Yeah, because I'm sure that everyone loves their local BMV. Everyone wants it to be fast and easy to deal with, but I will tell you a secret: in most places, the BMV sucks, everyone bitches about it, and it isn't getting better.
Shall I mention the VA or the IRS? I bet we all want those to be good too but, uh, yeah. They suck.
Government agencies, on the whole, are pretty shitty in part because they don't have to be good in order to stay in business.
That article needs to be updated with this H1-B situation.
I would do it myself, at least add a section with a few references and get it started, but every time I edit an article on Wikipedia my contributions are automatically reverted for some reason I cannot fathom. The Encyclopedia anyone can edit... Yeah right. I apparently need to be in some special club or something.
No, unions have nothing to do with being socialist or capitalist or communist. Nice trolling, though.
Unions can be good - and originally they were, here in the USA. They made sure workers had decent working conditions and weren't slaving away for pennies a day. In exchange, the union would ensure that the workers were qualified and doing their jobs and provided a pathway for technical training.
Unfortunately, they started to go too far, as these things often do. Today, too many of the USA's unions are money grabbing thug organizations that would rather burn a business to the ground than give up anything at all. Many unions are only interested in excessive compensation, keeping out competition / protectionism, and political activism.
Some unions are happy to let a business die rather than capitulate on ridiculous requests. The Hostess company is one example. The American automotive industry collapsed, in part, due to the unions. Did you know that in America, when vinyl records were used to play music on the radio, that the radio union created a position with the sole responsibility of putting the record on the turnstile? Nobody else was allowed to do that simple task of putting the record on and dropping the needle. If a sound engineer were to do it they would get in big trouble.
It's nearly impossible in some industries to fire someone because of the insane power the unions can wield - and the unions will always defend you, even if you're incompetent, have committed a serious crime, or whatever. After all, they want to ensure that there's a tradition of defending everybody no matter what, so that should the people at the top get in trouble for something legitimate...
That kind of behavior is why you see a growing anti-union sentiment in the USA. I don't know what it is like over in Europe - it may be that the unions over there are a lot more sensible.
It's very unfortunate. Unions, done properly, are an excellent thing, but greed is powerful and people are stupid. Here in the USA the unions have failed.
These days, because of the protection the Federal and State laws provide, official union organizations in general seem unnecessary. All the protections that unions fought hard for have become federal law. But, that doesn't mean a group of workers, who aren't in a legal "Union", can't just walk out anyway. If they're being abused, they should walk out and make their complaints known.
And if you ever find yourself there, or near any display of these wax sculptures, I highly recommend you take the time to see them. They are amazing works of art. If you have children with you, it can be a great history and cultural experience, too.
It's not just the outdated OS that is the problem. One must wonder why a medical image storage server is allowed by the network to make outbound network requests all the way to China.
I was wondering this myself. How is this legal? It seems to me that a major class action lawsuit should be just around the corner, followed by some kind of criminal proceedings, followed by a bunch of people in government getting kicked out of office.
Oh wait, that's right. Too many politicians are without ethics and are easily bribed.
Re-packaging the product as your own is bad enough, but another bad part is that older projects may have security vulnerabilities as well. It seems like it would be far more ethical to me to simply mark the project as "abandoned", then after a while remove it completely. If the project is alive somewhere else, then contact those folks, let them know what is up, give them a chance to close it all down themselves or revive the proejct on SF.
My father told me that when I took math classes in college, that Statistics I will teach me everything I really needed to know about the subject, but that Statistics II would teach me how to lie with what I learned. He was not incorrect. There's so many ways to manipulate the data that I find it very, very difficult to trust ANY stats that I find in the news without also having access to the raw data, the methodology, questions used, selection process, etc., etc., etc.
I wish I had known how mundane and utterly banal most software development is.
I spend 99% of my time on bug fixes, documentation, configuration management, and writing new code that quite frankly, aside from exact implementation, isn't that much different than code I wrote 10 years ago.
"I need to shuffle data from point A to point B." "I need to hit an API and stuff the result somewhere." "I need to make sure the user doesn't enter something retarded into this form."
Maybe 1% of the work I do is even remotely interesting. Why? Because of the flood of software frameworks and libraries that take care of all that interesting stuff for you. A vast majority of us don't have to care about the best algorithm for X, for example - that work has already been done. Software is more like legos these days. You take the pieces you want and put them together.
That is good in that making software is easier and faster than ever before, but it is murder for people who did this stuff because it was interesting. There's very little mystique these days.
You assume he changed his stance. I think his stance hasn't changed - he just said what he needed to say to get elected. In other words, he lied. This is nothing new for him, by the way.
It seemed that the company did, in fact, have growth on track: The article mentioned that in 2014 sales were up 40%. That's huge, and it shows that whatever they were doing was working. The company was actually doing well and had broke even for the first time.
Investors were likely unwilling to dump more money into the company because they saw these lawsuits and said, "Damn man, there's no way I'm going to make my money back in a reasonable amount of time. Sorry dude."
So... Thanks, France.
Isn't socialism wonderful? Workers of the world unite and all that? I mean, obviously, the business is rich with unlimited funds because it's a business, right?
And the numbers don't seem particularly significant either. 1,100 people out of 1.2 billion, when 2/3 of those people don't have access to electricity and therefore air conditioning?
If anything, the news story should be, "Holy crap, there's a serious heat wave and only this many people died. That's amazing, how does this population manage to deal with this kind of weather so well?"
Me, anything over 70F is too hot. 117F? That's insanity. I'm glad I'm here and not there.
I have Time Warner here in Ohio and I don't have any complaints. Service interruptions are very rare, speed is great for a semi-rural area (I have neighbors with goats, alpaca, chickens, geese, and horses - I'm not in a metro area at all), and on the occasion that I've had problems I've had a truck out, with a technician that knew what he was doing, the same day.
It's a little pricey, but then again, I'm in a semi-rural area. I'd be surprised if TWC breaks even doing business here.
Sure, I use SSL when it is available, I use AdBlock et al., I stay off of the social networking sites, but c'mon: What exactly is it that I'm supposed to do? If the government wants to snoop on me then it will. There's really nothing I can do about it.
"Encrypt all your email!" Mmhmm. Yeah, okay, sure. That will work out great when I want to send a message to my technologically normal friends and family. Web-based encrypted mail is a farce anyway - you're still relying on a Java applet, or some JavaScript, and you're trusting that it isn't leaking your keystrokes.
"Use SSL!" Great idea. Let's all use SSL. Except the NSA has the resources, reportedly, to break TLS / SSL. So... Back to zero once more.
"Use Tor!" Sure. Okay. Aside from the fact that it is slow, there have been plenty of articles here about how it's possible to track individual users on Tor - using the resources of a university computer lab. What do you think the government can do?
Basically, we're boned. These technologies are great against your neighbor next door or the 1337x0r h4x0r in the next country, but when it comes to the resources at the government's disposal, there's really very little you can do on the Internet, if anything at all, that can be kept private.
I'm not rooting for the whip master. I'm rooting for being responsible and reaping the consequences of failing to be responsible.
I'm also rooting for this example of extreme, heavy handed socialism to fail in a spectacular fashion so that it can be used as a warning to my country, which is also surviving on massive deficit spending. It's bad. It shouldn't be done. Do you want to collapse like Greece? No? Okay, then stop, set up a real budget (not the "we balanced the budget because we borrowed money" bullshit), and be responsible.
And it would make sense for them to do it, too. The Republicans always promote themselves as the "small government party that wants to get government out of your life," so the legalization of marijuana and backing of non-traditional marriage should fall right in line with that.
So, you know, put up or shut up. Do they believe in the freedom to live one's life as one wishes, or do they not?
So with that information in hand, if one were to be conspiratorial about it (don your tin foil hats people), one might worry that the political left might want to encourage poor economic policy and dependence on the government in order to capture the vote for a long time to come.
No, no, no, settle down, geeze, I'm not saying that there is some great grand conspiracy, but I have no doubt that there are in fact some people who think that way.
The media did a great job of smearing Romney, and he himself didn't do a great job of handling it. I'm not surprised that some districts had zero votes for Romney, and I'm not surprised that he lost. The guy was too passive to stand a chance against the very aggressive Obama campaign.
What should raise eyebrows, however, are the voting districts that had more votes than registered voters.
A second vote for MobaXTerm. I moved to it from Putty. It has tabs and the X11 stuff built in, don't have to configure a thing - it just works. Love it.
"knowing the business" or "being the best in what you do" would save one's derriere
Except that it won't, except in very special circumstances.
Let's be honest here: Most IT jobs - being a sysadmin, writing software, setting up a network - are not complicated. Most systems don't need much other than some some packages and configuration handled by something like Puppet. Most software doesn't do anything remarkable - it just shuffles data from point A to point B and displays a few things to an end user. Etc., etc.
A vast majority of IT jobs only require mediocre skill and knowledge. Most H1-B folks I know have rarely been mediocre, but they ARE cheap and management doesn't know the difference anyway. All they know is eventually their widget does the new X they've been asking for. So what if the code is a terrible mess and deployment is a gigantic pain? The management doesn't see or care.
Knowing the business? That's what project managers and other management-y types are for (or so they think). You and I know that a software engineer who is well versed in a certain business will design better systems, for example, but I've not once seen a manager that believes this way.
Management sees IT staff as nearly a commodity with people easily interchangeable. They're not entirely wrong - not entirely - but they think they're not wrong at all.
Remember: It isn't what YOU think that is important when a company is doing the hiring. What is important is what THEY think and how cheap they can get you and how much they can work you before you burn out.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. It reminds me of so many "Web 3.0 Hipster Startups" that bastardize a word and make some kind of vague hand-wavey promise by using a buzzowrd or two and adding "in the cloud".
Ugh. The modern tech industry makes me want to puke. Maybe I'm getting too old for this...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because I'm sure that everyone loves their local BMV. Everyone wants it to be fast and easy to deal with, but I will tell you a secret: in most places, the BMV sucks, everyone bitches about it, and it isn't getting better.
Shall I mention the VA or the IRS? I bet we all want those to be good too but, uh, yeah. They suck.
Government agencies, on the whole, are pretty shitty in part because they don't have to be good in order to stay in business.
That article needs to be updated with this H1-B situation.
I would do it myself, at least add a section with a few references and get it started, but every time I edit an article on Wikipedia my contributions are automatically reverted for some reason I cannot fathom. The Encyclopedia anyone can edit... Yeah right. I apparently need to be in some special club or something.
No, unions have nothing to do with being socialist or capitalist or communist. Nice trolling, though.
Unions can be good - and originally they were, here in the USA. They made sure workers had decent working conditions and weren't slaving away for pennies a day. In exchange, the union would ensure that the workers were qualified and doing their jobs and provided a pathway for technical training.
Unfortunately, they started to go too far, as these things often do. Today, too many of the USA's unions are money grabbing thug organizations that would rather burn a business to the ground than give up anything at all. Many unions are only interested in excessive compensation, keeping out competition / protectionism, and political activism.
Some unions are happy to let a business die rather than capitulate on ridiculous requests. The Hostess company is one example. The American automotive industry collapsed, in part, due to the unions. Did you know that in America, when vinyl records were used to play music on the radio, that the radio union created a position with the sole responsibility of putting the record on the turnstile? Nobody else was allowed to do that simple task of putting the record on and dropping the needle. If a sound engineer were to do it they would get in big trouble.
It's nearly impossible in some industries to fire someone because of the insane power the unions can wield - and the unions will always defend you, even if you're incompetent, have committed a serious crime, or whatever. After all, they want to ensure that there's a tradition of defending everybody no matter what, so that should the people at the top get in trouble for something legitimate...
That kind of behavior is why you see a growing anti-union sentiment in the USA. I don't know what it is like over in Europe - it may be that the unions over there are a lot more sensible.
It's very unfortunate. Unions, done properly, are an excellent thing, but greed is powerful and people are stupid. Here in the USA the unions have failed.
These days, because of the protection the Federal and State laws provide, official union organizations in general seem unnecessary. All the protections that unions fought hard for have become federal law. But, that doesn't mean a group of workers, who aren't in a legal "Union", can't just walk out anyway. If they're being abused, they should walk out and make their complaints known.
It wouldn't be a good, scary InfoWorld article without sensationalist bullcrap.
And if you ever find yourself there, or near any display of these wax sculptures, I highly recommend you take the time to see them. They are amazing works of art. If you have children with you, it can be a great history and cultural experience, too.
It's not just the outdated OS that is the problem. One must wonder why a medical image storage server is allowed by the network to make outbound network requests all the way to China.
I was wondering this myself. How is this legal? It seems to me that a major class action lawsuit should be just around the corner, followed by some kind of criminal proceedings, followed by a bunch of people in government getting kicked out of office.
Oh wait, that's right. Too many politicians are without ethics and are easily bribed.
Re-packaging the product as your own is bad enough, but another bad part is that older projects may have security vulnerabilities as well. It seems like it would be far more ethical to me to simply mark the project as "abandoned", then after a while remove it completely. If the project is alive somewhere else, then contact those folks, let them know what is up, give them a chance to close it all down themselves or revive the proejct on SF.
But taking it over? No, that is not cool.
My father told me that when I took math classes in college, that Statistics I will teach me everything I really needed to know about the subject, but that Statistics II would teach me how to lie with what I learned. He was not incorrect. There's so many ways to manipulate the data that I find it very, very difficult to trust ANY stats that I find in the news without also having access to the raw data, the methodology, questions used, selection process, etc., etc., etc.
I wish I had known how mundane and utterly banal most software development is.
I spend 99% of my time on bug fixes, documentation, configuration management, and writing new code that quite frankly, aside from exact implementation, isn't that much different than code I wrote 10 years ago.
"I need to shuffle data from point A to point B."
"I need to hit an API and stuff the result somewhere."
"I need to make sure the user doesn't enter something retarded into this form."
Maybe 1% of the work I do is even remotely interesting. Why? Because of the flood of software frameworks and libraries that take care of all that interesting stuff for you. A vast majority of us don't have to care about the best algorithm for X, for example - that work has already been done. Software is more like legos these days. You take the pieces you want and put them together.
That is good in that making software is easier and faster than ever before, but it is murder for people who did this stuff because it was interesting. There's very little mystique these days.
You assume he changed his stance. I think his stance hasn't changed - he just said what he needed to say to get elected. In other words, he lied. This is nothing new for him, by the way.
It seemed that the company did, in fact, have growth on track: The article mentioned that in 2014 sales were up 40%. That's huge, and it shows that whatever they were doing was working. The company was actually doing well and had broke even for the first time.
Investors were likely unwilling to dump more money into the company because they saw these lawsuits and said, "Damn man, there's no way I'm going to make my money back in a reasonable amount of time. Sorry dude."
So... Thanks, France.
Isn't socialism wonderful? Workers of the world unite and all that? I mean, obviously, the business is rich with unlimited funds because it's a business, right?
For now. In a few years I fully expect additional funds to be appropriated so that people can have both services subsidized.
And the numbers don't seem particularly significant either. 1,100 people out of 1.2 billion, when 2/3 of those people don't have access to electricity and therefore air conditioning?
If anything, the news story should be, "Holy crap, there's a serious heat wave and only this many people died. That's amazing, how does this population manage to deal with this kind of weather so well?"
Me, anything over 70F is too hot. 117F? That's insanity. I'm glad I'm here and not there.
I have Time Warner here in Ohio and I don't have any complaints. Service interruptions are very rare, speed is great for a semi-rural area (I have neighbors with goats, alpaca, chickens, geese, and horses - I'm not in a metro area at all), and on the occasion that I've had problems I've had a truck out, with a technician that knew what he was doing, the same day.
It's a little pricey, but then again, I'm in a semi-rural area. I'd be surprised if TWC breaks even doing business here.
What exactly is it that I'm supposed to do?
Sure, I use SSL when it is available, I use AdBlock et al., I stay off of the social networking sites, but c'mon: What exactly is it that I'm supposed to do? If the government wants to snoop on me then it will. There's really nothing I can do about it.
"Encrypt all your email!" Mmhmm. Yeah, okay, sure. That will work out great when I want to send a message to my technologically normal friends and family. Web-based encrypted mail is a farce anyway - you're still relying on a Java applet, or some JavaScript, and you're trusting that it isn't leaking your keystrokes.
"Use SSL!" Great idea. Let's all use SSL. Except the NSA has the resources, reportedly, to break TLS / SSL. So... Back to zero once more.
"Use Tor!" Sure. Okay. Aside from the fact that it is slow, there have been plenty of articles here about how it's possible to track individual users on Tor - using the resources of a university computer lab. What do you think the government can do?
Basically, we're boned. These technologies are great against your neighbor next door or the 1337x0r h4x0r in the next country, but when it comes to the resources at the government's disposal, there's really very little you can do on the Internet, if anything at all, that can be kept private.
You say that the IMF and ECB gave loans to Greece at rates that are not sustainable.
I say that Greece accepted loans offered to them at rates that are not sustainable - and they should have known better.
I'm not rooting for the whip master. I'm rooting for being responsible and reaping the consequences of failing to be responsible.
I'm also rooting for this example of extreme, heavy handed socialism to fail in a spectacular fashion so that it can be used as a warning to my country, which is also surviving on massive deficit spending. It's bad. It shouldn't be done. Do you want to collapse like Greece? No? Okay, then stop, set up a real budget (not the "we balanced the budget because we borrowed money" bullshit), and be responsible.
And it would make sense for them to do it, too. The Republicans always promote themselves as the "small government party that wants to get government out of your life," so the legalization of marijuana and backing of non-traditional marriage should fall right in line with that.
So, you know, put up or shut up. Do they believe in the freedom to live one's life as one wishes, or do they not?
So with that information in hand, if one were to be conspiratorial about it (don your tin foil hats people), one might worry that the political left might want to encourage poor economic policy and dependence on the government in order to capture the vote for a long time to come.
No, no, no, settle down, geeze, I'm not saying that there is some great grand conspiracy, but I have no doubt that there are in fact some people who think that way.
The media did a great job of smearing Romney, and he himself didn't do a great job of handling it. I'm not surprised that some districts had zero votes for Romney, and I'm not surprised that he lost. The guy was too passive to stand a chance against the very aggressive Obama campaign.
What should raise eyebrows, however, are the voting districts that had more votes than registered voters.
I would rather consider someone's ability to be president by looking at their experience, accomplishments, policy, and vision for the future.
People who are swayed by a "Travelocity Gnome" smear campaign probably shouldn't be voting, and people who advocate such a thing come off as children.
A second vote for MobaXTerm. I moved to it from Putty. It has tabs and the X11 stuff built in, don't have to configure a thing - it just works. Love it.
Except that it won't, except in very special circumstances.
Let's be honest here: Most IT jobs - being a sysadmin, writing software, setting up a network - are not complicated. Most systems don't need much other than some some packages and configuration handled by something like Puppet. Most software doesn't do anything remarkable - it just shuffles data from point A to point B and displays a few things to an end user. Etc., etc.
A vast majority of IT jobs only require mediocre skill and knowledge. Most H1-B folks I know have rarely been mediocre, but they ARE cheap and management doesn't know the difference anyway. All they know is eventually their widget does the new X they've been asking for. So what if the code is a terrible mess and deployment is a gigantic pain? The management doesn't see or care.
Knowing the business? That's what project managers and other management-y types are for (or so they think). You and I know that a software engineer who is well versed in a certain business will design better systems, for example, but I've not once seen a manager that believes this way.
Management sees IT staff as nearly a commodity with people easily interchangeable. They're not entirely wrong - not entirely - but they think they're not wrong at all.
Remember: It isn't what YOU think that is important when a company is doing the hiring. What is important is what THEY think and how cheap they can get you and how much they can work you before you burn out.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. It reminds me of so many "Web 3.0 Hipster Startups" that bastardize a word and make some kind of vague hand-wavey promise by using a buzzowrd or two and adding "in the cloud".
Ugh. The modern tech industry makes me want to puke. Maybe I'm getting too old for this...