>>>2. Tech companies haven't been above screwing employees. People get let go a couple weeks before their options come due, often for fabricated reasons. H1-B visas get rammed through Congress to drive down IT salaries. Imagine if the Big Three automakers tried to import tens of thousands of foreign workers and then pay them substandard wages!! It can only happen in IT.
>>>This sounds racist to me. If other people are willing to do your job for less, and they're just as capable as you, why shouldn't they get the job? Because their skin is a different colour?
No. That's wrong. I used to work for SeraNova. We built web sites. The company was run by a guy from India. The parent company is called Intelligroup. The CEO and his friends would bring in a bunch of developers from India. Sure they worked cheaper. But if one of them did ASP dev, he sure didn't do C++, or PERL, or even Visual C++. After they laid off of most of the IT and programming departments (me included), because the company was losing money, our little part of the company started losing money and clients as fast as the rest. Why? Because all these kids they brought in from India were paper Unix, or paper MCSE, or paper whatever you java people are, had no experience with anything, are completely unwilling to work on or learn about anything not directly related to their specialty, and don't seem to have much imagination at all.
Please, shut up. I'm not being racist. I'm telling you about the people that came to Provo Utah, from India, and couldn't cut the mustard.
The few guys that are left over from the old company have to work harder. The kids who used to just do HTML had to learn java, unix, etc, to get everything done themselves. I'm sure Cliff and Nick exaggerate, but not by too much. The "Unix Specialist" they hired knows telnet, knows IRC, knows how to chat, and that's it. They had to outsource their actual hosting and management of Solaris machines to a guy that used to work there (he made a little hosting company just for them).
So. Not racist. Just PISSED. We had a fun, profitable, working little company going, and Intelligroup/SeraNova fscked everything up. With cheap imported labor. Happily, that includes themselves.
It isn't/. that is hammering Sega. Every news source I subscribe to that covers games, consoles, or electronics is on the same bandwagon.
/. is only here to give you a link to news other sites have posted, maybe a little more eyeballs for something that would be otherwise obscure, and more importantly to give you one place to look for geek-news. Oh, and a place to sound off about it.
>>ex: states that have the death pentalty in the US have violent crime rates that easily dwarf the violent crime rates in states without it
erhm, that is assuming cause and effect that noone can prove. For all we know it is effect and cause (ie perhaps the people from that area are more disposed towards violence... this comes out in their crimes and their laws). Any numbers stating certainty which is cause and which is effect are generated by people with an agenda.
If you really wanted to prove which was cause and which was effect, you'd have to go back in time and watch the history of the area very carefully. And not just generally, but individually as well.
Accept that what we're doing now isn't working, and let's see if we can't do something about it. But assuming that capitol punishment is causing a higher rate of violent crimes is silly at best.
I worked with a guy that had root account access. Naturally, his job required it.
Imagine my fear when he told me what he and several coworkers did at a previous job:
They had some sort of *nix machines for their personal development boxes. They set up root cron jobs that would wipe the hd at like 9am monday morning. So if they weren't there to disable it... WOOOM!
Happily, he left the company on a good note... he was doing some contracting work for one of our clients and they offered him a position as manager of their brand new datacenter. We let him go, and I was thrilled that it was on a positive note.
But I cannot even begin to tell you how carefully I searched for backdoors, bombs, etc. Didn't find any, but I was really scared for a while.
I worked for a company called Network Publishing. NetPub was purchased by Intelligroup. Intelligroup spun NetPub and other bits of the company off into a full service web publishing company, or something, called SeraNova.
The guy running SeraNova, and in fact many of the top people, were from India. Raj Kineru. Spelling is incorrect, but I'll be honest: I hate the guy. Hate him.
Raj had some odd prejudice against folks from USA... or maybe whites, or maybe just anyone who isn't from India. He would hire people with basic certifications to do jobs they didn't have experience to do. A lot. But because they were from India, they must be just as good as Americans. Right?
One of his problems is that he wanted people to work cheap. Ok, I can see that. Except, the people from India that actually knew how to do the stuff (Java, Javascript, PERL, C++, etc, depending on the app), would have wanted just as much money to do it as us greedy Americans. So he hired these people that had a cert in just one thing, and knew nothing else, and had NO experience in what they were supposed to be doing, and they were useless in any kind of cross-technological application.
Anyway, my point is, it seems like the folks from India that I've dealt with have a real hangup on knowing one technology, and anything outside their specialty is not their responsibility, and in fact not something they want to get involved in at all.
Meanwhile, most of the folks that I've known in this industry have jumped from specialty to specialty, looking for something they like, or something new, or just because there wasn't anyone else to do it, and so even the guys in marketing tend to have some experience with different programming and systems technology, enough that when you tell them they are insane, their idea can't be done, and explain basically why, they can understand. That doesn't stop them from trying to sell it to customers, but at least they know they are lying;)
If my limited experience were to hold true, then maybe this guy doesn't know any better... he doesn't know anything about Sytem administration, firewalls, tcp ports, anything. And so if they say they can do it, perhaps he believes them. And, if HE says they can do it, to his boss, then his boss will know that it is true.
It is truly strange to me, how people in another country can think in what are, to me, such totally alien ways.
He seemed to be implying that he had to say no if I asked, but that he wouldn't do anything about it if I HADN'T asked. But that sort of goes against the other stuff I heard, so I don't know what to say about that.
I asked Simon R. Green for permission to use his "Deathstalker" novels as a basis for a clan or whatever the hell they were called on UO.
His reply was that he couldn't give permission because it would mean he was actually giving me permission for far more than just the clan. Apparently it would mean I could do whatever I wanted (or at least a great deal) with the characters/etc, and his lawyers said that it could cost him if he tried to make a game out of it later.
Also, I've heard that if a company doesn't go after you for a license breach, then they are actally decreasing the value of their claims against other potential breaches in court.
...read him like you would read Gibson. Gibson doesn't know his technology that well. In fact, most of the time, he glosses right over it.
The story in every Gibson book has essentially been: what happens when you inject paticular individuals into one potential evolutionary track of society/technology, and then let Murphy go nuts all over them.
Gibson never ever says that he believes it will go that way, or that everything will happen the way he envisions it in his books. He just says: "this is one way I think things could go... given that technology continues to advance at a predictable rate, and that someone overcomes many of the limitations we have now, and that noone reroutes the evolution of corporations and society."
That's how I read Katz. "This is something to think about, here's what happens when I compare these movies with this paticular thought foremost in my mind... I wonder if..."
He's looking at these movies with the filter of a paticular concept in mind. This of course colors the way he views these movies. But if YOU can only look at a paticular concept (movie) in one way, then you're limiting your own vision.
If I may digress still further, it is the same reason that religious people read the bible more than once: when you read a paticular passage with a paticular mindset, that passage could have entirely different meaning to you than it did last time.
I hope someone gets my point. I have a difficult time explaining myself at times.
Uhm... I'm not sure how to do this without actually plugging the company I'm working for.
But, you are aware that there are companies with technology in place that allow for secure, automated, enforceable online transactions?
http://www.ilumin.com is where I've worked the past couple weeks. I don't know enough about the technology yet (I just provide servers and workstations for the developers), but this enforceable stuff is what we need to make this sort of thing secure, right?
I find it so fascinating that so many people think Bush is an idiot.
From his web site: "He received a bachelor's degree from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He served as an F-102 pilot for the Texas Air National Guard."
Obviously he used political connections to do all of that.
we've had two choices, TCI/AT&T, and Provo Cable, all along. Of course, it was never really a choice for many people. because Provo Cable sucks a$$.
But now the city fathers have signed a contract where they're putting fibre to every house in town. This will be for alternate phone, cable, internet, etc. I'm not certain that this is something that the taxpayers money should be spent on, and it'll take several years to get done, but damn the taxpayers, full speed ahead! Oh, the bandwidth!
I rather imagine that noone noticed it, as opposed to "keeping it operational on a heavily secured and monitored network for over a year without detection".
If a program doesn't show up in top, doesn't take up disk space, doesn't cause my system to crash, and doesn't take up enough bandwidth to notice, I'm not interested in whether the users are running it, most of the time.
Of course, we always have a good firewall in place, which resolves some of the simpler concerns.
However, your mention of inadvertent security leaks does make me think, so thanks for that. The company I work for deal with some fairly severly important financial info for our clients. Or will, or something. Leaks of that nature could be a bad thing.
>>> it's unreasonable to expect 100% quality before release
Are you insane, or just stupid? Why is it unreasonable to expect 100% quality before release?!
It is unreasonable to expect a software package to do everything YOU want it to, sure. But it is NOT unreasonable to expect everything to work as advertised.
Big fan of William Gibson. One of the things I enjoy about his work is this:
He doesn't seem to be an expert on any technology, nor on human behavior. But if his books were to have a purpose beyond entertainment, it would seem to be one of suggesting a way that things could happen. One way that the technology could IMPACT society, and vice versa.
Maybe Katz is trying to hang with that theory. Maybe Katz is just looking to get to you to think about how you're going to protect your technology and your rights and stuff.
Last night, I was watching Raw is War. I love wrestling. I really do. I have been impressed by the effort that the WWF has gone to, encouraging people to get out and vote.
Vince MacMahon came out to the ring last night, despite the "danger" that Stone Cold Steve Austin would assault him (they have "history), to make an impassioned plea that we vote.
He pointed out that all the PACs and special interest groups and unions and suchlike that vote in a block for one candidate or the other essentially cancel each other out, and that Average American, the WWF fan, was going to decide who the next president would be. He ALMOST convinced me to go out today and vote. It was a good speech.
Then I remembered that I believe it doesn't matter who wins... it doesn't matter which laws are passed... we're all fucked anyway, so who cares?
Still, Seagis made me think that maybe I should go vote anyway.
Then I remembered that I'm more than just a geek: I'm an uber-lazy geek.
So, I've admitted it. I don't think voting matters enough to overcome my laziness.
Who says the rest of them are honest about it? They all same the same exact things: "All my opponents are divisive, but I'm a peacemaker and will solve all of it." They quote statistics that favor their position or hurt their opponent, ignoring the statistics that punch holes in their position, and they say what they think will get the most people to vote for them.
I figure it isn't an insult to your intelligence, or mine. It is an attempt to get the vote of the people who might be... misinformed, let's say... enough to believe something he says.
Politicians figure (rightly) that those in the latter category extensively outnumber those of us who have taught ourselves how to think, and that we are going to see through their smokescreens... but we won't have anyone else to vote for anyway.
They aren't insulting us. They consider us a powerless statistical anomaly. And possibly the most important reason we're powerless is that we can't agree on anything. Which isn't to say that we should pick an official/. viewpoint and all agree on it...
But there's obviously enough people that believe politicians, or think they have no choice in the matter, that keep voting for one based on his "position".
The mistake he made was in not finding a list of every belief system in existence.
I liked the other guy's response better. He said that he was going to support every system that worked for the betterment of the human condition. Call me a bigot, but I'm glad to hear he isn't going to help out you bloody Satan worshippers.
If you prefer a CLI, then you shouldn't be using DOS anyway. MS-DOS CLI is old, powerless, and annoying.
MS Windows is for three things, in order of importance:
Games
MS Office (so you can read the stupid crap your Project Manager sends you)
testing the new web site you just built for your whiney customer.
If you want CLI, get off your ass and make that linux box work, or download Solaris 8 if you don't like linux (don't admit to it on this site though;).
Slashdot Mirror
what post did /you/ read? Cause your response sounds like one made to a different post than I read.
;)
Is this like having a conversation with the Demon Goddess, where everyone in the room hears something different?
>>>2. Tech companies haven't been above screwing employees. People get let go a couple weeks before their options come due, often for fabricated reasons. H1-B visas get rammed through Congress to drive down IT salaries. Imagine if the Big Three automakers tried to import tens of thousands of foreign workers and then pay them substandard wages!! It can only happen in IT.
>>>This sounds racist to me. If other people are willing to do your job for less, and they're just as capable as you, why shouldn't they get the job? Because their skin is a different colour?
No. That's wrong. I used to work for SeraNova. We built web sites. The company was run by a guy from India. The parent company is called Intelligroup. The CEO and his friends would bring in a bunch of developers from India. Sure they worked cheaper. But if one of them did ASP dev, he sure didn't do C++, or PERL, or even Visual C++. After they laid off of most of the IT and programming departments (me included), because the company was losing money, our little part of the company started losing money and clients as fast as the rest. Why? Because all these kids they brought in from India were paper Unix, or paper MCSE, or paper whatever you java people are, had no experience with anything, are completely unwilling to work on or learn about anything not directly related to their specialty, and don't seem to have much imagination at all.
Please, shut up. I'm not being racist. I'm telling you about the people that came to Provo Utah, from India, and couldn't cut the mustard.
The few guys that are left over from the old company have to work harder. The kids who used to just do HTML had to learn java, unix, etc, to get everything done themselves. I'm sure Cliff and Nick exaggerate, but not by too much. The "Unix Specialist" they hired knows telnet, knows IRC, knows how to chat, and that's it. They had to outsource their actual hosting and management of Solaris machines to a guy that used to work there (he made a little hosting company just for them).
So. Not racist. Just PISSED. We had a fun, profitable, working little company going, and Intelligroup/SeraNova fscked everything up. With cheap imported labor. Happily, that includes themselves.
Failure is not an option.
It isn't /. that is hammering Sega. Every news source I subscribe to that covers games, consoles, or electronics is on the same bandwagon.
/. is only here to give you a link to news other sites have posted, maybe a little more eyeballs for something that would be otherwise obscure, and more importantly to give you one place to look for geek-news. Oh, and a place to sound off about it.
So quit picking on them.
Failure is not an option.
How, exactly, is that going to slow Microsoft down any?
Do they care about any of those platforms? Answer honestly, now.
Failure is not an option.
>>ex: states that have the death pentalty in the US have violent crime rates that easily dwarf the violent crime rates in states without it
erhm, that is assuming cause and effect that noone can prove. For all we know it is effect and cause (ie perhaps the people from that area are more disposed towards violence... this comes out in their crimes and their laws). Any numbers stating certainty which is cause and which is effect are generated by people with an agenda.
If you really wanted to prove which was cause and which was effect, you'd have to go back in time and watch the history of the area very carefully. And not just generally, but individually as well.
Accept that what we're doing now isn't working, and let's see if we can't do something about it. But assuming that capitol punishment is causing a higher rate of violent crimes is silly at best.
Failure is not an option.
I worked with a guy that had root account access. Naturally, his job required it.
Imagine my fear when he told me what he and several coworkers did at a previous job:
They had some sort of *nix machines for their personal development boxes. They set up root cron jobs that would wipe the hd at like 9am monday morning. So if they weren't there to disable it... WOOOM!
Happily, he left the company on a good note... he was doing some contracting work for one of our clients and they offered him a position as manager of their brand new datacenter. We let him go, and I was thrilled that it was on a positive note.
But I cannot even begin to tell you how carefully I searched for backdoors, bombs, etc. Didn't find any, but I was really scared for a while.
Failure is not an option.
I worked for a company called Network Publishing. NetPub was purchased by Intelligroup. Intelligroup spun NetPub and other bits of the company off into a full service web publishing company, or something, called SeraNova.
;)
The guy running SeraNova, and in fact many of the top people, were from India. Raj Kineru. Spelling is incorrect, but I'll be honest: I hate the guy. Hate him.
Raj had some odd prejudice against folks from USA... or maybe whites, or maybe just anyone who isn't from India. He would hire people with basic certifications to do jobs they didn't have experience to do. A lot. But because they were from India, they must be just as good as Americans. Right?
One of his problems is that he wanted people to work cheap. Ok, I can see that. Except, the people from India that actually knew how to do the stuff (Java, Javascript, PERL, C++, etc, depending on the app), would have wanted just as much money to do it as us greedy Americans. So he hired these people that had a cert in just one thing, and knew nothing else, and had NO experience in what they were supposed to be doing, and they were useless in any kind of cross-technological application.
Anyway, my point is, it seems like the folks from India that I've dealt with have a real hangup on knowing one technology, and anything outside their specialty is not their responsibility, and in fact not something they want to get involved in at all.
Meanwhile, most of the folks that I've known in this industry have jumped from specialty to specialty, looking for something they like, or something new, or just because there wasn't anyone else to do it, and so even the guys in marketing tend to have some experience with different programming and systems technology, enough that when you tell them they are insane, their idea can't be done, and explain basically why, they can understand. That doesn't stop them from trying to sell it to customers, but at least they know they are lying
If my limited experience were to hold true, then maybe this guy doesn't know any better... he doesn't know anything about Sytem administration, firewalls, tcp ports, anything. And so if they say they can do it, perhaps he believes them. And, if HE says they can do it, to his boss, then his boss will know that it is true.
It is truly strange to me, how people in another country can think in what are, to me, such totally alien ways.
Meh.
Failure is not an option.
Not that you care, but Christian Coleman, one of the main guys at DaemonNews, is my brother-in-law. I'm so excited for all of them.
/. heheh
Partly I'm excited because they are worthy of mention on the great
Have a nice day!
Failure is not an option.
oh, and to follow up my post ;)
He seemed to be implying that he had to say no if I asked, but that he wouldn't do anything about it if I HADN'T asked. But that sort of goes against the other stuff I heard, so I don't know what to say about that.
Failure is not an option.
IANAL
I asked Simon R. Green for permission to use his "Deathstalker" novels as a basis for a clan or whatever the hell they were called on UO.
His reply was that he couldn't give permission because it would mean he was actually giving me permission for far more than just the clan. Apparently it would mean I could do whatever I wanted (or at least a great deal) with the characters/etc, and his lawyers said that it could cost him if he tried to make a game out of it later.
Also, I've heard that if a company doesn't go after you for a license breach, then they are actally decreasing the value of their claims against other potential breaches in court.
Failure is not an option.
...read him like you would read Gibson. Gibson doesn't know his technology that well. In fact, most of the time, he glosses right over it.
..."
The story in every Gibson book has essentially been: what happens when you inject paticular individuals into one potential evolutionary track of society/technology, and then let Murphy go nuts all over them.
Gibson never ever says that he believes it will go that way, or that everything will happen the way he envisions it in his books. He just says: "this is one way I think things could go... given that technology continues to advance at a predictable rate, and that someone overcomes many of the limitations we have now, and that noone reroutes the evolution of corporations and society."
That's how I read Katz. "This is something to think about, here's what happens when I compare these movies with this paticular thought foremost in my mind... I wonder if
He's looking at these movies with the filter of a paticular concept in mind. This of course colors the way he views these movies. But if YOU can only look at a paticular concept (movie) in one way, then you're limiting your own vision.
If I may digress still further, it is the same reason that religious people read the bible more than once: when you read a paticular passage with a paticular mindset, that passage could have entirely different meaning to you than it did last time.
I hope someone gets my point. I have a difficult time explaining myself at times.
Have a nice day!
Failure is not an option.
Penny Arcade has a paticular comic that some of the posts on this reminded me of ;)
Failure is not an option.
Uhm... I'm not sure how to do this without actually plugging the company I'm working for.
But, you are aware that there are companies with technology in place that allow for secure, automated, enforceable online transactions?
http://www.ilumin.com is where I've worked the past couple weeks. I don't know enough about the technology yet (I just provide servers and workstations for the developers), but this enforceable stuff is what we need to make this sort of thing secure, right?
Failure is not an option.
I find it so fascinating that so many people think Bush is an idiot.
From his web site: "He received a bachelor's degree from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He served as an F-102 pilot for the Texas Air National Guard."
Obviously he used political connections to do all of that.
Duh.
Failure is not an option.
we've had two choices, TCI/AT&T, and Provo Cable, all along. Of course, it was never really a choice for many people. because Provo Cable sucks a$$.
But now the city fathers have signed a contract where they're putting fibre to every house in town. This will be for alternate phone, cable, internet, etc. I'm not certain that this is something that the taxpayers money should be spent on, and it'll take several years to get done, but damn the taxpayers, full speed ahead! Oh, the bandwidth!
Failure is not an option.
I rather imagine that noone noticed it, as opposed to "keeping it operational on a heavily secured and monitored network for over a year without detection".
If a program doesn't show up in top, doesn't take up disk space, doesn't cause my system to crash, and doesn't take up enough bandwidth to notice, I'm not interested in whether the users are running it, most of the time.
Of course, we always have a good firewall in place, which resolves some of the simpler concerns.
However, your mention of inadvertent security leaks does make me think, so thanks for that. The company I work for deal with some fairly severly important financial info for our clients. Or will, or something. Leaks of that nature could be a bad thing.
Failure is not an option.
>>> it's unreasonable to expect 100% quality before release
Are you insane, or just stupid? Why is it unreasonable to expect 100% quality before release?!
It is unreasonable to expect a software package to do everything YOU want it to, sure. But it is NOT unreasonable to expect everything to work as advertised.
Sheesh.
Failure is not an option.
Big fan of William Gibson. One of the things I enjoy about his work is this:
He doesn't seem to be an expert on any technology, nor on human behavior. But if his books were to have a purpose beyond entertainment, it would seem to be one of suggesting a way that things could happen. One way that the technology could IMPACT society, and vice versa.
Maybe Katz is trying to hang with that theory. Maybe Katz is just looking to get to you to think about how you're going to protect your technology and your rights and stuff.
I don't think he's trying to make you paranoid.
Failure is not an option.
Last night, I was watching Raw is War. I love wrestling. I really do. I have been impressed by the effort that the WWF has gone to, encouraging people to get out and vote.
Vince MacMahon came out to the ring last night, despite the "danger" that Stone Cold Steve Austin would assault him (they have "history), to make an impassioned plea that we vote.
He pointed out that all the PACs and special interest groups and unions and suchlike that vote in a block for one candidate or the other essentially cancel each other out, and that Average American, the WWF fan, was going to decide who the next president would be. He ALMOST convinced me to go out today and vote. It was a good speech.
Then I remembered that I believe it doesn't matter who wins... it doesn't matter which laws are passed... we're all fucked anyway, so who cares?
Still, Seagis made me think that maybe I should go vote anyway.
Then I remembered that I'm more than just a geek: I'm an uber-lazy geek.
So, I've admitted it. I don't think voting matters enough to overcome my laziness.
But I hope you win!
Failure is not an option.
Who says the rest of them are honest about it? They all same the same exact things: "All my opponents are divisive, but I'm a peacemaker and will solve all of it." They quote statistics that favor their position or hurt their opponent, ignoring the statistics that punch holes in their position, and they say what they think will get the most people to vote for them.
... misinformed, let's say ... enough to believe something he says.
/. viewpoint and all agree on it...
I figure it isn't an insult to your intelligence, or mine. It is an attempt to get the vote of the people who might be
Politicians figure (rightly) that those in the latter category extensively outnumber those of us who have taught ourselves how to think, and that we are going to see through their smokescreens... but we won't have anyone else to vote for anyway.
They aren't insulting us. They consider us a powerless statistical anomaly. And possibly the most important reason we're powerless is that we can't agree on anything. Which isn't to say that we should pick an official
But there's obviously enough people that believe politicians, or think they have no choice in the matter, that keep voting for one based on his "position".
Failure is not an option.
he wouldn't get any respect from most of us even if he had answers that we liked, and we believed he meant them.
/.-ers are often very unforgiving.
He's made some serious blunders and we
Failure is not an option.
The mistake he made was in not finding a list of every belief system in existence.
I liked the other guy's response better. He said that he was going to support every system that worked for the betterment of the human condition. Call me a bigot, but I'm glad to hear he isn't going to help out you bloody Satan worshippers.
Failure is not an option.
You've obviously never had a job where you had to support these people.
There is a reason some of us spell user: L U S E R
Not that this has anything to do with anything. I just like to complain about lUsers whenever possible.
Failure is not an option.
Hmmm. Maybe Mr. Bill is a saint, rather than the anti-christ. Maybe he designed his software that way on purpose to make the world a safer place!
*loud exhale*
Wow, that's some good s**t.
Probably shouldn't post while I'm smoking it though...
Failure is not an option.
MS Windows is for three things, in order of importance:
If you want CLI, get off your ass and make that linux box work, or download Solaris 8 if you don't like linux (don't admit to it on this site though
Failure is not an option.