Good point, I forgot that some cities mandate higher than their state. A bit of reading yields that Santa Fe and San Francisco tend to bounce back and forth as to who is the highest, and the winner for 2011 is San Francisco at $9.92. Both are indexed to inflation and other cost of living, so it's likely we'll see $10.50 pretty soon.
However, getting back to the original point, the parent said that the minimum wage was $10.50, and I can't find anywhere where that is the case (within the US).
True, local minimum wages can be significantly higher than Federal. Anyhow, Washington State seems to have the highest, at $8.67, still significantly off the $10.50 the parent quoted.
I hear this argument a lot. Can you provide a pointer to a union (or a group of unions) being a specific driver towards the 8-hour day, retirement benefits or employer-subsidized health insurance?
That's extreme, but what the parent is trying to say is that for the work that he does, he's well compensated in comparison to his peers. He can try to do better, but why would anyone want to pay this guy (or his union) $20, or $25 an hour to sell electronics? Keep in mind, there are plenty of people out there who would gladly do his job for less.
It's not about whining, it's about knowing your value to the company. You're probably right, most of these Apple employees can't go find higher paying jobs for the same work. They are among the best paid in the industry.
I think you're reading it wrong. I agree that a lot of the comments on here are pretty scary. Let me try a different approach.
What the above commenters mean when they say "be happy for what you get, you're unskilled labor," what they mean is: "Your value to the company is not above what you're paid. There are a sea of workers (supply) that can fill our need for people (demand) like you." Further, there are people that think that this worker is trying to change the terms of his employment, which seems unfair to the company. Let's say I hire you to paint my fence at $10/hour. Half way through the job, you come back to me and tell me that you need $15/hour to finish the fence. Obviously I have the right to tell you that I will hire your brother to paint it at $10/hour to finish the job. Introducing the union aspect to this situation gets a lot of people riled up, and some pretty strong emotions come out.
What I want to know is: what is this really about? Does the guy just want to be paid more, or does he feel like Apple is making too much money and needs to return it to their employees at a higher rate?
Agreed that he's making some nice cash, especially as a one man team. I don't know how Cydia does their payouts, but assuming it's 50% for the developers, he hasn't made that much. Specifically, because there are discounts offered. It appears that it's gone as low as $2.99 during certain sales. If you assume that 50% of the sales actually came during the discount period, the math looks like this:
(50,000 downloads X 50% of sales X $9.99 + 50,000 downloads X 50% of sales X $2.99 ) X 50% Cydia Payout = $162K
$162K is nothing to sneeze at, but I bet he'd rather have a developer job at Apple for his efforts.
and half of Slashdot would probably object to this being a Federal law rather than a state law or would propose that we adopt a technological/market solution instead.
Yes, I would object to a Federal Law to govern state workers or local workers. If a state needs this law, it's welcome to pass it, as it's probably a pretty good law. However, there's no reason to bring the Feds into it, unless we're talking about Federal employees.
the ONLY jobs that certs mean anything is entry level.
Certs only help you get your foot in the door, or to an interview. In a world of keyword based resume searches and HR run interviews, a cert can get you to the next round. Ultimately, you'll have to prove your worth to the final decision maker, but it can be a hard road to even get there without that something extra on the resume.
Once you're in the company, your work will stand on it's own, and your certs won't matter. However, if you're just an unknown applying for a job from outside (be it entry level, manager or director level and higher) a cert can lend some legitimacy to you.
I'm a CCIE at a large company. My certification holds little value for the company and little value for me in my current job. However, the certification proves that I can work hard and learn things and recite them for a test. It means I work well under pressure and I have a quantifiable measure of that skill.
Additionally, as a few others have noted, having a CCIE frequently means that companies will consider hiring me just to get a higher partner status. It's not a bad thing to be in demand, and have some relative security due to a piece of paper. If I want to stay in networking, I'll be significantly more "hirable" than someone without a CCIE. From an employer perspective, I may not be any better (I may be worse) than the other guy, but they'll want to hire me for the other reasons.
For these reasons, I believe that a CCIE increases my net worth and marketability. Ultimately, this is what it's all about, so I consider the hours I spent getting certified as a success.
Interesting that you chose to single out Sarah Palin, the "corrupt politician". I'm not Palin supporter, but couldn't you have picked at least a practicing politician, or one that is at least working with the FAA or the NTSB? You know, someone it's feasible they could have paid off to get favorable treatment? If you pay off Palin, you might get some nice comments at a rally, but no actions.
I'm hanging on to my 4:3 screens for this reason, and it took a lot of tweaking to get my 16:10 laptop to really work well for me. I still can't use all the horizontal space. However, maybe you should try turning your LCD (assuming it's not a laptop) on it's side into portrait view. If my 4:3 dual monitors die, I'm picking up two widescreens and turning them sideways.
I didn't get a chance to read either report yet, but it seems like 150GB would be pretty generous.
it called the data levels generous and said limits would only affect 2 percent of its customers. It turns out Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media, according to a different Sandvine report (PDF).
So an Average Netflix user uses 40GB per month "just" for streaming media. However, that's easily the biggest chunk of the average user's usage. I can't imagine the average user is also pulling down another 40GB worth of webpages without streaming media. I would guess that if the average user is doing 40GB of Netflix, they're probably also only doing 10-20GB of everything else. Assuming various things about the distribution, it's not hard to imagine that only 2% of users are pulling down 150GB, which is more than double the average user.
Yes, I know you can get to 150GB if you're legally downloading Linux torrents all day, but remember, we're talking about average people here.
In the US, Congress has to declare war for the country to "legally" be at war.
The grandparent seems to be mistaken that the US isn't at war. PL 107-40 specifically gives the military authority to use force against those who committed the terrorist acts of September 11th, 2001. The US is legally at war with terrorists, as difficult as they may be to define.
This is counter to what is going on in Libya with Operation Odyssey Dawn, which has not been authorized by Congress, but instead is defined as a limited scope operation, which does not need Congress' approval. There is criticism of this, and if the US operation should expand to regime change, would probably have to be authorized by Congress.
So the reviewer should buy a BB on another network just to test it out?
Yes, the reviewer should be equipped with the tools in order to do his job without hacks. I get that it's bullshit that it's not in the AT&T store yet, but don't bother writing a review without the proper tools.
And yes, I absolutely did fail to read the rest of the review. My bad, I figured he reviewed the rest without email.
Disclaimer: I've used a Blackberry as my primary device for most of the last decade. I've watched the platform grow and in general really like it. I want to see the product be successful, but I'm willing to admit it currently has many faults. I still think my current Blackberry is the best device for me. I don't classify myself as a fanboy because I can admit its faults.
From the article:
If your BlackBerry is on the AT&T network, you can't install Bridge -- AT&T won't allow it. As luck would have it, my BlackBerry Torch uses the AT&T network, so AT&T blocked me from installing Bridge, which meant I could not get my Exchange or IMAP email, work with my calendar, or look up contacts.
The Blackberry Bridge being blocked on AT&T is very ridiculous, but writing this review without Blackberry Bridge is even more ridiculous. This kind of like saying: "I couldn't get iTunes to install on my Linux machine, so this iPad thing is pretty worthless. Every time I turned it on, it told me to connect to iTunes for setup."
While this wasn't originally advertised as such, having a Blackberry phone (with Bridge) is in absolute requirement of the Playbook. I don't think that's a great decision for RIM, but that's besides the point. Don't try to write a review without the required equipment.
I have an LG BluRay player that uses Vudu, and I agree - their service is excellent. Unfortunately, their pricing model (pay per movie) isn't my preferred method when I'm already forking over $xx/month to Netflix for "unlimited" movies, but I have used it a few times when they have a new release that I really am interested in.
Wo wo wo, you mean that someone who supports an issue explained an issue for the first time to someone who had never heard of the issue and he took the same side?! And this guy is a traditional Republican? Net Neutrality must be right! Oh drat, I'm sure those ninnies at Fox News will distort the truth and get him to switch sides.
Or.... maybe he'll hear the other side of the story from someone who doesn't support Net Neutrality (FoxNews or otherwise) and realize that your presentation of the facts wasn't exactly unbiased.
The economics of the internet, re: my ISP, are the same as they've ever been. I pay them $60 a month, and they deliver mediocre "broadband." It doesn't matter what the fuck I do with my internet connection. In the past, my bits maybe came from Geocities instead of Facebook, but none of that means shit re: an ISP. What has changed is that other people have started making a lot of money from their websites, and the ISPs want a cut.
This is not true. Depending on where the packet is sourced and destined, the cost can change for your service provider. Additionally, depending on the type of content you are requesting, it matters how the packets arrive. For instance, if your provider has an agreement to cache Facebook content in their network, it may be easier for them to provide Facebook packets to you, resulting in a lower cost (and price) than going to some random website. For something like Netflix, your packets need to be delivered in order and consistently, rather than in bursts (which would be acceptable for most web traffic). This causes additional stress on the network, and your provider might want to guarantee quality for Netflix, at a specific cost to you or to Netflix.
Slashdot Mirror
They also have a great one about Michelle Obama which I've been tracking on Tumblr.
Good point, I forgot that some cities mandate higher than their state. A bit of reading yields that Santa Fe and San Francisco tend to bounce back and forth as to who is the highest, and the winner for 2011 is San Francisco at $9.92. Both are indexed to inflation and other cost of living, so it's likely we'll see $10.50 pretty soon.
However, getting back to the original point, the parent said that the minimum wage was $10.50, and I can't find anywhere where that is the case (within the US).
True, local minimum wages can be significantly higher than Federal. Anyhow, Washington State seems to have the highest, at $8.67, still significantly off the $10.50 the parent quoted.
I hear this argument a lot. Can you provide a pointer to a union (or a group of unions) being a specific driver towards the 8-hour day, retirement benefits or employer-subsidized health insurance?
That's extreme, but what the parent is trying to say is that for the work that he does, he's well compensated in comparison to his peers. He can try to do better, but why would anyone want to pay this guy (or his union) $20, or $25 an hour to sell electronics? Keep in mind, there are plenty of people out there who would gladly do his job for less.
It's not about whining, it's about knowing your value to the company. You're probably right, most of these Apple employees can't go find higher paying jobs for the same work. They are among the best paid in the industry.
I think you're reading it wrong. I agree that a lot of the comments on here are pretty scary. Let me try a different approach.
What the above commenters mean when they say "be happy for what you get, you're unskilled labor," what they mean is: "Your value to the company is not above what you're paid. There are a sea of workers (supply) that can fill our need for people (demand) like you." Further, there are people that think that this worker is trying to change the terms of his employment, which seems unfair to the company. Let's say I hire you to paint my fence at $10/hour. Half way through the job, you come back to me and tell me that you need $15/hour to finish the fence. Obviously I have the right to tell you that I will hire your brother to paint it at $10/hour to finish the job. Introducing the union aspect to this situation gets a lot of people riled up, and some pretty strong emotions come out.
What I want to know is: what is this really about? Does the guy just want to be paid more, or does he feel like Apple is making too much money and needs to return it to their employees at a higher rate?
You're off by about 50%. Minimum wage in the US is $7.25.
I saw that comment - it wasn't clear if he gave him the CV, or if he told them to go screw.
No, I don't know. I looked around and couldn't find any documentation on their cut.
Agreed that he's making some nice cash, especially as a one man team. I don't know how Cydia does their payouts, but assuming it's 50% for the developers, he hasn't made that much. Specifically, because there are discounts offered. It appears that it's gone as low as $2.99 during certain sales. If you assume that 50% of the sales actually came during the discount period, the math looks like this:
(50,000 downloads X 50% of sales X $9.99 + 50,000 downloads X 50% of sales X $2.99 ) X 50% Cydia Payout = $162K
$162K is nothing to sneeze at, but I bet he'd rather have a developer job at Apple for his efforts.
and half of Slashdot would probably object to this being a Federal law rather than a state law or would propose that we adopt a technological/market solution instead.
Yes, I would object to a Federal Law to govern state workers or local workers. If a state needs this law, it's welcome to pass it, as it's probably a pretty good law. However, there's no reason to bring the Feds into it, unless we're talking about Federal employees.
the ONLY jobs that certs mean anything is entry level.
Certs only help you get your foot in the door, or to an interview. In a world of keyword based resume searches and HR run interviews, a cert can get you to the next round. Ultimately, you'll have to prove your worth to the final decision maker, but it can be a hard road to even get there without that something extra on the resume.
Once you're in the company, your work will stand on it's own, and your certs won't matter. However, if you're just an unknown applying for a job from outside (be it entry level, manager or director level and higher) a cert can lend some legitimacy to you.
I'm a CCIE at a large company. My certification holds little value for the company and little value for me in my current job. However, the certification proves that I can work hard and learn things and recite them for a test. It means I work well under pressure and I have a quantifiable measure of that skill.
Additionally, as a few others have noted, having a CCIE frequently means that companies will consider hiring me just to get a higher partner status. It's not a bad thing to be in demand, and have some relative security due to a piece of paper. If I want to stay in networking, I'll be significantly more "hirable" than someone without a CCIE. From an employer perspective, I may not be any better (I may be worse) than the other guy, but they'll want to hire me for the other reasons.
For these reasons, I believe that a CCIE increases my net worth and marketability. Ultimately, this is what it's all about, so I consider the hours I spent getting certified as a success.
Interesting that you chose to single out Sarah Palin, the "corrupt politician". I'm not Palin supporter, but couldn't you have picked at least a practicing politician, or one that is at least working with the FAA or the NTSB? You know, someone it's feasible they could have paid off to get favorable treatment? If you pay off Palin, you might get some nice comments at a rally, but no actions.
I'm hanging on to my 4:3 screens for this reason, and it took a lot of tweaking to get my 16:10 laptop to really work well for me. I still can't use all the horizontal space. However, maybe you should try turning your LCD (assuming it's not a laptop) on it's side into portrait view. If my 4:3 dual monitors die, I'm picking up two widescreens and turning them sideways.
it called the data levels generous and said limits would only affect 2 percent of its customers. It turns out Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media, according to a different Sandvine report (PDF).
So an Average Netflix user uses 40GB per month "just" for streaming media. However, that's easily the biggest chunk of the average user's usage. I can't imagine the average user is also pulling down another 40GB worth of webpages without streaming media. I would guess that if the average user is doing 40GB of Netflix, they're probably also only doing 10-20GB of everything else. Assuming various things about the distribution, it's not hard to imagine that only 2% of users are pulling down 150GB, which is more than double the average user.
Yes, I know you can get to 150GB if you're legally downloading Linux torrents all day, but remember, we're talking about average people here.
In the US, Congress has to declare war for the country to "legally" be at war.
The grandparent seems to be mistaken that the US isn't at war. PL 107-40 specifically gives the military authority to use force against those who committed the terrorist acts of September 11th, 2001. The US is legally at war with terrorists, as difficult as they may be to define.
This is counter to what is going on in Libya with Operation Odyssey Dawn, which has not been authorized by Congress, but instead is defined as a limited scope operation, which does not need Congress' approval. There is criticism of this, and if the US operation should expand to regime change, would probably have to be authorized by Congress.
So the reviewer should buy a BB on another network just to test it out?
Yes, the reviewer should be equipped with the tools in order to do his job without hacks. I get that it's bullshit that it's not in the AT&T store yet, but don't bother writing a review without the proper tools.
And yes, I absolutely did fail to read the rest of the review. My bad, I figured he reviewed the rest without email.
Yes, I absolutely did fail to read the rest of the review. My bad, I figured he reviewed the rest without email.
From the article:
If your BlackBerry is on the AT&T network, you can't install Bridge -- AT&T won't allow it. As luck would have it, my BlackBerry Torch uses the AT&T network, so AT&T blocked me from installing Bridge, which meant I could not get my Exchange or IMAP email, work with my calendar, or look up contacts.
The Blackberry Bridge being blocked on AT&T is very ridiculous, but writing this review without Blackberry Bridge is even more ridiculous. This kind of like saying: "I couldn't get iTunes to install on my Linux machine, so this iPad thing is pretty worthless. Every time I turned it on, it told me to connect to iTunes for setup."
While this wasn't originally advertised as such, having a Blackberry phone (with Bridge) is in absolute requirement of the Playbook. I don't think that's a great decision for RIM, but that's besides the point. Don't try to write a review without the required equipment.
I have an LG BluRay player that uses Vudu, and I agree - their service is excellent. Unfortunately, their pricing model (pay per movie) isn't my preferred method when I'm already forking over $xx/month to Netflix for "unlimited" movies, but I have used it a few times when they have a new release that I really am interested in.
Wo wo wo, you mean that someone who supports an issue explained an issue for the first time to someone who had never heard of the issue and he took the same side?! And this guy is a traditional Republican? Net Neutrality must be right! Oh drat, I'm sure those ninnies at Fox News will distort the truth and get him to switch sides.
Or.... maybe he'll hear the other side of the story from someone who doesn't support Net Neutrality (FoxNews or otherwise) and realize that your presentation of the facts wasn't exactly unbiased.
There go those greedy telcos again, not taking any risk and expecting to be able to charge higher rates for certain types of service.
/sarcasm
The economics of the internet, re: my ISP, are the same as they've ever been. I pay them $60 a month, and they deliver mediocre "broadband." It doesn't matter what the fuck I do with my internet connection. In the past, my bits maybe came from Geocities instead of Facebook, but none of that means shit re: an ISP. What has changed is that other people have started making a lot of money from their websites, and the ISPs want a cut.
This is not true. Depending on where the packet is sourced and destined, the cost can change for your service provider. Additionally, depending on the type of content you are requesting, it matters how the packets arrive. For instance, if your provider has an agreement to cache Facebook content in their network, it may be easier for them to provide Facebook packets to you, resulting in a lower cost (and price) than going to some random website. For something like Netflix, your packets need to be delivered in order and consistently, rather than in bursts (which would be acceptable for most web traffic). This causes additional stress on the network, and your provider might want to guarantee quality for Netflix, at a specific cost to you or to Netflix.