People are always afraid that businesses will have to shut down if smokers can't go. Instead, you see businesses actually doing about the same or better, because non smokers enjoy going out more. When they enacted non smoking laws where I live, I didn't see a single restaraunt or bar close due to customers not going because they couldn't smoke.
Yup, but like the earlier parent said in this long thread, you shouldn't base assumptions on a sample of one. When anti-smoking laws took effect where I live this did happen. The bars I go to on weekends are easier to see in, but that partially because there are fewer people in them. One of my favorite restaurants also closed, citing in part the smoking ban. See, lots of the businesses in our downtown get customers from other cities within a fifty mile radius (some larger than us). When the smoking band started, people stopped coming so much, and stayed in their hometowns where they could smoke.
The other thing that happened is every business started opening back porches, beer gardens, and front dining space on the sidewalk. All these front outdoor dining areas can be an obsticle when you're walking down the street sometimes (as each one takes up half the sidewalk width, creating bottlenecks). The businesses have to get approval from the city to put them in, but the city doesn't deny anyone because some businesses already had them before the smoking ban, and the lack of a smoking-friendly space puts a business at a competitive disadvantage.
Did I mention that with everyone smoking out front/in back/on elevated decks there is now a lot more smoking related litter on the street and sidewalks near businesses?
I'm a non-smoker, and was in support of the smoking ban in general when it came out. I was sometimes annoyed by how smoky some establishments got. But after seeing how it has effected the nightlife in town, I rather wish it would be scaled back to not being in effect after 10pm or something like that, making bars exempt, ect. This would still be quite effective for "thinking of the children". The only problem is employees of some of these establishments. They would have to be able to request not to work during smoking hous without it effecting their employability, and that wouldn't happen.
The smoking band had a chance to get put on a ballot (it was enacted by the city commission without a citywide vote originally), but the supports of repealing/changing it were not able to get the required signatures on the petition. Since a fairly large chunk of the smoking population is college students, many who wanted the smoking ban reconsidered were people not able to vote in area elections, because they were not legal residents of the state.
So what does this article say really? Apple's Intel based laptops "may" come out in April-May next year? Yawn.
It's not even a wild-ass guess that may become true, nor rampant speculation on something unlikely and unannounced. We all know Intel Powerbooks are coming, just not precisely when. This is just another educated guess within that timeframe.
What?
Were you expecting groundbreaking facts from an article linked to a writeup titled "Intel Powerbook Rumor Mill"?
AmaroK music player [kde.org] -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.
Not to troll here, but how exactly is an OSS Linux music player a threat to iTunes?
Does Amarok run on Windows or MacOSX? (no) Does iTunes run on Linux? (no) How much does AmaroK cost? (FREE) How much does iTunes cost? (FREE) Does Amarok allow easy updating/syncing of an iPod? (no) How many people will abandon their cache of Fairplay DRMed music for a new application? (kind of a trick question, given neither player will run on the other's platform)
Saying Amarok is a threat to iTunes is like saying an independant movie theater in Russia is a threat to a U.S. movie theater conglomerate. It's also like that often repeated phrase "iPod Killer": a claim often made, never delivered.
If I go to a.mobi domain in my cell phone browser and it looks like crap, I won't go back. The website doesn't get any traffic. The company fixes it.
But not all phones use the same browser. What if a browser that does not display the site the same as others becomes the market leader because the phone brand it is tied to gains market share? The other phones may lose business as sites are written to display best in that browser. Then other phone brands either must adopt that browser or emulate it's rendering, no matter how flawed it may be, because that's what people will be expecting, and if it doesn't people will think the phone's internet abilites are broken.
Did you just feel that chilly breeze of déjà vu, too?
The poster may be a troll but his comment isn't. Transcoding degrades music quality and people with large libraries of music didn't appreciate having the size of their collection double on disk just so they could use it on their MD.
Apple actaully let folks use whatever bitrate they wished (rather than three to six choices like Sony). I would have abandoned Minidisc far sooner if the iPod had had the battery life and recording abilities an MD unit did.
Yesterday we had a story about VoIP wiretapping that makes this one feel like a dupe. One of the comments on that story jokingly asked why VoIP users shouldn't have to deal with the same government abuses PSTN telephone users do. It was actually a valid question. They should be dealt with any differently?
Now remember that P2P networks have been fighting hard to gain any legitamacy becuase they are used so much for pirating music and movies. The RIAA/MPAA has been trying to get P2P networks themselves deemed illegal because of this.
Has it occured to anyone the bellco's can play just as stupid a card if VoIP is not tappable. They'll say VoIP is a haven for drug dealers and those plotting against America to communicate and will try to get all VoIP banned the same way recording industry stooges try to P2P banned.
The minidisc could have done so much better in the US if Sony hadn't forced consumers to transcode their mp3's to ATRAC3 to put them on disc. Same with Sony's first HDD players. It could have continued even better if Sony had used it for PSP instead of inventing that stupid UMD disc (which for the most part seems to be a minidisc platter in a differnt sleeve).
IIRC, iChat uses libgiam for the AOL OSCAR compatability. And among the recent Google Summer of Code projects was adding support to Giam for the iChat ad-hoc instant messenger networks set up using Apple's Bonjour.
Another press release about a breakthrough that (assuming we actually get it working reliably and cheaply) may possibly dubut in a high end product nobody would buy for sticker-shock reasons in Japan in three years.
Really, wake me up when it's actually in a shipping product. I'll be excited then. Until it's working in the real world, it's just vaporware.
Naturally, the time after that, Mr. L. C. Bastard will be outflanked by a much less corrupt bastard, who will win, because the gosh-darn voters keep preferring the less corrupt candidate, no matter what the other guy promises....
What a great plan. Now all we need to do to get that one corrupt bastard out of office is replace all the voters with ones who will vote for someone who is less corrupt ot start with, instead of the whoever promises to lower taxes.
If that were to happen, publishers could never totally eradicate all the stolen books that would be floating around on the Internet or dark nets.
They can't do that anyway. Someone could just as easily transcribe/OCR the book into an etext. We don't need Google to steal the world's literature for us, we can manage it just fine on our own.
Once it's in digital form, it can never be completely eradicated. There will always be someone on a P2P network or with an FTP server or an Angelfire page with the file available if it's in demand.
It's like the RIAA/MPAA trying to stop piracy, the ony way to gaurantee no one steals your work is not to allow anyone access to it to begin with.
When you, as a human being, call a business over an issue you deserve to talk to a human being with a real name. But with Blizzard even their customer service reps hide behind fantasy names.
Some of this is for security. I used to work for a government subcontractor, and we could not give out the location of the facilitiy, becuase every once in awhile we would get a bomb threat or someone would say they were going to come out and shoot (insert phone reps name here). And we weren't masquerading as the IRS or anything, we were supposed to be the Dept. of Education! We used our real first names and fake last names.
Later I was in training in cable modem support, and our trainer had worked a stint at Earthlink, and he told us about a fellow who called mad about spam or some other issue supposedly coming from an Earthlink subscriber, he managed to fanagle the subscriber's name an address for the rep, and went vigilante on him. We use our real first names and wont give our last names, but will give a rep number if requested.
Then again, you have to believe I'm giving you the right information. People have issues and they are mad at whoever they talked to and they ask for the person's name, but it never occurs to them they could be getting incorrect information. It's like any info you get from someone on the phone. It's your choice whether you believe it or not. For the interaction to take place, there has to be a certain level of trust between the phone represenetive and the customer.
To the Americans who are posting comments like "wow. I never thought that would happen" I ask one question. What have you done to protect your rights, that the FBI are trampling? Posting sarcastic comments isn't doing anything to protect your rights.
Did you vote?
Spoken like someone who has never voted before themselves.
Lets see, do you want to drown in water or be burned to death? Whould you prefer your table lean too far to the Right or too far to the Left? It's not like there's always a choice that will make things All Right. Sometimes we can only choose between a devil with blue horns and one with red ones. Many of the people who I would be quite interested to see as President, Congressman, ect don't run. And is it any wonder? Would you want to be blamed for problems of at least a third of the country at any one time? How about that electroral college. Why the fuck do I go to the polls as part of the only blue city n a red state, I might as well not vote at all. Yeah, you heard me. It literally DOES NOT MATTER if I vote. When the reciepient of "my" support is already a forgone conclusion.
Because you can't just protect your rights by once every 4 years (it is 4 in America, right?) ticking a box and not doing anything else until the next 4 years. I think it was Thomas Jefferson that said once the people stop fighting for their rights, the government willl take them away.
And what would you suggest we do? A massive political movement only works when it is massive. There are too many people who like things as they are. Too many who aren't even aware of any of this because they are too distracted by mass entertainment. And too many more who are afraid to do something. More afraid of what would happen if they did something than if their rights be stripped away instead. Maybe it's from seeing those Eastern bloc countries that have revolutions or civil wars get plunged into a Third World status for a decade while they recover.
People have retirement nest-eggs locked up in mutual funds and kids about to graduate college (or just being born) and the last thing they want is someone to overturn the boat and flush the economy and the country's infastrcture down the tubes over something they really aren't that worried about (even though they should). People are frightened of change.
Maybe wherever you are it's normal to hear mortar fire at night and have a differnt President get overthrown every nine months, or have friends die fighting the police but to the people of a country that hasn't seen a war on it's own soil in several decades the idea of doing anything drastic with our nation's leadership is downright terrifying.
So people posting here obviously do care. But what have you done to protect them?
Becoming one of a few who end up as martyrs is not nearly as productive as staying alive to work for change other ways. Until the sentiment is held by a larger view all we're asking for is to be labeled paranoid fools by acting up. Another Ruby Ridge for the 11 o'clock news.
Why is it unethical? Because you don't like it? Do you think these foreign workers sould be entitled to some sort of guaranteed wage minimum, comparable to those holding similar skills that are native to the country?
Let's see, paying someone a lower salary based on their ethnicity. Yeah, that sounds unethical. If they were U.S. citizens, without the threat of being deported for not agreeing to those terms, they could take their employer to court for discrimination. If we're talking about H1B workers living in the U.S., they are having to pay the same for rent, food, utilities as the "natives", So why shouldn't they be paid the same?
It's already been screwed in many industries by union-forced excessive wages - look at those industries on their ass today because they can't lower their expenses enough to compete with the availability of cheaper, yet sufficiently skilled labor.
Unions do hold an inordinate amount of power, yes. They have grown beyond their original purpose (making sure workers were not exploited in the sweatshops of the '30's) to being a group know for artifically inflating wages and mireing themselves in corruption.
Everybody wants cheaper prices - until it's their rice bowl being looked at.
That's just greed and consumerism (as in get somehting for nothing way, not in the protect consumer rights way). Marketers are partailly responsible for this climate. Car dealships running neverending sales, cable companies allowing customers to hop from one promotion to another, people get conditioned to paying less than the "normal" price for anything and don't seem to feel the provider is entitled to making any sort of margin for what they do. Plus, there may be a growing resentment to executives getting paid salaries many times what the rank and file are, when their actions are percieved (and rightly so sometimes) to be of less importance then the average joe's duties when it comes to the company's success.
The icing on the cake was when they tried to give me a bad phone reference but contridicted themselves enough that the recruiter knew they were full of it. Luckily I'd worded the recruiter up that I didn't know what they'd say since they were sore I'd left and I'd been having trouble for 4 months getting a written reference out of them.
I think that's really sad, and should be illegal. Employers should have to be truthful about the performance about employees. What happens to the guy who works hard for years and then with a change of management gets booted because the new head doesn't like him? He's going to have trouble finding new work if he's getting an unfair reference from the previous employer that isn't based on his actual job performance. I guess the easy way to solve this is to make all refrences written and manditory.
The employee should have a right to know what his employer says about him and the right to take him to court if he's being deceptive. This does effect an employee's ability to work after all.
I get the feeling one of the main draws to posting stories about Snort isn't so much the software but so they can make joke headlines and comments about narcotics.
What I don't understand is how companies like this manage to stay in business.
Which one? [grin] The one I work for or the ones who hire us?
The reason our clients stay in business vary. I should point out not all of them follow the lousy system I outlined in the previous post, some are actually quite decent. The three I've worked for so far have, though. And one of them *did* in fact go out of business, not from lousy service, but from other financial issues (note: part of their bankruptcy filing was ducking out of a seven figure amount they owed my employer for services, so we were a victim too). And why do they stay in business? You're going to love this: in my case, they've all been cable companies! So their customers have little other choice if they don't want to fiddle with rabbit ears.
Why does my employer stay in business? Well, contracted support has not been the bread & butter the company for the most part, that would be (you knew this was coming) telemarketing. But we're doing more support work now than outbound work. We stay in business because of what we are: outsourcing. We get the job done (at least to the client's standards) for less than they spend when they do it themselves. This is kinda sad, because we're aware that on the other side of the country someone was else was doing this job before us, and making $3-5 more an hour than we are. We just signed a new deal with a large client, we're hiring over a hundred people right now, that's a lot of people somewhere else who are going to lose their jobs soon.
The company is able to find employees because people need jobs. When the fast-food/retail employers are all starting at $6.50-7.50/hr, who wouldn't apply for a job where you sit in an office chair all day for $8.75 to start (plus health/dental after 90 days)? Most jobs paying this wage or higher involve heavy lifting all day long or are dangerous (did I mention there's a distribution center for a major retail chain and a garage door manufacturer close by?). Wages are low because of two things. One is Wal-Mart, the other is that this city has a university right in the middle of it. That means there's a fresh influx of kids who have their rent and tuition paid by mom and dad but need spending cash, and will let themselves get treated like crap for lower than living wage to get it.
Please explain this concept of "earning more" by working overtime. I'm very confused.
Well there's the first way:
Working overtime is generally not allowed, so by working all scheduled hours I am making the most money possible at my pay rate (without raising ire with the higher ups). I'm scheduled for 40 hrs a week, so base wage x 40 = maximum weekly gross. But when overtime is allowed I can work over 40, so the weekly gross will be more than what my normal maximum weekly gross is.
Then I also get time-and-a-half for overtime hours, so I therefore earn more per hour for each hour over 40 I work per week.
If enough tech workers do this then companies may give higher raises to keep their workforce. Or they (Like my company) will replace these people with people will less skills for less pay and train them with experience.
In other words, fire the experienced employees who want a decent wage and hire unskilled workers who don't have the guts to ask for more pay and let the customers suffer with bad support while the new class learns what the hell they're doing..
At my employer (we do contracted support) The client pays for training classes for new employees (these training classes are not as long as they should be but anyway) what happens if the company can't retain the new hires? They have to hire some more and the client has to pay for their training. At some point, the client gets tired of paying for new groups to be trained, and simply don't allow new classes. The result is a hiring freeze for that department. The employees on the project get overworked, irritable, ect. trying to cover the workload of a larger group. We may have oppertunities to earn more from overtime when this happens, sometimes these "oppertunities" are not our choice. In any case, the remaining employees don't get any additional compensation per hours for the extra workload. This situation continues until the company that hired us starts to lose money from their customers leaving from bad support or the employee numbers drop to a point where it is not possible to fulfill staffing hours. The only people who really suffer in the end is the employees who don't quit and the customers (end users) who deal with poor support.
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People are always afraid that businesses will have to shut down if smokers can't go. Instead, you see businesses actually doing about the same or better, because non smokers enjoy going out more. When they enacted non smoking laws where I live, I didn't see a single restaraunt or bar close due to customers not going because they couldn't smoke.
Yup, but like the earlier parent said in this long thread, you shouldn't base assumptions on a sample of one. When anti-smoking laws took effect where I live this did happen. The bars I go to on weekends are easier to see in, but that partially because there are fewer people in them. One of my favorite restaurants also closed, citing in part the smoking ban. See, lots of the businesses in our downtown get customers from other cities within a fifty mile radius (some larger than us). When the smoking band started, people stopped coming so much, and stayed in their hometowns where they could smoke.
The other thing that happened is every business started opening back porches, beer gardens, and front dining space on the sidewalk. All these front outdoor dining areas can be an obsticle when you're walking down the street sometimes (as each one takes up half the sidewalk width, creating bottlenecks). The businesses have to get approval from the city to put them in, but the city doesn't deny anyone because some businesses already had them before the smoking ban, and the lack of a smoking-friendly space puts a business at a competitive disadvantage.
Did I mention that with everyone smoking out front/in back/on elevated decks there is now a lot more smoking related litter on the street and sidewalks near businesses?
I'm a non-smoker, and was in support of the smoking ban in general when it came out. I was sometimes annoyed by how smoky some establishments got. But after seeing how it has effected the nightlife in town, I rather wish it would be scaled back to not being in effect after 10pm or something like that, making bars exempt, ect. This would still be quite effective for "thinking of the children". The only problem is employees of some of these establishments. They would have to be able to request not to work during smoking hous without it effecting their employability, and that wouldn't happen.
The smoking band had a chance to get put on a ballot (it was enacted by the city commission without a citywide vote originally), but the supports of repealing/changing it were not able to get the required signatures on the petition. Since a fairly large chunk of the smoking population is college students, many who wanted the smoking ban reconsidered were people not able to vote in area elections, because they were not legal residents of the state.
So what does this article say really? Apple's Intel based laptops "may" come out in April-May next year? Yawn.
It's not even a wild-ass guess that may become true, nor rampant speculation on something unlikely and unannounced. We all know Intel Powerbooks are coming, just not precisely when. This is just another educated guess within that timeframe.
What?
Were you expecting groundbreaking facts from an article linked to a writeup titled "Intel Powerbook Rumor Mill"?
AmaroK music player [kde.org] -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.
Not to troll here, but how exactly is an OSS Linux music player a threat to iTunes?
Does Amarok run on Windows or MacOSX? (no)
Does iTunes run on Linux? (no)
How much does AmaroK cost? (FREE)
How much does iTunes cost? (FREE)
Does Amarok allow easy updating/syncing of an iPod? (no)
How many people will abandon their cache of Fairplay DRMed music for a new application?
(kind of a trick question, given neither player will run on the other's platform)
Saying Amarok is a threat to iTunes is like saying an independant movie theater in Russia is a threat to a U.S. movie theater conglomerate. It's also like that often repeated phrase "iPod Killer": a claim often made, never delivered.
If I go to a .mobi domain in my cell phone browser and it looks like crap, I won't go back. The website doesn't get any traffic. The company fixes it.
But not all phones use the same browser. What if a browser that does not display the site the same as others becomes the market leader because the phone brand it is tied to gains market share? The other phones may lose business as sites are written to display best in that browser. Then other phone brands either must adopt that browser or emulate it's rendering, no matter how flawed it may be, because that's what people will be expecting, and if it doesn't people will think the phone's internet abilites are broken.
Did you just feel that chilly breeze of déjà vu, too?
"Fayling emphasized the pitfalls of combining a device designed for younger audiences with content they are prohibited from..."
Alex my answer is "What would a tobacco executive never say?"
According to Microsoft, 'when you have a company of 60,000 employees, people are coming and going all the time.'
Sounds like the manager of the Taco Bell down the street, except replace "60,000" with "sixteen".
The poster may be a troll but his comment isn't. Transcoding degrades music quality and people with large libraries of music didn't appreciate having the size of their collection double on disk just so they could use it on their MD.
Apple actaully let folks use whatever bitrate they wished (rather than three to six choices like Sony). I would have abandoned Minidisc far sooner if the iPod had had the battery life and recording abilities an MD unit did.
Yesterday we had a story about VoIP wiretapping that makes this one feel like a dupe. One of the comments on that story jokingly asked why VoIP users shouldn't have to deal with the same government abuses PSTN telephone users do. It was actually a valid question. They should be dealt with any differently?
Now remember that P2P networks have been fighting hard to gain any legitamacy becuase they are used so much for pirating music and movies. The RIAA/MPAA has been trying to get P2P networks themselves deemed illegal because of this.
Has it occured to anyone the bellco's can play just as stupid a card if VoIP is not tappable. They'll say VoIP is a haven for drug dealers and those plotting against America to communicate and will try to get all VoIP banned the same way recording industry stooges try to P2P banned.
The minidisc could have done so much better in the US if Sony hadn't forced consumers to transcode their mp3's to ATRAC3 to put them on disc. Same with Sony's first HDD players. It could have continued even better if Sony had used it for PSP instead of inventing that stupid UMD disc (which for the most part seems to be a minidisc platter in a differnt sleeve).
IIRC, iChat uses libgiam for the AOL OSCAR compatability. And among the recent Google Summer of Code projects was adding support to Giam for the iChat ad-hoc instant messenger networks set up using Apple's Bonjour.
Another press release about a breakthrough that (assuming we actually get it working reliably and cheaply) may possibly dubut in a high end product nobody would buy for sticker-shock reasons in Japan in three years.
Really, wake me up when it's actually in a shipping product. I'll be excited then. Until it's working in the real world, it's just vaporware.
Naturally, the time after that, Mr. L. C. Bastard will be outflanked by a much less corrupt bastard, who will win, because the gosh-darn voters keep preferring the less corrupt candidate, no matter what the other guy promises....
What a great plan. Now all we need to do to get that one corrupt bastard out of office is replace all the voters with ones who will vote for someone who is less corrupt ot start with, instead of the whoever promises to lower taxes.
Uh, it's cool and all but not likely to be in the history books.
Until someone writes the Wikipedia entry for it. I can see it five years from now...
On this date in 2005, ATI Technologies sucessfully crossed to the 1 Ghz barrier with Computer Graphics Cards, ushering in a new era in computer gaming.
If that were to happen, publishers could never totally eradicate all the stolen books that would be floating around on the Internet or dark nets.
They can't do that anyway. Someone could just as easily transcribe/OCR the book into an etext. We don't need Google to steal the world's literature for us, we can manage it just fine on our own.
Once it's in digital form, it can never be completely eradicated. There will always be someone on a P2P network or with an FTP server or an Angelfire page with the file available if it's in demand.
It's like the RIAA/MPAA trying to stop piracy, the ony way to gaurantee no one steals your work is not to allow anyone access to it to begin with.
When you, as a human being, call a business over an issue you deserve to talk to a human being with a real name. But with Blizzard even their customer service reps hide behind fantasy names.
Some of this is for security. I used to work for a government subcontractor, and we could not give out the location of the facilitiy, becuase every once in awhile we would get a bomb threat or someone would say they were going to come out and shoot (insert phone reps name here). And we weren't masquerading as the IRS or anything, we were supposed to be the Dept. of Education! We used our real first names and fake last names.
Later I was in training in cable modem support, and our trainer had worked a stint at Earthlink, and he told us about a fellow who called mad about spam or some other issue supposedly coming from an Earthlink subscriber, he managed to fanagle the subscriber's name an address for the rep, and went vigilante on him. We use our real first names and wont give our last names, but will give a rep number if requested.
Then again, you have to believe I'm giving you the right information. People have issues and they are mad at whoever they talked to and they ask for the person's name, but it never occurs to them they could be getting incorrect information. It's like any info you get from someone on the phone. It's your choice whether you believe it or not. For the interaction to take place, there has to be a certain level of trust between the phone represenetive and the customer.
To the Americans who are posting comments like "wow. I never thought that would happen" I ask one question. What have you done to protect your rights, that the FBI are trampling? Posting sarcastic comments isn't doing anything to protect your rights.
Did you vote?
Spoken like someone who has never voted before themselves.
Lets see, do you want to drown in water or be burned to death? Whould you prefer your table lean too far to the Right or too far to the Left? It's not like there's always a choice that will make things All Right. Sometimes we can only choose between a devil with blue horns and one with red ones. Many of the people who I would be quite interested to see as President, Congressman, ect don't run. And is it any wonder? Would you want to be blamed for problems of at least a third of the country at any one time? How about that electroral college. Why the fuck do I go to the polls as part of the only blue city n a red state, I might as well not vote at all. Yeah, you heard me. It literally DOES NOT MATTER if I vote. When the reciepient of "my" support is already a forgone conclusion.
Because you can't just protect your rights by once every 4 years (it is 4 in America, right?) ticking a box and not doing anything else until the next 4 years. I think it was Thomas Jefferson that said once the people stop fighting for their rights, the government willl take them away.
And what would you suggest we do? A massive political movement only works when it is massive. There are too many people who like things as they are. Too many who aren't even aware of any of this because they are too distracted by mass entertainment. And too many more who are afraid to do something. More afraid of what would happen if they did something than if their rights be stripped away instead. Maybe it's from seeing those Eastern bloc countries that have revolutions or civil wars get plunged into a Third World status for a decade while they recover.
People have retirement nest-eggs locked up in mutual funds and kids about to graduate college (or just being born) and the last thing they want is someone to overturn the boat and flush the economy and the country's infastrcture down the tubes over something they really aren't that worried about (even though they should). People are frightened of change.
Maybe wherever you are it's normal to hear mortar fire at night and have a differnt President get overthrown every nine months, or have friends die fighting the police but to the people of a country that hasn't seen a war on it's own soil in several decades the idea of doing anything drastic with our nation's leadership is downright terrifying.
So people posting here obviously do care. But what have you done to protect them?
Becoming one of a few who end up as martyrs is not nearly as productive as staying alive to work for change other ways. Until the sentiment is held by a larger view all we're asking for is to be labeled paranoid fools by acting up. Another Ruby Ridge for the 11 o'clock news.
Did anyone catch the tagline at the bottom the (entire discussion) page?
It reads:
What fools these morals be!
Why is it unethical? Because you don't like it? Do you think these foreign workers sould be entitled to some sort of guaranteed wage minimum, comparable to those holding similar skills that are native to the country?
Let's see, paying someone a lower salary based on their ethnicity. Yeah, that sounds unethical. If they were U.S. citizens, without the threat of being deported for not agreeing to those terms, they could take their employer to court for discrimination. If we're talking about H1B workers living in the U.S., they are having to pay the same for rent, food, utilities as the "natives", So why shouldn't they be paid the same?
It's already been screwed in many industries by union-forced excessive wages - look at those industries on their ass today because they can't lower their expenses enough to compete with the availability of cheaper, yet sufficiently skilled labor.
Unions do hold an inordinate amount of power, yes. They have grown beyond their original purpose (making sure workers were not exploited in the sweatshops of the '30's) to being a group know for artifically inflating wages and mireing themselves in corruption.
Everybody wants cheaper prices - until it's their rice bowl being looked at.
That's just greed and consumerism (as in get somehting for nothing way, not in the protect consumer rights way). Marketers are partailly responsible for this climate. Car dealships running neverending sales, cable companies allowing customers to hop from one promotion to another, people get conditioned to paying less than the "normal" price for anything and don't seem to feel the provider is entitled to making any sort of margin for what they do. Plus, there may be a growing resentment to executives getting paid salaries many times what the rank and file are, when their actions are percieved (and rightly so sometimes) to be of less importance then the average joe's duties when it comes to the company's success.
The icing on the cake was when they tried to give me a bad phone reference but contridicted themselves enough that the recruiter knew they were full of it. Luckily I'd worded the recruiter up that I didn't know what they'd say since they were sore I'd left and I'd been having trouble for 4 months getting a written reference out of them.
I think that's really sad, and should be illegal. Employers should have to be truthful about the performance about employees. What happens to the guy who works hard for years and then with a change of management gets booted because the new head doesn't like him? He's going to have trouble finding new work if he's getting an unfair reference from the previous employer that isn't based on his actual job performance. I guess the easy way to solve this is to make all refrences written and manditory.
The employee should have a right to know what his employer says about him and the right to take him to court if he's being deceptive. This does effect an employee's ability to work after all.
I get the feeling one of the main draws to posting stories about Snort isn't so much the software but so they can make joke headlines and comments about narcotics.
Checkpoint Aquires Snort - Oct. 6, 2005
Snort up For Revamp, says Creator - May 24, 2004
Using Snort Stealthily - Sept. 13, 2002
Snort Creator Makes Good - July 1, 2002
Guardent To Sell Snort And Nessus - Dec. 14, 2001
He should reimburse the MPAA for the worth of those movies...
Nothing.
Mr Hydrogen! Installation in Delorians may cause the car to consume itself.
What I don't understand is how companies like this manage to stay in business.
Which one? [grin] The one I work for or the ones who hire us?
The reason our clients stay in business vary. I should point out not all of them follow the lousy system I outlined in the previous post, some are actually quite decent. The three I've worked for so far have, though. And one of them *did* in fact go out of business, not from lousy service, but from other financial issues (note: part of their bankruptcy filing was ducking out of a seven figure amount they owed my employer for services, so we were a victim too). And why do they stay in business? You're going to love this: in my case, they've all been cable companies! So their customers have little other choice if they don't want to fiddle with rabbit ears.
Why does my employer stay in business? Well, contracted support has not been the bread & butter the company for the most part, that would be (you knew this was coming) telemarketing. But we're doing more support work now than outbound work. We stay in business because of what we are: outsourcing. We get the job done (at least to the client's standards) for less than they spend when they do it themselves. This is kinda sad, because we're aware that on the other side of the country someone was else was doing this job before us, and making $3-5 more an hour than we are. We just signed a new deal with a large client, we're hiring over a hundred people right now, that's a lot of people somewhere else who are going to lose their jobs soon.
The company is able to find employees because people need jobs. When the fast-food/retail employers are all starting at $6.50-7.50/hr, who wouldn't apply for a job where you sit in an office chair all day for $8.75 to start (plus health/dental after 90 days)? Most jobs paying this wage or higher involve heavy lifting all day long or are dangerous (did I mention there's a distribution center for a major retail chain and a garage door manufacturer close by?). Wages are low because of two things. One is Wal-Mart, the other is that this city has a university right in the middle of it. That means there's a fresh influx of kids who have their rent and tuition paid by mom and dad but need spending cash, and will let themselves get treated like crap for lower than living wage to get it.
Please explain this concept of "earning more" by working overtime. I'm very confused.
Well there's the first way:
Working overtime is generally not allowed, so by working all scheduled hours I am making the most money possible at my pay rate (without raising ire with the higher ups). I'm scheduled for 40 hrs a week, so base wage x 40 = maximum weekly gross. But when overtime is allowed I can work over 40, so the weekly gross will be more than what my normal maximum weekly gross is.
Then I also get time-and-a-half for overtime hours, so I therefore earn more per hour for each hour over 40 I work per week.
If enough tech workers do this then companies may give higher raises to keep their workforce. Or they (Like my company) will replace these people with people will less skills for less pay and train them with experience.
In other words, fire the experienced employees who want a decent wage and hire unskilled workers who don't have the guts to ask for more pay and let the customers suffer with bad support while the new class learns what the hell they're doing..
At my employer (we do contracted support) The client pays for training classes for new employees (these training classes are not as long as they should be but anyway) what happens if the company can't retain the new hires? They have to hire some more and the client has to pay for their training. At some point, the client gets tired of paying for new groups to be trained, and simply don't allow new classes. The result is a hiring freeze for that department. The employees on the project get overworked, irritable, ect. trying to cover the workload of a larger group. We may have oppertunities to earn more from overtime when this happens, sometimes these "oppertunities" are not our choice. In any case, the remaining employees don't get any additional compensation per hours for the extra workload. This situation continues until the company that hired us starts to lose money from their customers leaving from bad support or the employee numbers drop to a point where it is not possible to fulfill staffing hours. The only people who really suffer in the end is the employees who don't quit and the customers (end users) who deal with poor support.