Yeah, I thought about that -- but if inexperienced newbs or immigrants can do the job adequately for less, then the company would already have replaced its workforce with them.
Most companies will step over "adequately" to pick up the "less".
Perhaps that would motivate employers to quit as soon as their company starts being vastly evil, which would in itself be a motivation for companies not to be evil.
On first thought, that sounds quite plausible. But on second thought, i know and you know that if someone bails out of a $25/hr job, the company will be more than happy to try to hire someone into it (read: inexperienced newbs or immigrants) at $9/hr.
All and all, that will have a detrimental effect on everyone in the entire industry, as we see now. Plus, one of the first backlashes for this sort of thing would be to start an IT Union or something of that effect. Maybe in the 1930's Unions were a good thing, ensuring people didn't get literally worked to death in unsafe conditions for peanuts.
However these days, most unions are ridiculous beauracracies (sp, i know) that wince financial support from both employers and employees for their own gain, under the muse of taking care of both sides....
Do any slashdotters have experience with their companies pulling the plug on Linux projects due to the SCO trial or is it business as usual?"
In the datacentre i work in, RH discontinuing its "free RedHat" is a bigger deal than all this. We aren't the least bit concerned about SCO. Just Fedora Core vs. Debian for our new servers.:oP
Re:In the last office...
on
Cube House
·
· Score: 1
Oh! and i forgot to mention...
I feel you deserve some sort of award. Maybe not a/. award, or geek award, but just some sort of "really cool decoration award".
...that i worked at with cubicles, i would have gotten fired for this probably.
But that being said, i say this is the coolest cubicle "alterations" i've seen ever. You did an excellent job on it, and i think it's awesome. Plus, i bet with a cover on it it is quieter and feels more 'private'....
Although the result - single-floppy with some essential Linux and character-based games on it, can be hardly practical in the modern world,
Impractical? The reviewer must be quite young, or i'm just a dinosaur. Personally i quite enjoyed those "character-based games" (though i prefer to call them Text Adventures). In the days of FPS and classic literary works being turned into movies, perhaps some ppl lack imagination.
Things don't have to be complicated to be well designed and easy to use.
Well said. In fact, i notice that whenever one tries to make something "easier" for a novice user, they end up overcomplicating it for people who know what they're doing.
Sure, i agree that computer should conform to people, not the other way around, but there is a bit of initiative that a person must take in learning to use a complicated piece of equipment. Well, at least until they are completely sanitized like an automobile, but that took almost 100 years!
Why is it that whenever Microsoft "invents" something that everyone else has had for decades, it's "big news" and "innovation"
Well.. seeing's how Apple recently invented such things as UNIX, Pre-emptive multitasking (as opposed to Pre-emptive single-tasking) and protected memory, the boys at Microsoft are feeling a little left out.
Linux/Mac user reply: Formats HD, overheats CPU and lists you with the dept of HS as potential communistic terrorist involved with drug cartels. Automaticallly posts a flame claiming Linux is a travestite and RMS's beard is made out of pubic hair.
Funny.. i give you that... But i dunno if you should lump the Linux and Mac folks together yet. They still don't mix together quite so well.;^)
...but MS trying to pull this sort of thing is just what we need. Maybe i'm biased or pessimistic, but i'm sure that they will find some way to proprietize it (one) and leverage some way to (intentionally or unintentionally) break current email systems (two).
Case in point? Win95 splash screens extolling the ability to "personalize your email with RTF, different fonts and HTML". Because of this, 3 out of 5 email messages being sent appear to be purple MS Comic Sans text over blue background, with 180K of attached animated GIFs. Crap that, IMHO, shouldn't belong in email to start with.
Another? OLE's broken "virus protection". Sure, you can tell OLE to no open attachments. But that means ALL attachments. It doesn't differentiate between *.vbs and *.jpg. Furthermore, it nags the user to allow it to open attachments, therefore defeating itself. Most of them keep their "virus protection" disabled constantly and get nailed with the next email virus that comes down the pike.
Next? WinXP's MS MovieMaker touts "Movies made with MovieMaker are small enough to share via email.". Ugggh!! Around the holidays i can expect a huge rash of support calls coming in due to ppl trying to email each other 1.7Gb movie files.
Maybe i've got a bad attitude, or maybe i'm jaded by working in Tech Support, but it often sickens me the way that Microsoft tends to empower people to do things when they don't sufficiently understand the technology. I'm not trying to sound as if i'm l33+3r than though, or anything, but in the days when i wanted to do stuff, i had to work at it, and if it didn't work for me, i had to learn why. I couldn't just call someone else up and have a conversation like:
"I can't send email"
"why, what happens?"
"It won't send"
"What does it do instead?"
"It doesn't go."
"What are you trying to do?"
"I don't know. I'm trying to send my email!" ...and on and on. Worse yet, they will believe the error messages that their computer tells them vs. what i tell them. I can't win.
It seems odd to me that if you were the first company to release an lower-end 64 bit processor you'd be "quiet" about it.
Actually, Slashdot just advertised it to pretty much everyone on the planet that really truly gives a crap about a 64-bit Capable Athlon, much less knows what "64-bits" really means. I mean, look at Dell and their "Forget all that Gigabytes and Megabytes" stuff. It used to be that most consumers were clueless about computer purchases but *tried* to understand enough to purchase soemthing that will be useful for what they want to do, and remain relavant for the longest time possible (value for the money).
Lately, i've noticed a lot of people in stores buying computers ('tis the season) who will just assume that any computer is good enough for everything. In a sense, for accomplishing everyday tasks they are probably right, *but* as we all know the $399 off-the-shelf eMachine is a bad choice as far as upgradeability and longevity.
Down the road, MS will advertise [Longhorn] as "The Premier, new 64-bit OS!" and that's when average-joe consumers will learn about 64-bits. They won't understand it mind you, they'll just know "64-bits are more bits than 32-bits!" and that's it.
Some people have a habit of making everything they send "URGENT, or HIGHEST" priority, which is rapidly becoming annoying.
And don't forget read receipts, quite possibly the most rude thing you can do to someone you intend on maintaining a contact with.
I have a handful of customers (i do tech support) that email me with the priority set to HIGHEST and a read reciept request on a regular basis. It used to be that if i sent the read receipt, i would get a call within 10 minutes saying "I see you've read my email, why haven't you responded?" or "How come you haven't fixed XYZ yet, i told you about it half an hour ago!" etc.
I dig the fact that Thunderbird (and probably a number of other clients) will simply pitch the read receipt if you want them to. It seems like 9 times out of 10 most of these people's problems are user error anyways, not in my "jurisdiction" of tech support, or something they could fix if they would either google or stop and think about it for a second.
Well, now i'm off onto a tangent... so i'll STFUAGAN..
[b]Perhaps I should just quit and let them sort out the details?[/b]
That is exactly what i did. This isn't related to IT or coding, nor was it employees in a different company. But in a large corporation a few years ago our entire department was getting canned and an outsourced company was coming in to take our place. "We're cutting costs"
We were instructed to train this outsourced company for six weeks on how to do our job. Not only did they lack the enthusiasm and integration that we had, but they were snotty to boot. After the second day of training, we (the dept.) unanimously all walked out.
We got handed the "you should be thankful that you still even HAVE a job" line also.
Sorry, we were all just too insulted by this. From the friends i still have at that office building, i hear that the turnover rate for people in that dept. is awful. They've even gone through a few different outsourcing companies since then, and the latest one negotiated the same wages all of us were making at the time we left. And the job still isn't getting done right.
I don't want to diss anyone from foreign lands, and i don't mean to make blanket statements...
but a majority of the things i hear about using coders and admins from these places sounds as though it would be a counterproductive business strategy.
A case in point- a friend of mine (who btw, isn't prejudiced at all) used to work for a county job in SoCal. He would say that a lot of the code written and sent over by the interns from the middle east was just horrible. Often it would just barely "function", and when it would break, whoever was stuck with maintaining it would take one look at it and decide it would be easier to just rewrite it from scratch.
Things like variables named sequentially ("aa, ab, ac, ad, ae..."), no comments, or comments that rarely made sense or were ambiguous, etc etc.
Sometimes the application wouldn't work at all, and it would have to be either rewritten or have hundreds of hours of time invested into it before it could be used.
Sure there are plenty of native coders that get pumped out of some 2-year degree mill and are probably just as bad, but the job market seems to be infiltrated with foreign coders doing just this.
The main thing is that they aren't ready to do the job they are doing. With some more practice and experience maybe, but they aren't ready to make market-ready code. This sort of thing wouldn't fly from a U.S. coder, but businesses put up with it from the offshore coders because they can pay slave labour wages to them. It is sad because native coders and admins are out of work, and the offshore coders are being borderline exploited.
Hopefully businesses are learning that this sort of thing often means having to do stuff twice- that their own greed is costing them more money than they thought.
I had a C= 16, and later a C= Plus/4. Got the 16 in 1987 for $20, and the Plus/4 in 1988 for about $25. I loved them both. I didn't care about stuff like built-in word processors or spreadsheets or anything (the stuff that was on the +/4). I just wanted it to write BASIC, pure and simple.
Unfortunately, i didn't have a floppy nor tape drive. I had to save stuff on Spiral-Bound Pulp Media(tm). I think that during that time (before i discovered electric guitars at age 13) i had filled up about 5 100pg notebooks full of programs.
Sometimes i really miss those days. I've thought about installing C= emulators and stuff so i could continue on, but it really wouldn't be the same.
...i'm not as geeky as i used to be, but i've currently got an XP 1800+ system with EIDE drives, and a TNT1(!) video card.
It replaces my 300mhz k6-II (which i still use almost daily).
Everyone and their dog can run out and buy the latest n greatest hardware. I personally feel that i'm set for about the next 4 years. By then, stuff like SATA and 64-bit processors will actually mean something.
Right now, there are few OSes and applications that can really use this hardware, including Apple. It's kinda pointless, IMHO
But hey, i can't wait till we've all got 64-bit hyperthreaded tools like rm ls cp ln grep mv......
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I thought about that -- but if inexperienced newbs or immigrants can do the job adequately for less, then the company would already have replaced its workforce with them.
Most companies will step over "adequately" to pick up the "less".
Perhaps that would motivate employers to quit as soon as their company starts being vastly evil, which would in itself be a motivation for companies not to be evil.
On first thought, that sounds quite plausible. But on second thought, i know and you know that if someone bails out of a $25/hr job, the company will be more than happy to try to hire someone into it (read: inexperienced newbs or immigrants) at $9/hr.
All and all, that will have a detrimental effect on everyone in the entire industry, as we see now. Plus, one of the first backlashes for this sort of thing would be to start an IT Union or something of that effect. Maybe in the 1930's Unions were a good thing, ensuring people didn't get literally worked to death in unsafe conditions for peanuts.
However these days, most unions are ridiculous beauracracies (sp, i know) that wince financial support from both employers and employees for their own gain, under the muse of taking care of both sides....
Do any slashdotters have experience with their companies pulling the plug on Linux projects due to the SCO trial or is it business as usual?"
:oP
In the datacentre i work in, RH discontinuing its "free RedHat" is a bigger deal than all this. We aren't the least bit concerned about SCO. Just Fedora Core vs. Debian for our new servers.
Oh! and i forgot to mention...
/. award, or geek award, but just some sort of "really cool decoration award".
I feel you deserve some sort of award. Maybe not a
...that i worked at with cubicles, i would have gotten fired for this probably.
:o)
But that being said, i say this is the coolest cubicle "alterations" i've seen ever. You did an excellent job on it, and i think it's awesome. Plus, i bet with a cover on it it is quieter and feels more 'private'....
Well done!
Can't wait to see what you do next year.
Although the result - single-floppy with some essential Linux and character-based games on it, can be hardly practical in the modern world,
:o)
Impractical? The reviewer must be quite young, or i'm just a dinosaur. Personally i quite enjoyed those "character-based games" (though i prefer to call them Text Adventures). In the days of FPS and classic literary works being turned into movies, perhaps some ppl lack imagination.
[/soapbox]
All in all, looks like an interesting read.
Things don't have to be complicated to be well designed and easy to use.
Well said. In fact, i notice that whenever one tries to make something "easier" for a novice user, they end up overcomplicating it for people who know what they're doing.
Sure, i agree that computer should conform to people, not the other way around, but there is a bit of initiative that a person must take in learning to use a complicated piece of equipment. Well, at least until they are completely sanitized like an automobile, but that took almost 100 years!
Why is it that whenever Microsoft "invents" something that everyone else has had for decades, it's "big news" and "innovation"
Well.. seeing's how Apple recently invented such things as UNIX, Pre-emptive multitasking (as opposed to Pre-emptive single-tasking) and protected memory, the boys at Microsoft are feeling a little left out.
Linux/Mac user reply: Formats HD, overheats CPU and lists you with the dept of HS as potential communistic terrorist involved with drug cartels. Automaticallly posts a flame claiming Linux is a travestite and RMS's beard is made out of pubic hair.
;^)
Funny.. i give you that... But i dunno if you should lump the Linux and Mac folks together yet. They still don't mix together quite so well.
...but MS trying to pull this sort of thing is just what we need. Maybe i'm biased or pessimistic, but i'm sure that they will find some way to proprietize it (one) and leverage some way to (intentionally or unintentionally) break current email systems (two).
...and on and on. Worse yet, they will believe the error messages that their computer tells them vs. what i tell them. I can't win.
Case in point? Win95 splash screens extolling the ability to "personalize your email with RTF, different fonts and HTML". Because of this, 3 out of 5 email messages being sent appear to be purple MS Comic Sans text over blue background, with 180K of attached animated GIFs. Crap that, IMHO, shouldn't belong in email to start with.
Another? OLE's broken "virus protection". Sure, you can tell OLE to no open attachments. But that means ALL attachments. It doesn't differentiate between *.vbs and *.jpg. Furthermore, it nags the user to allow it to open attachments, therefore defeating itself. Most of them keep their "virus protection" disabled constantly and get nailed with the next email virus that comes down the pike.
Next? WinXP's MS MovieMaker touts "Movies made with MovieMaker are small enough to share via email.". Ugggh!! Around the holidays i can expect a huge rash of support calls coming in due to ppl trying to email each other 1.7Gb movie files.
Maybe i've got a bad attitude, or maybe i'm jaded by working in Tech Support, but it often sickens me the way that Microsoft tends to empower people to do things when they don't sufficiently understand the technology. I'm not trying to sound as if i'm l33+3r than though, or anything, but in the days when i wanted to do stuff, i had to work at it, and if it didn't work for me, i had to learn why. I couldn't just call someone else up and have a conversation like:
"I can't send email"
"why, what happens?"
"It won't send"
"What does it do instead?"
"It doesn't go."
"What are you trying to do?"
"I don't know. I'm trying to send my email!"
*whew*
Sorry.
If Ansel Adams, one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century, was still alive, would have he gone digital?
:o)
If Jimi Hendrix, one of the most famous and influental blues-based rock guitarists of the 20th century, was still alive, would he use digital effects?
It's stuff like this that initiate hours upon hours of philosophical banter in real life, and page after page of trolling and flamewars online
You mean the patch i just installed is a MYSTERY TO MICROSOFT TOO?
....at least that's what i was thinking when i read that headline. like "oh great, now some ghey crax0rz have infiltrated Windows Update....
Holy shit!
*whew*, i think..
It seems odd to me that if you were the first company to release an lower-end 64 bit processor you'd be "quiet" about it.
Actually, Slashdot just advertised it to pretty much everyone on the planet that really truly gives a crap about a 64-bit Capable Athlon, much less knows what "64-bits" really means. I mean, look at Dell and their "Forget all that Gigabytes and Megabytes" stuff. It used to be that most consumers were clueless about computer purchases but *tried* to understand enough to purchase soemthing that will be useful for what they want to do, and remain relavant for the longest time possible (value for the money).
Lately, i've noticed a lot of people in stores buying computers ('tis the season) who will just assume that any computer is good enough for everything. In a sense, for accomplishing everyday tasks they are probably right, *but* as we all know the $399 off-the-shelf eMachine is a bad choice as far as upgradeability and longevity.
Down the road, MS will advertise [Longhorn] as "The Premier, new 64-bit OS!" and that's when average-joe consumers will learn about 64-bits. They won't understand it mind you, they'll just know "64-bits are more bits than 32-bits!" and that's it.
Some people have a habit of making everything they send "URGENT, or HIGHEST" priority, which is rapidly becoming annoying.
And don't forget read receipts, quite possibly the most rude thing you can do to someone you intend on maintaining a contact with.
I have a handful of customers (i do tech support) that email me with the priority set to HIGHEST and a read reciept request on a regular basis. It used to be that if i sent the read receipt, i would get a call within 10 minutes saying "I see you've read my email, why haven't you responded?" or "How come you haven't fixed XYZ yet, i told you about it half an hour ago!" etc.
I dig the fact that Thunderbird (and probably a number of other clients) will simply pitch the read receipt if you want them to. It seems like 9 times out of 10 most of these people's problems are user error anyways, not in my "jurisdiction" of tech support, or something they could fix if they would either google or stop and think about it for a second.
Well, now i'm off onto a tangent... so i'll STFUAGAN..
'The Collaborative User Experience (CUE) team in IBM Research has spent nearly a decade studying email.
May Buddha have mercy on their poor souls...
I mean, almost TEN years on email...
poor sops...
Steganography is new to me (as a science). All i can say is i'm RTFA'ing and it's badass cool :o)
Does this disqualify me as a slashbot?
[b]Perhaps I should just quit and let them sort out the details?[/b]
That is exactly what i did. This isn't related to IT or coding, nor was it employees in a different company. But in a large corporation a few years ago our entire department was getting canned and an outsourced company was coming in to take our place. "We're cutting costs"
We were instructed to train this outsourced company for six weeks on how to do our job. Not only did they lack the enthusiasm and integration that we had, but they were snotty to boot. After the second day of training, we (the dept.) unanimously all walked out.
We got handed the "you should be thankful that you still even HAVE a job" line also.
Sorry, we were all just too insulted by this. From the friends i still have at that office building, i hear that the turnover rate for people in that dept. is awful. They've even gone through a few different outsourcing companies since then, and the latest one negotiated the same wages all of us were making at the time we left. And the job still isn't getting done right.
So fsck em.
I don't want to diss anyone from foreign lands, and i don't mean to make blanket statements...
but a majority of the things i hear about using coders and admins from these places sounds as though it would be a counterproductive business strategy.
A case in point- a friend of mine (who btw, isn't prejudiced at all) used to work for a county job in SoCal. He would say that a lot of the code written and sent over by the interns from the middle east was just horrible. Often it would just barely "function", and when it would break, whoever was stuck with maintaining it would take one look at it and decide it would be easier to just rewrite it from scratch.
Things like variables named sequentially ("aa, ab, ac, ad, ae..."), no comments, or comments that rarely made sense or were ambiguous, etc etc.
Sometimes the application wouldn't work at all, and it would have to be either rewritten or have hundreds of hours of time invested into it before it could be used.
Sure there are plenty of native coders that get pumped out of some 2-year degree mill and are probably just as bad, but the job market seems to be infiltrated with foreign coders doing just this.
The main thing is that they aren't ready to do the job they are doing. With some more practice and experience maybe, but they aren't ready to make market-ready code. This sort of thing wouldn't fly from a U.S. coder, but businesses put up with it from the offshore coders because they can pay slave labour wages to them. It is sad because native coders and admins are out of work, and the offshore coders are being borderline exploited.
Hopefully businesses are learning that this sort of thing often means having to do stuff twice- that their own greed is costing them more money than they thought.
I had a C= 16, and later a C= Plus/4. Got the 16 in 1987 for $20, and the Plus/4 in 1988 for about $25. I loved them both. I didn't care about stuff like built-in word processors or spreadsheets or anything (the stuff that was on the +/4). I just wanted it to write BASIC, pure and simple.
Unfortunately, i didn't have a floppy nor tape drive. I had to save stuff on Spiral-Bound Pulp Media(tm). I think that during that time (before i discovered electric guitars at age 13) i had filled up about 5 100pg notebooks full of programs.
Sometimes i really miss those days. I've thought about installing C= emulators and stuff so i could continue on, but it really wouldn't be the same.
*sigh*.
...enforcement.
Make all the laws you want. How can you enforce it, when the spammers are in S.Korea, or in an Eastern Bloc country?
or:
"The intarweb worm diddit!!"
Going around sticking your thingy into the thingy of random strangers all willy nilly is certainly NOT a good idea these days.
Anyone have any trivia on why the servers that host the daily snapshots are named after an STD?
* FTP: ftp://chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de/pub/DragonFly
* HTTP: http://chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de/pub/DragonFly
(on the bottom of http://www.dragonflybsd.org/Main/download.cgi)
I mean, even in German, The Clap is The Clap, right?
I spent last night looking at a spare machine that was given to me, trying to figure out what to put on it...
:o)
I would say that DBSD would be as good a choice as any
...i'm not as geeky as i used to be, but i've currently got an XP 1800+ system with EIDE drives, and a TNT1(!) video card.
It replaces my 300mhz k6-II (which i still use almost daily).
Everyone and their dog can run out and buy the latest n greatest hardware. I personally feel that i'm set for about the next 4 years. By then, stuff like SATA and 64-bit processors will actually mean something.
Right now, there are few OSes and applications that can really use this hardware, including Apple. It's kinda pointless, IMHO
But hey, i can't wait till we've all got 64-bit hyperthreaded tools like rm ls cp ln grep mv......
hypocrite retards.
http://d.revinc.org/fuck.cgi