I'm with the parent post on this one. I've read quite a few of the comments here and they all seem to look over the fact that many people who are poor CHOOSE to be poor. A lot of poor choices go in to this...many on instant gratification and no patients or vision to struggle for a better life.
Case in point, my sister-in-law is poor. I mean no rent paying, no job for the last 2yrs, no utilities, the list goes on. She has been leaching off of my wife and her mother for quite a while now. She has refused to search for a job and has exhausted her unemployment. The only reason she was unemployed was because she decided one day that her job was too far away to drive to so she quit going until she was let go (i.e. qualified for unemployment). After the unemployment ran out (and many fake job applications posted), she started receiving food stamps. So what do she do with the food stamps? She takes people to the grocery store and has them pick out what they want and then they pay her about half of what the groceries cost. She then uses the money to buy beer and cigarettes. Meanwhile, she has a now 18yr old son that cannot read and is quickly becoming a burden on society. He skips school all of the time but his mom always makes excuses for him, bails him out of jail, lets him steel cable TV from the neighbor two doors down with a long cable that he hooks up at night and removes in the morning...
oh, and her live in boyfriend (btw she's in her 40's) of the last 10yrs, does not pay rent, works every now and then and used to live under a bridge.
These people are poor because they CHOOSE to be. No amount of handouts will make these people a productive member of society.
oh...and the US was not founded to provide representation for the poor. Look back in the history, the original voting rights were only given to white males who owned property as they were thought to be the only people with a valid stake. Poor were specifically excluded for many years as it was thought that they did not have a valid stake and could not be trusted to place an educated vote. It was only when the Democratic party realized that these voter, among others, could be influenced to vote in their favor that suffrage was granted. The US government is an aristocracy and the only reason non-rich are allowed to vote is because the political parties see them as voting pawns.
I am not rich but I enjoy the opportunity to be so in the US.
Fuck wireless security, we're talking about actual bona fide security problems here.
Who cares how unsecure the DNC is. Nothing will happen. Why would the terrorists attack their favorite candidates? They'll be too busy working on the attack details for the RNC anyway.
If most of the internet advertising companies stop with the spyware, popups, homepage jacking, etc and switched to plain text or simple HTML, there would be a lot less effort in blocking the ads and probably many more clicks on the ads.
Ah yes... life was good back in 1995-96. The only things I could buy online were porn and indie music (as in independently distributed as opposed to the crap they call indie now). I was amazed that Netscape would let me download more than one spank file at a time. This was a huge jump over the one download at a time I was getting from the bulletin boards. Ah yes...the good old days...before Al Gore "created" the internet.
Just go to the grocery store, look for the ageing food at the end of the isle with the little toothpicks and swat your way through the old folks. The only spam you should end up with will be on the end of a toothpick.
This isn't the evolution of technology in the workplace. It's the evolution of stupidity in the user. At least what you mention about GUI apps for people who can't follow directions and web applications for people with broken browsers.
I disagree. This issue is likely more related to the expansion of the user base. I think it's unreasonable to expect every technology user to become an expert; especially considering the proliferation of technology in our everyday lives. For a technology tool to be useful it must also contain a certain amount of intuitive capabilities. Intuition is generally derived from past experience. Since developers and systems designers typically have control over what and how information is presented to the user it is not always practical to expect the user to just "know" what to do next. Perhaps they could burn time reading the poorly constructed directions that the developer created but the reality is usually such that the user just needs to get a task accomplished. Not to become an expert in the technology?
btw...a broken browser is a relative observation. Firfox is "broken" to me when I view certain pages that work fine in IE and Netscape.
Technology is not limited to computers and electronic things. Technology by definition is the practical application of knowledge. It's the shear number of "practical applications of knowledge" that have me feeling overwhelmed, stressed and out of control. So many applications of technology have left me feeling naive and ignorant despite my best attempts to keep up and the fact that I once was considered to be on top of these things. Now I have to be even more concerned with the possibility that what I learned and applied yesterday being considered foolish and flawed tomorrow.
Stress is a reaction to an environmental pressure. The proliferation of new technology certainly has increased mental and physical environment pressures. Someone or something will be affected and therefore stress will always be an absolute consequence of new technology.
Ok...when I was in grade school I tried to wire up my clock radio to activate my train set every morning. I'm a heavy sleeper and I had a bad habit of turning the alarm off without waking up. My idea was to get the alarm clock to activate the train which was set up to run into my light switch. I figured all the noise and light would wake me up....I only succeeded in ruining the digital display.
...I also still have a pretty sizeable collection of little electric motors that I salvaged from old boom boxes and anything else I could find a motor in at the dump. I always figured I would build a robot with them one day. I'm not sure why I've kept them more than 15 years now though...
I second the parent comments about telling the truth.
My suggestion would be to focus on the accomplishments and knowledge gained while in the short stints. Companies generally do not lay people off for no reason. It's typically due to a slowdown, a reorganization or a project coming to an end. Try to find a brief, yet positive and truthful reason for the company to have laid you off. Write these things down and maybe even practice verbal communication about it to a friend... find a way to be confident and honest about everything you are communicating.
Come on people...suggesting dishonesty is just downright bad advice and hypocritical. You can't spend a whole discussion about how bad SCO is for lying and then suggest someone lie on their resume.
I'm not sure what your point is. So what if computers are under utilized and exactly how do you measure their under utilization?...CPU utilization or the ability to complete everyday tasks like person to person communications, balancing a checkbook, research, entertainment and the like.
Comming from the farm I would say people in the city who drive trucks with v8's, v10's, v12's and maybe even v6's to their desk jobs every day is an utter waste of engine power.:)
they can buy goods from overseas and luxury goods - the production of which doesn't create very many jobs.
Production is not the only source of jobs. If the wealthy choose to spend for overseas goods it still has to get to their home... shipworkers, shipping yards, truck drivers, dock workers, delivery drivers, whatever... will still benefit.
A flatter distribution of income creates more jobs producing things that benefit more people
Do you really belive this? I believe that incentive helps to drive inovation. A flatter distribution creates little incentive. How well would you produce at your job if you knew that you would always be paid the same as the guy next to you who is a total slacker?
At least a year ago I contacted Sprint PCS's phone support. I called about changing my automatic bill pay's credit card number and there were no options for that yet the dumb thing kept trying to "solve" my problem. I finaly yelled "give me a fucking live person" and the auto-lady replied with something like "I'm sorry please hold for an operator" and a person answered the phone.
Online calendaring is the tool of the incompetent manager.
Meetings with huge groups of people are monumental wastes of time & energy.
I can't even count the number of "show & tell" staff meetings that I wasted my time on over the years. At one meeting, where the attendees were mostly contract staff, we estimated that one droning staff meeting cost about $50/minute with no discernable value.
I provide a reasonable question and illustration of a situation that is not addressed by the open source software solutions listed and this crap reply post gets mod insightful!?
How would you suggest organizing and meeting the business client in order to initiate a project, perform analysis of business requirements, get consensus and sign-off on the business cases to be developed, report status, receive input from prototypes and user acceptance testing...the list goes on. A large company with a complex environment will most certainly rely on shared calendaring functionality. Not having this functionality available would definitely create a situation of wasted time & energy.
Since you believe online calendaring to be a "tool of the incompetent manager", how do you suggest management address the need to conveniently schedule you and everyone else's time to comunicate organizational issues? It would seem to me that you have an issue with the application of the tool and not the necessity of the tool itself.
I had checked into open groupware and the functionality I described still seems to be a work in progress or a non-open source add-on. I hadn't taken a look at open exchange....thanks for the recomendations.
I use a Compaq IPAQ with Pocket PC 2002. It has Pocket Word and Excel and until a recent ROM update it had an application for viewing PowerPoint (iPresent I believe...I just need to find it again and re-install it). I don't do much editing on the device itself as it's pretty small and cumbersome to move around in (e.g. an Excel doc only has about 10 rows by 3 columns when displayed at a size suitable for editing). Having the docs available at the meetings though has been very valuable. Especially for me since I like to avoid printing as much as possible...too much waste.
So what do you use for email integrated shared scheduling? At my IT job I have a lot of meetings to attend and schedule. Everyone is busy and I absolutely must have a way to schedule meetings when people are free. It is not always practical or even possible to contact everyone so I need a tool that will show me the attendee's availability. Also, since I'm away from my desk most of the day I need my schedule information to be updateable to my PDA as well as any supporting documents, presentations or spreadsheets. Oh and when I have a problem with my email/scheduling client I need to have a helpdesk available with the ability to assist me.
Name all successful companies that you know of which are not publicly traded
I know of at least off the top of my head:
Hallmark Cards
American Century
Russell Stover Candies
It's a little naive to believe that only publicly traded companies are successful.
Now, let me speak from the experience of having been an employee of a successful company that went public....it was the absolute worst thing that happened to us. The only people that profited from the IPO were the partners and many of them left shortly after the IPO. There was almost an immediate shift from being employee focused to shareholder return focused. Benefits were cut (my tuition re-imbursement, profit sharing company contributions and career level annual bonuses were all suspended), training was cut, raises were cut and soon jobs were cut. All the while the company continued to report substantial revenue increases. I'm no longer with the firm but I did see a recent article about them wanting to increase their India headcount from around 3,000 to 10,000...surpassing "Big Blue" and thus allowing them more flexibility to offer companies off-shoring services. The off shore increase probably would have occurred with or without the IPO. Yeah, I received a couple hundred shares but I would have much rather have had a better working environment and maintained my previous benefits.
So IPO:
Great for upper level partners and folks that have already been given a substantial stake in the company.
Bad for all the other employees of the company.
Good for large IPO investment firms. ...and probably not a good investment for the rest of us emotional stock purchasers:)
(such as WMP, killing Real, or IE, killing Netscape),
Not to defend Microsoft but Netscape killed itself around the version 4 Communicator time frame and if you have ever tangled with the original real jukebox trash you'd know why many people gave up on them. Not to mention both have turned into bloatware.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with the parent post on this one. I've read quite a few of the comments here and they all seem to look over the fact that many people who are poor CHOOSE to be poor. A lot of poor choices go in to this...many on instant gratification and no patients or vision to struggle for a better life.
Case in point, my sister-in-law is poor. I mean no rent paying, no job for the last 2yrs, no utilities, the list goes on. She has been leaching off of my wife and her mother for quite a while now. She has refused to search for a job and has exhausted her unemployment. The only reason she was unemployed was because she decided one day that her job was too far away to drive to so she quit going until she was let go (i.e. qualified for unemployment). After the unemployment ran out (and many fake job applications posted), she started receiving food stamps. So what do she do with the food stamps? She takes people to the grocery store and has them pick out what they want and then they pay her about half of what the groceries cost. She then uses the money to buy beer and cigarettes. Meanwhile, she has a now 18yr old son that cannot read and is quickly becoming a burden on society. He skips school all of the time but his mom always makes excuses for him, bails him out of jail, lets him steel cable TV from the neighbor two doors down with a long cable that he hooks up at night and removes in the morning...
oh, and her live in boyfriend (btw she's in her 40's) of the last 10yrs, does not pay rent, works every now and then and used to live under a bridge.
These people are poor because they CHOOSE to be. No amount of handouts will make these people a productive member of society.
oh...and the US was not founded to provide representation for the poor. Look back in the history, the original voting rights were only given to white males who owned property as they were thought to be the only people with a valid stake. Poor were specifically excluded for many years as it was thought that they did not have a valid stake and could not be trusted to place an educated vote. It was only when the Democratic party realized that these voter, among others, could be influenced to vote in their favor that suffrage was granted. The US government is an aristocracy and the only reason non-rich are allowed to vote is because the political parties see them as voting pawns.
I am not rich but I enjoy the opportunity to be so in the US.
Fuck wireless security, we're talking about actual bona fide security problems here.
Who cares how unsecure the DNC is. Nothing will happen. Why would the terrorists attack their favorite candidates? They'll be too busy working on the attack details for the RNC anyway.
If most of the internet advertising companies stop with the spyware, popups, homepage jacking, etc and switched to plain text or simple HTML, there would be a lot less effort in blocking the ads and probably many more clicks on the ads.
Ah yes... life was good back in 1995-96. The only things I could buy online were porn and indie music (as in independently distributed as opposed to the crap they call indie now). I was amazed that Netscape would let me download more than one spank file at a time. This was a huge jump over the one download at a time I was getting from the bulletin boards. Ah yes...the good old days...before Al Gore "created" the internet.
Just go to the grocery store, look for the ageing food at the end of the isle with the little toothpicks and swat your way through the old folks. The only spam you should end up with will be on the end of a toothpick.
I disagree. This issue is likely more related to the expansion of the user base. I think it's unreasonable to expect every technology user to become an expert; especially considering the proliferation of technology in our everyday lives. For a technology tool to be useful it must also contain a certain amount of intuitive capabilities. Intuition is generally derived from past experience. Since developers and systems designers typically have control over what and how information is presented to the user it is not always practical to expect the user to just "know" what to do next. Perhaps they could burn time reading the poorly constructed directions that the developer created but the reality is usually such that the user just needs to get a task accomplished. Not to become an expert in the technology?
btw...a broken browser is a relative observation. Firfox is "broken" to me when I view certain pages that work fine in IE and Netscape.
Technology is not limited to computers and electronic things. Technology by definition is the practical application of knowledge. It's the shear number of "practical applications of knowledge" that have me feeling overwhelmed, stressed and out of control. So many applications of technology have left me feeling naive and ignorant despite my best attempts to keep up and the fact that I once was considered to be on top of these things. Now I have to be even more concerned with the possibility that what I learned and applied yesterday being considered foolish and flawed tomorrow.
Stress is a reaction to an environmental pressure. The proliferation of new technology certainly has increased mental and physical environment pressures. Someone or something will be affected and therefore stress will always be an absolute consequence of new technology.
Ok...when I was in grade school I tried to wire up my clock radio to activate my train set every morning. I'm a heavy sleeper and I had a bad habit of turning the alarm off without waking up. My idea was to get the alarm clock to activate the train which was set up to run into my light switch. I figured all the noise and light would wake me up.
I second the parent comments about telling the truth.
My suggestion would be to focus on the accomplishments and knowledge gained while in the short stints. Companies generally do not lay people off for no reason. It's typically due to a slowdown, a reorganization or a project coming to an end. Try to find a brief, yet positive and truthful reason for the company to have laid you off. Write these things down and maybe even practice verbal communication about it to a friend... find a way to be confident and honest about everything you are communicating.
Come on people...suggesting dishonesty is just downright bad advice and hypocritical. You can't spend a whole discussion about how bad SCO is for lying and then suggest someone lie on their resume.
I'm not sure what your point is. So what if computers are under utilized and exactly how do you measure their under utilization? ...CPU utilization or the ability to complete everyday tasks like person to person communications, balancing a checkbook, research, entertainment and the like.
:)
Comming from the farm I would say people in the city who drive trucks with v8's, v10's, v12's and maybe even v6's to their desk jobs every day is an utter waste of engine power.
Production is not the only source of jobs. If the wealthy choose to spend for overseas goods it still has to get to their home... shipworkers, shipping yards, truck drivers, dock workers, delivery drivers, whatever... will still benefit.
Do you really belive this? I believe that incentive helps to drive inovation. A flatter distribution creates little incentive. How well would you produce at your job if you knew that you would always be paid the same as the guy next to you who is a total slacker?
At least a year ago I contacted Sprint PCS's phone support. I called about changing my automatic bill pay's credit card number and there were no options for that yet the dumb thing kept trying to "solve" my problem. I finaly yelled "give me a fucking live person" and the auto-lady replied with something like "I'm sorry please hold for an operator" and a person answered the phone.
I appreciated the additional ideas though.
In closing, I'll use one of my other favorite pet-peeves of the "I know what I'm talking about", "bull huh" contributors.
Think about it
How would you suggest organizing and meeting the business client in order to initiate a project, perform analysis of business requirements, get consensus and sign-off on the business cases to be developed, report status, receive input from prototypes and user acceptance testing...the list goes on. A large company with a complex environment will most certainly rely on shared calendaring functionality. Not having this functionality available would definitely create a situation of wasted time & energy.
Since you believe online calendaring to be a "tool of the incompetent manager", how do you suggest management address the need to conveniently schedule you and everyone else's time to comunicate organizational issues? It would seem to me that you have an issue with the application of the tool and not the necessity of the tool itself.
Well I wouldn't normally reply to this but since you described one of my pet-peeves and referenced it toward me...well let me clarify something.
...but I get your point.
My illustration may remind you of a boss you once had but I am far from the person you described.
btw...superior technology does not equal superior implementation, usability, or a superior available pool of people to support the technology.
I had checked into open groupware and the functionality I described still seems to be a work in progress or a non-open source add-on. I hadn't taken a look at open exchange. ...thanks for the recomendations.
I use a Compaq IPAQ with Pocket PC 2002. It has Pocket Word and Excel and until a recent ROM update it had an application for viewing PowerPoint (iPresent I believe...I just need to find it again and re-install it). I don't do much editing on the device itself as it's pretty small and cumbersome to move around in (e.g. an Excel doc only has about 10 rows by 3 columns when displayed at a size suitable for editing). Having the docs available at the meetings though has been very valuable. Especially for me since I like to avoid printing as much as possible...too much waste.
I'll respond.
So what do you use for email integrated shared scheduling? At my IT job I have a lot of meetings to attend and schedule. Everyone is busy and I absolutely must have a way to schedule meetings when people are free. It is not always practical or even possible to contact everyone so I need a tool that will show me the attendee's availability. Also, since I'm away from my desk most of the day I need my schedule information to be updateable to my PDA as well as any supporting documents, presentations or spreadsheets. Oh and when I have a problem with my email/scheduling client I need to have a helpdesk available with the ability to assist me.
Are there any open source options support this?
I know of at least off the top of my head:
Hallmark Cards
American Century
Russell Stover Candies
It's a little naive to believe that only publicly traded companies are successful.
Now, let me speak from the experience of having been an employee of a successful company that went public.
So IPO:
Great for upper level partners and folks that have already been given a substantial stake in the company.
Bad for all the other employees of the company.
Good for large IPO investment firms.