"We have what they call "managed services"" which is a lot like "outsourcing", except the work stays in the country. Managed services are quite common, and you are working for the service provider... who does the paycheck come from, and who sends you the W2 form? Does the service provider withold taxes and social security or does HP?
So HP has contracted out some of their work to Agency X to manage... usually the lowest bidder wins for managed services, and in a poor job market like Boise, the pay rates can suck.
Managed services aren't the same thing as what I described - I work all over the place on fairly short-term projects that need my skills. Whoever finds me the job, wherever it may be, is my employer du jour.
Various companies have tried to slide out of witholding taxes and paying the employers share of unemployment and social security by classifying people as "independent contractors" when they were not truly independent. That's what nailed MSFT - they had supposedly independent contractors who had no independence. The IRS rules for "independent contractors" don't apply to the usual managed services setup because your witholding and social security tax is being taken care of by the service company.
I've been a (mostly) contract worker since the mid-1980s, mostly as a tech writer, mostly for high-tech companies. Although I've been in and out of a few companies several times I have never mistaken my treatment for that of a permanent employee. I'm a hired hand, not family.
I get a higher hourly wage than permanent employees doing the same work.
I can use the extra puy to get benefits from the contracting agency... and they can be pretty good.
I can leave early, because I'm paid by the hour, not with a weekly salary.
I don't have to play office politics: I just do what they hired me to do and watch managers come and go. In one term at ChipZilla I belonged to three departments while working on one project.
If I work more than 40 hours a week, I get OVERTIME... salaried permanent employees don't.
I don't have to get or give performance reviews. If they don't ask me back, I obviously screwed up somewhere.
"Does the employer have control over where you work, what time you work and what you work with?" Yes, because letting contractors choose to work in Puerto Vallarta when the project is in Boston is a bit awkward. You have to keep the same hours as the rest of the team, and if they hired you for Project Orlando you can't decide unilaterally to work on Project Ottowa instead.
"Miller said she was employed by HP in Boise from 1989 to 1995, when she took a severance package and left the company. She returned later in 1995 as a contract worker and worked at HP until March 9. Part of the time she was a contract employee through Veritest and Manpower Professional. Her jobs included testing software for HP printers.""
Something about this sounds wierd. Every employer I know of has had a strict time limit on length of contract: ChipZilla's is one year, with a minumum of 6 months off the payroll before you can be recontracted. A series of contracts doesn't equal a permanent employment.
The USA, and most countries that have the English law as their basis. You can't act like something's OK, then turn around and sue over it... a common example is a landlord who lets a tenant have a dog for several months, sees the dog on several occasions, then tries to evict them for violating the "no pets" clause of the lease.
"Now, my employer is trying to lay claim to this software and has filed at least one patent on it that I know of. They have also distributed it but refuse to make the source public. They claim that because of my IP agreement, they have full rights to this source code."
Your IP agreement is NOT binding on anyone but you. That means that those parts of the software you brought in that were from GPL code are STILL GPL code and the persons who are patenting and refusing to provide source are violating the copyrights of those authors by not using the code according to the license.
Point out to them that infringing copyrights is an expensive blunder, and that they do NOT want to tangle with IBM over the code from the IBM Developer's site. IBM plays rough, and they have a very experienced bunch of lawyers on staff for just these occasions.
Can you identify those parts of the code that are GPL and notify your company's legal department that they are risking financial disaster by failing to observe the GPL? They are into the willful infringement section of the law because you have informed them that the code has been copyrighted by others.
Then... the moral decision. I personally would contact the authors of the code and let them know their work has been infringed, and that the code is being distributed. I would also make sure I had another job lined up, and stash copies of the evidence of the violations in a safe spot.
"may have been intentionally leaked onto file-sharing networks"
Great, if true, because they can't prosecute anyone for doing what they themselves did. It's "equitable estoppel"... A type of estoppel that bars a person from adopting a position in court that contradicts his or her past statements or actions when that contradictory stance would be unfair to another person who relied on the original position. For example, if a landlord agrees to allow a tenant to pay the rent ten days late for six months, it would be unfair to allow the landlord to bring a court action in the fourth month to evict the tenant for being a week late with the rent. The landlord would be estopped from asserting his right to evict the tenant for late payment of rent. Also known as estoppel in pais.
"but we do live in a world where if you pick up a catalog to order things, there's a price for 1-25, a price for 25-50 and a price for 100+, the more you buy the cheeper you get what you want."
Yes, discounts for quantity happen, and are legal... but what if the owners of Catalog "A" charged you more for your 100 widgets than they charged me for the 100 I bought, just because you also bought widgets from Catalog "B". That is not only unfair pricing, it is an attack on "B".
Japan has no problem with the quantity discounts, but they are justifiably annoyed that Intel appears to have two prices for the same quantity of chips - one for Intel-only customers and one for customers who also buy AMD chips.
"more high tech flim-flammery for diseases that should have been prevented"
Where did they mention "diseases that should have been prevented"? They could be talking about surgery for broken bones, gall stones, appendectomies, or whatever... you leapt to the conclusion that it would be a "lifestyle" disease.
""After a patient has been hospitalized for a surgical intervention, he usually wants to return to his normal life. But doctors would like to monitor him to be sure that the operation was successful. How can they manage this without being too intrusive?"
Even if they only go to a convalescent care center, the faster they get out of the hospital and into a place that is more like a home envoronment, the better for all concerned. Hospitals are no place to try to rest and recover from anything (and I speak as an ex-Med Tech).
Being able to monitor blood pressure, temp and pulse, perhaps with a "store and send" technology, would be a big step, because the firsat sign of a complicating infection is usually shown when one or more of the three goes off the patient's usual pattern.
"Now, if they were blocking MS Office Updates for people running MS Office on WINE -- then we'd have a story."
And that's what they are doing. The WINE people aren't complaining about not being able to get the Windows up-dates. But if I can't get an update for the MSFT Office 2003 that I purchased at FULL RETAIL because I'm running it under WINE and not WINDOWS, that's not only annoying, it's illegal. "Tying"... requiring the purchase of "A" in order to get "B" is illegal.
If I get one of those "you must do this and resend the email" when I send a legitimate email, I delete the email and forget about communicating with that person. It's not worth it. I do not want to encourage the spread of challenge/response email filtering.
If an ISP can't be bothered to set up a decent virus and spam filter, and relies on bouncing EVERYTHING back to the sender to check for signs of life, it creates two problems for the rest of us:
All the spam sent with my address forged in the FROM field comes back to me to be validated.
All the viruese sent with my address forged in the FROM field comes back to me to be validated.
I'm doing the ISPs filtering for them - all they do is an automatic bounce for anything that is not whitelisted.
Inevitably, the new software will require new versions of something it relies on, like MSIE or ActiveX... and those will refuse to run unless the OS is upgraded... and the OS will require newer hardware.
So a $19 upgrade to Quicken can end up forcing the purchase of a $1000 new computer... and some of your other software will have problems running in it so it needs to be upgraded too.
"allow you to pay your bills online like Quicken does what alternative do users have?"
My credit union has a FREE bill-paying service on their website. Of course, CUs aren't beholden to stockholders and a Board of directorsd to make a profit - they prefer working for the good of their members and making enough profit to pay staff and interest.
"'People don't want lots and lots of single purpose devices...." Does his billness mean like a stupid little thing that can only download and play music? Oh... wait, that's an iPod.
It's such a PITA to find networking HW and SW that aren't going to be obsolete with the next release of whatever OS that it's CHEAPER to schlep a CD over to the stereo instead of buying one of these streaming thingies and all the gadgets that make it work.
"So, the question is: How are the monkeys able to see who is dominant and who is not?" It's easy, they watch the other monkey
Body language: the way other monkeys react to them, the way they move, whether they stare at the camera. Staring, in primates, is an act of aggression... so only dominant males are free to stare at any monkey they please.
Appearance: Dominant males tend to have thicker, glossier coats, longer fur, and look "sleeker" for lack of a better word.
"Fundamentally, what you have is a set of products. Each makes some money (varying levels of margins), each helps to sell the others. This includes the whole realm of Mac products, as iPods help sell computers help sell computers help sell iPods. And the whole set of items in turns helps sell branches of accessories."
Like Barbie... between the dolls, the outfits, the houses, cars, and pets, Mattel has a gold mine!
At least King Gillette only sued other manufacturers for infringement, not the people who bought 3rd party blades to use in his razors.
Apple's iPod and ITunes is just more vendor lock-in, and it's time for the consumers to stop "consuming" until they can use the hardware of their choice to play the music of their choice.
"Since this is a kitchen, the display and input devices should be appropriate for a kitchen environment, i.e. resistant to dust and moisture."
And what is the difference between a kitchen and a hospital lab? Nothing. And labs have tons of computer equipment.
The environment in a kitchen is nothing special... use a cheap keyboard and an optical mouse (the trackball gums up) on a low-end computer. Adding a TV card so they can watch TV is probably not a good idea. Unless the best location for the TV is also OK for the monitor, two displays would be better.
Don't forget a printer for the recipes... stick it in a pullout drawer to keep it clean
I do NOT wait to hear of a specific opening - I want a fresh resume to be in the agency database when a job requisition is sent to the recruiter. Agencies look at their database first, so they can impress the client with how fast they can find talent. They only advertise the openings if they can't send over as many interviewees as the client requests.
I use a spreadsheet with the following columns:
Company name
Contact name
e-mail address
Phone number
Fax number
Physical address
Resume sent (checkmark)
Followup made (checkmark)
Interviews (lots of room for comments)
When I need work, usually as a contract is nearing its end, I pull up the previous spreadsheet and doublecheck the information against the current phone book. I update my resume to reflect the last job and the new skills I have acquired. Then I send the first round of resumes to the existing list, with a note that I'm back in the job market.
Then I hit the online job listings, the yellow pages, and the local paper, checking to see if any new placement firms are in business and to get an idea of how strong the local market is. If I spot any new agencies, they get a resume too. If I spot the perfect job, I send a resume specifically for that - although it's not as successful a tactic as sending a resume to the agencies, I have occasionally been lucky.
A few days after the resumes are sent, I start calling (phone) agencies for a followup, to chat up the recruiters.
I track all the contacts on the spreadsheet, and keep track of the interviews and resume submissions too. It's the kiss of death around here if your resume is submitted by two different agencies, so I make sure it doesn't happen.
How well does it work? I've been almost steadily employed since the mid-80s with this approach, and usually have another contract lined up before the first one ends.
"A lot of the 'scientific' evidence that supports the "vaccination == immunisation" myth gives wonderful stats that show disease rates dropping dramatically at approx the same time as vaccination was introduced, but completely ignores other data, like the general improvement of public hygeine, the introduction of running water, the recognition that things like washing hands and sterilising surgical instruments are good."
There are food and water-borne diseases, like typhoid and cholera that water and sewer treatment can prevent. There are vector-borne diseases like typhus that vector control can help prevent. You will note that vaccines for these are seldom administered. (except to researchers, and persons travelling to areas where the sanitation systems are not adequate.
A second category are the diseases with a large reservoir in the animal world, from which it spreads to humans: malaria (birds), yellow fever (monkeys), bubonic plague (rodents). Only yellow fever vaccine is routinely given, in areas where the disease is a hazard, and it is extremely effective, to the extent that unvaccinated jungle tourists get yellow fever while their vaccinated guides do not. An effective malaria vaccine has eluded researchers for decades, and the bubonic plague vaccine is really painful and provides limited protection (it's better than nothing in an epidemic).
Then there are the diseases that spread human to human, via airborne or direct contact, like smallpox, diptheria and measles. Just look at the sudden, DRAMATIC decrease in measles deaths and severe disabilities, in the USA, immediately after the introduction of the vaccine in the 1960s. Were we lacking running water before then? Did we suddenly realize that aseptic surgery was a good idea? Nope! The only significant change in the society was the administration of the vaccine.
Culturing them is the easy part. It means they figured out how to squirt live cells through the tiny aperture onto the substrate without rupturing them and killing them.
""Our calculations show that, with further improvements in efficiency, combining infrared and visible photovoltaics could allow up to 30 per cent of the sun's radiant energy to be harnessed, compared to six per cent in today's best plastic solar cells.""
Nice. AFAIR, the break-even point for silicon cells was only about 10% - it was not attainable at the time. If it's cheaper to make and install than the standard cells, getting just a 10-12% conversion would put it into the realm of practical as a source of renewable energy.
From the grsecurity page: "my personal gripe is that for 3 weeks not a single acknowledgement arrived in my mailbox, i don't think that's the way the chief developers are supposed to handle security issues (however small or irrelevant they may have been in this case - it takes a one liner to tell us so)."
So... rather than ask on the mailing list who is the best person for security submissions relating to whatever bug he found, he emails the top dude (during Christmas holidays no less) and then whines when no answer is forthcoming within his preferred timeline. Gimme a break!
As a total noob, I went to kernel,org and found this on the first page:
Please see http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/reportin g-bugs.html if you want to report a Linux kernel bug.
http://www.tux.org/lkml/#ss5 explains why XX doesn't answer emails - too fricking busy is the usual reason.
If I were concerned about publishing the bug, I would have asked ON THE LKML LIST for who would be the best person to submit security-related bug and patch to for the XX module.
Slashdot Mirror
So HP has contracted out some of their work to Agency X to manage ... usually the lowest bidder wins for managed services, and in a poor job market like Boise, the pay rates can suck.
Managed services aren't the same thing as what I described - I work all over the place on fairly short-term projects that need my skills. Whoever finds me the job, wherever it may be, is my employer du jour.
Various companies have tried to slide out of witholding taxes and paying the employers share of unemployment and social security by classifying people as "independent contractors" when they were not truly independent. That's what nailed MSFT - they had supposedly independent contractors who had no independence. The IRS rules for "independent contractors" don't apply to the usual managed services setup because your witholding and social security tax is being taken care of by the service company.
"Miller said she was employed by HP in Boise from 1989 to 1995, when she took a severance package and left the company. She returned later in 1995 as a contract worker and worked at HP until March 9. Part of the time she was a contract employee through Veritest and Manpower Professional. Her jobs included testing software for HP printers.""
Something about this sounds wierd. Every employer I know of has had a strict time limit on length of contract: ChipZilla's is one year, with a minumum of 6 months off the payroll before you can be recontracted. A series of contracts doesn't equal a permanent employment.
Check out Baen Boooks, at , and take the link to the free library. Putting books on line has helped Baen's sales, not hurt them. Every time thety put a new book on line in the free librasry, sales of that author's books increas - even sales of the book that is available for free.
Baen put a CD into a hardcover book with all the rest of the books in that series on it. Sales increased.
The USA, and most countries that have the English law as their basis. You can't act like something's OK, then turn around and sue over it ... a common example is a landlord who lets a tenant have a dog for several months, sees the dog on several occasions, then tries to evict them for violating the "no pets" clause of the lease.
"Now, my employer is trying to lay claim to this software and has filed at least one patent on it that I know of. They have also distributed it but refuse to make the source public. They claim that because of my IP agreement, they have full rights to this source code."
Your IP agreement is NOT binding on anyone but you. That means that those parts of the software you brought in that were from GPL code are STILL GPL code and the persons who are patenting and refusing to provide source are violating the copyrights of those authors by not using the code according to the license.
Point out to them that infringing copyrights is an expensive blunder, and that they do NOT want to tangle with IBM over the code from the IBM Developer's site. IBM plays rough, and they have a very experienced bunch of lawyers on staff for just these occasions.
Can you identify those parts of the code that are GPL and notify your company's legal department that they are risking financial disaster by failing to observe the GPL? They are into the willful infringement section of the law because you have informed them that the code has been copyrighted by others.
Then ... the moral decision. I personally would contact the authors of the code and let them know their work has been infringed, and that the code is being distributed. I would also make sure I had another job lined up, and stash copies of the evidence of the violations in a safe spot.
Great, if true, because they can't prosecute anyone for doing what they themselves did. It's "equitable estoppel" ... A type of estoppel that bars a person from adopting a position in court that contradicts his or her past statements or actions when that contradictory stance would be unfair to another person who relied on the original position. For example, if a landlord agrees to allow a tenant to pay the rent ten days late for six months, it would be unfair to allow the landlord to bring a court action in the fourth month to evict the tenant for being a week late with the rent. The landlord would be estopped from asserting his right to evict the tenant for late payment of rent. Also known as estoppel in pais.
Yes, discounts for quantity happen, and are legal ... but what if the owners of Catalog "A" charged you more for your 100 widgets than they charged me for the 100 I bought, just because you also bought widgets from Catalog "B". That is not only unfair pricing, it is an attack on "B".
Japan has no problem with the quantity discounts, but they are justifiably annoyed that Intel appears to have two prices for the same quantity of chips - one for Intel-only customers and one for customers who also buy AMD chips.
Where did they mention "diseases that should have been prevented"? They could be talking about surgery for broken bones, gall stones, appendectomies, or whatever ... you leapt to the conclusion that it would be a "lifestyle" disease.
Even if they only go to a convalescent care center, the faster they get out of the hospital and into a place that is more like a home envoronment, the better for all concerned. Hospitals are no place to try to rest and recover from anything (and I speak as an ex-Med Tech).
Being able to monitor blood pressure, temp and pulse, perhaps with a "store and send" technology, would be a big step, because the firsat sign of a complicating infection is usually shown when one or more of the three goes off the patient's usual pattern.
And that's what they are doing. The WINE people aren't complaining about not being able to get the Windows up-dates. But if I can't get an update for the MSFT Office 2003 that I purchased at FULL RETAIL because I'm running it under WINE and not WINDOWS, that's not only annoying, it's illegal. "Tying" ... requiring the purchase of "A" in order to get "B" is illegal.
Have you considered that there may be designated "leakers" and it's all part of a PR campaign?
If an ISP can't be bothered to set up a decent virus and spam filter, and relies on bouncing EVERYTHING back to the sender to check for signs of life, it creates two problems for the rest of us:
- All the spam sent with my address forged in the FROM field comes back to me to be validated.
- All the viruese sent with my address forged in the FROM field comes back to me to be validated.
I'm doing the ISPs filtering for them - all they do is an automatic bounce for anything that is not whitelisted.So a $19 upgrade to Quicken can end up forcing the purchase of a $1000 new computer ... and some of your other software will have problems running in it so it needs to be upgraded too.
My credit union has a FREE bill-paying service on their website. Of course, CUs aren't beholden to stockholders and a Board of directorsd to make a profit - they prefer working for the good of their members and making enough profit to pay staff and interest.
It's such a PITA to find networking HW and SW that aren't going to be obsolete with the next release of whatever OS that it's CHEAPER to schlep a CD over to the stereo instead of buying one of these streaming thingies and all the gadgets that make it work.
Body language: the way other monkeys react to them, the way they move, whether they stare at the camera. Staring, in primates, is an act of aggression ... so only dominant males are free to stare at any monkey they please.
Appearance: Dominant males tend to have thicker, glossier coats, longer fur, and look "sleeker" for lack of a better word.
Like Barbie ... between the dolls, the outfits, the houses, cars, and pets, Mattel has a gold mine!
Apple's iPod and ITunes is just more vendor lock-in, and it's time for the consumers to stop "consuming" until they can use the hardware of their choice to play the music of their choice.
And what is the difference between a kitchen and a hospital lab? Nothing. And labs have tons of computer equipment.
The environment in a kitchen is nothing special ... use a cheap keyboard and an optical mouse (the trackball gums up) on a low-end computer. Adding a TV card so they can watch TV is probably not a good idea. Unless the best location for the TV is also OK for the monitor, two displays would be better.
Don't forget a printer for the recipes ... stick it in a pullout drawer to keep it clean
I use a spreadsheet with the following columns:
Company name
Contact name
e-mail address
Phone number
Fax number
Physical address
Resume sent (checkmark)
Followup made (checkmark)
Interviews (lots of room for comments)
When I need work, usually as a contract is nearing its end, I pull up the previous spreadsheet and doublecheck the information against the current phone book. I update my resume to reflect the last job and the new skills I have acquired. Then I send the first round of resumes to the existing list, with a note that I'm back in the job market.
Then I hit the online job listings, the yellow pages, and the local paper, checking to see if any new placement firms are in business and to get an idea of how strong the local market is. If I spot any new agencies, they get a resume too. If I spot the perfect job, I send a resume specifically for that - although it's not as successful a tactic as sending a resume to the agencies, I have occasionally been lucky.
A few days after the resumes are sent, I start calling (phone) agencies for a followup, to chat up the recruiters.
I track all the contacts on the spreadsheet, and keep track of the interviews and resume submissions too. It's the kiss of death around here if your resume is submitted by two different agencies, so I make sure it doesn't happen.
How well does it work? I've been almost steadily employed since the mid-80s with this approach, and usually have another contract lined up before the first one ends.
There are food and water-borne diseases, like typhoid and cholera that water and sewer treatment can prevent. There are vector-borne diseases like typhus that vector control can help prevent. You will note that vaccines for these are seldom administered. (except to researchers, and persons travelling to areas where the sanitation systems are not adequate.
A second category are the diseases with a large reservoir in the animal world, from which it spreads to humans: malaria (birds), yellow fever (monkeys), bubonic plague (rodents). Only yellow fever vaccine is routinely given, in areas where the disease is a hazard, and it is extremely effective, to the extent that unvaccinated jungle tourists get yellow fever while their vaccinated guides do not. An effective malaria vaccine has eluded researchers for decades, and the bubonic plague vaccine is really painful and provides limited protection (it's better than nothing in an epidemic).
Then there are the diseases that spread human to human, via airborne or direct contact, like smallpox, diptheria and measles. Just look at the sudden, DRAMATIC decrease in measles deaths and severe disabilities, in the USA, immediately after the introduction of the vaccine in the 1960s. Were we lacking running water before then? Did we suddenly realize that aseptic surgery was a good idea? Nope! The only significant change in the society was the administration of the vaccine.
Culturing them is the easy part. It means they figured out how to squirt live cells through the tiny aperture onto the substrate without rupturing them and killing them.
I suggest you learn to write, then try again.
Nice. AFAIR, the break-even point for silicon cells was only about 10% - it was not attainable at the time. If it's cheaper to make and install than the standard cells, getting just a 10-12% conversion would put it into the realm of practical as a source of renewable energy.
So ... rather than ask on the mailing list who is the best person for security submissions relating to whatever bug he found, he emails the top dude (during Christmas holidays no less) and then whines when no answer is forthcoming within his preferred timeline. Gimme a break!
As a total noob, I went to kernel,org and found this on the first page:n g-bugs.html if you want to report a Linux kernel bug.
Please see http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/reporti
http://www.tux.org/lkml/#ss5 explains why XX doesn't answer emails - too fricking busy is the usual reason.
If I were concerned about publishing the bug, I would have asked ON THE LKML LIST for who would be the best person to submit security-related bug and patch to for the XX module.