The fact that the UK government records you whenever you go to a e-cafe does not constitute a high probability that something awful is going to happen to you. This is not the case in China. You can say publicly "screw the Queen" and sleep well at home. You say "screw the CP" and guess what's going to happen?
The fact that Tianamen Square MIGHT be seeing as parallel to the Kent State U' killings, that does not make them so. Kent State's was (and still is) an isolated incident. Tianamen Square was just the most widely known incident, a repetition of the status quo. The harassment and killing of individuals on the basis of political views and religious freedoms is systematic and endemic of China. I challenge you to mention one modern Western democratic nation where such harassment and killing is both systematic and endemic.
This moral relativism of yours is disgusting and pretty much immoral and impractical. If a nation or individual cannot denounce the crimes committed by another because of one's apparent imperfections, then we might as well embrace the idea that a serial pedophile rapist and the dude who ran a stop sign because he was stressed and pissed are equally immoral and wrong.
That our current democratic nations incur in 1984'esque monitoring tactics and the fact that politically-motivated violent, murderous incidents have occurred in the past does not equate them to nations where such reprehensible activities are carried out frequently, endemically and systematically as a matter of policy.
Likewise, it does not prevent the citizen's of the former from condemning the actions of the later. If you believe your nation is equally immoral, that's fine and dandy. Your position should be, in that case, to condemn both your nation and the nation in the greater moral wrong, not in going "meh, were are kinda like the same you know, so why telling them they are wrong, let's kumbaya while they screw people up more."
I ready don't quite care if my attitude sucks by your standards. As of a couple of days ago a major production release at a company I work for was completely nixed and axed due to the horrendous quality of code that plagued it. You look at the CV of those responsible and you'd think they actually know how to program. This was for all practical purposes a catastrophe that affected a whole bunch of people and teams that didn't even remotely had anything to do with this crap. This is not about being arrogant, but about maintaining a standard of software manufacture.
We get paid good and well to provide a service. The least we should do if we have a a little fucking bit of decency is to code accordingly. Just because the people that pay us and depends on our skills don't know quack about software, that doesn't mean we are free to pull the lowest possible quality crap out of our ass.
WHAT WE DO, WHAT WE CODE, THAT HAS MONETARY CONSEQUENCES TO PEOPLE WHO DEPEND ON THE QUALITY OF OUR PROFESSIONAL SERVICES.
If that's being arrogant, if that's having a sucky attitude, then fuck yeah, so be it. Starting with the net bubble back in 97-98 we have witnessed a decline in the quality of professionals graduating from IT.
Maybe the ones you think are arrogant are so indeed. But at least they deliver. They are not quacks. If you get a man with a diploma saying he's a MD, but all he does is selling aspirins for all medical reasons coupled with a mega-ass bill, you'd see other COMPETENT doctors raising hell about it.
Not so in IT. If it rubs you, well... too bad.
Having a person with a B.S degree putting caching a connection pulled out of a connection pool into a static member of a non-thread safe servlet class, programming with the assumption his desk PC is a good testing environment and programming with the assumption that resources such as RAM or file handles are eternal, infinite and exclusive to his domain is pretty fucking depressive...
... and those aren't things I'm pulling out of my ass. Those thing are actual examples I've witnessed multiple times, verbatin, from people who should have known better and who got paid.
In conjunction with a few colleagues, in the last 8 years I've literally made a career out fixing shit written by people who should know better. Just because we don't have a legally-binding fiduciary responsibility it doesn't mean we should not act as if we don't have one.
If that makes me a jackass, that's fine. At least I deliver and I don't rip off my employers with sub par "highschoolish" code.
So yes, I will look down on those who graduate out of a career and for X/Y reason still can't produce quality work in the field of their choosing, increasing cost to their employers and causing unnecessary complexity to many things that should not be so.
Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way. You can kumbaya your way with those tards coming to IT for all the wrong reasons (while IT schools keep watering down the standards.) I won't.
We do not need more tards in Computer Science. Even after the down-turn after the dot.com bust, we got these people who can't for their fucking life understand what a pointer is, writing the crappiest code everywhere they go.
We need quality, not quantity. The more we get tards who just go and graduate into something because it's "the next thing in getting $$$", the lesser the quality of work being performed.
Seriously man, this was a very, very, very bad move by this kid. I'm not talking about whether what he did was right or wrong, but about how people's reactions would be.
As Chris Rock would say "what did you expect? a cookie?" same goes to this kid: what the fuck did you expect to happen? To get a pat on the back? Some moment of geek glory to gloat and be remembered for generations to come? A thanks?
For any kid, young man or socially-inept geek out there not quite capable of interacting with other members of the human race, remember this:
People are fucked up. People has buttons. People are stupid. Push the wrong button on a fucked up stupid asshole and he's going to try to stick it up your ass. Simple as that.
Sysadmins are territorial. Hell, all IT people are. But also, there are some that are very insecure about their skills, and anything that could put their skills on doubt, they'll lash out with geeky, lawyered up weasel fury.
I'm not going to tell you what to do or not to do when it comes to breaking into a system and then document the methods of how you did it for the sysadmin to use. I'm not going to tell you if it's right or wrong.
But I'm going to tell you that if you are going to do this, for fucks sake, submit your findings anonymously.
If you have the skills to break into a system, for fucks sake, also develop the mental skills to see the system's owners might not be too kind and might you want to put in jail, in a cell next to a lonely 300lbs dude named Bubba:
Bubba - He, what have we here? Hello, sweet pretty little thing. Get them panties down and let's get busy!!!
How many of these Apple employees were forced to work under those conditions? That is, how many were forced to work like that against their will, depriving them of the ability to, you know, suck it up and walk away?
Regardless of the validity of this class action suit, calling them 'modern day slaves' is yet one more display of attention whoring emo faggotry. If you have a fucking valid point, you don't need exagerations to support it, specially exagerations that make a mockery of real issues (such as ACTUAL modern day slavery.)
If they are going to go the way of mindless sensationalism, they may as well go all the way and accuse Apple of war crimes and genocide against them as well as killing puppies.
That task is purely red tape. Sounds good in theory, but if you dissect it, you find that this is merely a list of "authorized" software. What does "authorized" mean? Authorized for what? For whom? By whom?
It certainly cannot be secure because all apps have different functions, outputs and installation requirements. You would have to come up with a "lowest common denominator" for the security requirements that apply for all. And if so, it would be of such low common denomination that the term "secure" becomes useless.
What are you going to categorize all this apps with? With the requirement that they don't crash? That they don't access priviledge info (which is mostly done via OS/infrastructure restrictions). That they don't leak info (whatever that could possibly mean). That'd pretty much all you can use as a requirement for building a semi-usable, non-retarded list.
Furthermore, the security of an app, the criticality of it depends on who uses it, where and how. You don't care if your copy of MS Word crashes on your desktop, but you care if a copy of TOAD is running with autocommit on while accessing a production database.
Any IT person worth its salt would see the major folly of trying to create an authorized list of 'secure' applications for general use without specifying a context (type of user, type of use, type of resource been access, blah blah blah.) The whole idea is ludricuous corporate red-taping process-making, const-increasing hooplah.
Now, a wide and open list of authorized software by license (to prevent copyright violations), that makes absolute sense.
Security is an abused word. Most people have no clue what it means, incredibly and unjustifiably so by individuals who earn their living in IT. They confused 'authorized' with 'secure' and assume the attribute of being secure to be free of context, readily applicable to anything, like a color or something.
I want my database' color to be mauve as it has the most ram... plus it's more secure than blue.
For starters, generalization != characterization. I'm not generalizing on his life. I'm characterizing him based on this particular incident, in this particular context, based on his action and behavior. There is no denying that he commited a generalization. There is no denying that this was a reproachable act. There is no denying that such act cannot be justified by any person with an ounce of morals or with mental capacities above mental retardation. There is no denying that a derogatory generalization about a nationality, ethnic, religious or cultural group is a mindless act.There is no denying, ergo, that, in this fucking context, he should justifiably be called a mindless generalizing punk.
Or what else should he be called other than a mindless generalizing punk? An individual with competing views? An e-buddy that's just playing devil's advocate? A jolly, happy-go-lucky fellow with whom you agree to disagree?
Forgive me if I don't suck your kool aid. Fuck. That. Shit.
Consider the following statements, examples, and bear with me if I'm going too fast for you:
- all Jews are greedy and dirty and speak funny.
- all Black people are lazy and stupid
- if she's a Latina teenager, most likely she's pregnant already.
If a person where to gratuituosly make any of those statements (or any statement of the form "(social group X| x member of X) is/has (derogatory statement)", you would not even bother pondering if the aforementioned person has any redeemable qualities, who he is, what he does, what he has for breakfast or whether he gets a tingly feeling up his leg whenever he sees Jessica Alba on stage (or Gene Hackman, whatever he's into.) You would, and rightly so, call him on his shit... not unless you share his POV or you prefer to live in this "agree to disagree" limbotic state.
But somehow if the group is "Americans" and the derogatory statement is not far from being an actual criticism, then it's ok, and one, according to your logic, cannot call him on his shit without leaving room for exploring or pondering on his redeemable qualities if anything (as if they somehow mitigate his questionable statement.)
Now, the fact of the matter is that, indeed, Americans are in general oblivious of world issues... just like any average Joe you can pick up from any nation. That oxymoronic statement is not into question. It is the motivation, the general thinking behind the knee-jerking spouting of such generalizations is what is into question. Things like this do not occur in a vacuum, in complete separation from the value systems we live by.
We have all come accross a gross generalization in our minds. We have all thought of one. But most of us, at least those who a bare minimum sense of decency and at least a pair of fully functioning neurons, we refrain from spouting such nonsense, for we know such generalizations are mindless bouts of stupidty. We do not look for an excuse or an opportunity to spout generalizations, not unless we firmly believe in them and have no moral or intellectual boundaries that prevents us from doing in so.
Barring the fact that I don't know shit about MagdJTK other than his retarded generalization of Americans (prompted by the equally retarded post by BadAnalogy), and based on the fact that, in general, such crap does not occur unless you believe it's ok to do so, then, I do not see the logical problem of calling him a mindless generalizing punk (in the only context in which I know him, which is the post in question.)
Only a retard (or at best an infuckingcredibly naive person) would ponder if a racist/clasist/chauvinistic generalizationist, for example, has some redeemable qualities.
"Oh say you, Black people suck in school and spend all their time eating watermelon? I would call you a worthless and brainless motherfucking racist, but I'll refrain from characterizing you so since I don't want to accidentally generalize on other aspects of your life, which are unkn
>> Semi-first world countries? Just goes to show how out of touch Americans really are with the rest of the world.
This goes to show you are not too retarded to be beneath blatant generalizations. Since when BadAnalogy (and his statement) became the spokeman, mind, heart and soul of the American people?
Seriously dude, get your head off your ass next time you want to generalize about Americans, Europeans, Chinese or Klingons. You are right next to this dude in the stupidity department. Generalizing arrogant punk.
I know that one should not use Wikipedia as a source of quotations, but c'mon dude, don't pull definitions off your ass, specially when they run counter with widely accepted definitions:
The term "first world" refers to countries that are capitalist, which are technologically advanced, and whose citizens have a high standard of living.
The terms "First World", "Second World" and "Third World" have precise political and economical definitions going back to the Cold World era. This definition of yours doesn't match any. This is not to mention that "First World", "Second World" and "Third World" have fallen off of favor due to the changes that have taken place since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Not only is the adjective you are trying to use antiquated, but the meaning you are attaching to it is not in tune to the way it's been historically been used.
This guy was a fucking coward. There is people in this world who have to go through horrible shit, picking up their lunch from garbage cans, living in shantytown houses made out of carton boxes, and you don't seem them flippying out, killing their children in the process.
Fucking weak-ass yellow belly spineless coward, that what he was. RIP for the poor child, and I hope this coward rots in hell for this.
For half? Not in my experience. When shit hits the fan really, really bad, they hire you back with at least 10% extra of what you used to make.
At this point, I'm ambivalent of whether to pursue a permanent position or not. I walked away from permanent positions and became a consultant 8 years ago, and that's the best choice I've made.
Unless hostile aliens from planet X throw us back to the stone age with a massive asteroid bombardment, I do not see local IT dissapearing anytime soon. Jobs will be lost, just like in any other industry, offshore included. Loss of high paying jobs locally affect the economy as internal consumption goes down. National economy goes down, and that has ripple effects in other countries selling us services, including IT offshoring.
So if you are a crappy IT professional, whether you are here in the US or in India, Singapore or Malaysia, you'll be out. Period. If you have some professional quality and skill resilience, then you can ride the wave.
It won't be pretty, but it won't be your doom either.
Besides, it's high time to do some cleaning in the IT industry. We have too fucking many bozos who can't tell the difference between a NIC, a use case document and a condom. Whether are fresh out of school here or in India, some of these people should have never had graduated from IT at all, much less work in IT. Seriously.
When you have someone with a BS in Computer Science who pesters you with "how do I do this?" every fucking time he/she is asked to do something without ever thinking to do a fucking google search for possible solutions, without ever having the initiative to do some research, some critical thinking, dude, you just want to slap him with the keyboard first and then make him flip some burgers for a living.
Seriously. It's crap like that at all levels of IT that increases costs.
Fortunately for me, they create shit that needs to be fixed. Their garbage is your fortune if you know how to play your technical cards.
>> that offshore jobs will go first. They're cheaper than local jobs.
Oh, please. That's already happening. The supposed ROI with offshore jobs is not materializing due to a lack of quality and experience, in addition to a high turn-around (specially with offshore-based IT operations and support.)
Many IT shops are already facing the reality of increasing costs in the form of loss of productivity when going "the cheaper" way. There are offshore teams that are of high quality, but they aren't as cheap as some pointy hairy bosses would like to believe... and they are finding this the hard way as they are trying to keep their budgets above the red ink.
Others are still buying the offshore==cheaper fallacy, and as the economy dives down, they'll get hit hard at some point. Offshore is for IT 2008-2009 what the "new internet economy" was for IT back in 2001.
This whole 'standarization' thing is just plain stupid the way most companies do nowadays. And here is why: it makes almost no difference in standardizing stuff to one language if your programmers are shit.
At work we have all this apps written in CF and Java, and most of them are just shity work done by software engineers with skills comparable to a sophomore student. So take a shitty CF application and translated to java by a shitty programmer, and what you get? A shitty java application.
Right now I have a whole bunch of apps written in Java, a lot of them converted to it from CF in a stardarization effort. I would have preferred that these morons never had touched anything. What's worse (and which I've seen in several places already) is that you end up having shitty java apps, some of them poorly written to run on tomcat, others poorly written to run on weblogic and so on and so on...... so we end up with standardizing on one language to produce shitty apps that run in different app containers. And don't any of you tell me that a WAR can be deployed in any J2EE compliant container. Maybe an example pet store WAR can, certainly not a complex app, and much less if it's written in a pretty shitty way.
My take, based on developing, admin and support experience is "if it ain't broke, don't touch it." But in this world full of shitty programmers and dev team leaders, that will be like wishing for world peace or something.
It doesn't matter if he was looking for UFO's, peanuts, or the meaning of life (which we all know it's 42). And it doesn't matter if the GOV lost $1 billion in damages or if the figure is inflated.
He broke into state property, so fuck him.
Some say that any excuse will serve a tyrant. But I say that a claim of being smart, nutty and eccentric is not a permit to break into private or state property. Your rights as an individual ends when the rights of others and your social and legal obligations begin.
Dude, your boss is an asshole. You already gave him the courtesy of notifiying him of your departure. Also, he can't withold your last paycheck. It's yours, and he is by law obliged to give it to you. AFAIK, you were not required to find a replacement, nor your paycheck was conditional to that. Therefore, if he threatens you with that bullcrap, tell him that you will contact the proper authorities (which you can btw).
Also, if your boss is making things unbearable, just wrap things up and leave. I'd suggest you get your co-workers and clients' contact information for future reference. One of your senior co-workers may write a recommendation for you (or let you include them as references in future job references.)
And if in a future interview, you are asked about the job you are currently leaving, just be brief about your job functions, and if pressed, just mentioned that your boss didn't take it well that you leave, and MENTION THAT HE THREATENED TO WITHOLD YOUR LAST PAYCHECK. If you are pressed to talk about it by an interviewer, make sure he/she understands (without going through the gory details), that your boss was the nutcase, not you.
One last thing, in the remote case you actually get your last paycheck withold, just let it go (if your financial situation allows it of course.) The reason I'm saying is that trying to get your paycheck paid can be quite costly (legally), not counting the headaches and heart-poisoning that will come with it. Sometimes, it's better to let shit go. By doing so, you prove that you are a better person, and despite the monetary loss, you have a new start without bringing any baggage added by your nutcase boss.
Gosh, Enterprise was the most God-awfull, little fancy piece of crap I've ever seen!!!!!! It, and that bundle of cow-poo called Voyager can't even be compared to the worst episodes one can think of from 'The Original Series', 'TNG', or 'DS9'.
Those three shows developed solid plots, solid characters, and solid everything. The only thing I ever liked about 'Voyager' was Keri Ryan's role as 'Seven' (I always mentally salivated wondering if those Borg implants were real... oh well.)
With 'Enterprise', there was nothing to salivate, no plots to keep you glued to the TV, no heroes to awe you, no villains to love. The best thing is for this piece of crap to die. Hopefully, several years from now, there will be some talented men and women with brains in their skulls (instead of chicken sh*t) that may revive Rodenberry's creation.
What matters are the requirements of the system/solution you are about to implement. You've worked in a different industry, so try to see what parallels exist between your previous projects (successes and failures) and this one you are about to engage.
If your team has never worked with J2EE or.NET, I'd say just pick one and stick to it. Technological details aside, if you are good with one, you'll be good with the other. Choosing one over the other won't kill you. What can kill you is either one of the following:
not understanding the project requirements
not understanding external dependencies of the project THAT YOU CANNOT CONTROL - db dependencies, mainframe dependencies, external systems, EDI shit, etc.
not establishing the scope of the project - thus leaving the customer(s) free to ask for new features anytime
no clear SLA
bad software project management
customers that are IMPOSSIBLE to work with
not understanding the limitations of the choosen platform, be it J2EE,.NET, Saruman's magic tricks or whatever:)
Don't fall for the trap of this platform over another one. Once you pick one, you may want to dedicate one or two of your team to really dig the living crap out of it, and understand its power and limitations. The rest of the team should concentrate in getting all the other crap right - requirements, SLA's, establish good contacts with user's liasons, internal development/testing/release/maintenance procedures, etc.
One thing above all (which a lot of folks forget) is to understand how the hell you are going to deploy and maintain your solution for a given client. Lots of folks develop the coolest solutions in J2EE and.NET, just to find out that they can't deploy and maintain the sucker without lending a kidney.
Do that, and you should be fine. As for job marketability, either J2EE or.NET skills will do fine. What matters is not so much having J2EE or.NET skills, but solid software engineering/architecture ones;)
It's still dysfunctional in my opinion. No one can appreciate the real pain of making a living by living off free. A parent's duty is to provide her offsprings with a roof, food and a sense of duty, responsibility and direction, never to pamper without question.
Now that I'm reading this, shit, I'm so off topic!!! LOL. Maybe I'm just jealous cuz these kids have all the cool gadgets while I don't:P
I personally find it disgusting to hear about young adults living off free at their parents' home without contributing to the rent.
Part of the local culture? Maybe, but it's still disgusting to have lots of disposable cash by sponging off one's parents. Talking about being dysfunctional.
That's the saddest thing, to see a lone elder having to buy a robot to have someone to talk to. And it's even sadder that a culture allows it to happen, and to have companies making a profit out of it.
Oh, no, I don't like those travelling contractor jobs. You never know if you end up in an isolated cow town up to your waist in snow. LOL. I'm staying in sunny South Florida. The market down here is not as good as in other states, but the weather is unbeatable:P
But regardless of travelling or not travelling my friend, I'm charging for every hour I work. Tell your wife to be a bit more understanding with your "travelling contracting needs"... I would leave the "different girl in every town" out of the details, though. LOL.
I had a similar experience with Sony Latin America. I loved the people there, but the way of doing business was just ridiculous (not much different from ea_spouse's annectode.)
My only suggestion for her (assuming is a 'she') is to ask her spouse to leave. I mean, he wouldn't have taken the job had he known it would be like this (in her own words). He, just like me or many others, would have stayed out unemployed for as long as possible while avoiding such crappy jobs. He got into it by a conbination of his own naiveness and EA's deceipt. He is going to get sick and his marriage is going to suffer. No job is worth risking that!!!!
On a more personal note, after Sony (and other weird experiences I've had), I've come to the conclusion that I will never work as a perm ever (God willing and if I have my way.) Per-hour contractor gigs only baby. Every hour, every second I work is counted in my by-weekly paycheck. F*ck anything else. I've work too hard in school and in life to get the skills I have to throw away my work hours for free.
I really hope this person and her spouse get out of that crap. No one deserves to work like that. After all, there is something called 'The Emancipation Proclamation', right?:)
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Uhhhh, how does the 4th amendment (and the expectation of privacy) apply to something you abandon or that is no longer yours?
This moral relativism of yours is disgusting and pretty much immoral and impractical. If a nation or individual cannot denounce the crimes committed by another because of one's apparent imperfections, then we might as well embrace the idea that a serial pedophile rapist and the dude who ran a stop sign because he was stressed and pissed are equally immoral and wrong.
That our current democratic nations incur in 1984'esque monitoring tactics and the fact that politically-motivated violent, murderous incidents have occurred in the past does not equate them to nations where such reprehensible activities are carried out frequently, endemically and systematically as a matter of policy.
Likewise, it does not prevent the citizen's of the former from condemning the actions of the later. If you believe your nation is equally immoral, that's fine and dandy. Your position should be, in that case, to condemn both your nation and the nation in the greater moral wrong, not in going "meh, were are kinda like the same you know, so why telling them they are wrong, let's kumbaya while they screw people up more."
Seriously, that's really weak dude.
We get paid good and well to provide a service. The least we should do if we have a a little fucking bit of decency is to code accordingly. Just because the people that pay us and depends on our skills don't know quack about software, that doesn't mean we are free to pull the lowest possible quality crap out of our ass.
WHAT WE DO, WHAT WE CODE, THAT HAS MONETARY CONSEQUENCES TO PEOPLE WHO DEPEND ON THE QUALITY OF OUR PROFESSIONAL SERVICES.
If that's being arrogant, if that's having a sucky attitude, then fuck yeah, so be it. Starting with the net bubble back in 97-98 we have witnessed a decline in the quality of professionals graduating from IT.
Maybe the ones you think are arrogant are so indeed. But at least they deliver. They are not quacks. If you get a man with a diploma saying he's a MD, but all he does is selling aspirins for all medical reasons coupled with a mega-ass bill, you'd see other COMPETENT doctors raising hell about it.
Not so in IT. If it rubs you, well... too bad.
Having a person with a B.S degree putting caching a connection pulled out of a connection pool into a static member of a non-thread safe servlet class, programming with the assumption his desk PC is a good testing environment and programming with the assumption that resources such as RAM or file handles are eternal, infinite and exclusive to his domain is pretty fucking depressive...
In conjunction with a few colleagues, in the last 8 years I've literally made a career out fixing shit written by people who should know better. Just because we don't have a legally-binding fiduciary responsibility it doesn't mean we should not act as if we don't have one. If that makes me a jackass, that's fine. At least I deliver and I don't rip off my employers with sub par "highschoolish" code.
So yes, I will look down on those who graduate out of a career and for X/Y reason still can't produce quality work in the field of their choosing, increasing cost to their employers and causing unnecessary complexity to many things that should not be so.
Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way. You can kumbaya your way with those tards coming to IT for all the wrong reasons (while IT schools keep watering down the standards.) I won't.
We do not need more tards in Computer Science. Even after the down-turn after the dot.com bust, we got these people who can't for their fucking life understand what a pointer is, writing the crappiest code everywhere they go.
We need quality, not quantity. The more we get tards who just go and graduate into something because it's "the next thing in getting $$$", the lesser the quality of work being performed.
Ugh.
As Chris Rock would say "what did you expect? a cookie?" same goes to this kid: what the fuck did you expect to happen? To get a pat on the back? Some moment of geek glory to gloat and be remembered for generations to come? A thanks?
For any kid, young man or socially-inept geek out there not quite capable of interacting with other members of the human race, remember this:
People are fucked up. People has buttons. People are stupid. Push the wrong button on a fucked up stupid asshole and he's going to try to stick it up your ass. Simple as that.
Sysadmins are territorial. Hell, all IT people are. But also, there are some that are very insecure about their skills, and anything that could put their skills on doubt, they'll lash out with geeky, lawyered up weasel fury.
I'm not going to tell you what to do or not to do when it comes to breaking into a system and then document the methods of how you did it for the sysadmin to use. I'm not going to tell you if it's right or wrong.
But I'm going to tell you that if you are going to do this, for fucks sake, submit your findings anonymously.
If you have the skills to break into a system, for fucks sake, also develop the mental skills to see the system's owners might not be too kind and might you want to put in jail, in a cell next to a lonely 300lbs dude named Bubba:
Bubba - He, what have we here? Hello, sweet pretty little thing. Get them panties down and let's get busy!!!
Regardless of the validity of this class action suit, calling them 'modern day slaves' is yet one more display of attention whoring emo faggotry. If you have a fucking valid point, you don't need exagerations to support it, specially exagerations that make a mockery of real issues (such as ACTUAL modern day slavery.)
If they are going to go the way of mindless sensationalism, they may as well go all the way and accuse Apple of war crimes and genocide against them as well as killing puppies.
It certainly cannot be secure because all apps have different functions, outputs and installation requirements. You would have to come up with a "lowest common denominator" for the security requirements that apply for all. And if so, it would be of such low common denomination that the term "secure" becomes useless.
What are you going to categorize all this apps with? With the requirement that they don't crash? That they don't access priviledge info (which is mostly done via OS/infrastructure restrictions). That they don't leak info (whatever that could possibly mean). That'd pretty much all you can use as a requirement for building a semi-usable, non-retarded list.
Furthermore, the security of an app, the criticality of it depends on who uses it, where and how. You don't care if your copy of MS Word crashes on your desktop, but you care if a copy of TOAD is running with autocommit on while accessing a production database.
Any IT person worth its salt would see the major folly of trying to create an authorized list of 'secure' applications for general use without specifying a context (type of user, type of use, type of resource been access, blah blah blah.) The whole idea is ludricuous corporate red-taping process-making, const-increasing hooplah.
Now, a wide and open list of authorized software by license (to prevent copyright violations), that makes absolute sense.
Security is an abused word. Most people have no clue what it means, incredibly and unjustifiably so by individuals who earn their living in IT. They confused 'authorized' with 'secure' and assume the attribute of being secure to be free of context, readily applicable to anything, like a color or something.
I want my database' color to be mauve as it has the most ram... plus it's more secure than blue.
For starters, generalization != characterization. I'm not generalizing on his life. I'm characterizing him based on this particular incident, in this particular context, based on his action and behavior. There is no denying that he commited a generalization. There is no denying that this was a reproachable act. There is no denying that such act cannot be justified by any person with an ounce of morals or with mental capacities above mental retardation. There is no denying that a derogatory generalization about a nationality, ethnic, religious or cultural group is a mindless act.There is no denying, ergo, that, in this fucking context, he should justifiably be called a mindless generalizing punk.
Or what else should he be called other than a mindless generalizing punk? An individual with competing views? An e-buddy that's just playing devil's advocate? A jolly, happy-go-lucky fellow with whom you agree to disagree?
Forgive me if I don't suck your kool aid. Fuck. That. Shit.
Consider the following statements, examples, and bear with me if I'm going too fast for you:
- all Jews are greedy and dirty and speak funny.
- all Black people are lazy and stupid
- if she's a Latina teenager, most likely she's pregnant already.
If a person where to gratuituosly make any of those statements (or any statement of the form "(social group X| x member of X) is/has (derogatory statement)", you would not even bother pondering if the aforementioned person has any redeemable qualities, who he is, what he does, what he has for breakfast or whether he gets a tingly feeling up his leg whenever he sees Jessica Alba on stage (or Gene Hackman, whatever he's into.) You would, and rightly so, call him on his shit... not unless you share his POV or you prefer to live in this "agree to disagree" limbotic state.
But somehow if the group is "Americans" and the derogatory statement is not far from being an actual criticism, then it's ok, and one, according to your logic, cannot call him on his shit without leaving room for exploring or pondering on his redeemable qualities if anything (as if they somehow mitigate his questionable statement.)
Now, the fact of the matter is that, indeed, Americans are in general oblivious of world issues... just like any average Joe you can pick up from any nation. That oxymoronic statement is not into question. It is the motivation, the general thinking behind the knee-jerking spouting of such generalizations is what is into question. Things like this do not occur in a vacuum, in complete separation from the value systems we live by.
We have all come accross a gross generalization in our minds. We have all thought of one. But most of us, at least those who a bare minimum sense of decency and at least a pair of fully functioning neurons, we refrain from spouting such nonsense, for we know such generalizations are mindless bouts of stupidty. We do not look for an excuse or an opportunity to spout generalizations, not unless we firmly believe in them and have no moral or intellectual boundaries that prevents us from doing in so.
Barring the fact that I don't know shit about MagdJTK other than his retarded generalization of Americans (prompted by the equally retarded post by BadAnalogy), and based on the fact that, in general, such crap does not occur unless you believe it's ok to do so, then, I do not see the logical problem of calling him a mindless generalizing punk (in the only context in which I know him, which is the post in question.)
Only a retard (or at best an infuckingcredibly naive person) would ponder if a racist/clasist/chauvinistic generalizationist, for example, has some redeemable qualities. "Oh say you, Black people suck in school and spend all their time eating watermelon? I would call you a worthless and brainless motherfucking racist, but I'll refrain from characterizing you so since I don't want to accidentally generalize on other aspects of your life, which are unkn
This goes to show you are not too retarded to be beneath blatant generalizations. Since when BadAnalogy (and his statement) became the spokeman, mind, heart and soul of the American people?
Seriously dude, get your head off your ass next time you want to generalize about Americans, Europeans, Chinese or Klingons. You are right next to this dude in the stupidity department. Generalizing arrogant punk.
The term "first world" refers to countries that are capitalist, which are technologically advanced, and whose citizens have a high standard of living.
The terms "First World", "Second World" and "Third World" have precise political and economical definitions going back to the Cold World era. This definition of yours doesn't match any. This is not to mention that "First World", "Second World" and "Third World" have fallen off of favor due to the changes that have taken place since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Not only is the adjective you are trying to use antiquated, but the meaning you are attaching to it is not in tune to the way it's been historically been used.
Fucking weak-ass yellow belly spineless coward, that what he was. RIP for the poor child, and I hope this coward rots in hell for this.
For half? Not in my experience. When shit hits the fan really, really bad, they hire you back with at least 10% extra of what you used to make. At this point, I'm ambivalent of whether to pursue a permanent position or not. I walked away from permanent positions and became a consultant 8 years ago, and that's the best choice I've made. Unless hostile aliens from planet X throw us back to the stone age with a massive asteroid bombardment, I do not see local IT dissapearing anytime soon. Jobs will be lost, just like in any other industry, offshore included. Loss of high paying jobs locally affect the economy as internal consumption goes down. National economy goes down, and that has ripple effects in other countries selling us services, including IT offshoring. So if you are a crappy IT professional, whether you are here in the US or in India, Singapore or Malaysia, you'll be out. Period. If you have some professional quality and skill resilience, then you can ride the wave. It won't be pretty, but it won't be your doom either. Besides, it's high time to do some cleaning in the IT industry. We have too fucking many bozos who can't tell the difference between a NIC, a use case document and a condom. Whether are fresh out of school here or in India, some of these people should have never had graduated from IT at all, much less work in IT. Seriously. When you have someone with a BS in Computer Science who pesters you with "how do I do this?" every fucking time he/she is asked to do something without ever thinking to do a fucking google search for possible solutions, without ever having the initiative to do some research, some critical thinking, dude, you just want to slap him with the keyboard first and then make him flip some burgers for a living. Seriously. It's crap like that at all levels of IT that increases costs. Fortunately for me, they create shit that needs to be fixed. Their garbage is your fortune if you know how to play your technical cards.
>> that offshore jobs will go first. They're cheaper than local jobs. Oh, please. That's already happening. The supposed ROI with offshore jobs is not materializing due to a lack of quality and experience, in addition to a high turn-around (specially with offshore-based IT operations and support.) Many IT shops are already facing the reality of increasing costs in the form of loss of productivity when going "the cheaper" way. There are offshore teams that are of high quality, but they aren't as cheap as some pointy hairy bosses would like to believe... and they are finding this the hard way as they are trying to keep their budgets above the red ink. Others are still buying the offshore==cheaper fallacy, and as the economy dives down, they'll get hit hard at some point. Offshore is for IT 2008-2009 what the "new internet economy" was for IT back in 2001.
This whole 'standarization' thing is just plain stupid the way most companies do nowadays. And here is why: it makes almost no difference in standardizing stuff to one language if your programmers are shit.
... so we end up with standardizing on one language to produce shitty apps that run in different app containers. And don't any of you tell me that a WAR can be deployed in any J2EE compliant container. Maybe an example pet store WAR can, certainly not a complex app, and much less if it's written in a pretty shitty way.
At work we have all this apps written in CF and Java, and most of them are just shity work done by software engineers with skills comparable to a sophomore student. So take a shitty CF application and translated to java by a shitty programmer, and what you get? A shitty java application.
Right now I have a whole bunch of apps written in Java, a lot of them converted to it from CF in a stardarization effort. I would have preferred that these morons never had touched anything. What's worse (and which I've seen in several places already) is that you end up having shitty java apps, some of them poorly written to run on tomcat, others poorly written to run on weblogic and so on and so on...
My take, based on developing, admin and support experience is "if it ain't broke, don't touch it." But in this world full of shitty programmers and dev team leaders, that will be like wishing for world peace or something.
I won't stand idle while Bush crushes my constitutional right to search for pics of Kobe Tai during my hot, passionate, lonely nights.
He broke into state property, so fuck him.
Some say that any excuse will serve a tyrant. But I say that a claim of being smart, nutty and eccentric is not a permit to break into private or state property. Your rights as an individual ends when the rights of others and your social and legal obligations begin.
Also, if your boss is making things unbearable, just wrap things up and leave. I'd suggest you get your co-workers and clients' contact information for future reference. One of your senior co-workers may write a recommendation for you (or let you include them as references in future job references.)
And if in a future interview, you are asked about the job you are currently leaving, just be brief about your job functions, and if pressed, just mentioned that your boss didn't take it well that you leave, and MENTION THAT HE THREATENED TO WITHOLD YOUR LAST PAYCHECK. If you are pressed to talk about it by an interviewer, make sure he/she understands (without going through the gory details), that your boss was the nutcase, not you.
One last thing, in the remote case you actually get your last paycheck withold, just let it go (if your financial situation allows it of course.) The reason I'm saying is that trying to get your paycheck paid can be quite costly (legally), not counting the headaches and heart-poisoning that will come with it. Sometimes, it's better to let shit go. By doing so, you prove that you are a better person, and despite the monetary loss, you have a new start without bringing any baggage added by your nutcase boss.
Good luck with your new job!!!!
-- Luis
Those three shows developed solid plots, solid characters, and solid everything. The only thing I ever liked about 'Voyager' was Keri Ryan's role as 'Seven' (I always mentally salivated wondering if those Borg implants were real... oh well.)
With 'Enterprise', there was nothing to salivate, no plots to keep you glued to the TV, no heroes to awe you, no villains to love. The best thing is for this piece of crap to die. Hopefully, several years from now, there will be some talented men and women with brains in their skulls (instead of chicken sh*t) that may revive Rodenberry's creation.
Oh, by the way... DIE MOTHERF*CKER!!! DIE!!!!!
If your team has never worked with J2EE or .NET, I'd say just pick one and stick to it. Technological details aside, if you are good with one, you'll be good with the other. Choosing one over the other won't kill you. What can kill you is either one of the following:
Don't fall for the trap of this platform over another one. Once you pick one, you may want to dedicate one or two of your team to really dig the living crap out of it, and understand its power and limitations. The rest of the team should concentrate in getting all the other crap right - requirements, SLA's, establish good contacts with user's liasons, internal development/testing/release/maintenance procedures, etc.
One thing above all (which a lot of folks forget) is to understand how the hell you are going to deploy and maintain your solution for a given client. Lots of folks develop the coolest solutions in J2EE and .NET, just to find out that they can't deploy and maintain the sucker without lending a kidney.
Do that, and you should be fine. As for job marketability, either J2EE or .NET skills will do fine. What matters is not so much having J2EE or .NET skills, but solid software engineering/architecture ones ;)
Peace and merry xmas!
- Moi.
Now that I'm reading this, shit, I'm so off topic!!! LOL. Maybe I'm just jealous cuz these kids have all the cool gadgets while I don't :P
Part of the local culture? Maybe, but it's still disgusting to have lots of disposable cash by sponging off one's parents. Talking about being dysfunctional.
That's the saddest thing, to see a lone elder having to buy a robot to have someone to talk to. And it's even sadder that a culture allows it to happen, and to have companies making a profit out of it.
But regardless of travelling or not travelling my friend, I'm charging for every hour I work. Tell your wife to be a bit more understanding with your "travelling contracting needs"... I would leave the "different girl in every town" out of the details, though. LOL.
Crap, I was in such a hurry, that I didn't even spell-checked this thing, nor I added breaks between paragraphs. My post looks ugly :P
I had a similar experience with Sony Latin America. I loved the people there, but the way of doing business was just ridiculous (not much different from ea_spouse's annectode.) My only suggestion for her (assuming is a 'she') is to ask her spouse to leave. I mean, he wouldn't have taken the job had he known it would be like this (in her own words). He, just like me or many others, would have stayed out unemployed for as long as possible while avoiding such crappy jobs. He got into it by a conbination of his own naiveness and EA's deceipt. He is going to get sick and his marriage is going to suffer. No job is worth risking that!!!! On a more personal note, after Sony (and other weird experiences I've had), I've come to the conclusion that I will never work as a perm ever (God willing and if I have my way.) Per-hour contractor gigs only baby. Every hour, every second I work is counted in my by-weekly paycheck. F*ck anything else. I've work too hard in school and in life to get the skills I have to throw away my work hours for free. I really hope this person and her spouse get out of that crap. No one deserves to work like that. After all, there is something called 'The Emancipation Proclamation', right? :)