want to know why you don't have digital projection in every theater? Hell, the studios would kill for it because they think they will save on the $15,000 it costs to ship each copy on film. It's the theater owners who don't want to shell out the quarter million bucks per theater that are to blame and who can blame 'em? A thirty screen multiplex would cost $7.5 million dollars to convert to digital. There are roughly 31,000 movie screens in the United States, so it would cost on the order of $8 BILLION (more than total ticket sales in a year) to give you all-digital, all-the-time and they'd still have to make prints and people would still bitch about how crappy anything but animation looks in digital when blown up to billboard proportions compared to film.
Besides, what the begeezuz does the MPAA have to do with any of this? Virtually NOTHING! It is a representative industry body that conducts lobbying, legal advocacy and adopts voluntary trade practices like movie and t.v. ratings. Big fat hairy deal.
When what the consumer wants everything made with pure unobtainium, delivered instantaneously and at no cost, don't expect anyone to come running to market when something like "Titanic" costs a quarter billion dollars to make. The legal issues the MPAA may squeak about are practically inconsequential compared to the logistics alone of meeting unreasonable and seemingly unlimited consumer demand.
Really, if "they haven't provided legitimate alternatives for what consumers want," what the hell do you think consumers want within the relatively limited scope of the laws of physics and economics? That sort of statement just smacks of squealing babies that will NEVER, EVER be satisfied no matter how often you wipe their asses for them.
Although this was modded as "funny" and I'm sure it was intended to be so, cigarette companies are already doing much the same thing. At least in California, you'll find cigarette reps in bars photographing drivers licenses and handing out free smokes with handy questions indicative of their target market such as "do you like NASCAR?" also indicating they intend to sell the hell out of the database. The avalanche of spam and paper junk mail, not to mention the occasional pack or two of cigarettes by post ensues quickly thereafter. Given the hassle and inherent pointlessness (see the bagillion fake i.d. posts), it doesn't take much of a conspiratorial mind to think the liquor companies might be behind this masquerading behind an image of responsibility or at least foaming at the mouth thinking about the possibilities.
Sun ONE App Server Enterprise Pro includes a process management system that is pretty flexible for the sort of routing you are talking about. They bill it is far more useful than it really is, but for workflow ticketing, it's pretty damned cool, if insanely expensive and packaged with the usual quality documentation *cough* and caveats emptor. On the other hand, it has lots of pretty shiny buttons and Visio-style lego development widgets for selling to the megalomaniacal PHB. Make sure you have a working solution from a trial run before you write the enormous check. However, if the model works for you, you could easily argue that you would spend far more developing from scratch or shoe-horning a simpler shrink-wrapped ticketing system.
It's a great set up. Financial aid packages cover room and board for on-campus living, yet as soon as a student chooses to move off-campus, suddenly financial need doesn't include food or shelter and the money disappears. My university did the same to incoming freshmen, resorting to "Quads" -- 18x12 rooms with shared bathrooms -- eight 18yos sharing one toilet, roughly 7' square each for bed, desk and drawers. If a private landlord allowed that kind of abuse, he'd be thrown in jail. Hell, I had better accommodations at university in rural Africa, including free high-speed internet, than I've seen at any U.S. school, certainly of the private variety that seem to be the most egregious lot. It's sickening. They act as if because the students are paying on credit, they're being gracious to provide anything short of what otherwise would barely meet Red Cross standards for a refugee camp.
It's akin to if you walked up to a Mercedes dealer with cash and drove away with a Mercedes for 10% under sticker, but if you walked up with a letter of credit, they'd charge you for Lamborghini and force you drive away in a slightly used 1984 Yugo... and then if you returned your Yugo a month later, they'd demand full payment for the Lamborghini anyway.
Students are already paying considerably more than the market rates for their rooms. If the universities can't cough up decent network services equivalent to what is commercially available, they simply need to outsource and stop crying. This "we just can't afford it" is bullshit.
If students can get ostensibly unlimited use of DSL for $50/month from the local telco, there is no reason the university cannot approximate that service even if that means having the local telco wire the buildings and offload the res.net from their domain and stop bitching about it entirely. Of course, outsourced services fall prey to the constant and overt mark-up rackets and micro-kingdom vanity that universities so irrationally cherish.
If you have 7,500 students signed-up for residential service and $50/month is extracted from each, thats $375,000 per month, far and beyond well enough for a 10G connection that would allow every single student a sustained 1Mb/s link with LOTS of breathing room. Say they only pay for eight months a year, that's still $3,000,000 or $250,000 per month. If they can't get enough bandwidth for less than a quarter million a month, whoever is in charge needs to be fired immediately. Ok, so in Florida's case, they pay for DHNet out of the rents. Fine. A single occupancy room costs $2675 per semester, or, about $643 per month in a city where studio apartments run more like $400/month. I would gander they could find fifty bucks a month in there somewhere or they could just explicitly charge for network services. http://www.housing.ufl.edu/housing/GenInfo_Stats.h tm
They simply have no excuse to brow beat students to protect their pathetic service levels when cheap commercial alternatives are available that could easily be integrated into university housing and when minimal access fees would pay for obscene amounts of bandwidth. So they dropped their usage by 85% by being draconian. Great, I could cut traffic on Los Angeles freeways by jack-knifing a tractor-trailer on at the I-405/10 interchange. Doesn't mean it solved the problem. It's a racket. Screw 'em.
Very few people will take a student seriously, unless you are working on a PhD - and even then good luck - who throws out numbers like $75-125/hour, certainly now.
This scenario sounds very much like a research grant and presenting it as such may be to your advantage. You should talk to your university faculty who have done this before. Presenting this as a consultant vendor-client, or employee-employer relationship does not sound like it is in your interest. Doing so may either sound insincere or lead to misunderstandings about responsibilities and ownership.
In a grant, you can expect to inflate a salary by 30%-40% to allow for administrative and facilities overhead. However, those inflations apply to organizations that actually have that overhead, so watch the credibility gap. If your effort on this project is 50% of your time and you could reasonably expect a $100,000 salary, don't expect to pull much more than $75/hour out of a grant in terms of labor costs. If you cannot reasonably expect a $100,000 salary, I think these inducements to demand $75/hr and more are, under the circumstances, a bit overly optimistic.
In total agreement, I've also seems that with the Barnes and Noble, brick and mortar edition, that came about contemporaneously with the internet, the dead tree vendors have either completely disappeared or become absolutely piss-poor, filled with nothing but massive stacks of fluff. On the other hand, the on-line versions of even the most sterile retail bookstores like B&N have available an enormous amount of new books in the relatively esoteric corners of specialized fields.
As for finding information online, it more often than not takes an informed researcher who knows the physical location of the appropriate repositories as well as the biases of those sources to dig up high-quality information over the net that may or may not even be possible to search for via any general search engine. I've seen far too many people, certainly first-year university students, who when asked for "research" to back up assumptions respond with nothing more than:
Librarians do a good job of debunking that idea, but sadly, post-Google, I don't think most people see, much less speak, to librarians even once a year anymore, much the way they don't think a securities analyst is of any use when they have E-Trade.
For that matter, the United States is more left-wing than France, since we spend in taxes FAR more per capita than France or Britain on health care and social insurance. There is a huge misconception that the United States does not have socialized medicine. We have the most well-funded social health system in the world. We also have the most backwards, ill-designed, ineffective system whereby the government forces providers to provide the most costly emergency services, yet allows them to deny less expensive preventive services, centralizes funding, then decentralizes distribution through the states, which then dole out to both public and private providers adding a beyond byzantine amount of administrative overhead and consumer confusion. Canadians and Britons pay far less in taxes, yet have universal coverage that is more effective and costs them far less.
Don't start harping about how they all die in the hallways -- that is FAR more of an American problem where over 40% of people get their medical service in the Emergency Room when the condition has become life-threatening, thus costing you the taxpayer tens to hundreds of times more than it should have and causing trauma centers to pile up with patients.
It has nothing to do with running "a nanny state" and everything to do with basic concepts of public health like preventing epidemics. Like it or not, it IS in YOUR interest to ensure that your seemingly unwashed, irresponsible neighbors have health care so they won't accidentally kill you when they sneeze.
No, the CATO institute would probably have a paper on the moral duty of the unemployed to increase downward pressure on wages and how the recently homeless have merely chosen to realize capital gains by selling their houses to pay for food. The Heritage Foundation would no doubt follow up with a paper on how eliminating the capital gains tax would then be in the best interest of the future homeless population. It's the compassionately conservative thing to do.
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Really, at roughly fifty-cents per day, MS Office SPLA fees cost less per employee than the coffee service. You don't even need to get into file conversion costs before it becomes a huge financial risk to switch from anything to anything when user familiarity is at issue. However, as soon as file conversion does become an issue, the cost of converting a single document exceeds the per-user cost per month of the SPLA.
Ugh. I'd love to see everyone move far, far away from Microsoft and start using OpenOffice. I dread the almost daily email containing "can you send that to me in [my favorite version of] Word?" Damn it, now I have to reboot or switch machines, then make sure everything still looks all perty in the latest version of F@$%ing Word because some schmuck can't open a PDF, RTF or Word9x file without having a tantrum. Sadly, large come huge companies just aren't going to risk hundreds to thousands of crying employees sucking up hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars because they're not comfortable with new applications or, indeed, just selecting a different format on the handy drop-down box that might not let you embed every other conceivable piece of trash on the desktop in the document, but works perfectly well enough anyway. Sigh.
A company I worked for a few years back finally migrated from Lotus to MS for their general office apps. It cost in the neighborhood of $15,000 (not including the admin overhead of the project) just to convert one document collection of just a few hundred files to Word from AmiPro, since many of them were full of necessary macros. Rolling out over the entire organization would easily exceed $1M in document conversion costs alone.
The primary concern for such general applications is the lack of training necessary for both existing users and new hires. In that particular case, new hires for five years or more were not coming to the job with knowledge of SmartSuite. Considering the total cost of training 1000 employees for as little as one day each easily exceeds $1M and often to several times as much no matter how you structure the training, such a move made sense even in the relatively short-term.
A move to OpenOffice in such an organization would entail the same conversion cost, the same ongoing training cost over the forseeable future as well as instantaneously over the entire organization, vastly dwarfing any licensing and administrative costs of ownership. Unfortunately, in any large organization, you can't expect thousands of people to just buck-up and wing it with unfamiliar applications and still have a functioning business.
That said, the same organization began the migration process just before Microsoft rolled-out its new and improved subscription licensing, causing a great deal of bad-blood and talk of formally giving them the finger and going back to Lotus or IBM Selectrics if necesary.
Yeah, screw it. I won't be happy until we're all unemployed. I just can't stomach the idea of paying people to live 50% below the poverty line. Let's just get it over with and fire them all so they can just die already and we can get on with spending 45 minutes at the self-scan machine to pay for a box of chiclets. Now, that's what I call progress.
Perhaps because they are they most audacious marketers in the computer industry and, good or bad, they come off as the BMW "ultimate driving machine" of PCs. Maybe it is the annoyingly pretentious attitudes taken by the owners of both products that get so many in a tizzy. In the end, it's just a car and it's just a computer, both of which depreciate with the rapidity of take-out sushi.
On the other hand, no one ever overly scrutinized the marketing of Volvos as appealing to vanity or performance anxiety. Hmmmm...
As handily pointed out in Gattaca, where this law was in place, there are other ways around it. Just like in California where I cannot fire you because you are a single mother black lesbian jew with a physical handicap, but I CAN fire you because you are one of the above who happens to wear really ugly shoes that I can only rid myself of by firing you.
Admittedly, there may be one or two rare cases where someone writes on the pink slip: "you, single mother black lesbian jew with a predisposition for diabetes, are fired." Since most people exclude the portion between the commas, resorting to the more de riguer "you're just fired" these laws are pointless. Proving that you were fired for a specific reason when from all appearances you were fired for no reason at all is for all reasonable purposes impossible.
"Smashing, yay capitalism." -- Austin Powers
Just like when auto manufacturers claim "it's the [fastest|most luxurious|most efficient] machine in its class" when basically the class in question is the item itself.
This is not much different from: "(In our opinion) The new G5 is (right now at this moment, which is months before you'll ever see one) the most powerful (aesthetically, socially, computationally -- hell, it's mostly subjective, you decide) machine (compared other products we chose as being prima facie inferior) you can buy (from us)."
Everyone knows what they're saying, except for those who want to believe whatever they read between the lines rather than the obvious message that is simply a variant of "buy this, chicks dig it."
Not that the poster made any wildly paranoid claims. Having read through the entire document, I can't think of a single portal server that wouldn't meet most or all of the claims. I seriously doubt it will stand up to legal challenges, but expect to see quite a few million bucks that would be better spent creating jobs wasted in the courts.
Wow, then the user should be able to get it together in the same amount of time, you know, because it is all set up to be simple... and stuff. Obviously, there are other, ostensibly reasonable, issues involved.
It is not that idea that Macs are hard that is behind a refusal to support them, it is the laundry list of administrative issues behind having personal equipment in the office that is. Will the network backup system work? Probably not. Will the network virus scanning work? Probably not. Do they have disk images ready so when your system is hosed you will be back to work in a reasonable amount of time? Nope. If they use Tivoli or other VNC software for remote admin, will that work? Maybe. Is there any control over installed software? Nope. Is there a huge liability that a user might claim something in the company, be it the power, some virus, the admins themselves destroyed something on the personal computer or the computer itself? Yeah, big time.
Sure, you're not like all the other people. You know how to keep your system clean and manage your own data. You don't install hostile software. You won't sue. Unfortunately, you're the only one who knows if that is true.
The bottom line is that by bringing in personal equipment you are potentially threatening everything in place to ensure business operates with as little interruption and liability as possible. Paranoid? Sure. It is also realistic and common practice in large organizations.
I would expect precisely the same attitude in a company with nothing but Macs on the desktops.
The general rule in most larger organizations I've worked in is if you bring in your personal equipment you support it your damn self, that is if you're even allowed to bring it in the door in the first place. The infinite configurations of a home computer are nearly impossible to support in a corporate environment with any consistency. It's not ignorance keeping them from supporting personal hardware, it is configuration management policies and procedures that are there to ensure the business doesn't come to a complete stand-still because some petulant ignoramus is insisting on doing everything their way even though they haven't the remotest clue HOW to do it their way without wasting everyone else's time. How many OS configurations do you think an IT department should support? One is already a pain in the ass with enough users once anything needs to be changed or upgraded. Most larger IT departments are already dealing with a few flavors of *nix on their severs, plus a few variants of Windows on the desktops. Adding Mac support would not add one, but several OS variants to the mix as well as innumerable hardware and application configurations. It sounds so simple to say "support my Mac," but it just isn't. You don't just "learn mac" or "get a mac guy." There are organizational concerns that make it perfectly reasonable to demand a level of conformity. This "I can't get my randomly configured computer to work, ergo you must be ignorant for not wanting to fix it" is a common point a view that makes me dread working in tech support.
This guy needs to give up his freaking red-swingline-stapler and stop whining.
Modern manufacturing processes are not news to me - I've done my share of time in MQC/QA in biologics and aerospace companies. However, personal tours of Chinese manufacturing plants that highlight the working conditions beyond racism, xenophobia and 'they work cheap' are indeed rare, so by /. standards, this qualifies as interesting enough.
Maybe he meant all literate people know how to make something approximating the first Apple computer, which could have just as effectively been constructed out of macaroni shells and Elmer's glue on construction paper over the "look 'ma, I can hammer on plywood" process chosen for the prototype.
On the contrary, I think most literate people are aware that they are unable to fabricate resin models with frickin' laser beams in their garage and don't fault their 7th grade science teacher for that ignorance.
Last I checked, in Canada and most of Europe the government provides significantly more benefits than what most people receive here and certainly more than in China. o/~ Blame Canada! Blame Canada! o/~
The San Francisco Fire Department employs 1901 FTEs with a salary and fringe budget of $184M. With 95% of those salaries devoted to the uniformed service and an average salary and benefit package worth $96,000, the SFFD is hardly impoverishing their employees. Where did you get your information, you anonymous coward? Besides, the "dire needs" of the tech workforce are dire when you define "tech workforce" not just as "$80k per year engineer with $125k in student loans to repay" but also as "$14k per year electronics assembler with a GED."
Sounds alot like stories of factory visits to Czechoslovakia before communism bit the dust where econo-tourists were presented with gleaming factories for PR purposes when the truth was less than sparkling.
In all fairness, this facility, the housing and, relatively speaking, the wages do not appear to differ much from manufacturing working conditions in the United States. A single U.S. electronics fabrication line worker earns about $1000 per month, spends half that on housing and a third on food, leaving $200 or less in the bank for things like paying the utility bills, insurace and transportation. Basically, if you included the same "on-campus housing" model, they'd be slaves.
Manufacturing line worker types of this sort in the United States generally live at or below the federal poverty line, which is significantly less than the statistical poverty line in any major city. A great deal of these manufacturing jobs in California or Texas are filled in precisely the same migrant-worker manner, resulting in well over a $1 billion per month in transfers to Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America by the workers that have, legally and illegally, moved to the U.S. for the purpose of working and sending money home. Of course, some U.S. companies have realized this and set up maquilladoras in northern Mexico so they can pay them less without all those inconvenient OSHA requirements.
Then there is Dell who until very recently used prison labor, which is perfectly legal in this country. Talk about "slave labor" conditions, those workers were paid almost dollar-for-dollar the same as their Chinese counterparts and hey, they had "on-campus" housing too.
I'm all for taking China to task, but let's be real here. The United States is distinctly not a favorable location from which to start pointing fingers on this issue.
I have used a three-panel arc of displays, with a smaller fourth in center-down position dedicated to assorted tails and top, for a couple years at home. With a handful of ssh sessions to servers at work, a development environment, cvs client, browser and API docs open simultaneously, one monitor would mean a huge drop in productivity. I put a keyboard-activated KVM switch to a windows machine on the center monitor so when someone called up with a problem on a windows app, I could switch my main view area without losing track of what was going on with all the other machines and without having to switch keyboards or turn my head. The PHBs at my office slammed two 21" monitors dedicated to separate Windows and Sun machines, which was inconvenient, space wasting given the double-keyboard, double-mouse set-up, and horribly uncomfortable. Needless to say, I preferred working at home.
There simply is no comparison between virtual desktops on any single monitor and a good multi-head setup.
So is the prohibition of rape and murder. Any discussion of "freedom" invariably concludes that the the term does not imply a necessary lack of restriction. In fact most would argue that certain restrictions are necessary to avoid limitless tragedies of the commons, for which the whole P2P issue is a textbook example. By equating restriction to "an attack on freedom" you are ignoring the consequences of unlimited freedom, which is not necessarily anarchy, where everyone eventually is worse off.
Ok, so philosophy class is over. The notion that compulsory licensing is inherently unconstitutional flies in the face of the last century of industry practice and media regulation. What do you think radio, television, cable and 'jukebox' distribution models are based on? Voila, compulsory licensing. It is also explicitly allowed as part of the WTO agreements that formed WIPO, notably TRIPS. Sure, there's the chance that laws in place for decades might be unconsitutional, as evidenced by the endless arguments for and against the death penalty or gun ownership, but this is hardly an open-and-shut case of failing consitutional muster.
"The MPAA hasn't provided legitimate alternatives for what consumers want."
Give me a break. The motion picture industry has plenty of valid excuses for any problems in distribution, not the least of which is the massive file sizes in any electronic copy.
That said, you have distribution through purchase for little more and often less than music cds, rental for as little as a dollar, digital satellite and cable with 12 channels of HBO alone often in HDTV and 5.1 surround sound, on-demand pay per view for around three bucks, which you can now pipe via digital cable into a DVD recorder or DVR/TiVO, analog cable, broadcast tv, as well as first-run theater distribution.
There are simply far to many aspects of distribution to start blaming the MPAA because you can't squeeze a full 3000dpi film-resolution 24fps 2 hour flick onto a dial-up internet connection for free or because you have to pay $3.50 for a coke at a theater that made fifty damn cents off your ticket because of a specific studio's royalty scheme. Yes, that spread changes for every studio, the MPAA does NOT set the rates, so stop blaming them because it sounds official just as everyone blames the RIAA for everything because its the only acronym they know.
Want to know why you don't have digital projection in every theater? Hell, the studios would kill for it because they think they will save on the $15,000 it costs to ship each copy on film. It's the theater owners who don't want to shell out the quarter million bucks per theater that are to blame and who can blame 'em? A thirty screen multiplex would cost $7.5 million dollars to convert to digital. There are roughly 31,000 movie screens in the United States, so it would cost on the order of $8 BILLION (more than total ticket sales in a year) to give you all-digital, all-the-time and they'd still have to make prints and people would still bitch about how crappy anything but animation looks in digital when blown up to billboard proportions compared to film.
Besides, what the begeezuz does the MPAA have to do with any of this? Virtually NOTHING! It is a representative industry body that conducts lobbying, legal advocacy and adopts voluntary trade practices like movie and t.v. ratings. Big fat hairy deal.
When what the consumer wants everything made with pure unobtainium, delivered instantaneously and at no cost, don't expect anyone to come running to market when something like "Titanic" costs a quarter billion dollars to make. The legal issues the MPAA may squeak about are practically inconsequential compared to the logistics alone of meeting unreasonable and seemingly unlimited consumer demand.
Really, if "they haven't provided legitimate alternatives for what consumers want," what the hell do you think consumers want within the relatively limited scope of the laws of physics and economics? That sort of statement just smacks of squealing babies that will NEVER, EVER be satisfied no matter how often you wipe their asses for them.
Although this was modded as "funny" and I'm sure it was intended to be so, cigarette companies are already doing much the same thing. At least in California, you'll find cigarette reps in bars photographing drivers licenses and handing out free smokes with handy questions indicative of their target market such as "do you like NASCAR?" also indicating they intend to sell the hell out of the database. The avalanche of spam and paper junk mail, not to mention the occasional pack or two of cigarettes by post ensues quickly thereafter. Given the hassle and inherent pointlessness (see the bagillion fake i.d. posts), it doesn't take much of a conspiratorial mind to think the liquor companies might be behind this masquerading behind an image of responsibility or at least foaming at the mouth thinking about the possibilities.
Sun ONE App Server Enterprise Pro includes a process management system that is pretty flexible for the sort of routing you are talking about. They bill it is far more useful than it really is, but for workflow ticketing, it's pretty damned cool, if insanely expensive and packaged with the usual quality documentation *cough* and caveats emptor. On the other hand, it has lots of pretty shiny buttons and Visio-style lego development widgets for selling to the megalomaniacal PHB. Make sure you have a working solution from a trial run before you write the enormous check. However, if the model works for you, you could easily argue that you would spend far more developing from scratch or shoe-horning a simpler shrink-wrapped ticketing system.
It's a great set up. Financial aid packages cover room and board for on-campus living, yet as soon as a student chooses to move off-campus, suddenly financial need doesn't include food or shelter and the money disappears. My university did the same to incoming freshmen, resorting to "Quads" -- 18x12 rooms with shared bathrooms -- eight 18yos sharing one toilet, roughly 7' square each for bed, desk and drawers. If a private landlord allowed that kind of abuse, he'd be thrown in jail. Hell, I had better accommodations at university in rural Africa, including free high-speed internet, than I've seen at any U.S. school, certainly of the private variety that seem to be the most egregious lot. It's sickening. They act as if because the students are paying on credit, they're being gracious to provide anything short of what otherwise would barely meet Red Cross standards for a refugee camp.
It's akin to if you walked up to a Mercedes dealer with cash and drove away with a Mercedes for 10% under sticker, but if you walked up with a letter of credit, they'd charge you for Lamborghini and force you drive away in a slightly used 1984 Yugo... and then if you returned your Yugo a month later, they'd demand full payment for the Lamborghini anyway.
Students are already paying considerably more than the market rates for their rooms. If the universities can't cough up decent network services equivalent to what is commercially available, they simply need to outsource and stop crying. This "we just can't afford it" is bullshit.
h tm
If students can get ostensibly unlimited use of DSL for $50/month from the local telco, there is no reason the university cannot approximate that service even if that means having the local telco wire the buildings and offload the res.net from their domain and stop bitching about it entirely. Of course, outsourced services fall prey to the constant and overt mark-up rackets and micro-kingdom vanity that universities so irrationally cherish.
If you have 7,500 students signed-up for residential service and $50/month is extracted from each, thats $375,000 per month, far and beyond well enough for a 10G connection that would allow every single student a sustained 1Mb/s link with LOTS of breathing room. Say they only pay for eight months a year, that's still $3,000,000 or $250,000 per month. If they can't get enough bandwidth for less than a quarter million a month, whoever is in charge needs to be fired immediately. Ok, so in Florida's case, they pay for DHNet out of the rents. Fine. A single occupancy room costs $2675 per semester, or, about $643 per month in a city where studio apartments run more like $400/month. I would gander they could find fifty bucks a month in there somewhere or they could just explicitly charge for network services.
http://www.housing.ufl.edu/housing/GenInfo_Stats.
They simply have no excuse to brow beat students to protect their pathetic service levels when cheap commercial alternatives are available that could easily be integrated into university housing and when minimal access fees would pay for obscene amounts of bandwidth. So they dropped their usage by 85% by being draconian. Great, I could cut traffic on Los Angeles freeways by jack-knifing a tractor-trailer on at the I-405/10 interchange. Doesn't mean it solved the problem. It's a racket. Screw 'em.
Very few people will take a student seriously, unless you are working on a PhD - and even then good luck - who throws out numbers like $75-125/hour, certainly now.
This scenario sounds very much like a research grant and presenting it as such may be to your advantage. You should talk to your university faculty who have done this before. Presenting this as a consultant vendor-client, or employee-employer relationship does not sound like it is in your interest. Doing so may either sound insincere or lead to misunderstandings about responsibilities and ownership.
In a grant, you can expect to inflate a salary by 30%-40% to allow for administrative and facilities overhead. However, those inflations apply to organizations that actually have that overhead, so watch the credibility gap. If your effort on this project is 50% of your time and you could reasonably expect a $100,000 salary, don't expect to pull much more than $75/hour out of a grant in terms of labor costs. If you cannot reasonably expect a $100,000 salary, I think these inducements to demand $75/hr and more are, under the circumstances, a bit overly optimistic.
In total agreement, I've also seems that with the Barnes and Noble, brick and mortar edition, that came about contemporaneously with the internet, the dead tree vendors have either completely disappeared or become absolutely piss-poor, filled with nothing but massive stacks of fluff. On the other hand, the on-line versions of even the most sterile retail bookstores like B&N have available an enormous amount of new books in the relatively esoteric corners of specialized fields.
o rm ation
As for finding information online, it more often than not takes an informed researcher who knows the physical location of the appropriate repositories as well as the biases of those sources to dig up high-quality information over the net that may or may not even be possible to search for via any general search engine. I've seen far too many people, certainly first-year university students, who when asked for "research" to back up assumptions respond with nothing more than:
http://www.google.com/search?q=high+quality+inf
Librarians do a good job of debunking that idea, but sadly, post-Google, I don't think most people see, much less speak, to librarians even once a year anymore, much the way they don't think a securities analyst is of any use when they have E-Trade.
For that matter, the United States is more left-wing than France, since we spend in taxes FAR more per capita than France or Britain on health care and social insurance. There is a huge misconception that the United States does not have socialized medicine. We have the most well-funded social health system in the world. We also have the most backwards, ill-designed, ineffective system whereby the government forces providers to provide the most costly emergency services, yet allows them to deny less expensive preventive services, centralizes funding, then decentralizes distribution through the states, which then dole out to both public and private providers adding a beyond byzantine amount of administrative overhead and consumer confusion. Canadians and Britons pay far less in taxes, yet have universal coverage that is more effective and costs them far less.
Don't start harping about how they all die in the hallways -- that is FAR more of an American problem where over 40% of people get their medical service in the Emergency Room when the condition has become life-threatening, thus costing you the taxpayer tens to hundreds of times more than it should have and causing trauma centers to pile up with patients.
It has nothing to do with running "a nanny state" and everything to do with basic concepts of public health like preventing epidemics. Like it or not, it IS in YOUR interest to ensure that your seemingly unwashed, irresponsible neighbors have health care so they won't accidentally kill you when they sneeze.
No, the CATO institute would probably have a paper on the moral duty of the unemployed to increase downward pressure on wages and how the recently homeless have merely chosen to realize capital gains by selling their houses to pay for food. The Heritage Foundation would no doubt follow up with a paper on how eliminating the capital gains tax would then be in the best interest of the future homeless population. It's the compassionately conservative thing to do.