Yea, you are right about that. Not only that, the standalone program may very well install some stealth programs of their own, now legalized (http://billg.ms-bs.com/modules.php?name=News&file =article&sid=1225).
Geez, Washington is just giving away our rights all over the place, just like the east coast and the west coast. What is the world, or the country coming to?
Remember when Windows 3.1 wouldn't run on DRDOS, but on MSDOS? After some digging people found the code that did it. It was encrypted (simply), so during Windows loading it was decrypted, and executed and specifically checked for DRDOS, and if found, wouldn't run. This smakes of exactly the same sort of thing.
If I'm not mistaken, I believe that this may have been one of the many MS behaviors that caused the monopoly suite to be filed. If this is the case, it's like "Will they never learn?"
I don't see any reasonable reason that MS should deny patch download access to any MS software running on Wine, or any other emulator for that matter. The implicite assumption is that the MS software was legally purchased. After all, it's their software quality that's being addressed with the patches.
On the other hand, given the already known security flaws and weaknesses of ActiveX, I'm not all that pleased about requiring an ActiveX control download and installation for demonstrating that I'm legal. No telling what that control is doing. It could be sending all my Quicken data files to MS or something. Well, at least I can run the standalone program.
Yea, I figure it must be the lunatic fringe that's after this idea. If you consider the implementation case with the students id badges (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/16/2 341200&tid=158&tid=126) which is, or was, further along in it's implementation, the parents were strongly against it. Now why would those same adults, or at least the ones in the Cal state legislature, support the idea that each car, and hence themselves, would be trackable in the same manner?
Sometimes you have to toe the company line, if you want to remain part of the organization. It comes along with being part of the organization and its advantages. However, if the company line, as you put it, is one that crosses your own moral lines, then you are obligated to remove yourself from the organization.
The best advice that I can give is to google for Colin Powell's PowerPoint: "A Leadership Primer".
While it'll not make you a better manager, or understand the management speak (some would say double speak), it will give you some pointers and guidelines as to how to be an effective leader of people, which is probably more important anyway.
When I was in a leadership position, I myself read and thought about a different slide at the start of each day, and it helped me. Aside from that, there are a number of books that would help you in growing into an effective leader.
I'll not agree with those here that have said that geeks go to management to die, and to refuse management positions. My experience indicates that the most effective technical team leaders are ones that have a well rounded knowledgebase and can effectively communicate, and learn from, their team (of course the team learn from the leader as well). Quickly grasping the essentials of a highly technical issue and making a decision is a great way to gain technical credibility with your team.
The greatest positive experience that can await you is to effectively lead a positive, self-directed team. I was very close to achieving this with my team. The moral was high, positive, everyone helped each other, supported each other, and everyone learned from each other, and no one was afraid to grow, stretch and extend their own knowledge.
Refusing a management position is in itself a career limiting move. The real question is how to continue to increase your value contribution to the organization so that you can continue to command the compensation that you are looking for. Let's face it: Old geeks are being replaced by the younger geeks 'cause the younger geeks work for less (same could be said for outsourcing, but that is another discussion).
I hope that this helps, and I wish you well in this new zone of experience, outside of your normal comfort zone. Now I have to quick duck before the following flame war erupts
Yea, well some late breaking news.
It appears that not only is the corporate R&D funding freezing or declining, the innovation outsourcing is already taking place.
Read here for more information:
http://www.cio.com/archive/011505/outsourcing.html
Well I don't know. Back then it seemed all rather revolutionary and futuristic rather than obvious. I can still remember thinking that the bandwidth constraints would make it difficult to deliver high quality digital video to multiple homes in the same neighborhood at the same time.
The same paper predicted MPG encoding, peer to peer file swapping and related legal issues, video on demand, and lots of other related things.
Did I miss something? Seems so.
I appologize.
I thought that they were shutting down the Media Lan in Boston.
Guess not, which is really good.
Oops. My Bad.
That's really too bad. I think that we will all miss the source of insightful, future-looking, new idea-creation factory, much to our long term deficit.
I remember when I first heard about the MIT Media Lab, it must have been about '90 or '91. I read a research paper that predicted exactly what is going on with cable / satellite, and PVRs right now. Including the network downloading of video content for 'Video On Demand', the DRM issues and a bunch more (I can't remember exactly right now). This was at the time when broadband was not even available for any household and was typically the domain of the very progressive or IT corporations.
Yup. More shortsightedness to the detriment of us all. I think that we need idea factories like this, and it does not speak well of our long term vision when we close down places like this.
Consider the global economy competition. US workers are not doing the manufacturing, nor other minimal value added activities. Some supporters of off shoring have said that the US needs to innovate, as this is their place in the global marketplace. So what do we do? Shut down one of the places where were were innovating?
Long term plans? Don't think that will ever happen. For how many years have we had the 1/4 to 1/4 mentality? It's pretty clear that this will only continue for the foreseeable future.
What's more to worry: As the off shoring continues from the manufacturing to engineering and other high value white collar careers, where are we going to get the engineering talent to design and build these future space vehicles? Doing it ourselves is not cost effective, better to get the Chinese and Indian engineers to design and built it for us? We'll just buy them and fly them?. We'll buy a system to take us to Mars and back?
If that's the case, whose achievement is it really? Ours? I think not. It will be theirs!
Even if we will manage to retain the engineering talent to design these systems, whose going to build them? Much of our manufacturing capacity has already moved off shore. Only the military manufacturing is staying, due to it's national security imperatives, and that capacity is not very great. It's questionable if that capacity could support both military and NASA customer bases.
It's the engineering achievement of designing and building the systems that's the greatest benefit to the society, not just the getting there and back. Think of all the industries and advances that we've made from our investment and developments of our space program. If we off shore the engineering, we won't be benefiting from those. The off shore location will be benefiting from them.
I think that we are already screwed, and just don't realize it. Well on our way of falling from a first world nation to a second world nation. Yea, we have a lot of inertia keeping us in our present place, but that'll erode soon enough.
Very much in a similar vain, when thinking
about the original postings sited example of Choctaw,"a language with two past tenses - one for
giving information which is definitely true, the other for passing on material
taken without checking from someone else.'"
gave me pause to consider.
Imagine a people who found it so important
to know the reliability of information given to them, that they created two
past tenses to be able to tell the difference
Thinking hypothetically, what if English
had adopted a similar structure. What would the politicians and media
do? Sound like? Say?
Yes, I know, completely pointless, but I
thought it was an interesting mental hot foot.
Unfortunately not. I stumbled across it on one of the news web sites, CNews.com, CNN.com, ZDNet, or PCMag. I just can't remember which one. Which I did, I'd rather have the source than not.
It used to be that employers were interviewing candidates trying to assess their potential. The employer typically ended up teaching the new employee the specifics of what they need to know to do the work. It used to be that working someplace was a relationship between employer and employee.
But alas, those days have passed, and now it's merely "what can you do for me right now?" "I hired you to do a specific job, don't get any ideas beyond that" "I'm not interested in your career growth" "I'll dump you ass on the street when it suits me" "Next year your job will be off shored anyway" "When your job is off shored, I expect you to train your replacements"
In your specific case, I'd say that candidates would have to know either C++ or C#, but both would be extra (with a little patients knowledge of one will transfer to the other), and COM, as ASP.NET is built on top of COM, and if you have the fundamentals, you can easily learn the particulars of ASP.NET fairly quickly. Design skills are required, and translate good discipline into the how the code is done.
Do you phrase your requirements in this fashion? No. You are casting too narrow a net, and I think that you've already indicated that in your response.
By specifying your requirements in such narrow specifics, and / or combination of specifics, and your unwillingness to have a little patience and allow someone to 'come up to speed' on the particulars, you really are making it more difficult for yourself finding suitable candidates.
Lastly, I can't believe that you can't find worthwhile candidates given the amount of layoffs and firing in the IT sector. I recently read in the trades that unemployment in the IT sector was still running around 60%. With that amount of people floating around out there, there has to be someone that wants to work for you, and that you'd not hesitate to invest a little bit into.
I think that you are deluded. I've seen the hiring process degrade to the point where the manager gives a list of 10 allegedly required certifications to the HR manager, and all they do is use this as a check list to throw resumes away. It'll be rare that anyone will have the exact list deemed as required, so the next step is to start looking for foreign workers to fill the position.
End result, corporations demand more H1B visas, while American IT workers are flipping burgers.
Consideration for good candidates my ass! You may not have even been made aware of the good candidates that applied as they might have missed even one of those allegedly required certifications.
Until you are interviewing FOR good candidate and NOT a list of certifications will you even meet good candidates.
Funny, last that I recall from reading in some of the trades, unemployment in the IT sector was still around 60%.
I know that nothing for me has gotten any better, and I'm thankful for the under-challenging job that I have now.
So now the big corporations want to import more IT people? Hey! How about hiring unemployed Americans first!
Of course one could, and probably should, consider their actions as yet another example of the extreme lack of morals and foresightedness in the current crop of corporate leadership. Consider renting PBS' "The Corporation".
Photo Badge, OK. As long as it's not required to be worn on the outside of clothing.
RFID badge? Not on my kid. I'd start looking for a private school that didn't need them.
Just think of the longer term impact of the message that this gives the kids:
"It's OK that we can track you electronically".
So 20 years from now, the notion of tracking all people in the US with sub-dermal RFIDs comes up, and we have an entire voting block that would probably support it. Is this the future that we want? I think not!
I don't agree with the premise either.
I was an IT Manager, CIO's right hand man as it turns out, for a $1B/yr tier one automotive supplier. It was the greatest experience that I've ever had. I was the manager that understood the technologies, and took care of the people, while at the same time was setting the expectations and influencing the decision makers that I reported to. The best part was that I could extract and summarize time and cost requirements from the leadership, and lead my team to a solution that met all the requirements in a very participatory manner. Team moral was very high. Too bad that the company went chapter 11 and reduced the staff from 18 down to 5. It was very soon after that they the leadership figured that I wasn't really needed either.
Now that I've got my masters degree, I'm looking to get back to a position like that again. I honestly feel like this is were I can provide the best value exchange both for myself and the team that I'm leading.
A DD course is something that I hadn't tought about, and it a good idea. Too bad that there is no actual driving time associated with it. After all, that's where it becomes real.
Here are you from? Graduated system? Could you please elaborate? I'm interested. Wish we could get +5 and +10 MPH license plates:P Though it'll never happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, you are right about that. Not only that, the standalone program may very well install some stealth programs of their own, now legalized (http://billg.ms-bs.com/modules.php?name=News&file =article&sid=1225).
Geez, Washington is just giving away our rights all over the place, just like the east coast and the west coast. What is the world, or the country coming to?
Yup. I agree with you there.
Remember when Windows 3.1 wouldn't run on DRDOS, but on MSDOS? After some digging people found the code that did it. It was encrypted (simply), so during Windows loading it was decrypted, and executed and specifically checked for DRDOS, and if found, wouldn't run. This smakes of exactly the same sort of thing.
If I'm not mistaken, I believe that this may have been one of the many MS behaviors that caused the monopoly suite to be filed. If this is the case, it's like "Will they never learn?"
I don't see any reasonable reason that MS should deny patch download access to any MS software running on Wine, or any other emulator for that matter. The implicite assumption is that the MS software was legally purchased. After all, it's their software quality that's being addressed with the patches.
On the other hand, given the already known security flaws and weaknesses of ActiveX, I'm not all that pleased about requiring an ActiveX control download and installation for demonstrating that I'm legal. No telling what that control is doing. It could be sending all my Quicken data files to MS or something. Well, at least I can run the standalone program.
But geez MS! Get a clue will you?
Yea, I figure it must be the lunatic fringe that's after this idea. If you consider the implementation case with the students id badges (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/16/2 341200&tid=158&tid=126) which is, or was, further along in it's implementation, the parents were strongly against it. Now why would those same adults, or at least the ones in the Cal state legislature, support the idea that each car, and hence themselves, would be trackable in the same manner?
Does anyone else see an inconsistency here?
Does anyone really believe for one minute that this new version of IE will actually be an improvement specific to exploitations?
If anything, I think it'll reset the clock on the patchwork, so to speak. MS'll have to re-release all the patches that they've release for IE 6.
Yea,
I know.
Just keep forgetting to put them in. My own fault, really.
I elect not to respond to the liar comment.
Sometimes you have to toe the company line, if you want to remain part of the organization. It comes along with being part of the organization and its advantages. However, if the company line, as you put it, is one that crosses your own moral lines, then you are obligated to remove yourself from the organization.
Damm it. I hate it when /. does that. One huge run-on again. Wish I could edit it to be the nice paragraphs that I wanted. Oh well. It's posted now. ;-)
The best advice that I can give is to google for Colin Powell's PowerPoint: "A Leadership Primer". While it'll not make you a better manager, or understand the management speak (some would say double speak), it will give you some pointers and guidelines as to how to be an effective leader of people, which is probably more important anyway. When I was in a leadership position, I myself read and thought about a different slide at the start of each day, and it helped me. Aside from that, there are a number of books that would help you in growing into an effective leader. I'll not agree with those here that have said that geeks go to management to die, and to refuse management positions. My experience indicates that the most effective technical team leaders are ones that have a well rounded knowledgebase and can effectively communicate, and learn from, their team (of course the team learn from the leader as well). Quickly grasping the essentials of a highly technical issue and making a decision is a great way to gain technical credibility with your team. The greatest positive experience that can await you is to effectively lead a positive, self-directed team. I was very close to achieving this with my team. The moral was high, positive, everyone helped each other, supported each other, and everyone learned from each other, and no one was afraid to grow, stretch and extend their own knowledge. Refusing a management position is in itself a career limiting move. The real question is how to continue to increase your value contribution to the organization so that you can continue to command the compensation that you are looking for. Let's face it: Old geeks are being replaced by the younger geeks 'cause the younger geeks work for less (same could be said for outsourcing, but that is another discussion). I hope that this helps, and I wish you well in this new zone of experience, outside of your normal comfort zone. Now I have to quick duck before the following flame war erupts
Ahh yes. The brilliance and short sightedness of greedy business leaders is just amazing.
Yea, well some late breaking news. It appears that not only is the corporate R&D funding freezing or declining, the innovation outsourcing is already taking place. Read here for more information: http://www.cio.com/archive/011505/outsourcing.html
Well I don't know. Back then it seemed all rather revolutionary and futuristic rather than obvious. I can still remember thinking that the bandwidth constraints would make it difficult to deliver high quality digital video to multiple homes in the same neighborhood at the same time. The same paper predicted MPG encoding, peer to peer file swapping and related legal issues, video on demand, and lots of other related things.
Did I miss something? Seems so. I appologize. I thought that they were shutting down the Media Lan in Boston. Guess not, which is really good. Oops. My Bad.
That's really too bad. I think that we will all miss the source of insightful, future-looking, new idea-creation factory, much to our long term deficit.
I remember when I first heard about the MIT Media Lab, it must have been about '90 or '91. I read a research paper that predicted exactly what is going on with cable / satellite, and PVRs right now. Including the network downloading of video content for 'Video On Demand', the DRM issues and a bunch more (I can't remember exactly right now). This was at the time when broadband was not even available for any household and was typically the domain of the very progressive or IT corporations.
Yup. More shortsightedness to the detriment of us all. I think that we need idea factories like this, and it does not speak well of our long term vision when we close down places like this.
Consider the global economy competition. US workers are not doing the manufacturing, nor other minimal value added activities. Some supporters of off shoring have said that the US needs to innovate, as this is their place in the global marketplace. So what do we do? Shut down one of the places where were were innovating?
Long term plans? Don't think that will ever happen. For how many years have we had the 1/4 to 1/4 mentality? It's pretty clear that this will only continue for the foreseeable future.
What's more to worry: As the off shoring continues from the manufacturing to engineering and other high value white collar careers, where are we going to get the engineering talent to design and build these future space vehicles? Doing it ourselves is not cost effective, better to get the Chinese and Indian engineers to design and built it for us? We'll just buy them and fly them?. We'll buy a system to take us to Mars and back?
If that's the case, whose achievement is it really? Ours? I think not. It will be theirs!
Even if we will manage to retain the engineering talent to design these systems, whose going to build them? Much of our manufacturing capacity has already moved off shore. Only the military manufacturing is staying, due to it's national security imperatives, and that capacity is not very great. It's questionable if that capacity could support both military and NASA customer bases.
It's the engineering achievement of designing and building the systems that's the greatest benefit to the society, not just the getting there and back. Think of all the industries and advances that we've made from our investment and developments of our space program. If we off shore the engineering, we won't be benefiting from those. The off shore location will be benefiting from them.
I think that we are already screwed, and just don't realize it. Well on our way of falling from a first world nation to a second world nation. Yea, we have a lot of inertia keeping us in our present place, but that'll erode soon enough.
All of the above is IMHO.
OK. I retract my comment. Obviously I don't know German as well as I thought. Oh well....
Although not a 100% certain, I don't believe that German has anything specific in it's grammar about the quality of the information being passed.
- Imagine a people who found it so important
to know the reliability of information given to them, that they created two
past tenses to be able to tell the difference
- Thinking hypothetically, what if English
had adopted a similar structure. What would the politicians and media
do? Sound like? Say?
Yes, I know, completely pointless, but I thought it was an interesting mental hot foot.Unfortunately not. I stumbled across it on one of the news web sites, CNews.com, CNN.com, ZDNet, or PCMag. I just can't remember which one. Which I did, I'd rather have the source than not.
Sorry about that.
It used to be that employers were interviewing candidates trying to assess their potential. The employer typically ended up teaching the new employee the specifics of what they need to know to do the work. It used to be that working someplace was a relationship between employer and employee.
But alas, those days have passed, and now it's merely
"what can you do for me right now?"
"I hired you to do a specific job, don't get any ideas beyond that"
"I'm not interested in your career growth"
"I'll dump you ass on the street when it suits me"
"Next year your job will be off shored anyway"
"When your job is off shored, I expect you to train your replacements"
In your specific case, I'd say that candidates would have to know either C++ or C#, but both would be extra (with a little patients knowledge of one will transfer to the other), and COM, as ASP.NET is built on top of COM, and if you have the fundamentals, you can easily learn the particulars of ASP.NET fairly quickly. Design skills are required, and translate good discipline into the how the code is done.
Do you phrase your requirements in this fashion? No. You are casting too narrow a net, and I think that you've already indicated that in your response.
By specifying your requirements in such narrow specifics, and / or combination of specifics, and your unwillingness to have a little patience and allow someone to 'come up to speed' on the particulars, you really are making it more difficult for yourself finding suitable candidates.
Lastly, I can't believe that you can't find worthwhile candidates given the amount of layoffs and firing in the IT sector. I recently read in the trades that unemployment in the IT sector was still running around 60%. With that amount of people floating around out there, there has to be someone that wants to work for you, and that you'd not hesitate to invest a little bit into.
I think that you are deluded. I've seen the hiring process degrade to the point where the manager gives a list of 10 allegedly required certifications to the HR manager, and all they do is use this as a check list to throw resumes away. It'll be rare that anyone will have the exact list deemed as required, so the next step is to start looking for foreign workers to fill the position.
End result, corporations demand more H1B visas, while American IT workers are flipping burgers.
Consideration for good candidates my ass! You may not have even been made aware of the good candidates that applied as they might have missed even one of those allegedly required certifications.
Until you are interviewing FOR good candidate and NOT a list of certifications will you even meet good candidates.
Funny, last that I recall from reading in some of the trades, unemployment in the IT sector was still around 60%.
I know that nothing for me has gotten any better, and I'm thankful for the under-challenging job that I have now.
So now the big corporations want to import more IT people? Hey! How about hiring unemployed Americans first!
Of course one could, and probably should, consider their actions as yet another example of the extreme lack of morals and foresightedness in the current crop of corporate leadership. Consider renting PBS' "The Corporation".
Photo Badge, OK. As long as it's not required to be worn on the outside of clothing. RFID badge? Not on my kid. I'd start looking for a private school that didn't need them. Just think of the longer term impact of the message that this gives the kids: "It's OK that we can track you electronically". So 20 years from now, the notion of tracking all people in the US with sub-dermal RFIDs comes up, and we have an entire voting block that would probably support it. Is this the future that we want? I think not!
I don't agree with the premise either. I was an IT Manager, CIO's right hand man as it turns out, for a $1B/yr tier one automotive supplier. It was the greatest experience that I've ever had. I was the manager that understood the technologies, and took care of the people, while at the same time was setting the expectations and influencing the decision makers that I reported to. The best part was that I could extract and summarize time and cost requirements from the leadership, and lead my team to a solution that met all the requirements in a very participatory manner. Team moral was very high. Too bad that the company went chapter 11 and reduced the staff from 18 down to 5. It was very soon after that they the leadership figured that I wasn't really needed either. Now that I've got my masters degree, I'm looking to get back to a position like that again. I honestly feel like this is were I can provide the best value exchange both for myself and the team that I'm leading.
A DD course is something that I hadn't tought about, and it a good idea. Too bad that there is no actual driving time associated with it. After all, that's where it becomes real.
Here are you from? Graduated system? Could you please elaborate? I'm interested. Wish we could get +5 and +10 MPH license plates :P Though it'll never happen.