If the regular phone companies wanted to compete, they should be offering free caller ID, free voicemail (similar to above), and detailed online billing and reporting of incoming & outgoing calls. Really, how hard would it be to add these features to a regular phone service? There's been zero innovation in POTS (well, callerID, but they charge extra for that).
Nope. The telcos have been gaming the regulatory system for decades and now they have to live with the awful mess they've created. They have been creating features as extra-charge items as a way of segregating revenue from the basic rate regulation. They also do sneaky things like not allowing *69 to be disabled and charging an arm and a leg for each time its used, unless you subscribe to one of their bundles of features.
It's a mess. The telcos made it, and now they can't undo it. Screw 'em. They're going the way of the dinosaurs.
Well, since with Vonage, you can get a number in any exchange, If you lived in NY and they tried to levy taxes on vonage, get a NJ or CT phone number...
I don't believe the regulatory effect has anything to do with the number you select. It has to do with your billing address. Use a remailing service or a friend's or relative's address in a state that doesn't yet regulate Vonage and choose a phone number in any part of the country you like, even your own home area.
On the other hand, I am pissed that a friend who switched to vonage on my recommendation has been paying for two accounts for six months. It seems that not only does one company own the phone line to your house, another the phone service, but another owns the phone number. They want to keep their original number, but company that give them service and the one that owns line aren't playing well together and they can't get the switch done.
I'm amazed! In a time when almost everyone mindless changes phone numbers at the drop of a hat, apparently completely oblivious to the disruptive effect that has on other people staying in touch with them or being able to call them after the passage of some time, you happen to know one of the very few people who makes keeping his number a sticking point. In your friend's situation I would tell the telco that doesn't want to give up the number to stick it up their ass and I'd banish them and their fees to history.
So, NY people, pick a new area code. Voice over IP is completely illegal in Qatar, but there sure are people who use it over there, they just don't call the government regulation board when they have problems with their provider.
You're half right. Pick a billing address outside the regulated area. You can plug a Vonage (usually Cisco) VoIP box into any network virtually anywhere in the world and your number will ring the phone plugged into it.
Also, the big reason people want to have a number local to where they live is so that people nearby won't have to make a long distance call to reach them. OTOH maybe that would be a great way to discourage local annoyance calls. Hmmm...
What qualifies traditional phone companies for regulation is the fact that they've been granted exclusive rights to lay cable in a particular area....
[Vonage is] not a traditional phone company, and the rationale for regulating traditional phone companies does not apply.
Finally someone gets it right. The signal to noise ratio here is appallingly low.
"Whats happening right now is a global shift in where things are engineered."
No, engineering is only a small part of it. What's happening right now is a global shift in where any kind of exportable work is being done.
"This has happened before as well."
No, this has never happened before, at least not on this scale. What has happened before has been the movement of low-level manufacturing overseas to take advantage of low-cost labor and the shrinkage of niche labor markets here due to increasing use of machines in place of hand labor. When shoe manufacturing went overseas, when textile-related fabrication went overseas, when steel went overseas, as shipbuilding has gone overseas, etc., those areas here were disrupted but other fields were large unaffected.
What is happening today is that everything that can be sent overseas is being sent overseas, from many of our remaining manufacturing jobs to programming, engineering, architecture, medical diagnosis, paralegal work, investment analysis, accounting, etc.
The only things not going overseas so far are clueless executives' jobs and PHB's jobs. They should hope their jobs go overseas before they are hanged from lampposts by the people they have helped to disemploy.
"Even right now at 6 % unemployment isn't to far from ideal unemployment at 5 %."
Those are no longer meaningful statistics -- they are junk stats. People who have exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits are no longer counted as "unemployed." People who have given up on finding work are no longer counted as "unemployed." People who have taken shit jobs just to avoid starving and are using their Masters and PhDs to flip burgers or stack boxes are no longer counted as "unemployed." My superprogrammer friend who took his own life last year after two years of being unemployed in the wake of a corporate takeover and inevitable consequent massive layoffs is no longer counted as "unemployed."
"Until the indian standard of living rises, there will be a shift of jobs"
Jobs will continue to shift until we:
outlaw it,
prohibit the purchase of better representation in Congress than American citizens have by foreign firms such as Indian outsourcers and warm body providers,
eliminate business tax deductions for expenses associated with exporting American jobs,
drastically curtail the H-1B and L-1 style of guest worker visas and eliminate all the loopholes,
imprison business execs and managers here who skirt anti-discrimination and comparable pay requirements,
behave like a sovereign nation and control our fucking borders as to both the movement of people seeking work and the movement of businesses seeking to export jobs for short-term profits and bonuses.
call the bluff of companies who threaten to move overseas in the face of sane limitations -- "Don't let the door hit your ass on your way out."
return to a sane and controlled transfer to poor and developing countries of only those industries that are truly no longer best done here. Their standard of living has to rise by the generation of energy and creativity from within, with the help of world markets, not by the entirely parasitic means of devouring the guts of the host economies that feed them.
With regard to (1):
No foreign person or business has any inalienable right to come here and take jobs from Americans.
We are a sovereign nation. We can make laws in our own interest.
Do you think that the loss of our technical and white collar jobs all up and down the line is somehow inevitable, as the apologists for offshoring have claimed? Think again. We are not Nicaragua or Somalia. Those 100,000 people in the Dept of Justice (as large as the entire population of
"Actually during the depression, the idea of a revolution seemed feasible to a lot of people. Read It Can't Happen Here for an example of a book that presented the fears of the time."
I think that's a waaaay long stretch. I've never heard anything remotely like that and I was born in the decade immediately following the Great Depression. My father, mother and uncle all lived and worked throughout the 1930s, as did numerous more distant relatives, and the media of my youth were filled with rehashed news and stories of the 1930s and 40s. I've never heard anyone even suggest before that a revolution was possible here much less make a real case for it.
There's always a book. Someone could portray today's times any way they wish just by selecting the right book(s) from the almost infinite range available. Wearing a tinfoil hat is mandatory when doing such research or the reptilian Nazi aliens will get you.
"Why did HUAAC have such a field day in the '50s? Because people were willing to join the Communists in the '30s."
There was a fashionable but naive affection for communism (lower case "c" just as in "capitalism") in the 1930s in certain circles. By the 1950s communism had clearly become a cancer on the world and the Cold War had begun. Nothing at all to do with any real possibility of a revolution in America in the 1930s.
"Another downturn like that with our currently reduced safety net scares me."
The possibility of another depression (not "downturn") should scare anyone, but in the context of the Great Depression, what on Earth do you mean by "with our currently reduced safety net?" There were no "safety nets" in the 1930s.
Growing up in a communist country, we always thought, that the strenght of capitalism was the massive, relatively well paid middle-class, with good consuming power. Exactly what we missed in the former communist countries.
It has been one of the strengths, but is not a cause: it's an effect of all the other components of America.
The worlds largest corporations, in order to make more money for their shareholders have begun to dismantle this fundamental piece of the prospering capitalism.
Making money for the shareholders is now only part of the equation. Bonuses, stock options, golden parachutes... those are what heavily drive business executives today. They have a terminally short term view and in the long run don't give a shit what happens to the company or the shareholders.
But will the wipe-out of the consumer middle-class kill the success of capitalism, as we know it?
Yes. It's already beginning to happen. Ultimately the people now being disemployed are the customers of the corporations discarding them. Fucking over their U.S. employee base leads corporations on a suicidal downward spiral.
How long, before the the middle-class-less, most developed industrial countries economy turns into never ending recessions, do to the lack of purchising power of their own population?
Precisely. The present jobless "recovery" is the first major indicator that the process has begun. Since "jobless" also means "without purchasing power" the cost-cutting corporations are shooting themselves in the feet.
How long, before the mcdonaldized middle-class will look for radical political solutions?
Unlikely, in my opinion. Look back at The Great Depression. Most everyone just gritted their teeth and suffered. Of course things, people and politics are different now, so I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
How will it help, that huge number of the American population carries some kind of gun?
Not a factor in my opinion. Of course you're quite mistaken about most Americans carrying guns. We don't. Many Americans own guns. There's a big difference.
How long, before the riot starts?
A long time, I think. This isn't Italy or Nigeria.
How long, before governments realize that globalization is great for multinational corporations but destroyes the social fabric, which made these countries leading economies?
A good question. Some would say, "Never." Some would say that everything is presently going according to plan. Others would say, "No, that last is too conspiratorial. Government is just a slow, dimwitted beast that requires great pain before it reacts."
"...You'll be surprised how rewarding trades can be compared to an office job."
I agree. After 40 years of very serious software development (OS internals, languages, macro processors, protocols, device drivers, machine and peripheral emulators -- not JavaShit or Visual Barfic), I am changing careers because it seems no one wants actual, real software designers/developers anymore. So I say, "Screw 'em all!"
I got a hint of what was to come in 1990 when I moved into this house and had cable hooked up. The installer seemed too bright, too articulate. We talked. He was a degreed electronic engineer who used to design the "sleds" that give those thigh-mounted data entry devices we see being used by inventory takers their specific functions and behaviors. He quit and became a cable TV installer because of low pay, long hours, abuse and PHBs. He never looked back. In his new job he had variety every day, was outside a lot in fresh air and sunshine, was never seriously put out, and never took his job home with him.
I've never been ideologically anti-corporate, but it's now clear to me that corporate America is committing suicide. I no longer care. I'll donate the bullet or the razor or the match, however they want to put themselves out of their misery.
...a comment above says that the guide recommends the opposite of what you concluded. You should store your CD's vertically, not horizontally.
The poster didn't mean what he wrote. When he wrote "stacking vertically" he meant that he had been keeping them in vertical stacks of horizontally-oriented CDs/DVDs.
Then again, maybe he did completely misunderstand the recommendation. Unfortunately a lot of people today speak ambiguously. Maybe it comes from the contamination of language introduced by politics, where some now call a tax an "investment" and a reduction in the rate of increase of a budget a "cut."
Though I do have a 50cm-wide 150Mb removable Wang disk that has some interesting stuff on it if anyone has an old Wang VS lying around.
I do have a Wang VS -- more than one -- and they're not lying around. One runs a Web server 24 x 7 and others are used for development, conversions, etc. I've never heard of a 150 MB removable disk, though, and certainly don't have a drive for one. I don't see anything in GENEDIT that even remotely resembles a 150 MB Rem. What vintage is it?
FYI there are still some Wang WIIS imaging systems in operation -- 12" and 5.25" WORM opticals. I wonder whether Wang and users of those systems thought the opticals were archival.
I wonder whether they may have in fact been designed and built to much better standards than the CDs and DVDs being discussed here. Some of those systems have been in operation for about 15 years.
"A customer-centered philosophy is a key driver for taking a pro-active stance in formulating survival strategies for the age of discontinuity. At the same time, reduction of margin erosion interacts synergistically with change management in keeping your organisation aligned with the market, and inter-divisional teamwork presents challenges in the context of moving towards a 'cloverleaf' organisation. Juxtaposed to those is the fact that the necessary focus on core competencies presents challenges in the context of pinpointing the values that individuals add to key client processes, while a customer-centered philosophy interacts synergistically with change management in increasing the visibility of key business metrics. While devolution of profit and revenue responsibility is simply one aspect of methodological approaches to strategic decision-making oriented to market growth vectors and the price of yak butter, inter-divisional teamwork means that management must concentrate on the operational imperative of strategic decision-making oriented to market growth vectors.
"I'm your man. Fire the rest of these losers and let me build a new IT organization from the ground up."
You don't get into executive level positions because of your job skills -
Exactly. That is what has changed in the last 20-30 years. Once upon a time managers were expected to fully understand and -- in a pinch -- perform the work they managed. Once upon a time executives were expected to fully understand all the component pieces of the organizations they directed. Some of the best (and a few of the worst) rose to running companies from the technical or production ranks of the organizations they later oversaw. Some of the most notable execs founded their companies, coming from technical backgrounds.
Pretty much all the posts here from all viewpoints highlight the complete disconnect today in many companies between executives and what goes on under them. That is what leads to Enron's Jeff Skilling sitting before a congressional committee saying things like "Gee, I just had no idea what was going on in my organization!" I doubt very much that his executive job description contained anything specifying ignorance or absolving him of the responsibility of knowing everything of significance going on under him.
The advice a few posts previously about treating the execs as if they were retarded toddlers was pretty good, it seems to me. That's what many of today's executives are.
Clueless Exec #1: You know, somebody mentioned the other day that we have an IT department.
Clueless Exec #2: Oh? What does it do?
Clueless Exec #1: I dunno. I think we should find out, though. Maybe we can make some cuts and do some cost saving there. I wonder how we can size them up...
Clueless Exec #2: I know! We can schedule a dinner! That will fake them out. They'll think it's a social event and willprobably run off at the mouth and give us a pretty good picture of who isn't a team player and who's rocking the boat. Then we'll know who to cut.
Clueless Exec #1: Perfect! [leans to phone/intercom, gives instructions to executive secretary, finishes, turns back to Clueless Exec #2] Golf tomorrow?
We're not blocking all of 24.* right now because there are some people like you on that block, but if Comcast and other ISPs that are in that class A don't get their act together, you guys are likely to have problems...
Then the Internet is likely to have problems, because the number of businesses connected by cable is on the rise for a very good reason: reasonable rates for good bandwidth, fast install, and better reliability than a lot of xDSL customers whose horror stories abound.
If you have legitimate permission from your ISP to run your own servers, I'd hope they would separate you in the IP space from the DUL RBLs. If not, that's an issue your ISP should consider.
(As opposed to what? Illegitimate permission?) I pay for business class cable service with a static IP. There is no question that I can run my own servers, and I make no use whatsoever of the provider's Web, email or other servers except for occasional use of USENET.
As near as I can tell, this cable provider uses IP addresses that reflect their network topology, which is strongly geographic down through the neighborhood level. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
You can get by with less bandwidth on a higher-performing network that doesn't go through a bunch of goofy networks that don't have their act together. Shop around if you find yourself serviced by an ISP that is indescriminate about who they do business with. There are always options.
I can't get by with less bandwidth -- I need more as it is. Unfortunately the basic business rate is seriously asymmetrical, which is bad for servers. Also, I don't need an ISP in the traditional sense. I just need "Internet dial tone" -- packet routing to/from the Internet. I live on the fringe of a larger city, at the edge of suburban sprawl where in one direction things are highly built up and in the other direction there are farms. There is no reason why decent DSL shouldn't be available here but the telco has still not installed DSLAMs outside the COs around here, so even well within the heavily built-up border of the suburban sprawl only those fortunate enough to be close to a CO can even get DSL.
Before I got cable I had IDSN and then tried to go down the iDSL route with Verio and [Northpoint?]. In the end [Northpoint] screwed up in its death agonies and Verio accepted some nitwit's determination that my location is too far from the CO to do iDSL, even though I had working IDSN at the time, which is the same signalling on the line, and even though I could plug the iDSL modem into the IDSN line and get a green signal indication. It was a complete bust, convinced me of how brain dead Verio was, and cost months of lost calendar time filled with ultimately useless phone calls and emails.
When I ordered business class cable Internet from Time Warner Cable it was installed in three days and delivered 2 Mbits down and 384 Kbits up. The one long outage (60 hrs) I've experienced due to cable modem failure and the several briefer outages have been nothing compared to what people and businesses I know who use DSL have experienced. For example a hotel known to me with telco-provided DSL has experienced multiple outages lasting a week or more.
Shop around...
There's no "shopping around" to be done here. The only viable and affordable connectivity here is cable. Some day, if I get within range, I may install DSL as a backup. Meanwhile while the telcos and their DSL resellers try to see how many thumbs they can jam up their rears, the whole country is getting connected via cable. Determination by IP block of what can or should be blocked is becoming diluted and less effective every day. If you want to black out more and more of the Internet to your users, that will ultimately be your problem. I understand that running a large operation th
We're now getting near the point of blacklisting the entire 24.* IP block as well - which encompasses, among other things, a large portion of Comcast IP blocks that Comcast can't or won't control.
That's the real problem with blocking by IP ranges. I'm in 24.* because it's the only high-speed Internet I can get. It's not Comcast but I see tons of probes from infected machines local to me in my area of 24.*. But I'm not the only legitimate business living in a broadband network that contains tons of clueless residential subscribers. What would you have us do, get T1 lines and $3,500/mo ISP feeds? Go back to dialup? What's wrong with this picture?
I have a static IP, my own domains, and run my own Web and email servers. My site is business, has tons of information on a niche IT subject, has forums, and some growing e-commerce for parts and equipment in my niche.
If and when you block 24.*, either your users won't be able to write to me or I won't be able to reply to them, and if you follow the pattern of a lot of clueless admins out there you will also block to postmaster, so it will be impossible to let you know that you're blocking legitimate traffic.
Anyone legitimately in China that needs to communicate with our network can be quickly whitelisted.
Aside from the amusing notion of "Anyone legitimately in China" (what's the alternative -- being an illegal immigrant?), just how would a sender of legitimate email from China to a user in your network let you know that you are blocking their email? How would they let the person who can't receive their mail that the block is preventing them from communicating?
Most of my business contacts are initiated by the OP by email, from all over the world. If someone can't reach me because I block more than I should, that person will likely never reach me and I will never get any business from them. From my business perspective that would be exceptionally stupid network management.
I filter inbound spam by whitelist and then content. I get zero false negatives in my New Mail folder at the price of having to pick up some new correspondents from the SPAM folder and whitelist them. At least that way, though, I have a folder of truly confirmed spam to send to SpamCop by script, and thanks to the recent trend of gibberish tacked onto the Subject and other highly human-recognizable signals in From and Subject visible in the folder list, I no longer have to actually open any messages to confirm they are spam. Even when I do, though, my mail client doesn't retrieve any graphics from any servers.
Not retrieving graphics doesn't save me from confirming I am here, though, because as soon as I pass the confirmed spam to one of my servers the spam is first sent to SpamCop, then all the URLs are parsed out, spammer's email addresses are substituted for all occurrences of my email address in the URLs, spammer domains are substituted for any occurrences of my domain, and scripts then download the entire spam sites, once for each URL they have sent me.
That still leaves encoded values in the URLs, which I presume contain at least a cross reference to the email address the spam was sent to, but I don't care. "Send me spam and get your site downloaded. More spam -- more downloads." Most spam is, after all, an explicit invitation to visit a spamvertised Website.
I'm not a network guru like a lot on here but to me, the lay person, the IPv4 issue sounds a lot like the Y2K problem. Just another problem caused 30 years ago because the fast paced spread of the technology wasn't forseen.
Not trying to beat up on you... what you wrote is what people who weren't there commonly say with hindsight. The seeing eye moves, and moving, sees from different viewpoints over time. When 32 bits were selected to provide IP addressing for the the then-new phase, it probably seemed like a lot and any more than that would have run into objections of excess packet overhead and bandwidth waste.
Believe me, if anyone had suggested using more than six digits to store a date 30+ years ago it would have seemed idiotic and wasteful. Mostly these things don't even get discussed beyond unstated limits that are appropriate to the times and the circumstances. A real life example:
In late 1969 or early 1970 I was standing in a mostly empty computer room with people a lot older and wiser than I, and they were discussing what level of New York Stock Exchange trading volumes (as a measure of overall market ticker traffic in all exhanges) we should plan on for our second-generation network and computers, given a lifetime of, say, ten years. Our processing and communication loads were directly related to trading activity in stock, bond, commodities and other markets. NYSE volume was the common metric used to gauge all the market information traffic in the nation for load purposes.
The NYSE was doing, I think, about 6 million shares a day on a heavy day then. Some provision had to be made for growth but no one wanted to be the first to throw out too high a number. They looked at each other in turns in a most peculiar manner.
Finally the VP asked, "Do you think planning for 20 million shares a day would be going too far?" No one else had been willing to venture a number that high, but everyone agreed that that would be a good number for planning the network and computer capacity. Had anyone tried to sell the idea that we should have planned for much more than 20 million, he would have been noted as someone whose assessments were wildly outside the lines.
As it happened, our network and computers had to handle U.S. market information traffic measured by NYSE volumes of 200+ million shares per day before it was replaced by a newer system about 15 years later, and as early as 1976 the major exchanges began delivering information at a gross bit rate 70 times what it had been before. In that original discussion, anyone who might have insisted that 200 million was the right number probably would have lost his job on the spot for being so obviously out of touch with reality.
And so it goes. The viewpoint changes, the givens change, the parameters change, the changes change, and later judgments about decisions made decades earlier are rarely informed enough to be valid. In our case we blew it badly on the estimate of 20-million-share days, but we built our shit so well that it scaled without much difficulty to handle 10 times what we planned for and five years longer life than anyone had hoped for.
Also, system failures were not permitted. But that's another story for another time...
I think you communicated your point, but I don't believe it.
OK, fair enough. So perhaps I don't have to type slower, and in any case your post gave me an opportunity to put my case in other words and try to clarify parts of it, which I think turned out well. All in all a win.
I don't believe people will buy PCs with that kind of lock-in capability. (note: I'm talking about PCs specifically, not mainframes or supercomputers or even big servers.)
I don't think your disbelief can easily be justified. Platforms move forward and they shed technologies as they move on to new ones. SIMMs are pretty much gone, ISA memory cards have been long gone, PCI graphics cards are rapidly disappearing, AGP has advanced through several generations, USB, now in its second major generation, is obsoleting fleets of ISA and PCI products, wireless has brought us a new paradigm in the usage of PCs and laptops, etc. I'm suggesting that IBM is showing us in their mainframes and now in their unix servers that the platform can be controlled in such a way as to make indiscriminate use impossible or infeasible and to control and license the access to the processor and be selective in the fees and the operating systems to which they apply, and that their strategy there combined with their embrace of Linux may point to a future in which IBM effectively co-opts Linux on the "serious" platforms and that IBM or others may seek to duplicate that level of control on what we now think of as PCs. Trusted Computing as a framework in which to implement Digital Rights Management is already being actively developed and pieces of it are already in the P3 and P4 and in WinXP and WinServer 2003. To make TC and DRM work, it may already be a foregone conclusion that the accessible BIOS will become a thing of the past. If that happens, I'd bet that control of the OS you can load and run on a PC, and lease-like periodic licensing for your access to your own CPU will inevitably creep in.
Especially big business IT departments. They're not stupid, and Linux is really coming up on their radar now. If Intel tried right now to bring out a scheme that required a license to run an OS, the backlash would knock them straight on their collective asses. They would have to try and sneak it in without anyone noticing, but the Slashdot watchdogs aren't going to let that happen.
Actually, a good case could be made that business is stupid with regard to computers, but that's another thread for another time. Business will sell out in a heartbeat on this issue if there is something short-term in it for them. And there probably will be. Once the use of the PC CPU is under control, initial hardware and software revenues can be traded off against recurring license revenues by vendors in the same way that Polaroid pioneered the cheap machine that requires endless repeat purchases of expensive supplies -- in this case recurring license fees. Have you noticed that some printer ink cartridges cost half as much as some entire printers? Can they really make money selling printers that cheaply or do they sell some printers at a loss to outcompete their competition and then make it up in the unique, expensive ink cartridges you will have to buy again and again forever?
I didn't say that Intel would try to lock down the CPU and the BIOS right now, and I did suggest that when it comes, it will come as a sneaky rider on a vehicle such as Trusted Computing and DRM. I don't think that there has been any evidence to date that the Slashdot watchdogs have yet grokked the possibility of the licensing of processors to use a free operating system, but hopefully they will before they wake up some morning to discover that Linux requires a processor license fee on a PC as it already does on several lines of larger IBM systems, including the reinvented RS/60
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. The telcos have been gaming the regulatory system for decades and now they have to live with the awful mess they've created. They have been creating features as extra-charge items as a way of segregating revenue from the basic rate regulation. They also do sneaky things like not allowing *69 to be disabled and charging an arm and a leg for each time its used, unless you subscribe to one of their bundles of features.
It's a mess. The telcos made it, and now they can't undo it. Screw 'em. They're going the way of the dinosaurs.
I don't believe the regulatory effect has anything to do with the number you select. It has to do with your billing address. Use a remailing service or a friend's or relative's address in a state that doesn't yet regulate Vonage and choose a phone number in any part of the country you like, even your own home area.
I'm amazed! In a time when almost everyone mindless changes phone numbers at the drop of a hat, apparently completely oblivious to the disruptive effect that has on other people staying in touch with them or being able to call them after the passage of some time, you happen to know one of the very few people who makes keeping his number a sticking point. In your friend's situation I would tell the telco that doesn't want to give up the number to stick it up their ass and I'd banish them and their fees to history.
You're half right. Pick a billing address outside the regulated area. You can plug a Vonage (usually Cisco) VoIP box into any network virtually anywhere in the world and your number will ring the phone plugged into it.
Also, the big reason people want to have a number local to where they live is so that people nearby won't have to make a long distance call to reach them. OTOH maybe that would be a great way to discourage local annoyance calls. Hmmm...
Finally someone gets it right. The signal to noise ratio here is appallingly low.
voss wrote:
Quite so. Proportionally, it is like a PHB being personally fined US$310.
No, engineering is only a small part of it. What's happening right now is a global shift in where any kind of exportable work is being done.
No, this has never happened before, at least not on this scale. What has happened before has been the movement of low-level manufacturing overseas to take advantage of low-cost labor and the shrinkage of niche labor markets here due to increasing use of machines in place of hand labor. When shoe manufacturing went overseas, when textile-related fabrication went overseas, when steel went overseas, as shipbuilding has gone overseas, etc., those areas here were disrupted but other fields were large unaffected.
What is happening today is that everything that can be sent overseas is being sent overseas, from many of our remaining manufacturing jobs to programming, engineering, architecture, medical diagnosis, paralegal work, investment analysis, accounting, etc.
The only things not going overseas so far are clueless executives' jobs and PHB's jobs. They should hope their jobs go overseas before they are hanged from lampposts by the people they have helped to disemploy.
Those are no longer meaningful statistics -- they are junk stats. People who have exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits are no longer counted as "unemployed." People who have given up on finding work are no longer counted as "unemployed." People who have taken shit jobs just to avoid starving and are using their Masters and PhDs to flip burgers or stack boxes are no longer counted as "unemployed." My superprogrammer friend who took his own life last year after two years of being unemployed in the wake of a corporate takeover and inevitable consequent massive layoffs is no longer counted as "unemployed."
Jobs will continue to shift until we:
With regard to (1):
zzyzx wrote:
I think that's a waaaay long stretch. I've never heard anything remotely like that and I was born in the decade immediately following the Great Depression. My father, mother and uncle all lived and worked throughout the 1930s, as did numerous more distant relatives, and the media of my youth were filled with rehashed news and stories of the 1930s and 40s. I've never heard anyone even suggest before that a revolution was possible here much less make a real case for it.
There's always a book. Someone could portray today's times any way they wish just by selecting the right book(s) from the almost infinite range available. Wearing a tinfoil hat is mandatory when doing such research or the reptilian Nazi aliens will get you.
There was a fashionable but naive affection for communism (lower case "c" just as in "capitalism") in the 1930s in certain circles. By the 1950s communism had clearly become a cancer on the world and the Cold War had begun. Nothing at all to do with any real possibility of a revolution in America in the 1930s.
The possibility of another depression (not "downturn") should scare anyone, but in the context of the Great Depression, what on Earth do you mean by "with our currently reduced safety net?" There were no "safety nets" in the 1930s.
Yes.
It has been one of the strengths, but is not a cause: it's an effect of all the other components of America.
Making money for the shareholders is now only part of the equation. Bonuses, stock options, golden parachutes... those are what heavily drive business executives today. They have a terminally short term view and in the long run don't give a shit what happens to the company or the shareholders.
Yes. It's already beginning to happen. Ultimately the people now being disemployed are the customers of the corporations discarding them. Fucking over their U.S. employee base leads corporations on a suicidal downward spiral.
Precisely. The present jobless "recovery" is the first major indicator that the process has begun. Since "jobless" also means "without purchasing power" the cost-cutting corporations are shooting themselves in the feet.
Unlikely, in my opinion. Look back at The Great Depression. Most everyone just gritted their teeth and suffered. Of course things, people and politics are different now, so I could be wrong, but I don't think so.
Not a factor in my opinion. Of course you're quite mistaken about most Americans carrying guns. We don't. Many Americans own guns. There's a big difference.
A long time, I think. This isn't Italy or Nigeria.
A good question. Some would say, "Never." Some would say that everything is presently going according to plan. Others would say, "No, that last is too conspiratorial. Government is just a slow, dimwitted beast that requires great pain before it reacts."
The best line in that parody article not long ago about the family that followed their outsourced jobs to India was:
The original article is here.
MSBob wrote:
I agree. After 40 years of very serious software development (OS internals, languages, macro processors, protocols, device drivers, machine and peripheral emulators -- not JavaShit or Visual Barfic), I am changing careers because it seems no one wants actual, real software designers/developers anymore. So I say, "Screw 'em all!"
I got a hint of what was to come in 1990 when I moved into this house and had cable hooked up. The installer seemed too bright, too articulate. We talked. He was a degreed electronic engineer who used to design the "sleds" that give those thigh-mounted data entry devices we see being used by inventory takers their specific functions and behaviors. He quit and became a cable TV installer because of low pay, long hours, abuse and PHBs. He never looked back. In his new job he had variety every day, was outside a lot in fresh air and sunshine, was never seriously put out, and never took his job home with him.
I've never been ideologically anti-corporate, but it's now clear to me that corporate America is committing suicide. I no longer care. I'll donate the bullet or the razor or the match, however they want to put themselves out of their misery.
[swish] [thunk!] [THUD!]
"Whoopsie! We underestimate the strength those new exercises must have imparted to our arms! Someone make this mess vanish!"
"Next!"
"Next...?"
Right udner the "Spel Chekc" optoin.
Sunlight?
Is that the stuff that pollutes the environment "outside" while I'm asleep inside?
--
"Outside??? You mean... DOWN THE STOOP???"
- Nero Wolfe
donheff wrote:
The poster didn't mean what he wrote. When he wrote "stacking vertically" he meant that he had been keeping them in vertical stacks of horizontally-oriented CDs/DVDs.
Then again, maybe he did completely misunderstand the recommendation. Unfortunately a lot of people today speak ambiguously. Maybe it comes from the contamination of language introduced by politics, where some now call a tax an "investment" and a reduction in the rate of increase of a budget a "cut."
Anonymous Coward wrote:
I wish my organic wang worked as well as my Wang VS systems do -- they never quit or go down.
heironymouscoward wrote:
I do have a Wang VS -- more than one -- and they're not lying around. One runs a Web server 24 x 7 and others are used for development, conversions, etc. I've never heard of a 150 MB removable disk, though, and certainly don't have a drive for one. I don't see anything in GENEDIT that even remotely resembles a 150 MB Rem. What vintage is it?
FYI there are still some Wang WIIS imaging systems in operation -- 12" and 5.25" WORM opticals. I wonder whether Wang and users of those systems thought the opticals were archival. I wonder whether they may have in fact been designed and built to much better standards than the CDs and DVDs being discussed here. Some of those systems have been in operation for about 15 years.
Knightsaber2003 wrote:
Yes. That's why I'll be very interested to see a followup by the article poster some time after the "dinner."
Franciscan wrote:
"A customer-centered philosophy is a key driver for taking a pro-active stance in formulating survival strategies for the age of discontinuity. At the same time, reduction of margin erosion interacts synergistically with change management in keeping your organisation aligned with the market, and inter-divisional teamwork presents challenges in the context of moving towards a 'cloverleaf' organisation. Juxtaposed to those is the fact that the necessary focus on core competencies presents challenges in the context of pinpointing the values that individuals add to key client processes, while a customer-centered philosophy interacts synergistically with change management in increasing the visibility of key business metrics. While devolution of profit and revenue responsibility is simply one aspect of methodological approaches to strategic decision-making oriented to market growth vectors and the price of yak butter, inter-divisional teamwork means that management must concentrate on the operational imperative of strategic decision-making oriented to market growth vectors.
"I'm your man. Fire the rest of these losers and let me build a new IT organization from the ground up."
itilguy wrote:
This would be a more effective way to put the question to the execs:
"How can we work better together to do the job and make sure you keep your job long enough to get your bonus and stock options?"
That would get their full attention.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
Exactly. That is what has changed in the last 20-30 years. Once upon a time managers were expected to fully understand and -- in a pinch -- perform the work they managed. Once upon a time executives were expected to fully understand all the component pieces of the organizations they directed. Some of the best (and a few of the worst) rose to running companies from the technical or production ranks of the organizations they later oversaw. Some of the most notable execs founded their companies, coming from technical backgrounds.
Pretty much all the posts here from all viewpoints highlight the complete disconnect today in many companies between executives and what goes on under them. That is what leads to Enron's Jeff Skilling sitting before a congressional committee saying things like "Gee, I just had no idea what was going on in my organization!" I doubt very much that his executive job description contained anything specifying ignorance or absolving him of the responsibility of knowing everything of significance going on under him.
The advice a few posts previously about treating the execs as if they were retarded toddlers was pretty good, it seems to me. That's what many of today's executives are.
Clueless Exec #1: You know, somebody mentioned the other day that we have an IT department.
Clueless Exec #2: Oh? What does it do?
Clueless Exec #1: I dunno. I think we should find out, though. Maybe we can make some cuts and do some cost saving there. I wonder how we can size them up...
Clueless Exec #2: I know! We can schedule a dinner! That will fake them out. They'll think it's a social event and willprobably run off at the mouth and give us a pretty good picture of who isn't a team player and who's rocking the boat. Then we'll know who to cut.
Clueless Exec #1: Perfect! [leans to phone/intercom, gives instructions to executive secretary, finishes, turns back to Clueless Exec #2] Golf tomorrow?
mabu wrote:
Then the Internet is likely to have problems, because the number of businesses connected by cable is on the rise for a very good reason: reasonable rates for good bandwidth, fast install, and better reliability than a lot of xDSL customers whose horror stories abound.
(As opposed to what? Illegitimate permission?) I pay for business class cable service with a static IP. There is no question that I can run my own servers, and I make no use whatsoever of the provider's Web, email or other servers except for occasional use of USENET.
As near as I can tell, this cable provider uses IP addresses that reflect their network topology, which is strongly geographic down through the neighborhood level. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
I can't get by with less bandwidth -- I need more as it is. Unfortunately the basic business rate is seriously asymmetrical, which is bad for servers. Also, I don't need an ISP in the traditional sense. I just need "Internet dial tone" -- packet routing to/from the Internet. I live on the fringe of a larger city, at the edge of suburban sprawl where in one direction things are highly built up and in the other direction there are farms. There is no reason why decent DSL shouldn't be available here but the telco has still not installed DSLAMs outside the COs around here, so even well within the heavily built-up border of the suburban sprawl only those fortunate enough to be close to a CO can even get DSL.
Before I got cable I had IDSN and then tried to go down the iDSL route with Verio and [Northpoint?]. In the end [Northpoint] screwed up in its death agonies and Verio accepted some nitwit's determination that my location is too far from the CO to do iDSL, even though I had working IDSN at the time, which is the same signalling on the line, and even though I could plug the iDSL modem into the IDSN line and get a green signal indication. It was a complete bust, convinced me of how brain dead Verio was, and cost months of lost calendar time filled with ultimately useless phone calls and emails.
When I ordered business class cable Internet from Time Warner Cable it was installed in three days and delivered 2 Mbits down and 384 Kbits up. The one long outage (60 hrs) I've experienced due to cable modem failure and the several briefer outages have been nothing compared to what people and businesses I know who use DSL have experienced. For example a hotel known to me with telco-provided DSL has experienced multiple outages lasting a week or more.
There's no "shopping around" to be done here. The only viable and affordable connectivity here is cable. Some day, if I get within range, I may install DSL as a backup. Meanwhile while the telcos and their DSL resellers try to see how many thumbs they can jam up their rears, the whole country is getting connected via cable. Determination by IP block of what can or should be blocked is becoming diluted and less effective every day. If you want to black out more and more of the Internet to your users, that will ultimately be your problem. I understand that running a large operation th
Just as I thought: I went there, clicked on their Intellectual Property link, and got:
Really.
mabu wrote:
That's the real problem with blocking by IP ranges. I'm in 24.* because it's the only high-speed Internet I can get. It's not Comcast but I see tons of probes from infected machines local to me in my area of 24.*. But I'm not the only legitimate business living in a broadband network that contains tons of clueless residential subscribers. What would you have us do, get T1 lines and $3,500/mo ISP feeds? Go back to dialup? What's wrong with this picture?
I have a static IP, my own domains, and run my own Web and email servers. My site is business, has tons of information on a niche IT subject, has forums, and some growing e-commerce for parts and equipment in my niche.
If and when you block 24.*, either your users won't be able to write to me or I won't be able to reply to them, and if you follow the pattern of a lot of clueless admins out there you will also block to postmaster, so it will be impossible to let you know that you're blocking legitimate traffic.
Aside from the amusing notion of "Anyone legitimately in China" (what's the alternative -- being an illegal immigrant?), just how would a sender of legitimate email from China to a user in your network let you know that you are blocking their email? How would they let the person who can't receive their mail that the block is preventing them from communicating?
Most of my business contacts are initiated by the OP by email, from all over the world. If someone can't reach me because I block more than I should, that person will likely never reach me and I will never get any business from them. From my business perspective that would be exceptionally stupid network management.
I filter inbound spam by whitelist and then content. I get zero false negatives in my New Mail folder at the price of having to pick up some new correspondents from the SPAM folder and whitelist them. At least that way, though, I have a folder of truly confirmed spam to send to SpamCop by script, and thanks to the recent trend of gibberish tacked onto the Subject and other highly human-recognizable signals in From and Subject visible in the folder list, I no longer have to actually open any messages to confirm they are spam. Even when I do, though, my mail client doesn't retrieve any graphics from any servers.
Not retrieving graphics doesn't save me from confirming I am here, though, because as soon as I pass the confirmed spam to one of my servers the spam is first sent to SpamCop, then all the URLs are parsed out, spammer's email addresses are substituted for all occurrences of my email address in the URLs, spammer domains are substituted for any occurrences of my domain, and scripts then download the entire spam sites, once for each URL they have sent me.
That still leaves encoded values in the URLs, which I presume contain at least a cross reference to the email address the spam was sent to, but I don't care. "Send me spam and get your site downloaded. More spam -- more downloads." Most spam is, after all, an explicit invitation to visit a spamvertised Website.
darkwhite wrote:
Why? So you can burn down your house while having the alibi that you were 30 miles away, at work?
[a directive occurred while processing this error]LinuxInDallas wrote:
Not trying to beat up on you... what you wrote is what people who weren't there commonly say with hindsight. The seeing eye moves, and moving, sees from different viewpoints over time. When 32 bits were selected to provide IP addressing for the the then-new phase, it probably seemed like a lot and any more than that would have run into objections of excess packet overhead and bandwidth waste.
Believe me, if anyone had suggested using more than six digits to store a date 30+ years ago it would have seemed idiotic and wasteful. Mostly these things don't even get discussed beyond unstated limits that are appropriate to the times and the circumstances. A real life example:
In late 1969 or early 1970 I was standing in a mostly empty computer room with people a lot older and wiser than I, and they were discussing what level of New York Stock Exchange trading volumes (as a measure of overall market ticker traffic in all exhanges) we should plan on for our second-generation network and computers, given a lifetime of, say, ten years. Our processing and communication loads were directly related to trading activity in stock, bond, commodities and other markets. NYSE volume was the common metric used to gauge all the market information traffic in the nation for load purposes.
The NYSE was doing, I think, about 6 million shares a day on a heavy day then. Some provision had to be made for growth but no one wanted to be the first to throw out too high a number. They looked at each other in turns in a most peculiar manner.
Finally the VP asked, "Do you think planning for 20 million shares a day would be going too far?" No one else had been willing to venture a number that high, but everyone agreed that that would be a good number for planning the network and computer capacity. Had anyone tried to sell the idea that we should have planned for much more than 20 million, he would have been noted as someone whose assessments were wildly outside the lines.
As it happened, our network and computers had to handle U.S. market information traffic measured by NYSE volumes of 200+ million shares per day before it was replaced by a newer system about 15 years later, and as early as 1976 the major exchanges began delivering information at a gross bit rate 70 times what it had been before. In that original discussion, anyone who might have insisted that 200 million was the right number probably would have lost his job on the spot for being so obviously out of touch with reality.
And so it goes. The viewpoint changes, the givens change, the parameters change, the changes change, and later judgments about decisions made decades earlier are rarely informed enough to be valid. In our case we blew it badly on the estimate of 20-million-share days, but we built our shit so well that it scaled without much difficulty to handle 10 times what we planned for and five years longer life than anyone had hoped for.
Also, system failures were not permitted. But that's another story for another time...
Spy Hunter wrote:
OK, fair enough. So perhaps I don't have to type slower, and in any case your post gave me an opportunity to put my case in other words and try to clarify parts of it, which I think turned out well. All in all a win.
I don't think your disbelief can easily be justified. Platforms move forward and they shed technologies as they move on to new ones. SIMMs are pretty much gone, ISA memory cards have been long gone, PCI graphics cards are rapidly disappearing, AGP has advanced through several generations, USB, now in its second major generation, is obsoleting fleets of ISA and PCI products, wireless has brought us a new paradigm in the usage of PCs and laptops, etc. I'm suggesting that IBM is showing us in their mainframes and now in their unix servers that the platform can be controlled in such a way as to make indiscriminate use impossible or infeasible and to control and license the access to the processor and be selective in the fees and the operating systems to which they apply, and that their strategy there combined with their embrace of Linux may point to a future in which IBM effectively co-opts Linux on the "serious" platforms and that IBM or others may seek to duplicate that level of control on what we now think of as PCs. Trusted Computing as a framework in which to implement Digital Rights Management is already being actively developed and pieces of it are already in the P3 and P4 and in WinXP and WinServer 2003. To make TC and DRM work, it may already be a foregone conclusion that the accessible BIOS will become a thing of the past. If that happens, I'd bet that control of the OS you can load and run on a PC, and lease-like periodic licensing for your access to your own CPU will inevitably creep in.
Actually, a good case could be made that business is stupid with regard to computers, but that's another thread for another time. Business will sell out in a heartbeat on this issue if there is something short-term in it for them. And there probably will be. Once the use of the PC CPU is under control, initial hardware and software revenues can be traded off against recurring license revenues by vendors in the same way that Polaroid pioneered the cheap machine that requires endless repeat purchases of expensive supplies -- in this case recurring license fees. Have you noticed that some printer ink cartridges cost half as much as some entire printers? Can they really make money selling printers that cheaply or do they sell some printers at a loss to outcompete their competition and then make it up in the unique, expensive ink cartridges you will have to buy again and again forever?
I didn't say that Intel would try to lock down the CPU and the BIOS right now, and I did suggest that when it comes, it will come as a sneaky rider on a vehicle such as Trusted Computing and DRM. I don't think that there has been any evidence to date that the Slashdot watchdogs have yet grokked the possibility of the licensing of processors to use a free operating system, but hopefully they will before they wake up some morning to discover that Linux requires a processor license fee on a PC as it already does on several lines of larger IBM systems, including the reinvented RS/60