I probably should be posting as an AC here, but who knows, you may want to follow up with emails.
What to do when you're worked into the ground without so much as a thank-you?
Some background first: My wife got her MBA, while working full-time, in a 2-year
program. During her last year, she was not only working (for a company whose name I can never divulge), but asked to fly all over the globe (Asia, Latin America) in her role, and was putting in weekends -- time she should have been using for the degree. (She still managed to graduate with honors, by the way.)
Her management team was so fraught with cronyism, however, and so dictatorial that she could never get past their bullying. She never did crack the glass ceiling there, even after trying every strategy in the book to succeed, including writing up new business plans. The plans were in fact implemented, but she never received credit for them.
Instead, her manager told her that the object of employment at this company was to do your job, take orders, and retire. (Nice place, huh?)
It got worse: During a celebratory lunch for her group, her skip-level manager never even acknowledged that she received her MBA from a top-flight B-school. He instead chose to heap accolades on a colleague (who, incidentally, was and is a lazy sack of shit).
She's scarred to this day. She has a new job, and it's pretty nice, but she's still wondering what she really wants to do with her life. Can you blame her?
The moral of the story: No matter how hard you try, there are some management teams that will, for whatever reason, ignore or denigrate you. If you find yourself in such a position, you do two things:
Learn the craft of networking, and network your ass off. That's how you find the next gig and stay in the game. Make sure this happens long before the shit hits etc. etc.
Run, don't walk, when the next gig comes along. Be sure to leave on good terms, but bolt nonetheless. Take care of yourself first!!!
Know that you tried, and don't take anything personally. It's not your fault that you wound up working with thankless sociopaths, especially if you've gone above and beyond the call.
Hope this helps. Good luck with whatever decision you make..
It is hard because I really don't want to make people feel uncomfortable but at the same time I have no idea why it should make anyone feel uncomfortable.
Allow me to enlighten you.
First off, I'm very glad that you've had a positive experience, on the whole, with your faith. Some of us however are not so lucky.
I consider myself a "recovering Catholic". I was born into the faith, baptized, etc. etc. and so forth, but never once did I feel as if I belonged. From my earliest years, Christianity equated emotionally with ostracism. I didn't help of course that the dogma of the Church was being regarded as more important than the teachings (a trend that has no end in sight, even if Pope Benedict keels over next week). I consider myself to have been on the receiving end of a lot of intolerance and inflexibility.
When my then-fiancée and I were meeting with a Unitarian minister to conduct our service, we received the industry-standard counseling. I had no reason to sit in that office and start shaking, but I did. Religious authority figures rattled me that much. It shocked the poor guy, to be honest.
To be honest, though, I had it easy.
The current crowd my wife and I hang out with has in its ranks a lot of very disaffected people from far worse environments. We have gays and lesbians in our congregation, for example, who were chastised as sinners before their whole Southern Baptist congregation just before being disowned by their folks. Not fun.
In conclusion, while I think it's unfair that all Christians get tarred by the same broad brush, the tarring that has happened has affected people very profoundly. So yeah, there are some of us who try to be extremely tolerant, yet still get aggravated by discussions of "my faith" in public. Sorry dude, but you're striking nerves; that's just not acceptable in some situtations, like the workplace.
It doesn't seem to make much sense to me to have Linux take over the entire box.
OS X is very stable, even if it's most common variant isn't server grade, and easier to administer. Paying Apple's hardware premium just to run Linux natively seems a tad screwy.
I'm far more stoked about getting Virtual PC or VMWare for OS X/Intel. If I need Linux, then a penguin-powered virtual machine can be a client for OS X's X11 server. (May as well let the prettier GUI do all of the graphical heavy lifting, no?) The performance hit would be bearable on a Core Duo (one core for OS X, one for the VM), so long as disk access isn't somehow hobbled (e.g. the files used as "drives" in Virtual PC).
Could someone explain to me what the advantages of booting Linux natively again would be here?
I am so very tired of US politicians hiding behind "the children". Doesn't matter to me if it's Hillary cracking down on video games or Dubya/Gonzalez raising a stink about search engines. I want the nanny state to die a horrible, painful, and decisive death.
Most of you here on/. who are parents understand what I mean. Yes, society does have an obligation to its most vulnerable and impressionable citizens, and it's in everyone's interest to have them become happy and productive adults. And oh yeah, water is wet.
But much of this ends at the parents' doorstep.
I'm seriously entertaining becoming a parent soon myself, and I promise all of you that I will not insist that the rest of society does my job, which by the way I'm volunteering for.
You know you're a Bush sycophant when you try to drag Bill Clinton -- who has been a private citizen for a few days short of five years -- into the flame war.
Did Clinton abuse the executive in similar ways? Maybe. But to his credit, he was never as bald-faced or as free-wheeling about presidential fiat as his successor.
PATRIOT, "extraordinary rendition", the deadly fiasco in Iraq, the WMDs.. shall I go on?
Look past the partisan bickering for once.
We're looking more and more like China, the world's largest Red State, every day: fewer rights for the individual, a wider gap between rich and poor, and a docile populace that values economic security (or, more accurately, the ability to consume) over real freedom. You would see that this is where America is heading, if you were paying attention.
Bitch about the ACLU's leanings if you want, but give them credit for standing up for your freedom from random surveillance.
I do remember the dark days of '97 when Apple was practically begging to be bought out by Sun. Fortunately, then-CEO Michael Spindler faded away shortly afterward.
The business models of both companies were wildly different, and to some extent still are. But now, I wonder if AAPL should snatch up SUNW for a song.
Apple wants to be a server company too, but can't quite crack the market, even though they have solid server hardware and a decent server OS. The only thing keeping Sun afloat today is their user base as a server manufacturer. So far, sounds like a match. And Sun shareholders would get a more refined CEO in the bargain once McNealy bolted.
The biggest challenge though, is probably insurmountable, and that's product line integration. Sun may be gasping, but Solaris still has a strong presence out there. I can't imagine a forced migration to OS X Server would please sysadmins, even if they get to keep their SPARC-based servers. Which server hardware and OS would "Snapple" sell? Would SPARC and Solaris be end-of-life'd in such a scenario?
So.. I'm not sure. If Sun is in serious trouble, Apple might have a case for rescuing a captive market. But ithe size of Sun's customer base would have to justify the hurdles involved in integrating the acquisition.
What I really want to know is how other Intel-based OSes fare in emulation or virtualization on this puppy.
I see VirtualPC going away, unless MSFT can add significant value to a new version other than "it interprets
the Intel instruction set real fast.. fast as molasses in Minneapolis on a not-so-cold day".
Hmm. Bochs and plex86 might actually be useful on this thing. And I wonder if the good folks at VMWare have scented this opportunity yet.
Actually, being married to a "geek girl" is rather nice.
Both of us can talk about our jobs, and not spend two hours explaining terms to each other like "kernel trap", "TCP syn-ack handshake", "spanning tree protocol", or "auto-boxing".
Both of us can look at trends in the marketplace, and make recommendations for each other's careers. (She went for her MBA, and I followed suit one year later.)
Both of us can decide what each of us want to do with our lives, and know the other will have a valuable opinion. And both of us can discuss those social issues with each other, and try to work through them together.
Having common interests outside The Job helps, of course, but when you find a geek girl, you usually find an intelligent, opinionated individual who forces you to work through life's issues as you would any engineering issue: with creativity, wit, and determination.
This may be off-topic, but I do have to ask this: Who on earth listens to this idiot?
I've read some of her stuff, and heard her speak on C-SPAN, and I have to admit that I have no idea what this person is trying to say.
It's not as if I just listened to Buckminster Fuller, who both amazed and bamboozled his audiences with his vision. Instead, I walk away from Ms. Paglia thinking that somehow, someone got her Ph.D. in sociology without being able to construct a single grammatically correct English sentence.
Her stunted syntax belies a confused mind. Her lectures are incoherent, pointless rambles, and I'm convinced she's incapable of articulating anything remotely cogent.
So what's all the fuss about her anyway? So she discusses sex and gender roles a lot -- big deal. I can buy other authors' books on these subjects by the metric ton, and most if not all of these will have discernable points. I can't say the same about poor dear Camille.
An itch for 50's music? Hah, try to find that on the radio.
Sad but true.. WCBS in New York, the premiere oldies station, recently changed its format to be more "competitive" (read: homogenized).
But you do know there's hope even without Sirius: Check out "Eight Track Flashback" on WNCU in Durham, North Carolina (yes, they have Internet streaming available) on Saturdays from 1pm to 4pm Eastern US time.
It's not as convenient as Sirius, granted, and probably not as clear; I think WNCU only has a 64 kbps feed. But it is still The Shit nonetheless.
I have the iPod in the car, public radio for news (NPR/BBC), and excellent streaming audio from KEXP , WFMU, WNCU, and KCRW. (And there's always WCPE when I need my classical fix.)
And I never subscribed to satellite radio.
This "commercial radio" of which you speak.. what was it again? And why should I have cared?
Well, duh: As a consumer, I want better products and service (from Sony, or Philips, or Magnavox, or..).
As a Sony (or Philips, or Magnavox, or..) shareholder, I would want happy customers.
In lieu of a real benefit, we'll motivate ourselves based on pretend benefits and wishes.
Ummm, no, you're still not quite getting it. The idea behind punitive damage awards is to (surprise!) punish the defendant, not necessarily to reward the plaintiff. I want Sony to pay not because I'll get some (painfully meager) settlement, but because I don't want them trying to pull this stunt, or any other truly bone-headed maneuver like it, ever ever again.
If they lose $100 million from their next income statement as a direct result, maybe they'll learn.
Um, because regardless of any direct benefit any consumers receive, a corporation will learn that unethical, anti-consumer behavior is frowned upon by the very people it claims to serve?
I've been thinking: it's no secret that the blue states subsidize the red states with tax dollars. Save for a few exceptions (PA and TX I think), the pattern of net cash flow is rather stark. And AK has to be one of the biggest recipients of Federal aid per capita, and one of the lowest contributors.
Why don't we just revoke its statehood and sell it to the Chinese?
Think about it. If you're the kind of person who thinks government should be run like a business, then this state, as a business unit, is a chronic money-loser. Even if it managed by some miracle to achieve positive cash flow, it would be well below the federal government's cost of capital. So why not do what the Russians did in 1867, and just sell it off as a way to pay down the national debt? Unlike West Virginia or Mississippi, Alaska has actual resale value.
Alternatively, we could use the Alaska Territory as collateral for all of those Treasury bonds that the Chinese are buying up. Either we pay off the national debt, or we adopt a flag with only 49 stars.
..after her hard drive crashed and crashed hard. (Really sucked. Two years of class notes vanished. Granted, she was done with the degree, but still..)
Once she knew I had another Office for Mac license, we picked up an iBook the day after we verified the extent of the damage. Never looked back.
But: it wasn't because of the iPod. It's because nobody says "But I have to resurrect my Dell!"
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, you do three things. And nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
I probably should be posting as an AC here, but who knows, you may want to follow up with emails. What to do when you're worked into the ground without so much as a thank-you?
Some background first: My wife got her MBA, while working full-time, in a 2-year program. During her last year, she was not only working (for a company whose name I can never divulge), but asked to fly all over the globe (Asia, Latin America) in her role, and was putting in weekends -- time she should have been using for the degree. (She still managed to graduate with honors, by the way.)
Her management team was so fraught with cronyism, however, and so dictatorial that she could never get past their bullying. She never did crack the glass ceiling there, even after trying every strategy in the book to succeed, including writing up new business plans. The plans were in fact implemented, but she never received credit for them.
Instead, her manager told her that the object of employment at this company was to do your job, take orders, and retire. (Nice place, huh?)
It got worse: During a celebratory lunch for her group, her skip-level manager never even acknowledged that she received her MBA from a top-flight B-school. He instead chose to heap accolades on a colleague (who, incidentally, was and is a lazy sack of shit).
She's scarred to this day. She has a new job, and it's pretty nice, but she's still wondering what she really wants to do with her life. Can you blame her?
The moral of the story: No matter how hard you try, there are some management teams that will, for whatever reason, ignore or denigrate you. If you find yourself in such a position, you do two things:
Hope this helps. Good luck with whatever decision you make..
It is hard because I really don't want to make people feel uncomfortable but at the same time I have no idea why it should make anyone feel uncomfortable.
Allow me to enlighten you.
First off, I'm very glad that you've had a positive experience, on the whole, with your faith. Some of us however are not so lucky.
I consider myself a "recovering Catholic". I was born into the faith, baptized, etc. etc. and so forth, but never once did I feel as if I belonged. From my earliest years, Christianity equated emotionally with ostracism. I didn't help of course that the dogma of the Church was being regarded as more important than the teachings (a trend that has no end in sight, even if Pope Benedict keels over next week). I consider myself to have been on the receiving end of a lot of intolerance and inflexibility.
When my then-fiancée and I were meeting with a Unitarian minister to conduct our service, we received the industry-standard counseling. I had no reason to sit in that office and start shaking, but I did. Religious authority figures rattled me that much. It shocked the poor guy, to be honest.
To be honest, though, I had it easy.
The current crowd my wife and I hang out with has in its ranks a lot of very disaffected people from far worse environments. We have gays and lesbians in our congregation, for example, who were chastised as sinners before their whole Southern Baptist congregation just before being disowned by their folks. Not fun.
In conclusion, while I think it's unfair that all Christians get tarred by the same broad brush, the tarring that has happened has affected people very profoundly. So yeah, there are some of us who try to be extremely tolerant, yet still get aggravated by discussions of "my faith" in public. Sorry dude, but you're striking nerves; that's just not acceptable in some situtations, like the workplace.
It doesn't seem to make much sense to me to have Linux take over the entire box.
OS X is very stable, even if it's most common variant isn't server grade, and easier to administer. Paying Apple's hardware premium just to run Linux natively seems a tad screwy.
I'm far more stoked about getting Virtual PC or VMWare for OS X/Intel. If I need Linux, then a penguin-powered virtual machine can be a client for OS X's X11 server. (May as well let the prettier GUI do all of the graphical heavy lifting, no?) The performance hit would be bearable on a Core Duo (one core for OS X, one for the VM), so long as disk access isn't somehow hobbled (e.g. the files used as "drives" in Virtual PC).
Could someone explain to me what the advantages of booting Linux natively again would be here?
I hear you loud and clear.
I am so very tired of US politicians hiding behind "the children". Doesn't matter to me if it's Hillary cracking down on video games or Dubya/Gonzalez raising a stink about search engines. I want the nanny state to die a horrible, painful, and decisive death.
Most of you here on /. who are parents understand what I mean. Yes, society does have an obligation to its most vulnerable and impressionable citizens, and it's in everyone's interest to have them become happy and productive adults. And oh yeah, water is wet.
But much of this ends at the parents' doorstep.
I'm seriously entertaining becoming a parent soon myself, and I promise all of you that I will not insist that the rest of society does my job, which by the way I'm volunteering for.
Now I ask a question to all Americans: do you actually feel any safer?
No.
One American asked, about 299,999,999 to go.
Sigh. We seem to have a troll lurking here.
You know you're a Bush sycophant when you try to drag Bill Clinton -- who has been a private citizen for a few days short of five years -- into the flame war.
Did Clinton abuse the executive in similar ways? Maybe. But to his credit, he was never as bald-faced or as free-wheeling about presidential fiat as his successor.
PATRIOT, "extraordinary rendition", the deadly fiasco in Iraq, the WMDs.. shall I go on?
Look past the partisan bickering for once.
We're looking more and more like China, the world's largest Red State, every day: fewer rights for the individual, a wider gap between rich and poor, and a docile populace that values economic security (or, more accurately, the ability to consume) over real freedom. You would see that this is where America is heading, if you were paying attention.
Bitch about the ACLU's leanings if you want, but give them credit for standing up for your freedom from random surveillance.
I know this is fiction, but I can imagine our current crop of neo-cons wishing for this. And not being careful about what they're wishing for.
Why am I thinking of pigoons ?
I do remember the dark days of '97 when Apple was practically begging to be bought out by Sun. Fortunately, then-CEO Michael Spindler faded away shortly afterward.
The business models of both companies were wildly different, and to some extent still are. But now, I wonder if AAPL should snatch up SUNW for a song.
Apple wants to be a server company too, but can't quite crack the market, even though they have solid server hardware and a decent server OS. The only thing keeping Sun afloat today is their user base as a server manufacturer. So far, sounds like a match. And Sun shareholders would get a more refined CEO in the bargain once McNealy bolted.
The biggest challenge though, is probably insurmountable, and that's product line integration. Sun may be gasping, but Solaris still has a strong presence out there. I can't imagine a forced migration to OS X Server would please sysadmins, even if they get to keep their SPARC-based servers. Which server hardware and OS would "Snapple" sell? Would SPARC and Solaris be end-of-life'd in such a scenario?
So.. I'm not sure. If Sun is in serious trouble, Apple might have a case for rescuing a captive market. But ithe size of Sun's customer base would have to justify the hurdles involved in integrating the acquisition.
What I really want to know is how other Intel-based OSes fare in emulation or virtualization on this puppy.
I see VirtualPC going away, unless MSFT can add significant value to a new version other than "it interprets the Intel instruction set real fast.. fast as molasses in Minneapolis on a not-so-cold day".
Hmm. Bochs and plex86 might actually be useful on this thing. And I wonder if the good folks at VMWare have scented this opportunity yet.
Said it before, now saying it again:
Unemployment is down, the economy is booming, we haven't had a terrorist attack...
So, you'd prefer to live here ?
If you think this place is "falling apart" by all means leave and tell me what you see elsewhere.
I don't even need to leave my chair to do that....
Actually, being married to a "geek girl" is rather nice.
Both of us can talk about our jobs, and not spend two hours explaining terms to each other like "kernel trap", "TCP syn-ack handshake", "spanning tree protocol", or "auto-boxing".
Both of us can look at trends in the marketplace, and make recommendations for each other's careers. (She went for her MBA, and I followed suit one year later.)
Both of us can decide what each of us want to do with our lives, and know the other will have a valuable opinion.
And both of us can discuss those social issues with each other, and try to work through them together.
Having common interests outside The Job helps, of course, but when you find a geek girl, you usually find an intelligent, opinionated individual who forces you to work through life's issues as you would any engineering issue: with creativity, wit, and determination.
My $.02, YMMV...
Well, you've basically described everyone who has a Ph.D. in sociology.
[rimshot]
Dang, that was fast.
But can anyone answer my original question?
I've read some of her stuff, and heard her speak on C-SPAN, and I have to admit that I have no idea what this person is trying to say.
It's not as if I just listened to Buckminster Fuller, who both amazed and bamboozled his audiences with his vision. Instead, I walk away from Ms. Paglia thinking that somehow, someone got her Ph.D. in sociology without being able to construct a single grammatically correct English sentence.
Her stunted syntax belies a confused mind. Her lectures are incoherent, pointless rambles, and I'm convinced she's incapable of articulating anything remotely cogent.
So what's all the fuss about her anyway? So she discusses sex and gender roles a lot -- big deal. I can buy other authors' books on these subjects by the metric ton, and most if not all of these will have discernable points. I can't say the same about poor dear Camille.
Could someone explain this?
Maybe you just need more domain levels. Anyone for steppedon.bananaslug.barefoot.eu ?
Sad but true.. WCBS in New York, the premiere oldies station, recently changed its format to be more "competitive" (read: homogenized).
But you do know there's hope even without Sirius: Check out "Eight Track Flashback" on WNCU in Durham, North Carolina (yes, they have Internet streaming available) on Saturdays from 1pm to 4pm Eastern US time.
It's not as convenient as Sirius, granted, and probably not as clear; I think WNCU only has a 64 kbps feed. But it is still The Shit nonetheless.
I have the iPod in the car, public radio for news (NPR/BBC), and excellent streaming audio from KEXP , WFMU, WNCU, and KCRW. (And there's always WCPE when I need my classical fix.)
And I never subscribed to satellite radio.
This "commercial radio" of which you speak.. what was it again? And why should I have cared?
Why do you care what they learn?
Well, duh: As a consumer, I want better products and service (from Sony, or Philips, or Magnavox, or..). As a Sony (or Philips, or Magnavox, or..) shareholder, I would want happy customers.
In lieu of a real benefit, we'll motivate ourselves based on pretend benefits and wishes.
Ummm, no, you're still not quite getting it. The idea behind punitive damage awards is to (surprise!) punish the defendant, not necessarily to reward the plaintiff. I want Sony to pay not because I'll get some (painfully meager) settlement, but because I don't want them trying to pull this stunt, or any other truly bone-headed maneuver like it, ever ever again.
If they lose $100 million from their next income statement as a direct result, maybe they'll learn.
Um, because regardless of any direct benefit any consumers receive, a corporation will learn that unethical, anti-consumer behavior is frowned upon by the very people it claims to serve?
At their bottom line, where it hurts the most?
I've been thinking: it's no secret that the blue states subsidize the red states with tax dollars. Save for a few exceptions (PA and TX I think), the pattern of net cash flow is rather stark. And AK has to be one of the biggest recipients of Federal aid per capita, and one of the lowest contributors.
Why don't we just revoke its statehood and sell it to the Chinese?
Think about it. If you're the kind of person who thinks government should be run like a business, then this state, as a business unit, is a chronic money-loser. Even if it managed by some miracle to achieve positive cash flow, it would be well below the federal government's cost of capital. So why not do what the Russians did in 1867, and just sell it off as a way to pay down the national debt? Unlike West Virginia or Mississippi, Alaska has actual resale value.
Alternatively, we could use the Alaska Territory as collateral for all of those Treasury bonds that the Chinese are buying up. Either we pay off the national debt, or we adopt a flag with only 49 stars.
(ducks)
All the FSF has to do is to declare war on France, and sign the armistice 30 minutes later..
Will the episode be sponsored by a producer of hot coffee?
Once she knew I had another Office for Mac license, we picked up an iBook the day after we verified the extent of the damage. Never looked back.
But: it wasn't because of the iPod. It's because nobody says "But I have to resurrect my Dell!"