Does the overtime pay count towards pensionable earnings? Probably not.
Remember, IBM's pension scheme went from being classified as "one of the best" to "one of the worst" in a very short space of time. They have screwed over their pensioners horribly. Here, in the UK, they have even done illegal things with the pension scheme and the Pensions Regulator has no teeth to put it right. Pension deductions are really deferred earnings to be paid out upon retirement. Retired IBMers have no sanctions to apply to make IBM keep to its pension promises to repay those monies as pensions in a decent, ethical way. The message is "We can do as we like and now you are a pensioner, you are worthless"
Ditto here, King_TJ! You wrote the piece I was going to, word for word. This malware stuff will kill the usage of the internet for some folks who will just give up hope of getting only what they asked for. It has serious implications for legitimate business users of the net and their customers.
I really feel sorry for you Americans. It was my misfortune to be staying in NC during the '96 Olympic Games. After the luxury of the BBC's coverage, what I got to see from Atlanta was severely limited and very censored. I say censored because if a sport didn't have an American competing in it, or the American competitor was not doing well, THEN IT DIDN'T GET SHOWN.
OK, so the BBC's output is heavily UK biased but that is understandable and expected. But,the BBC covered minority sports as well as the main ones. The coverage went out over two channels. There were hundreds of hours of LIVE coverage. (Almost ALL the US coverage was from tape and heavily edited.) How many of you from the US realise that there are eighteen hours a day of action from the games almost every day?
Was I glad to get back to the UK for the last three days of competition? Oh yes!
Not everyone will need all that power every day but when you get back from that European vacation and you want to do something cool with all the video you shot, you'll be glad it's there.
Americans taking a European vacation? I don't think so!
Whilst installing a 370/158 to replace a 360/50 I removed some raised-floor tiles. What I did not realise was that I had created an island of floor tiles that had no lateral support. So, when I gave the CPU a shove, the entire island with 2 CPUs, disks, tapes, printers, card reader and an 082 sorter sort of keeled over on the supports and crashed into the real floor. Shit, that cost a lot to fix.
PCI is a development of MicroChannel. Microchannel was, even by IBM's standards of marketing, very, very badly marketed. There was nothing wrong (IMO) with it technically.
And what does it cost you in extra time expended and goodwill lost to pursue such tactics?
The fact is, that most of us don't have the patience or stubbornness to do such things. We just roll over and have our bellies stroked because it's more efficient. The bulk of computer userdom just wants results. The computer is a tool, not an end in itself. They want it to work straight out of the box, not have to assemble it themselves, like flat-pack furniture. When they can do that with Linux, then you'll see a change.
IBM had to sell OS/360 to customers who wanted to run it on their plug-compatible (in other words, clone)machines. Fujitsu, Amdahl, Siemens, et alia. Predates even CP/M by quite a long way...
The REAL difference here is between word processing and text processing. I'm an exIBMer and we used to write fsking HUGE documents (still do!) Look at the size of an IBM tech library for just one machine and you'll know what I mean.
The answer was to write the docs in plain (EBCDIC, but ASCII works just as well) with markup characters to format the TEXT. It was called GML, Generalised Markup Language, from came SGML and later HTML.
If you want to write letters, Word is OK, If you want to write documents of any size, it sucks.
Remember the days when IBM used to do this all the time on almost every product? The line behind it was 'You are paying for what it does, not for what it is' Some customers discovered the bigger sheave on the 082 card sorter's motor pulley and moved the belt onto it. Twice the speed! Yeehaaaa!
Actually, Satan (aka Louis V Gerstner) got knighted a couple of years back. At least Microsoft is a reasonable place to be if you are an employee.... which is a lot more than you can say of the legacy Gerstner left IBM. From one of the best outfits to work for to one of the worst in one incumbency. Nice work!
You are absolutely right, they were not designed for this. A better way is to use the transmission lines as a support for fibre as they do here in the UK. No wayleaves to negotiate. No trenches to dig. And the technology for wrapping the fibre along the power lines already exists. Neat.
Slashdot Mirror
"the first set to become taught is automatically the shortest path" So, they can learn, can they? I think you meant "taut", but then again......
My stars! This _is_ addictive. I have just wasted even more time than I usually do reading \.
347 are Goatse
Does the overtime pay count towards pensionable earnings? Probably not. Remember, IBM's pension scheme went from being classified as "one of the best" to "one of the worst" in a very short space of time. They have screwed over their pensioners horribly. Here, in the UK, they have even done illegal things with the pension scheme and the Pensions Regulator has no teeth to put it right. Pension deductions are really deferred earnings to be paid out upon retirement. Retired IBMers have no sanctions to apply to make IBM keep to its pension promises to repay those monies as pensions in a decent, ethical way. The message is "We can do as we like and now you are a pensioner, you are worthless"
So what's the difference between this and an IBM mainframe?
and they allowed people to downgrade to XP. -surely you mean UPGRADE?
Whaddya think IBM themselves run on their own ThinkPads? Well, Linux, of course!
"Software is a set of specific rules that results in a specific and predictable effect." Not the way I write it, Buddy!
Yes, and its name is MAINFRAME!
Ever taken a moment to note the similarities between MCA and PCI? No, I didn't think you had.
Ditto here, King_TJ! You wrote the piece I was going to, word for word. This malware stuff will kill the usage of the internet for some folks who will just give up hope of getting only what they asked for. It has serious implications for legitimate business users of the net and their customers.
BASE jumping, anyone?
OK, so the BBC's output is heavily UK biased but that is understandable and expected. But,the BBC covered minority sports as well as the main ones. The coverage went out over two channels. There were hundreds of hours of LIVE coverage. (Almost ALL the US coverage was from tape and heavily edited.) How many of you from the US realise that there are eighteen hours a day of action from the games almost every day?
Was I glad to get back to the UK for the last three days of competition? Oh yes!
Americans taking a European vacation? I don't think so!
Now I understand- If they are going to charge that much per millibit you guys don't stand a chance!
The fact is, that most of us don't have the patience or stubbornness to do such things. We just roll over and have our bellies stroked because it's more efficient. The bulk of computer userdom just wants results. The computer is a tool, not an end in itself. They want it to work straight out of the box, not have to assemble it themselves, like flat-pack furniture. When they can do that with Linux, then you'll see a change.
The answer was to write the docs in plain (EBCDIC, but ASCII works just as well) with markup characters to format the TEXT. It was called GML, Generalised Markup Language, from came SGML and later HTML.
If you want to write letters, Word is OK, If you want to write documents of any size, it sucks.
.
Is this where you dress up in your general's uniform?
*
You are absolutely right, they were not designed for this. A better way is to use the transmission lines as a support for fibre as they do here in the UK. No wayleaves to negotiate. No trenches to dig. And the technology for wrapping the fibre along the power lines already exists. Neat.