Good thing the current President has changed all that... (Note: First news link I saw when I Googled it. I'm sure there are plenty better ones out there.)
I think you could actually get some good people, for any position, by having them answer "Jay Walking" type questions, just to see how smart they are in general - even in unrelated topics.
Large companies used to just give general IQ tests to prospective employees with the idea that they were going to have to retrain them for 80% of the job they wanted them for anyway, so they really just wanted people who would learn fast and succeed because they were smart.
Then the government came in and said that was discrimination and made it illegal to give a test that wasn't directly related to job skills. So now companies use proxies for intelligence (level of schooling, GPA, etc...) for new hires and "job-related" tests that mostly just weed out morons with no experience....And it becomes even more about who you know, in order to get to the interview/test stage. I'd prefer the old way.
I don't know where the market for all these lower-paying jobs you're hypothesizing comes from.
You can't have it both ways. Either there is a market for lower-paying jobs and the government is accomplishing something by making it illegal, or else there isn't and the government's regulations on the matter are thus pointless.
It's not very logical to say that since the government has made something illegal, there wouldn't be a market for it if it was legal.
It's basic economics. (http://www.investopedia.com/university/economics/economics3.asp) If you increase the price of something (say, less skilled workers) beyond the market clearing price, you get oversupply. Oversupply is what is referred to as unemployment in labor markets.
See http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa106.html or a dozen other references you can google for how things like minimum wage and other employeer-employees regulations affect employment.
Three weeks of vacation, anti-firing laws, and other regulations that drive up the base cost of employing anyone, hurt those who need a job, but can't offer enough initial value to a potential employer to overcome the minimums they have to spend on them. That group is typically the young, the undereducated, and racial/cultural minorities.
The worst part is that those groups would spend some time doing entry-level stuff and learning how to be more valuable in their work through new skills, work habits, and knowledge, except the government makes it illegal to employ them at the entry-level rate they can profitably be employed.
The needy among us are the ones that suffer as they will work in any conditions for any money at all.
Precisely my point. You punish the young, the needy, and the discriminated against who would rather have a job so that they can eventually gain the experience and skills they need to get a better job and make enough to easily support themselves by imposing your preference that they have no job at all rather than one where they'd get less than 3 weeks vacation. (Or whatever the employment restriction de jour is.)
You sound like one of those people who condemn companies for paying only a dollar an hour in a third-world country where if they weren't paying a dollar an hour, the people they were paying would be starving on ten cents a day. Don't let your self-righteousness get in the way of people who want to improve their lives through honest labor.
I already pre-answered your objection about power disparity. I even mentioned one of the main causes of it, which you yourself agreed to, the government regulations that serve as a barrier to entry, limiting competition and assisting existing large companies in an industry.
In practice, government imposed requirements of minimum vacation time serve as a way to limit competition for jobs from the least skilled and knowledgeable in society. They're the ones who would take a job for less benefit if it was offered to them, because they can't get started in the workforce any other way.
It's the same reasons employee unions are in favor of minimum wage increases. It reduces competition for jobs by pricing some individuals out of the market.
Teaching typically requires 40 weeks of work. Crab fishing, some dangerous oil-derrick related jobs, summer firefighting, typically dangerous and seasonal jobs are the ones that only require about 12 weeks of work a year.
Those are the ones I had in mind when I made my statement. I'm sure there are more than that as well.
So where do you work? I'm a generalist that can handle (and has real experience in) systems, networking, databases, whatever needs doing, and would love to work for a company that values a technology generalist and does 100% telecommute rather than relocate somewhere. I currently have a job with a company that has lots of money (It's most redeeming quality in the current marketplace), but I'd be open to a much better working environment.
You suggest that your government telling you that you may not contract with an employer for a job for less than three weeks vacation, no matter how much you'd like to do so, makes you more free.
We suggest that when you are told that you aren't allowed to do something that is otherwise legitimate, you have less choice/less options and are thus less free.
In the US there are industries where most employees have 12 weeks vacation every year. There are even industries where the norm is 40 weeks of vacation a year. Sometimes it just depends on what you and your employer find mutually beneficial. That's been the basis of trade and wealth for thousands of years. win-win exchanges that leave both parties better off.
I suppose the question is, what if you preferred to have less than three weeks of vacation time in your job in exchange for some other benefit the company was willing to give you? (For example, if you got paid enough more that you could take two weeks instead and travel the world, while before you got paid enough to only travel locally for your three weeks. I'm sure you can think of other examples.) How are you more free if your government forces you not to make a contract that you'd prefer?
Can you imagine wanting something other than what the government has decided you must desire?
You may counter that the companies have all the power in the relationship, so you need the government to have the power and protect you instead. Generally, when the government and companies get together, it's not the employees and customers that win as a result. As long as there are plenty of competitors (the government hasn't set up one company as a monopoly nor over-regulated things to prevent competitors from joining the market), you are better off negotiating with several companies that can use your skills, because they have to compete for your labor. You are also entitled to start your own company if you think you can do it better. There's a reason we have so many small businesses in the US and there's a reason poor immigrants come here for opportunity and end up wealthy in less than a generation based solely on their hard work and smarts.
Do you mentally make any connection between being forced to give 3 weeks vacation minimum (increasing the cost of employees to employers) and a high unemployment rate among the less skilled? Economists do.
Do you think that someone who hasn't been in the work force and thus hasn't been able to learn valuable job skills and experience prefers to be unemployable rather than accept lower wages, lower benefits, and lower vacation time than someone available with more experience? What is moral about the majority telling them that they must stay unemployed and backing it up with force? Why do you think foreigners and young people in that situation in France riot? Is it because they are happy with the laws that keep them unemployable?
Why should the most needy among us be punished for your preference for three weeks vacation? Can't you just negotiate that (and a corresponding pay cut) with a prospective employer instead of forcing the rest of us to bow down to your preference by using the political process and governmental force?
Sure, if you ask most people if they want more vacation for free (no trade-offs), they'll agree that they'd like that. In the real world there's no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch and to get that result someone sacrifices something else.
Now how can I get a cake college teaching job where someone who is supposed to know all about information systems can't find stuff like this in the two seconds with google it took me? I suppose they just don't pay enough for employees...
But if you order a Penutbutter and Jelly sandwitch and ask for the Jelly to be held you do not normally get a discount for the missing product.
Yeah, but the sandwich also doesn't come with a license agreement that says that if you don't accept the agreement, you aren't allowed to eat the jelly part of the sandwich and instructs you that you should return the jelly to the seller for a refund.
Hopefully you see that your analogy doesn't exactly match what's going on here...
Step one for a bad windows infection is to boot from something other than the infected drive, generally from a cd with all the tools you need.
Saves a lot of time fighting things in memory, with the added bonus that you don't have to rely on what an infected windows says is on the hard drive.
I would never try to manually clean a system these days, there is no way to guarantee you found everything, and there are too many 'stealth' viruses out there that infect small numbers of computers in an attempt to fly under the AV companies radar, and with the viruses that sit and harvest bank details, the risk is just too great.
These days I would always advise to backup your data, wipe, and re-install. It's the only way to be sure.
By that logic, its as possible you have a 'stealth' virus on your computer right this second as you are to have one at the time you are removing something louder. Are you currently in the process of doing a backup, wipe, and reinstall to be sure? Do you do one daily, just to be sure?
Maybe you should consider finding some tools that compare what's on your drive to what windows thinks is on your drive, rather than throwing up your hands and giving up?
I've run the same windows system with just OS upgrades (95-2000-XP Pro), no fresh installs, for about 12 years now. That's around 6-7 MB/CPU/Ram/HD/Video hardware upgrade cycles, since I always build my own and tend to upgrade pieces most of the time. I still have the original Win 95 install files in a sub-directory on my hard drive.
I'm currently running a dual-core with 2 GB of ram and a RAID 1/0 hard drive config (4 drives), so maybe that's it (although hardly unusual in today's market), but my computer seems much faster to me than any other computer I've worked on in the last few years, even brand-new computers with "fresh" installs.
I have 200+ applications installed, many of which are old enough that I'd never find the install media again, if I ever did a fresh install (packed away in some box somewhere, I suppose, since I've moved 4 times in the last 12 years).
Of course, I've also never bought into the idea that the only way to clean up an infected windows box is to reinstall everything from scratch. It takes me about 30 minutes of work to clean up the worst infected windows computer I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot). That's 30 minutes of work for me and about a day or so of work for the computer. Saves the end user a ton of work reinstalling everything, though.
I mean, I know that windows can be stupidly convoluted sometimes compared to unix, but it seems like the "fresh install of windows solves everything" crowd tends to be people who just don't understand what's going on under the hood enough to actually solve the problem they've run into.
1. Install script in end user's browser using drive-by download on site you get them to access, emailed javascript, etc... multitude of ways. 2. Wait for end user to accomplish steps 1-3a for you, which he will the next time he checks his mail. 3. Installed script passes whatever you want back to you since it now has secured access to your secure site. (???? step) 4. Profit $10K!
The phone call method of security is useless if you can just wait for the end user to legitimately accomplish it for you when they think they're doing it for themselves.
It's amazing how people who think we should do nothing to fight global warming because it would cost too much are the same who propose spending as much or more to save companies that are among the causes of global warming.
Maybe I'm confused by your statement, but in the U.S. it's the auto unions and their friends the Democrats who want to "save" the car companies and the environmentalists and their friends the Democrats who also want to destroy industry to "save" us from CO2 and Global Warming. Granted I mostly hang around a bunch of libertarian Republicans (hang around being defined as get exposed primarily to their random political comments as opposed to other groups), but it sure seems that those who oppose the "stimulus" and who oppose the bailouts also oppose Cap and Trade, CO2 treaties, etc...
So for the record, I don't believe that we should spend anything on limiting CO2 emissions and I also don't believe the government should spend anything to save companies, including the auto industry.
Homosexuals in California already have the exact same legal ability to take advantage of all the above based on state law that non-homosexuals do. The actual argument here is whether they get to call it "marriage" or not. That's it. The whole thing is over one group wanting to redefine a word and another group wanting to keep the old definition. There are no other legal implications in state law.
The last Oracle licenses I purchased cost $1.5 million and the clustered hardware we ran it on cost less than $100K. I know Oracle has lowered some of their pricing since then, but I think they could still afford a 10% or less "discount" and cover hardware for people.
Using your numbers, Oracle licenses of $2.5 million and hardware of $250K is still only 10%. They'll give you that just to make their end-of-quarter sales quotas.
On those $1.5 million Oracle licenses, the "list" was at least 25% higher than what we actually paid, so it's not like they aren't discounting in other ways already.
Remember that the marginal license costs to Oracle aren't very high, so they can afford to offer huge discounts. Offering them in the form of hardware instead of costs-off doesn't really matter to them, but will sound good to a lot of buyers.
Why wouldn't Oracle just throw in the hardware with the costs of the license?
Hardware is so cheap and the licenses so expensive that you'd think the sales guy will be on the golf course with the CEO saying, "Tell you what, you buy the unlimited user license for your website for four processors and we'll have our guys build the servers, install the software (really just a drive image) and deliver it ready to go to your datacenter, all for free."
Total of 25 Win XP Pro laptops, everything else on the desktop is Ubuntu 8.04, all internally managed servers (web, database, proxy, filtering, authentication, file server, etc...) are FreeBSD 7, network devices are a mixed bag of brands, and Google Apps handles email, chat, document sharing, etc...
When something needs to be done on all the desktops, you run a script from a FreeBSD box to log into them all at once and take care of it automatically.
I don't personally, but some people use the USB port on their router to connect a PC to it, so they've been coming that way for years.
I think a more useful feature on this model would be to use a USB port to connect an external USB storage enclosure and turn it into a NAS as a bonus. With a Linux OS, that'd be pretty easy to configure.
It's because their not your children. They're not the government's children. They're not the teacher's children. They're not the BBC's children. They don't belong to "society".
It's the children's parents that have the primary responsibility and authority to ensure that their children are taught and to decide what they are taught and how they are taught.
Hence, if a parent makes a decision as to what their children should learn, the rest of the system that those parents pay for should support their decision, not decide "we're the experts and we know more than you so we're going to decide for you".
Of course, as the UK falls more and more into socialism and the mommy-daddy state, eventually the government schools will manage to brainwash enough of the kids with the idea that they should just do whatever the government tells them that they'll raise their own kids that way.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're saying is that other game company's AIs should be like the AI in Galactic Civilizations?
Good thing the current President has changed all that...
(Note: First news link I saw when I Googled it. I'm sure there are plenty better ones out there.)
Guess what? Someone still pays for your emergency services and health care.
That someone may even in part be you, even in the UK.
Or do you seriously think that everyone involved works for free and the equipment is all donated by the makers?
Large companies used to just give general IQ tests to prospective employees with the idea that they were going to have to retrain them for 80% of the job they wanted them for anyway, so they really just wanted people who would learn fast and succeed because they were smart.
Then the government came in and said that was discrimination and made it illegal to give a test that wasn't directly related to job skills. So now companies use proxies for intelligence (level of schooling, GPA, etc...) for new hires and "job-related" tests that mostly just weed out morons with no experience. ...And it becomes even more about who you know, in order to get to the interview/test stage. I'd prefer the old way.
You can't have it both ways. Either there is a market for lower-paying jobs and the government is accomplishing something by making it illegal, or else there isn't and the government's regulations on the matter are thus pointless.
It's not very logical to say that since the government has made something illegal, there wouldn't be a market for it if it was legal.
It's basic economics. (http://www.investopedia.com/university/economics/economics3.asp) If you increase the price of something (say, less skilled workers) beyond the market clearing price, you get oversupply. Oversupply is what is referred to as unemployment in labor markets.
See http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa106.html or a dozen other references you can google for how things like minimum wage and other employeer-employees regulations affect employment.
If you want statistics, see:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/07/13/europes_new_lost_generation
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-07/24/content_11762331.htm
Three weeks of vacation, anti-firing laws, and other regulations that drive up the base cost of employing anyone, hurt those who need a job, but can't offer enough initial value to a potential employer to overcome the minimums they have to spend on them. That group is typically the young, the undereducated, and racial/cultural minorities.
The worst part is that those groups would spend some time doing entry-level stuff and learning how to be more valuable in their work through new skills, work habits, and knowledge, except the government makes it illegal to employ them at the entry-level rate they can profitably be employed.
An entry level job is better than no job at all.
Precisely my point. You punish the young, the needy, and the discriminated against who would rather have a job so that they can eventually gain the experience and skills they need to get a better job and make enough to easily support themselves by imposing your preference that they have no job at all rather than one where they'd get less than 3 weeks vacation. (Or whatever the employment restriction de jour is.)
You sound like one of those people who condemn companies for paying only a dollar an hour in a third-world country where if they weren't paying a dollar an hour, the people they were paying would be starving on ten cents a day. Don't let your self-righteousness get in the way of people who want to improve their lives through honest labor.
I already pre-answered your objection about power disparity. I even mentioned one of the main causes of it, which you yourself agreed to, the government regulations that serve as a barrier to entry, limiting competition and assisting existing large companies in an industry.
In practice, government imposed requirements of minimum vacation time serve as a way to limit competition for jobs from the least skilled and knowledgeable in society. They're the ones who would take a job for less benefit if it was offered to them, because they can't get started in the workforce any other way.
It's the same reasons employee unions are in favor of minimum wage increases. It reduces competition for jobs by pricing some individuals out of the market.
Teaching typically requires 40 weeks of work. Crab fishing, some dangerous oil-derrick related jobs, summer firefighting, typically dangerous and seasonal jobs are the ones that only require about 12 weeks of work a year.
Those are the ones I had in mind when I made my statement. I'm sure there are more than that as well.
So where do you work? I'm a generalist that can handle (and has real experience in) systems, networking, databases, whatever needs doing, and would love to work for a company that values a technology generalist and does 100% telecommute rather than relocate somewhere. I currently have a job with a company that has lots of money (It's most redeeming quality in the current marketplace), but I'd be open to a much better working environment.
There is a different understanding of freedom.
You suggest that your government telling you that you may not contract with an employer for a job for less than three weeks vacation, no matter how much you'd like to do so, makes you more free.
We suggest that when you are told that you aren't allowed to do something that is otherwise legitimate, you have less choice/less options and are thus less free.
In the US there are industries where most employees have 12 weeks vacation every year. There are even industries where the norm is 40 weeks of vacation a year. Sometimes it just depends on what you and your employer find mutually beneficial. That's been the basis of trade and wealth for thousands of years. win-win exchanges that leave both parties better off.
I suppose the question is, what if you preferred to have less than three weeks of vacation time in your job in exchange for some other benefit the company was willing to give you? (For example, if you got paid enough more that you could take two weeks instead and travel the world, while before you got paid enough to only travel locally for your three weeks. I'm sure you can think of other examples.) How are you more free if your government forces you not to make a contract that you'd prefer?
Can you imagine wanting something other than what the government has decided you must desire?
You may counter that the companies have all the power in the relationship, so you need the government to have the power and protect you instead. Generally, when the government and companies get together, it's not the employees and customers that win as a result. As long as there are plenty of competitors (the government hasn't set up one company as a monopoly nor over-regulated things to prevent competitors from joining the market), you are better off negotiating with several companies that can use your skills, because they have to compete for your labor. You are also entitled to start your own company if you think you can do it better. There's a reason we have so many small businesses in the US and there's a reason poor immigrants come here for opportunity and end up wealthy in less than a generation based solely on their hard work and smarts.
Do you mentally make any connection between being forced to give 3 weeks vacation minimum (increasing the cost of employees to employers) and a high unemployment rate among the less skilled? Economists do.
Do you think that someone who hasn't been in the work force and thus hasn't been able to learn valuable job skills and experience prefers to be unemployable rather than accept lower wages, lower benefits, and lower vacation time than someone available with more experience? What is moral about the majority telling them that they must stay unemployed and backing it up with force? Why do you think foreigners and young people in that situation in France riot? Is it because they are happy with the laws that keep them unemployable?
Why should the most needy among us be punished for your preference for three weeks vacation? Can't you just negotiate that (and a corresponding pay cut) with a prospective employer instead of forcing the rest of us to bow down to your preference by using the political process and governmental force?
Sure, if you ask most people if they want more vacation for free (no trade-offs), they'll agree that they'd like that. In the real world there's no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch and to get that result someone sacrifices something else.
Here's your whole job done already:
MIT OpenCourseWare - Intro to Computer Science
If you need some more advanced concepts:
Full Course list
Now how can I get a cake college teaching job where someone who is supposed to know all about information systems can't find stuff like this in the two seconds with google it took me? I suppose they just don't pay enough for employees...
Yeah, but the sandwich also doesn't come with a license agreement that says that if you don't accept the agreement, you aren't allowed to eat the jelly part of the sandwich and instructs you that you should return the jelly to the seller for a refund.
Hopefully you see that your analogy doesn't exactly match what's going on here...
Step one for a bad windows infection is to boot from something other than the infected drive, generally from a cd with all the tools you need.
Saves a lot of time fighting things in memory, with the added bonus that you don't have to rely on what an infected windows says is on the hard drive.
By that logic, its as possible you have a 'stealth' virus on your computer right this second as you are to have one at the time you are removing something louder. Are you currently in the process of doing a backup, wipe, and reinstall to be sure? Do you do one daily, just to be sure?
Maybe you should consider finding some tools that compare what's on your drive to what windows thinks is on your drive, rather than throwing up your hands and giving up?
Argh, should've been 95-98-2000-XP Pro.
I guess I'm just dumb, then.
I've run the same windows system with just OS upgrades (95-2000-XP Pro), no fresh installs, for about 12 years now. That's around 6-7 MB/CPU/Ram/HD/Video hardware upgrade cycles, since I always build my own and tend to upgrade pieces most of the time. I still have the original Win 95 install files in a sub-directory on my hard drive.
I'm currently running a dual-core with 2 GB of ram and a RAID 1/0 hard drive config (4 drives), so maybe that's it (although hardly unusual in today's market), but my computer seems much faster to me than any other computer I've worked on in the last few years, even brand-new computers with "fresh" installs.
I have 200+ applications installed, many of which are old enough that I'd never find the install media again, if I ever did a fresh install (packed away in some box somewhere, I suppose, since I've moved 4 times in the last 12 years).
Of course, I've also never bought into the idea that the only way to clean up an infected windows box is to reinstall everything from scratch. It takes me about 30 minutes of work to clean up the worst infected windows computer I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot). That's 30 minutes of work for me and about a day or so of work for the computer. Saves the end user a ton of work reinstalling everything, though.
I mean, I know that windows can be stupidly convoluted sometimes compared to unix, but it seems like the "fresh install of windows solves everything" crowd tends to be people who just don't understand what's going on under the hood enough to actually solve the problem they've run into.
1. Install script in end user's browser using drive-by download on site you get them to access, emailed javascript, etc... multitude of ways.
2. Wait for end user to accomplish steps 1-3a for you, which he will the next time he checks his mail.
3. Installed script passes whatever you want back to you since it now has secured access to your secure site. (???? step)
4. Profit $10K!
The phone call method of security is useless if you can just wait for the end user to legitimately accomplish it for you when they think they're doing it for themselves.
Maybe I'm confused by your statement, but in the U.S. it's the auto unions and their friends the Democrats who want to "save" the car companies and the environmentalists and their friends the Democrats who also want to destroy industry to "save" us from CO2 and Global Warming. Granted I mostly hang around a bunch of libertarian Republicans (hang around being defined as get exposed primarily to their random political comments as opposed to other groups), but it sure seems that those who oppose the "stimulus" and who oppose the bailouts also oppose Cap and Trade, CO2 treaties, etc...
So for the record, I don't believe that we should spend anything on limiting CO2 emissions and I also don't believe the government should spend anything to save companies, including the auto industry.
There is a major flaw in your argument.
Homosexuals in California already have the exact same legal ability to take advantage of all the above based on state law that non-homosexuals do. The actual argument here is whether they get to call it "marriage" or not. That's it. The whole thing is over one group wanting to redefine a word and another group wanting to keep the old definition. There are no other legal implications in state law.
Google, because then your students and teachers can use Google Apps instead of whatever they're using now to submit and share documents.
The last Oracle licenses I purchased cost $1.5 million and the clustered hardware we ran it on cost less than $100K. I know Oracle has lowered some of their pricing since then, but I think they could still afford a 10% or less "discount" and cover hardware for people.
Using your numbers, Oracle licenses of $2.5 million and hardware of $250K is still only 10%. They'll give you that just to make their end-of-quarter sales quotas.
On those $1.5 million Oracle licenses, the "list" was at least 25% higher than what we actually paid, so it's not like they aren't discounting in other ways already.
Remember that the marginal license costs to Oracle aren't very high, so they can afford to offer huge discounts. Offering them in the form of hardware instead of costs-off doesn't really matter to them, but will sound good to a lot of buyers.
Why wouldn't Oracle just throw in the hardware with the costs of the license?
Hardware is so cheap and the licenses so expensive that you'd think the sales guy will be on the golf course with the CEO saying, "Tell you what, you buy the unlimited user license for your website for four processors and we'll have our guys build the servers, install the software (really just a drive image) and deliver it ready to go to your datacenter, all for free."
1:1400 ratio.
Total of 25 Win XP Pro laptops, everything else on the desktop is Ubuntu 8.04, all internally managed servers (web, database, proxy, filtering, authentication, file server, etc...) are FreeBSD 7, network devices are a mixed bag of brands, and Google Apps handles email, chat, document sharing, etc...
When something needs to be done on all the desktops, you run a script from a FreeBSD box to log into them all at once and take care of it automatically.
Saves a lot of time that way.
I don't personally, but some people use the USB port on their router to connect a PC to it, so they've been coming that way for years.
I think a more useful feature on this model would be to use a USB port to connect an external USB storage enclosure and turn it into a NAS as a bonus. With a Linux OS, that'd be pretty easy to configure.
It's because their not your children. They're not the government's children. They're not the teacher's children. They're not the BBC's children. They don't belong to "society".
It's the children's parents that have the primary responsibility and authority to ensure that their children are taught and to decide what they are taught and how they are taught.
Hence, if a parent makes a decision as to what their children should learn, the rest of the system that those parents pay for should support their decision, not decide "we're the experts and we know more than you so we're going to decide for you".
Of course, as the UK falls more and more into socialism and the mommy-daddy state, eventually the government schools will manage to brainwash enough of the kids with the idea that they should just do whatever the government tells them that they'll raise their own kids that way.