Dealing with Microsoft at the enterprise level is like entering a partnership with Wal-mart. It may look great on paper, and like the only way to follow the next step economically. But it's often death on your bottom line, strips your corporate resources dry to maintain the relationship, and leaves your users frustrated with failed goals.
His big problem is not the desktop: it's the email system, most especially the associated calendar system. Calendar systems have turned out to be a huge chokepoint on the implementation of new email systems, and far too many of them simply stink due to poor interfaces, unstable databases, or user interfaces written for Exicing! New! Feature-Filled! Vaporware Demos!!!!!
I've been through the difficulty of convincing a company to switch from MS Exchange to an actually supportable mail server. I've seen half a dozen buy into Exchange as their primary mail server, then have to buy front-end Sendmail based servers to handle all their incoming email from outside their company because Exchange just couldn't deal with it.
1: Winbind (Requires Windows administrative access to add the machine to the domain.) 2: LDAP (Requires LDAP administrative access to add the machine to the domain.) 3: Plain old Kerberos (provides authentication only, not uid's or gid's, but cannot be turned off by Windows AD administrators.)
The capabilities of these vary, but for simple file-sharing access, the smbmount command or the Konqueror tool with smb: access capability is usually quite sufficient from the SuSE world.
I dunno. CIO's tend to pick mail systems, trouble ticket systems, and do departmental hiring. The damage they can do is pretty serious in any environment: in a hospital where the budget masters are often not as technically sophisticated as those at a fundamentally technological company, these decisions can ruin careers and cost lives as systems fail at awful moments, or lead to stunningly unstable workarounds.
Not that this one is incompetent, but I've discussed IT issues with physicians: one of them always schedules an extra 10 minutes for my appointments so we can swap more detailed information about his more difficult needs, and mine.
Similar, although not identical, reasons. Foreign laborers are often less expensive, at least in the US: many of them are glad to get paid in dollars rather than their national currencies, some of them have fascinating political asylym issues due to being intellectuals in repressive regimes and are delighted to get themselves and their families to places where they are under less pressure or censure, etc. They also often lack the social, professional, or fiscal resources to quit, at least for years after their arrival in the US. I've even seen a green card employee blackmailed with the threat of H1B's for some his family members being imperiled by reporting second jobs they held to the immigration services and getting them deported. (Nasty, but true: I finished that contract and got the heck out when I found out that kind of behavior was typical at that company. They tried to stiff me on my bill, too.)
Sorry, no. Afghanistan was a punitive strike, a well-justified one. Then we threw it away and invaded Iraq, to gain 20% of the world's oil and remove what we thought was an internaltion trouble spot for US policy, an unfunished bit of old busiiness. Unfortunately, we've generated far more death, mayhem, and terrorism for non-Iraqis that ever came out of Iraq in the past. We're actually killing more Iraqis every year there than Saddam did, and getting far more US citizens killed than Iraq ever threatened. (The terror weapons claims were demonstrably fraudulent: let's hear no more about how this was a defensive first strike.) Our troops over there are replaying Vietnam, the poor bastards, and I support them as people while loathing what their leaders have tricked and coerced them into.
That said, 4 years active duty doing fire-fighting, emergency work, Red Cross, etc. all make sense. That's a good idea for natives too: it should be how you get to vote. Robert Heinlein suggested this decades ago in Starship Troopers, and I've always liked the idea.
Yes. It often hurts the company because they'd have to pay a US citizen higher wages, and because US citizens talk back to their employers when their employers do stupid or illegal ideas. I've seen this in play: an H1-B is a very powerful hold over an employee to ensure loyalty and employer approved behavior, even at risk to the employee.
It's not always the case, but it's very frequent, that an H1-B holder is hired to keep salary costs down.
Excuse me, but this point is *not* lost on lawyers. They study long and hard on what "the right thing to do" is, and are taught very firmly that it's to represent your clients. That's just what these attorneys were doing.
Mind you, they're still scumballs, but attorneys who hold to higher ethical standards don't work for successful immigration law firms. They work for the immigrants directly, or take rotten salaries doing non-profit work, etc.
Training, salary, and whistle-blowing. By keeping the foreigher, they can avoid training a new employee, they can pay a wage that is competitive in their home country rather than in the US, and employees on H1-B's are very reluctant to report misbehavior or object to illicit corporate policies.
I've seen this in practice, where the H1-B holders refused to act against criminal activity by a company that employed. The US employees objected strongly, embarassed the managers doing it, and all resigned. En masse. I was stunned and impressed by their willingness to leave their decently paying jobs in protest of criminal activity, and wrote some of them stellar recommendations to help them find new work. They earned those recommendations!
And from your description, you *deserve* an H1-B. I'd grant it in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, I've been seeing a lot of "Java programmers" and "interface designers" who speak Russian very well, but couldn't spell "report errors" or "don't expect desktops to have 4 Gig of RAM to run your giant dancing bear website" to save their careers.
Go read the fine article yourself. Given a pool of 50 applicants, even if they're good applicants, the odds that any one applicant fulfills all the requirements exactly is low: there is a serious art to writing job ads that eliminate all but the previously selected candidate. This practice occurs in the managerial and corporate realm every day, to avoid any but the already selected candidate.
If you watch the video, the attorneys make clear that the employer can make interviews with any US applicants that run the gauntlet and should deliberately disqualify them on any pretext. I've seen the practice: it's nasty, and prevents applicants other than the previously chosen few from ever being considered. I've had an application shot down that way myself: the people who urged me to apply for the work were stunned I didn't get it, and truly lamented that the "golden child" applicant who was greased through the system wound up with it. The fact that he had a serious personal relationship already with his new supervisor became immediately apparent, and caused quite a legal ruckus 3 years later.
I actually bought a sandwich from such a Brazilian while traveling overseas last year. He sold me the sandwich, but I won't be going back to the shop the next time I'm in that city because he copped such an attitude about it.
Actually, it is. The employee safety standards, training practices, and most especially *union* policies of foreign employees often differ vastly. While US workers in technology are often more skilled and more creative and more productive, for example, they're more expensive and more demanding of their managers. They're also more likely to say "this is a really, really stupid idea" or to blow the whistle on criminal activity than foreign workers on H1-B visas.
I've seen this in practice, where the US contractors immediately went to the company management and said "we are in violation of our contracts with this customer, and in violation of US law: here's what we have to do to fix it" where the foreign workers continued merrily breaking basic US law. (Including the GPL: I had a long talk with some of their US engineers about software that I'd contributed heavily to under the GPL, and its implications for what they were doing. They resigned from the company and are employed elsewhere now, and the project eventually cost that company a big loss when their clients noticed the contract violations.)
Careful: you're twisting your words into falsehood. They're very careful in the visible parts of the presentation to tell how to comply with the law. The violation of the spirit of laws is what corporate attorneys are paid to do: it's absolutely typical and normal for them to advise clients on how to skirt the law.
The "read between the lines" parts of the presentation are fascinating: the implication that an employer could and should find some excuse to block US employees that they can put on paper, even a weak one, is very typical of such a discussion with a corporate attorney.
I've worked with it. The installers for Helix servers were written by drunken off-shore contractors who can't spell the phrase "report error conditions, don't just fail silently". It's just not stable enough for industrial scale use, even though various web streaming companies have tried to do so.
And the magician didn't have that rabbit up his sleeve when he started the trick. It's a tax, pure and simple: it's set and enforced federally, and the money goes into coffers under quite direct federal control.
Some of the results of this tax are positive: the world-wide news coverage by the BBC has historically been fabulous. But make no mistake, their leadership and staff bear the marks of other civil service bureaucracies such as the US Post Office.
The UK, where the BBC is based, does not have software patents. The issue is primarily one of protecting access to material in a way that is based on technology and corporate policy, not on existing copyright law or patents.
Their funding is also pretty odd. The BBC "license fee" would be called a tax almost anywhere else in the world: but the British tendency to strange taxes has led to trouble for them before, including the tea taxes that led to the Boston Tea Party.
There are in fact players for Windows Media that seem to work for DRM-ized Windows Media. They're just not legal in the US due to patent issues and the DMCA regulations, nor in Europe due to copyright issues. But if you need them for Linux, look for "Penguin Liberation Front".
The BBC seems to have been trapped by an early decision to cooperate with the desires of copyright holders to enforce their copyrights via software. This decision has, frankly, ruined the viability of Iplayer. Pirate video recorders will simply Bittorrent upload to sites like www.thepiratebay.org, and the value of the rights restricted content will rapidly diminish. And I don't see a good way out for them, unless they can make the Iplayer so responsive and so well managed that it's vastly superior to Bittorrenting. That would take a huge investment both in infrastructure and in responsive to customer desires.
Respononsiveness, I'm afraid, is not the BBC's strong point. Perhaps they could simply partner with YouTube to get a working interface, and throw out their own departments that were hired to do this?
It can be disobeyed. But that doesn't make it safe or economical to do so. Proving, in court, that that provision is illegal is very difficult and can be hideously expensive: ask anyone who's gotten involved in a pyramid scheme and attempted to get their "guaranteed money-back" actually returned to them, without spending far more than the refund is worth.
Maybe turn it into your typical CPAN perl module? (Forgive I've been dealing with a lot of really, really poorly organized and writen CPAN modules lately, from developers who think installing from CPAN is the same thing as source control.)
He wasn't discussing kernels specifically. Making *ANY* significantly derivative work from GPL licensed software is just like copying anyone else's code: it can be a violation of their copyright if not done correctly. It's potentially even worse if you violate patents in the US, since there is no "fair use" for patent violation. And you need never have seen or been aware of a patent to duplicate it, nor do you have to use the same code.
This is why source projects like Samba and many closed source projects rely on extensive "clean room" development techniques, so that they avoid risk of contaminating the with closed source tools and violate those copyrights or license agreements. It's vastly, vastly simpler to start with and work under a good GPL or other open source license, at least in development terms.
The GPL protects you, and anyone who might want to use your products, from exactly this risk. It also protects your clients from "abandonware", where you go out of business or get arrested for murdering your wife (like Hans Reiser of reiserfs fame). It makes you a consultant in producing a product, and provides a business for you and other people to integrate improvements and expand your market. To do this, you have to continue to develop: you can't just sell a killer product once and rely on your "secret sauce" in your software to bring in revenue forever.
Besides the ability to execute a "joe job" on someone you don't like by automatically having them sent thousands of "registration" emails? Or providing a level of traceability and authentication completely inappropriate for a semi-anonymous service like Slashdot?
Goodness, sir. Unfortunately, it's difficult to tell you from a troll planted by the scientologists to make this discussion look like a bunch of hateful critics so they can claim "Look, look! He's oppressing me!".
Don't insult "believers", don't call them names. It just makes them feel isolated and harassed and as if they're justified in tuning out any criticism as being from "enemies". Expose fraud and criminality but remain your charming self with them. Liberate by example, not by berating: it lasts longer and is more safe and pleasant for all concerned. That's good advice for dealing with any fanatics of religious or political belief.
Slashdot Mirror
Dealing with Microsoft at the enterprise level is like entering a partnership with Wal-mart. It may look great on paper, and like the only way to follow the next step economically. But it's often death on your bottom line, strips your corporate resources dry to maintain the relationship, and leaves your users frustrated with failed goals.
His big problem is not the desktop: it's the email system, most especially the associated calendar system. Calendar systems have turned out to be a huge chokepoint on the implementation of new email systems, and far too many of them simply stink due to poor interfaces, unstable databases, or user interfaces written for Exicing! New! Feature-Filled! Vaporware Demos!!!!!
I've been through the difficulty of convincing a company to switch from MS Exchange to an actually supportable mail server. I've seen half a dozen buy into Exchange as their primary mail server, then have to buy front-end Sendmail based servers to handle all their incoming email from outside their company because Exchange just couldn't deal with it.
There are 3 distinct ways to do this:
1: Winbind (Requires Windows administrative access to add the machine to the domain.)
2: LDAP (Requires LDAP administrative access to add the machine to the domain.)
3: Plain old Kerberos (provides authentication only, not uid's or gid's, but cannot be turned off by Windows AD administrators.)
The capabilities of these vary, but for simple file-sharing access, the smbmount command or the Konqueror tool with smb: access capability is usually quite sufficient from the SuSE world.
You too, huh?
I dunno. CIO's tend to pick mail systems, trouble ticket systems, and do departmental hiring. The damage they can do is pretty serious in any environment: in a hospital where the budget masters are often not as technically sophisticated as those at a fundamentally technological company, these decisions can ruin careers and cost lives as systems fail at awful moments, or lead to stunningly unstable workarounds.
Not that this one is incompetent, but I've discussed IT issues with physicians: one of them always schedules an extra 10 minutes for my appointments so we can swap more detailed information about his more difficult needs, and mine.
Similar, although not identical, reasons. Foreign laborers are often less expensive, at least in the US: many of them are glad to get paid in dollars rather than their national currencies, some of them have fascinating political asylym issues due to being intellectuals in repressive regimes and are delighted to get themselves and their families to places where they are under less pressure or censure, etc. They also often lack the social, professional, or fiscal resources to quit, at least for years after their arrival in the US. I've even seen a green card employee blackmailed with the threat of H1B's for some his family members being imperiled by reporting second jobs they held to the immigration services and getting them deported. (Nasty, but true: I finished that contract and got the heck out when I found out that kind of behavior was typical at that company. They tried to stiff me on my bill, too.)
OK. So pinch the suckers closed on their tentacles, instead?
Sorry, no. Afghanistan was a punitive strike, a well-justified one. Then we threw it away and invaded Iraq, to gain 20% of the world's oil and remove what we thought was an internaltion trouble spot for US policy, an unfunished bit of old busiiness. Unfortunately, we've generated far more death, mayhem, and terrorism for non-Iraqis that ever came out of Iraq in the past. We're actually killing more Iraqis every year there than Saddam did, and getting far more US citizens killed than Iraq ever threatened. (The terror weapons claims were demonstrably fraudulent: let's hear no more about how this was a defensive first strike.) Our troops over there are replaying Vietnam, the poor bastards, and I support them as people while loathing what their leaders have tricked and coerced them into.
That said, 4 years active duty doing fire-fighting, emergency work, Red Cross, etc. all make sense. That's a good idea for natives too: it should be how you get to vote. Robert Heinlein suggested this decades ago in Starship Troopers, and I've always liked the idea.
Yes. It often hurts the company because they'd have to pay a US citizen higher wages, and because US citizens talk back to their employers when their employers do stupid or illegal ideas. I've seen this in play: an H1-B is a very powerful hold over an employee to ensure loyalty and employer approved behavior, even at risk to the employee. It's not always the case, but it's very frequent, that an H1-B holder is hired to keep salary costs down.
Excuse me, but this point is *not* lost on lawyers. They study long and hard on what "the right thing to do" is, and are taught very firmly that it's to represent your clients. That's just what these attorneys were doing.
Mind you, they're still scumballs, but attorneys who hold to higher ethical standards don't work for successful immigration law firms. They work for the immigrants directly, or take rotten salaries doing non-profit work, etc.
Training, salary, and whistle-blowing. By keeping the foreigher, they can avoid training a new employee, they can pay a wage that is competitive in their home country rather than in the US, and employees on H1-B's are very reluctant to report misbehavior or object to illicit corporate policies.
I've seen this in practice, where the H1-B holders refused to act against criminal activity by a company that employed. The US employees objected strongly, embarassed the managers doing it, and all resigned. En masse. I was stunned and impressed by their willingness to leave their decently paying jobs in protest of criminal activity, and wrote some of them stellar recommendations to help them find new work. They earned those recommendations!
And from your description, you *deserve* an H1-B. I'd grant it in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, I've been seeing a lot of "Java programmers" and "interface designers" who speak Russian very well, but couldn't spell "report errors" or "don't expect desktops to have 4 Gig of RAM to run your giant dancing bear website" to save their careers.
Go read the fine article yourself. Given a pool of 50 applicants, even if they're good applicants, the odds that any one applicant fulfills all the requirements exactly is low: there is a serious art to writing job ads that eliminate all but the previously selected candidate. This practice occurs in the managerial and corporate realm every day, to avoid any but the already selected candidate.
If you watch the video, the attorneys make clear that the employer can make interviews with any US applicants that run the gauntlet and should deliberately disqualify them on any pretext. I've seen the practice: it's nasty, and prevents applicants other than the previously chosen few from ever being considered. I've had an application shot down that way myself: the people who urged me to apply for the work were stunned I didn't get it, and truly lamented that the "golden child" applicant who was greased through the system wound up with it. The fact that he had a serious personal relationship already with his new supervisor became immediately apparent, and caused quite a legal ruckus 3 years later.
I actually bought a sandwich from such a Brazilian while traveling overseas last year. He sold me the sandwich, but I won't be going back to the shop the next time I'm in that city because he copped such an attitude about it.
Actually, it is. The employee safety standards, training practices, and most especially *union* policies of foreign employees often differ vastly. While US workers in technology are often more skilled and more creative and more productive, for example, they're more expensive and more demanding of their managers. They're also more likely to say "this is a really, really stupid idea" or to blow the whistle on criminal activity than foreign workers on H1-B visas.
I've seen this in practice, where the US contractors immediately went to the company management and said "we are in violation of our contracts with this customer, and in violation of US law: here's what we have to do to fix it" where the foreign workers continued merrily breaking basic US law. (Including the GPL: I had a long talk with some of their US engineers about software that I'd contributed heavily to under the GPL, and its implications for what they were doing. They resigned from the company and are employed elsewhere now, and the project eventually cost that company a big loss when their clients noticed the contract violations.)
Careful: you're twisting your words into falsehood. They're very careful in the visible parts of the presentation to tell how to comply with the law. The violation of the spirit of laws is what corporate attorneys are paid to do: it's absolutely typical and normal for them to advise clients on how to skirt the law.
The "read between the lines" parts of the presentation are fascinating: the implication that an employer could and should find some excuse to block US employees that they can put on paper, even a weak one, is very typical of such a discussion with a corporate attorney.
I've worked with it. The installers for Helix servers were written by drunken off-shore contractors who can't spell the phrase "report error conditions, don't just fail silently". It's just not stable enough for industrial scale use, even though various web streaming companies have tried to do so.
And the magician didn't have that rabbit up his sleeve when he started the trick. It's a tax, pure and simple: it's set and enforced federally, and the money goes into coffers under quite direct federal control.
Some of the results of this tax are positive: the world-wide news coverage by the BBC has historically been fabulous. But make no mistake, their leadership and staff bear the marks of other civil service bureaucracies such as the US Post Office.
The UK, where the BBC is based, does not have software patents. The issue is primarily one of protecting access to material in a way that is based on technology and corporate policy, not on existing copyright law or patents.
Their funding is also pretty odd. The BBC "license fee" would be called a tax almost anywhere else in the world: but the British tendency to strange taxes has led to trouble for them before, including the tea taxes that led to the Boston Tea Party.
There are in fact players for Windows Media that seem to work for DRM-ized Windows Media. They're just not legal in the US due to patent issues and the DMCA regulations, nor in Europe due to copyright issues. But if you need them for Linux, look for "Penguin Liberation Front".
The BBC seems to have been trapped by an early decision to cooperate with the desires of copyright holders to enforce their copyrights via software. This decision has, frankly, ruined the viability of Iplayer. Pirate video recorders will simply Bittorrent upload to sites like www.thepiratebay.org, and the value of the rights restricted content will rapidly diminish. And I don't see a good way out for them, unless they can make the Iplayer so responsive and so well managed that it's vastly superior to Bittorrenting. That would take a huge investment both in infrastructure and in responsive to customer desires.
Respononsiveness, I'm afraid, is not the BBC's strong point. Perhaps they could simply partner with YouTube to get a working interface, and throw out their own departments that were hired to do this?
Usenet has etiquette? Who'd have thought?
It can be disobeyed. But that doesn't make it safe or economical to do so. Proving, in court, that that provision is illegal is very difficult and can be hideously expensive: ask anyone who's gotten involved in a pyramid scheme and attempted to get their "guaranteed money-back" actually returned to them, without spending far more than the refund is worth.
Maybe turn it into your typical CPAN perl module? (Forgive I've been dealing with a lot of really, really poorly organized and writen CPAN modules lately, from developers who think installing from CPAN is the same thing as source control.)
He wasn't discussing kernels specifically. Making *ANY* significantly derivative work from GPL licensed software is just like copying anyone else's code: it can be a violation of their copyright if not done correctly. It's potentially even worse if you violate patents in the US, since there is no "fair use" for patent violation. And you need never have seen or been aware of a patent to duplicate it, nor do you have to use the same code.
This is why source projects like Samba and many closed source projects rely on extensive "clean room" development techniques, so that they avoid risk of contaminating the with closed source tools and violate those copyrights or license agreements. It's vastly, vastly simpler to start with and work under a good GPL or other open source license, at least in development terms.
The GPL protects you, and anyone who might want to use your products, from exactly this risk. It also protects your clients from "abandonware", where you go out of business or get arrested for murdering your wife (like Hans Reiser of reiserfs fame). It makes you a consultant in producing a product, and provides a business for you and other people to integrate improvements and expand your market. To do this, you have to continue to develop: you can't just sell a killer product once and rely on your "secret sauce" in your software to bring in revenue forever.
Besides the ability to execute a "joe job" on someone you don't like by automatically having them sent thousands of "registration" emails? Or providing a level of traceability and authentication completely inappropriate for a semi-anonymous service like Slashdot?
Goodness, sir. Unfortunately, it's difficult to tell you from a troll planted by the scientologists to make this discussion look like a bunch of hateful critics so they can claim "Look, look! He's oppressing me!".
Don't insult "believers", don't call them names. It just makes them feel isolated and harassed and as if they're justified in tuning out any criticism as being from "enemies". Expose fraud and criminality but remain your charming self with them. Liberate by example, not by berating: it lasts longer and is more safe and pleasant for all concerned. That's good advice for dealing with any fanatics of religious or political belief.