Oh, I'm sorry, was that a little too much Liv Tyler as the hottie elf Arwen ? Give me a break guys. I love LOTR too, but damn if I don't question your sexuality when you would trade screen time of Liv-Tyler-as-a-hottie-elf for a minor minor change in the FOTR storyline.
I was ready to see the entire storyline modified so that she could become part of the Fellowship. The Fellowship is something of a sausage-fest, you must admit.
Yet another Linux kernel. That's great. Am I being a troll by stating that I think Linux kernels are a little over-versioned ? I mean, from an uninterested person's perspective (aka FreeBSD guy), it seems like kernel 2.4.13.44 came out yesterday, and 2.4.13.45 came out today (someone patched NFS), and tomorrow when someone finds a bug in inetd it'll be 2.4.13.46. I'm seriously not trying to flame or troll, but it just seems that way. If FreeBSD changed a version number every time 10 patches went in I'd go insane.
I worked at UPS, IN one of the hubs for nearly 3 years. I worked as an unloader, loader, and sorter. It's a common misconception that those guys in the brown uniform driving the brown truck are the "UPS guys". They don't touch your package until they pull it out of their little truck. People like me load and unload your package repeatedly from semi trailers until it gets to your destination, and then at 3-4am WE load the little brown trucks. Then the guy you see comes in, drives the truck around and gives you the packages.
Where does the damage come from you ask ? Simple. Two sources. (A) The massive conveyor belt system that is inside every UPS (and Fedex) hub. It allows us to move a good half of San Diego County's packages in a work shift of 4 hours. You can imagine this involves hard and fast work. Packages get caught in the belts, the arms, and sometimes will fall off. (B) US. We destroy your package, for several reasons. If you didn't pack it right, so the weight shifts back and forth in the box, you can and do injure my back and the backs of my fellow UPS workers when we try to lift and move your package. I promise you I destroyed every poorly packaged box that caused me to hurt my back. Boxes that are oversized, overweight, or irregular are also asking to be destroyed. Boxes with sharp edges or with sharp items that poke out and cut our hands or legs. I promise you any box which draws my blood is destroyed. How do we destroy your package ? Simple. We all wear big workboots. Most of the time it's just stomped in. Other times we throw them across trailers. Pull off the labels. Put them in wrong trucks. It's us on the inside, screwing up your package because we're college laborers trying to earn a buck to pay for school and we don't appreciate a life-long back injury due to your fucking poorly packaged shipment. Which leads us to the most common reason packages are destroyed. (3) YOU PACKAGED IT WRONG JACKASS ! People get these old old sat-out-in-the-rain cardboard boxes, put something inside them, and then WRAP and WRAP them in tape, like that's going to make it okay. The damned boxes fall apart all the time, landing on our feet, fingers, or bashing our shins with your worthless garbage shipment. It must not be worth anything or you'd have shipped it properly. If you ship something in a fucked up box, we might not even be the ones destroying it. It may just self-descruct while in our system, once again hurting me or one of my coworkers.
The point is, a LARGE majority of the boxes shipped through our system get to their destination in perfect condition. These are the properly packaged boxes of reasonable weight and size, which are evenly distributed (don't shift), and are packed in new or like-new boxes which are rated for the weight you put in them. It's that simple. You package it right, I ship it right, we're both happy. You package it wrong, I destroy it, my back is hurting in Calculus class tomorrow, you got what you deserved.
And this is NOT just a UPS thing. I know people who worked at FedEx and people who worked at other UPS hubs. We shared similar stories about being injured on the job by shitty packaging, not being able to report the injury because it affects your record far too much, and therefore taking out our pain on your packages. Believe me, unless you've worked in a hub, building walls of boxes in trailers, unloaded trailers for hours, and sorted boxes onto belts, you are in no position to naysay me on this. Fuck the little brown suit guy and his little brown truck. UPS hubs should have stickers on the side that say "Powered by Starving Students".
Don't forget this year it wasn't just GH. I certainly had my share of points in the final score. This year I was running under the flag of Digital Revelation, although that's not my group. The final team was Ghetto Hackers merged with Digital Revelation, and without our admin points, GH wouldn't have won. It was a real team effort.
Yeah it pissed us off too, that you were dumb enough to give away that many points to GH. However, since Digital Revelation merged with Ghetto Hackers, those turned out to be our points anyway. Since we only won by something like 10 points, thanks for the freebie.:)
Yeah, and I suppose FreeBSD's Linux emulation is a GPL violation too right ? You've got it backwards kid, the IP theft goes INTO Linux, not out of Linux.
Besides, this is exactly why the GPL is stupid in the first place. It supports Open Source like the holy jihad, but does it support open standards ? Well, if a non-open source OS wants to be Linux compatible, I guess they're theives right ? Nice open standards.
Gee, Linux's TCP/IP stack is based on the BSD TCP/IP stack. I wonder if there's any IP theft going on there. Oh wait, the BSD licence supports sharing rather than screaming violation.
Besides, even if I was serious, what do you mean, convert your ints to octets when saving ? Are you saying a char is the only size of data you can print to a file ? Files are sequences of bytes, or sequences of words, or sequences of dwords, depending on how you interpret them. There's nothing to stop you from stamping ints directly into a file, 16 or 32 bits at a time.
char ascii;
int unicode;
unicode = (int)ascii;
fwrite(&unicode,sizeof(int),1,fptr);
Get it ? It's still just a joke, but not only did you miss the joke, but you corrected me very poorly.
Yeah, mod everyone down who points out Theo's assholia. That's real nice. I'm not the only one who pointed it out. Then again, I'm not the only one who got modded down for telling it like it is.
Listen, I am a male nerd. You are a male nerd. We are all male nerds. We were all just bought out by the grease up the Vulcan girl. Is there something wrong with that ? HELLS NO. I was to see MUCH MORE disinfection. Maybe next time the Asian girl and the Vulcan are the only ones to get infected.
You know, senseless Microsoft bashing is bad enough, but to sit there and say "if Microsoft did is, I'd expect them to take it to court", and such and such bullshit. The point is, Microsoft DID NOT do it. They've done the exact same thing for years and KEPT the copyright notice. With the LONG track record they have of honoring the BSD licence, how can you sit there and babble on about some scenario in which they violate it and have to be taken to court, as though that's some kind of excuse for the Linux community's hot-and-cold attitude towards other people screwing up. BSD people screw up, Linux people are righteous. Microsoft people screw up, Linux people are fighting the holy jihad. Linux people screw up, the Linux community is either quiet as a mouse, playing down the problem as though it means nothing, or they try to somehow compare the situation to something to do with Microsoft, because somehow as long as Microsoft is worse, Linux's sins are forgiven. If this was a GPL violation committed by someone in the BSD community, Linux people would be sending death threats. The hypocrisy demonstrated by the Linux community almost weekly when it comes time to point out someone's faults, is laughable. They accuse other peoples' licences of not being "free enough" when the BSD licence is "more free". They accuse OS A or B of being slow, when there are many OSes faster than Linux. And to beat all hell, as a last resort, when all the cards are on the table, and some other OS like BSD comes out above Linux their fall-back saving-throw is "Linux is way better than Microsoft". I for one am tired of the hypocritical spin and FUD that comes from the Linux community, while at the same time they accuse others of the same bullshit. If you make a mistake, fix it, and take the blame like a professional. Instead you act like a little kid trying to claim he didn't break the glass, or trying to excuse the glass being broken because the kid down the street has done worse.
This is not flamebait, I'm just telling it like it is. With all the BSD is dying bullshit we have to put up with, I think we can mod this up a few points and get the truth out there. I'm not posting this anonymously because I am not trolling.
I can't believe how many idiots we have here. An Operating System is NOT just a kernel. An Operating System is a complete *System* for a user to manipulate his or her resources. FreeBSD is a real operating system. Linux is a kernel. GNU is a project full of software. My FreeBSD server can be installed and be functional and useful without GNU software. Linux does nothing without GNU software. If you Linux people aren't willing to recognize all of those programmers under the GNU label, THEN STOP USING GNU SOFTWARE. You want to prove that Linux on its own is a OS ? Use Linux without GNU. Otherwise, recognize those programmers who wasted their time writing software for Linux gimps like you and put the GNU/Linux. The only reason Linux people want to avoid that is it shows how piecemeal their system is.
Why is it every time someone compares Linux to FreeBSD or Linux to any other *nix, the Linux kiddies defend themselves by says "It's better than Windows !!!". No SHIT, it's better than Windows. That doesn't make it a good OS. Better than Windows is like the Taller Than Napolean Award, everyone wins. Here's another idiotic example.
"much more often on Linux than on other unices"
"FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water"
"The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right"
And the moron's response is:
"a properly maintained Unix or Linux system requires far less maintenance than Windos NT"
There it is again. On demand, the Linux kiddie will run to compare his OS to Windows.
challenge:
"But FreeBSD is a REAL OS, and it's far more stable and reliable than Linux."
response:
"Obviously you don't know what you're talking about. Linux is fifty bazillion times more stable than Windows 3.0 running over DRDOS on a 386 system with bad SIMMs."
WHO IS TALKING ABOUT WINDOWS ?!
Drop the s/FreeBSD/Windows/g bit when you're arguing about OSes Linux kiddies.
Oh, and you can mod this a flame if you like, but damnit, what I just said was the bare ass truth. Every time it comes down to an OS vs OS pissing contest, Linux kiddies have to bring MS into it, so at least they're better than somebody. In the above example the guy was talking about "Unicies" and the responding kiddie somehow felt he needed to bring Windows NT into it.
B) Tracking down any nuance in the Linux ->
FreeBSD transisition -- code but I'm really _really_ doubting it was built with portability in mind.
It was written in Perl... I think we have something compatible with that in BSD. Lemme check, wait, yes, here it is,
/usr/bin/perl
C) With all the pro-Linux stuff I see on here I'd consider it more likely to see Natalie Portman waring a pants full of hot grits screaming "All your base are belong to us!" in the middle of Times Square than see Slahdot switch to a BSD.
Geez ! I'm at work right now and I'm trying to code ! I can't work with Natalie Portman on my mind ! You owe my work whatever one day of my salary is !
I'm sick of reading about what rights the government will take away next. When was the last time the government protected someone's right to do something (besides protecting an African-American's "right" to go to a university with a 2.0 GPA and an 1100 SAT while protecting a white person's "right" to go to community college with a 3.8 GPA and a 1310 SAT). I swear to god, we just need to wait for this current generation of congress to frickin die off. We'll feel the difference when we get some of the Nintendo generation in office. Then we can start to clean up some of the damage being done by these hypocrites in office right now. By hypocrite, I mean people who say "It was okay for my peers and I to do it when we were your age, but now we're going to make sure none of you ever do it, because now it's different." We have a bunch of old men who didn't even grow up with calculators in office telling us what is right and what is wrong with their Christian value system and a complete ignorance of the things they are regulating.
This is the most ignorant posting I've ever seen to AskSlashdot. I don't mean to slam the person who asked the question, but this is ridiculous. We work in a capitalist market. Salesmen always have and always will try to sell anything. People will maximize their hours on a job for the maximum pay. So all the evil contractors and consultants are being unethical right ? What about the companies themselves, who will misrepresent how screwed up their setup is, causing contractors to underbid jobs, will withhold paying until certain 'extra' changes are made, knowing that the contractor probably doesn't have the money or time to sue them, and the company demanding that the contractor account for every minute billed before being paid, when they had not specified they wanted logged hours in the beginning, forcing the contractor to recall (or makeup) what he did every hour of the hours that he's billing, so he can actually get paid. When it comes to contracting and consulting, the businesses are in a serious position of power, and most of them know it. I've had MANY businesses refuse to pay the bill and demand that I work more (at no additional charge), or claim that my hours are false. I can't afford to work 18 hours on a contract, driving halfway across San Diego County to get screwed out of the pay. So what power do the consultants and contractors have ? They have the power of knowledge. What I've learned is this, although they hold the power of the paycheck, I hold the power of the production systems. If they are refusing to pay, shut them down. I've done it twice, and I had my check the next day. I've had someone tell me that's illegal or unethical. I disagree. If you don't pay your power bill, they turn off the power. If you don't pay for your car, they take it back. If you don't pay for your computer work, I turn off your computers. As for the issue of contractors spending extra hours on the job in order to pad their paychecks, I say more power to them. I see consultants and contractors from consulting companies charging rates of $150 or $200 an hour for someone that knows far less than I do. Most of that money goes to the company, the consultant getting maybe $20-$30. But because I'm not being sent out by a big company, there's no way I could get away with charging $150 an hour. So what do I do ? I charge $50 an hour and take 3 times longer to get the work done. It's really up to the business. You pay what I ask for, I'll get your work done fast and correctly. You pay me jack shit, I'll mess around until my hourly wage comes up to where it should be.
What it all comes down to is this. There are business people and there are computer people. Business people often look down on computer people like they aren't professionals, but instead just 'techies' like some advanced form of laborer. Business people try to play like they know computers, but most of them secretly hate computers and computer people. Business people treat computer people like shit, like we're all a bunch of socially inept morons who never leave the house. This attitude will eventually have to stop, but until it does, I just know one thing that keeps me from getting upset about it all. Knowledge is power. Companies have the paychecks, but if their computers aren't running, there's no money in the bank. They can threaten to sue, but by the time they got you in court, they'd be out so much frickin money from the computer downtime, it wouldn't be worth it to fight you over a couple hundred dollars.
Use your knowledge as power and don't let these business types treat you badly. You are the professional, you have the knowledge, THEY NEED YOU.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure you mean Frodo right jackass ?
Someone mark this guy Troll.
Oh, I'm sorry, was that a little too much Liv Tyler as the hottie elf Arwen ? Give me a break guys. I love LOTR too, but damn if I don't question your sexuality when you would trade screen time of Liv-Tyler-as-a-hottie-elf for a minor minor change in the FOTR storyline.
I was ready to see the entire storyline modified so that she could become part of the Fellowship. The Fellowship is something of a sausage-fest, you must admit.
Yet another Linux kernel. That's great. Am I being a troll by stating that I think Linux kernels are a little over-versioned ? I mean, from an uninterested person's perspective (aka FreeBSD guy), it seems like kernel 2.4.13.44 came out yesterday, and 2.4.13.45 came out today (someone patched NFS), and tomorrow when someone finds a bug in inetd it'll be 2.4.13.46. I'm seriously not trying to flame or troll, but it just seems that way. If FreeBSD changed a version number every time 10 patches went in I'd go insane.
I worked at UPS, IN one of the hubs for nearly 3 years. I worked as an unloader, loader, and sorter. It's a common misconception that those guys in the brown uniform driving the brown truck are the "UPS guys". They don't touch your package until they pull it out of their little truck. People like me load and unload your package repeatedly from semi trailers until it gets to your destination, and then at 3-4am WE load the little brown trucks. Then the guy you see comes in, drives the truck around and gives you the packages.
Where does the damage come from you ask ? Simple. Two sources. (A) The massive conveyor belt system that is inside every UPS (and Fedex) hub. It allows us to move a good half of San Diego County's packages in a work shift of 4 hours. You can imagine this involves hard and fast work. Packages get caught in the belts, the arms, and sometimes will fall off. (B) US. We destroy your package, for several reasons. If you didn't pack it right, so the weight shifts back and forth in the box, you can and do injure my back and the backs of my fellow UPS workers when we try to lift and move your package. I promise you I destroyed every poorly packaged box that caused me to hurt my back. Boxes that are oversized, overweight, or irregular are also asking to be destroyed. Boxes with sharp edges or with sharp items that poke out and cut our hands or legs. I promise you any box which draws my blood is destroyed. How do we destroy your package ? Simple. We all wear big workboots. Most of the time it's just stomped in. Other times we throw them across trailers. Pull off the labels. Put them in wrong trucks. It's us on the inside, screwing up your package because we're college laborers trying to earn a buck to pay for school and we don't appreciate a life-long back injury due to your fucking poorly packaged shipment. Which leads us to the most common reason packages are destroyed. (3) YOU PACKAGED IT WRONG JACKASS ! People get these old old sat-out-in-the-rain cardboard boxes, put something inside them, and then WRAP and WRAP them in tape, like that's going to make it okay. The damned boxes fall apart all the time, landing on our feet, fingers, or bashing our shins with your worthless garbage shipment. It must not be worth anything or you'd have shipped it properly. If you ship something in a fucked up box, we might not even be the ones destroying it. It may just self-descruct while in our system, once again hurting me or one of my coworkers.
The point is, a LARGE majority of the boxes shipped through our system get to their destination in perfect condition. These are the properly packaged boxes of reasonable weight and size, which are evenly distributed (don't shift), and are packed in new or like-new boxes which are rated for the weight you put in them. It's that simple. You package it right, I ship it right, we're both happy. You package it wrong, I destroy it, my back is hurting in Calculus class tomorrow, you got what you deserved.
And this is NOT just a UPS thing. I know people who worked at FedEx and people who worked at other UPS hubs. We shared similar stories about being injured on the job by shitty packaging, not being able to report the injury because it affects your record far too much, and therefore taking out our pain on your packages. Believe me, unless you've worked in a hub, building walls of boxes in trailers, unloaded trailers for hours, and sorted boxes onto belts, you are in no position to naysay me on this. Fuck the little brown suit guy and his little brown truck. UPS hubs should have stickers on the side that say "Powered by Starving Students".
Here's some pics:
My speech on behalf of Digital Revelation
Ceazar's speech on behalf of GH
And damn it was alot of fun this year.
Yeah it pissed us off too, that you were dumb enough to give away that many points to GH. However, since Digital Revelation merged with Ghetto Hackers, those turned out to be our points anyway. Since we only won by something like 10 points, thanks for the freebie. :)
Ghetto Hackers + Digial Revelation = 0wned CTF 2001
>Hey.. but linux is still way more stable than windows.
Yeah, I know I update my Microsoft Windows 2000 kernel every 4 days. Fucktard.
Yeah, and I suppose FreeBSD's Linux emulation is a GPL violation too right ? You've got it backwards kid, the IP theft goes INTO Linux, not out of Linux.
Besides, this is exactly why the GPL is stupid in the first place. It supports Open Source like the holy jihad, but does it support open standards ? Well, if a non-open source OS wants to be Linux compatible, I guess they're theives right ? Nice open standards.
Gee, Linux's TCP/IP stack is based on the BSD TCP/IP stack. I wonder if there's any IP theft going on there. Oh wait, the BSD licence supports sharing rather than screaming violation.
You do understand that was a joke right ?
Besides, even if I was serious, what do you mean, convert your ints to octets when saving ? Are you saying a char is the only size of data you can print to a file ? Files are sequences of bytes, or sequences of words, or sequences of dwords, depending on how you interpret them. There's nothing to stop you from stamping ints directly into a file, 16 or 32 bits at a time.
char ascii;
int unicode;
unicode = (int)ascii;
fwrite(&unicode,sizeof(int),1,fptr);
Get it ? It's still just a joke, but not only did you miss the joke, but you corrected me very poorly.
char ascii;
int unicode;
unicode = (int)ascii;
Yeah, mod everyone down who points out Theo's assholia. That's real nice. I'm not the only one who pointed it out. Then again, I'm not the only one who got modded down for telling it like it is.
I hate to post flamebait, but notice how Theo's being something of a prick as usual. That guy needs to lighten up.
I own the same drive, it works perfectly, always has. And I load it pretty heavily. blah.
Listen, I am a male nerd. You are a male nerd. We are all male nerds. We were all just bought out by the grease up the Vulcan girl. Is there something wrong with that ? HELLS NO. I was to see MUCH MORE disinfection. Maybe next time the Asian girl and the Vulcan are the only ones to get infected.
http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/v2.4/patch/patch-2.4 .6-ac1/linux.ac_drivers_ide_hptraid.h.html
You know, senseless Microsoft bashing is bad enough, but to sit there and say "if Microsoft did is, I'd expect them to take it to court", and such and such bullshit. The point is, Microsoft DID NOT do it. They've done the exact same thing for years and KEPT the copyright notice. With the LONG track record they have of honoring the BSD licence, how can you sit there and babble on about some scenario in which they violate it and have to be taken to court, as though that's some kind of excuse for the Linux community's hot-and-cold attitude towards other people screwing up. BSD people screw up, Linux people are righteous. Microsoft people screw up, Linux people are fighting the holy jihad. Linux people screw up, the Linux community is either quiet as a mouse, playing down the problem as though it means nothing, or they try to somehow compare the situation to something to do with Microsoft, because somehow as long as Microsoft is worse, Linux's sins are forgiven. If this was a GPL violation committed by someone in the BSD community, Linux people would be sending death threats. The hypocrisy demonstrated by the Linux community almost weekly when it comes time to point out someone's faults, is laughable. They accuse other peoples' licences of not being "free enough" when the BSD licence is "more free". They accuse OS A or B of being slow, when there are many OSes faster than Linux. And to beat all hell, as a last resort, when all the cards are on the table, and some other OS like BSD comes out above Linux their fall-back saving-throw is "Linux is way better than Microsoft". I for one am tired of the hypocritical spin and FUD that comes from the Linux community, while at the same time they accuse others of the same bullshit. If you make a mistake, fix it, and take the blame like a professional. Instead you act like a little kid trying to claim he didn't break the glass, or trying to excuse the glass being broken because the kid down the street has done worse.
This is not flamebait, I'm just telling it like it is. With all the BSD is dying bullshit we have to put up with, I think we can mod this up a few points and get the truth out there. I'm not posting this anonymously because I am not trolling.
I can't believe how many idiots we have here. An Operating System is NOT just a kernel. An Operating System is a complete *System* for a user to manipulate his or her resources. FreeBSD is a real operating system. Linux is a kernel. GNU is a project full of software. My FreeBSD server can be installed and be functional and useful without GNU software. Linux does nothing without GNU software. If you Linux people aren't willing to recognize all of those programmers under the GNU label, THEN STOP USING GNU SOFTWARE. You want to prove that Linux on its own is a OS ? Use Linux without GNU. Otherwise, recognize those programmers who wasted their time writing software for Linux gimps like you and put the GNU/Linux. The only reason Linux people want to avoid that is it shows how piecemeal their system is.
/*
7:44pm up 233 days, 16:20, 3 users, load average: 0.35, 0.42, 0.38
Desktop Workstation used for about 10 hours/day doing development and playing quake2 at lunch.. Thanks, but try again pal.
*/
Wow, that almost comes mildly close to some of my FreeBSD servers in production. Keep trying kid.
Why is it every time someone compares Linux to FreeBSD or Linux to any other *nix, the Linux kiddies defend themselves by says "It's better than Windows !!!". No SHIT, it's better than Windows. That doesn't make it a good OS. Better than Windows is like the Taller Than Napolean Award, everyone wins. Here's another idiotic example.
"much more often on Linux than on other unices"
"FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water"
"The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right"
And the moron's response is:
"a properly maintained Unix or Linux system requires far less maintenance than Windos NT"
There it is again. On demand, the Linux kiddie will run to compare his OS to Windows.
challenge:
"But FreeBSD is a REAL OS, and it's far more stable and reliable than Linux."
response:
"Obviously you don't know what you're talking about. Linux is fifty bazillion times more stable than Windows 3.0 running over DRDOS on a 386 system with bad SIMMs."
WHO IS TALKING ABOUT WINDOWS ?!
Drop the s/FreeBSD/Windows/g bit when you're arguing about OSes Linux kiddies.
Oh, and you can mod this a flame if you like, but damnit, what I just said was the bare ass truth. Every time it comes down to an OS vs OS pissing contest, Linux kiddies have to bring MS into it, so at least they're better than somebody. In the above example the guy was talking about "Unicies" and the responding kiddie somehow felt he needed to bring Windows NT into it.
It's God Emperor Leto III you gimp. Leto II was killed in sietch by Sardukar. Leto I was Paul's father.
It was written in Perl... I think we have something compatible with that in BSD. Lemme check, wait, yes, here it is,
C) With all the pro-Linux stuff I see on here I'd consider it more likely to see Natalie Portman waring a pants full of hot grits screaming "All your base are belong to us!" in the middle of Times Square than see Slahdot switch to a BSD.
Geez ! I'm at work right now and I'm trying to code ! I can't work with Natalie Portman on my mind ! You owe my work whatever one day of my salary is !
This is the most ignorant posting I've ever seen to AskSlashdot. I don't mean to slam the person who asked the question, but this is ridiculous. We work in a capitalist market. Salesmen always have and always will try to sell anything. People will maximize their hours on a job for the maximum pay. So all the evil contractors and consultants are being unethical right ? What about the companies themselves, who will misrepresent how screwed up their setup is, causing contractors to underbid jobs, will withhold paying until certain 'extra' changes are made, knowing that the contractor probably doesn't have the money or time to sue them, and the company demanding that the contractor account for every minute billed before being paid, when they had not specified they wanted logged hours in the beginning, forcing the contractor to recall (or makeup) what he did every hour of the hours that he's billing, so he can actually get paid. When it comes to contracting and consulting, the businesses are in a serious position of power, and most of them know it. I've had MANY businesses refuse to pay the bill and demand that I work more (at no additional charge), or claim that my hours are false. I can't afford to work 18 hours on a contract, driving halfway across San Diego County to get screwed out of the pay. So what power do the consultants and contractors have ? They have the power of knowledge. What I've learned is this, although they hold the power of the paycheck, I hold the power of the production systems. If they are refusing to pay, shut them down. I've done it twice, and I had my check the next day. I've had someone tell me that's illegal or unethical. I disagree. If you don't pay your power bill, they turn off the power. If you don't pay for your car, they take it back. If you don't pay for your computer work, I turn off your computers. As for the issue of contractors spending extra hours on the job in order to pad their paychecks, I say more power to them. I see consultants and contractors from consulting companies charging rates of $150 or $200 an hour for someone that knows far less than I do. Most of that money goes to the company, the consultant getting maybe $20-$30. But because I'm not being sent out by a big company, there's no way I could get away with charging $150 an hour. So what do I do ? I charge $50 an hour and take 3 times longer to get the work done. It's really up to the business. You pay what I ask for, I'll get your work done fast and correctly. You pay me jack shit, I'll mess around until my hourly wage comes up to where it should be.
What it all comes down to is this. There are business people and there are computer people. Business people often look down on computer people like they aren't professionals, but instead just 'techies' like some advanced form of laborer. Business people try to play like they know computers, but most of them secretly hate computers and computer people. Business people treat computer people like shit, like we're all a bunch of socially inept morons who never leave the house. This attitude will eventually have to stop, but until it does, I just know one thing that keeps me from getting upset about it all. Knowledge is power. Companies have the paychecks, but if their computers aren't running, there's no money in the bank. They can threaten to sue, but by the time they got you in court, they'd be out so much frickin money from the computer downtime, it wouldn't be worth it to fight you over a couple hundred dollars.
Use your knowledge as power and don't let these business types treat you badly. You are the professional, you have the knowledge, THEY NEED YOU.
Mod this guy up. He said it all.
Say the same sentence with the word Windows in place of X.
Hyprocrites.