Always pay attention to how people leaving your organization are treated. Most places I've worked, IT and otherwise, did the same thing. You at least got paid for the period of your notice, most places I've worked would not do this. If your place of employment plays games like this, then make sure to reciprocate. Don't give two weeks notice and throw the facts back in their face if HR complains when you give them all of five minutes notice.
The only reason to give two weeks notice to an employer who has a history of abusing that notice, is if you gain some benefit by doing so such as unused vacation time or your new employer requires it. And you must always be ready to dig in your heels in face of stupidity. If they want to let you go immediately, but don't offer to pay you for the next two weeks then refuse to go.
Anyone can be prosecuted for sabotage performed against an employer. This works the same way for computers as it does for construction equipment, factory machines, etc. Most places are afraid of short timers doing them wrong because in the company's mind, you have a reason to be disgruntled. This all goes back to how they treat their employees.
When I was laid off from my last IT job the managers were all walking on eggshells when they talked to me. They were obviously afraid I might go postal. Perhaps my supervisor should have thought of the possible consequences before I was subjected to months of stress and frustration from her insane decisions..."We'll hardcode all the dropdown lists on the forms instead of using data tables to store them in Oracle. That will make maintenance easier!" No wonder the three year project never saw the light of day. Stupid Bitch.
The self apointed user expert who will never use what he designs.
I work for someone who designed an input screen that is light grey in color with field labels that are variously colored: bright yellow; bright red; black (blinking!) and dark grey.
This same person also cannot understand my consernation that data is entered into the same data table in two completely different formats (informix, shudder...) depending on where you enter the information from. He himself didn't design this last part, but he did pay the software vendor to do it.
Please note that this individual designs or writes the specifications for this crap system, but never has to use it himself.
This doesn't even compare to my last supervisor. I was taking zoloft before I got the hell away from that nut job.
I was laid off three years ago. But in my case it was a few months after they tried to set me up for termination on the grounds that I had single handedly endangered the success of the project.
The termination didn't work becuase I came back with eight pages of rebuttal that cited specific meetings where insanely stupid decisions had been made by management with dates, times and direct quotes from those involved. I also let them know that the examples I gave were just the tip of the iceberg from my documentation.
In the end they used down sizing as an excuse to lay me off, along with another employee who had just returned from long term disability.
I didn't sabotage them, but I surely could have. Face it, there are a million ways to screw up your job that could be chalked up to neglegent oversight. And that, I'm sure, is very common among those who feel the need for revenge.
When I was laid off it was obvious they were afraid of any "scenes" so they just wanted me to walk out. They offered to pack my stuff up for me and I could come back later to pick it up, "oh and I believe you have a pager and an ID of ours..." My reply to that last was, "No thanks, I'll pack my stuff up now and take it with me." Meaning you'll get your stuff right after I get mine. Considering the run around I got getting my last paycheck, I can imagine what would have happened with all my property.
What was my immediate thought when they said I was being laid off? "Oh thank god! I don't have to come back here any more!" I was already getting another job anyway, so I got a six week paid vacation. And since no one ever bothered to learn how to work the complex conversion programs I had written (input six different kludged up systems into one new kludged up system), the project did fail. I'm sure they told the client it was all my fault.
With blood tests and mandatory screenings for crime history, blood history, pretty soon genetic history of family disease (company insurance is expensive you know they don't need any cancer heads) there will be no part of a worker's life that isn't controlled by the corporation that employs them.
Twenty-Five years ago, my mother had to jump through hoops during the employment process for Metropolitan Life to prove that her hysterectomy ten years earlier had nothing to do with cancer.
However, they have been used for decades and are quite pervasive in the food supply at this point. To single one company out to punish is absurd. Additionally, they were disclosed. Right on the package. Right were the consumer's rights people lobbied for them to be disclosed.
In the ingredients list.
Lets stop with the bleeding heart protect the people from their own stupidity nonsense already. Good information about trans-fatty acids might not have been as visible as it needed to be, but anyone concerned about the quality of the food they eat had all the tools they needed to make good decisions.
What more do you want? Do you want the food industry to cover the packaging of less healthy food choices in thorny proturbances, the sharpness of which increases in direct relation to the lack of nutritional value? How about some personal responsibility for a change!
I can't take this story at face value, since the UoCS has a history or taking a position and then "proving" the validity the their position with data that was either very selective or just plain fabricated
Given the past exploits of the UoCS, it is quite possible that the pool of respondants was tweaked by throwing out enough negative responses to create the desired end result.
The only thing I would take seriously from these guys, is a treatise on how to lie with statistics
If you replaced windows with anything else, it would still be a problem. There is no foolproof way of stopping everything. Any OS with a majority market share will be a target.
Yes, this inludes the sainted linux as well. I used to hear people harp about the mozilla browser being so much more secure than IE. Now that Firefox is gaining market share, it too is becoming a target for all sorts of unpleasant cracks
If you really want to bitch and moan about poor internet security, then why don't you look at the ISPs. Why did it take so long for the 800 lb. gorilla of service providers, AOL, to offer free virus protection? Seeing how it is in their best interest and they are much better situated to push the latest updates to the users.
witness: in school, teachers routinely punish the entire class until the party guilty of a particular offense comes forward. in real life, we would call this sort of activity by authorities "terrorism". in school, the mantra of maintaining order is "i don't care who started it." in the real world, we spend billions of dollars on a justice system to figure out "who started it."
This is a legal concept frequently used in the "real" world known as "The hand of one, is the hand of all." This concept is usually applied to a small group of people in the circumstance where it is obvious that one of them has perpetrated a crime, but no one steps forth to accept responsibility or point out the guilty party. For example, lock six people in a room for an hour. Open the door to find one of them murdered. Without any testimony or confession from the remaining five, they would all be charged with murder.
Its use with a classroom sized group of children is stretching the idea well beyond reasonable limits. With that in mind however, I have to say it is not a form of terrorism at all but more accurately authoritarianism.
First read "The One Minute Manager." This is a very quick read and following this book alone will put you into the top 20% of all managers I have ever seen.
Then read the Dale Carnegie book, or even better take the public speaking course at the local Dale Carnegie branch which heavily involves this book.
You have to really dig to find the information, but the UC had an agreement with the Indian Govt. about how the plant would be run with all the necessary safety precautiouns.
However, the govt. continually forced UC to bypass proper training and safe operating procedures. Gee, I wonder why you never read about these events in the mainstream press?
They have to add something to try and make up all that goodwill they've blown with the customer base over the years. What with snotty customer service reps and a community liason who took every opportunity to insult the players, its a wonder the game has stayed as popular as it has.
Most people are still playing EQ becuase their friends are. They better count on enough of that carrying people over into EQ2 to make it profitable.
These are the same people that wielded the ban stick far too indescriminately in Star Wars recently and then ruthlessly squashed any in game criticism of the same actions by teleporting their own customers into some very bad situations (outer space, in the middle of bases swarming with enemy).
I think the piece has no place on the airwaves. While it is an exercise in free speech, airing an anti Kerry screed like this is no more appropriate than airing F9-11 would be.
Personally I don't think the whole John Kerry war hero image is appropriate. When I think of a purple heart recipient, I think of someone who has sustained injury that results in a great deal of pain and suffering. The wounds Kerry received do not meet my expectation. Certainly there are some truly awful examples of Purple Hearts given out during that period. Kerry's at least did involve some personal risk, one man recieved his becuase he got a splinter from his chair when he jumped up after a bomb went off on the street outside the building he was in.
Far more important to me than John Kerry's conduct in Vietnam was his conduct afterwards. That he came home and helped sustain the fable that U.S. soldiers routinely committed the most heinous of war crimes was inexcusable. Yes, George W. Bush may have been missing some National Guard meetings, but that pales beside a man who regularly made his countrymen out to be murderous savages engaged in a widespread orgy of bloodletting and torture. He destroyed his credibility and respectability there so far as I'm concerned. Given such outrageous lies in the cynical pursuit of political currency, how is it possible to trust responsibility to such a man?
I don't agree with the practice. Its deceptive at the very least and I think we've already got more than enough deception (spin) going on already.
You can always count on a person or group to play up their positive aspects, but its really gotten out of hand in the last few years. Certainly mud slinging has always taken place, but its gotten progressively more vicious over the last thirty years. I mean what does it say when one party habitually refers to their opponents as "mean spirited." Yeah, sure...what exactly does that make you for calling them names then?
Ever see the graphic novel where they both got kidnapped by an alien. They end up on a world where they watch news footage of Earth's superheroes as some kind of horror-reality series.
Grimm gets all dressed up as a disquise and keeps getting recognized, while Hulk just puts some unconcious squidlike alien on his head like a hat and nobody every knows him.
The Thing actually manages to conince Hulk that talking your way out of trouble is a viable alternative which leads to the Hulk putting a load of bad guys to sleep when he bores them for hours with things like "shiney brass buttons in the sun hurt your eyes."
If you consider that a primary goal of both weapons research and propulsion research is concerned with fitting more energy into a smaller package, then it all makes perfect sense.
If the given quantity of anti-matter can, with its included containment system, occupy less space and weigh less than another type of energy source. Then it will definatly be advantageous to use it. The rest is simply a matter of implementation.
My greatest concern is storage. How do you make something so inherently destructive safe to store in any usable quantity.
Switching to Linux, like anything else, boils down to a cost benefit decision. It may be possible to switch to a linux system and save money in the long run, but there are always obstacles to convincing the decision makers that this is so. Here are a few possible obstacles:
Politics-The motives are many, but the results are the same.
Inertia-We are the (insert name), we fear change.
Ignoring the tech guy (a time honored tradition in business).
The last one is my biggest annoyance. I've run up against this wall so many times I've got a permanant dent in my skull.
The frequent cause of this situation is a long history of technical types who constantly pitch ideas to the non-technical managers that are full of gee-whiz stuff, but have no real monetary benefit. So the tech guy comes off looking like a clueless idiot and the leaders start to think that it might be safer to give a loaded gun to Charles Manson than to listen to anything the tech guys have to say about business planning.
So before you want to start making noise about how an organization should undertake some tech upgrade or project, please stop and think of it in business terms, or at least try to find someone who can do so and will help you. Those of us who have some business training are tired of being ignored out of habit because our predicessors couldn't put a coherent business plan together.
Has someone finally grasped the trailing thread of the FUD inducing cloak of obfuscation that SCO has thrown over this case from day one?
Will the whole mess finally start to unravel under expert scrutiny that is conversant engough to the non-technical person that they can explain what a load of drek SCO is peddling?
What's really amazing is how users who consistantly move their task bar to another edge of the screen and can never remember how to move it back, can get around all the safeguards of a managed system and screw it all up.
The computers we have here at the jail are locked out of almost everything. The only two things the average user can access is a terminal program and MS word. Yet these same people, who cannot tell the difference between a monitor and a CPU, manage to find every chink in the armor. They manage to gain access to the internet, play games, and in general screw up the whole operating system.
They may be idiots when it comes to computers, but never underestimate the users abilities to circumvent all your best laid plans of managing the computers they use.
Slashdot Mirror
Always pay attention to how people leaving your organization are treated. Most places I've worked, IT and otherwise, did the same thing. You at least got paid for the period of your notice, most places I've worked would not do this. If your place of employment plays games like this, then make sure to reciprocate. Don't give two weeks notice and throw the facts back in their face if HR complains when you give them all of five minutes notice.
The only reason to give two weeks notice to an employer who has a history of abusing that notice, is if you gain some benefit by doing so such as unused vacation time or your new employer requires it. And you must always be ready to dig in your heels in face of stupidity. If they want to let you go immediately, but don't offer to pay you for the next two weeks then refuse to go.
Anyone can be prosecuted for sabotage performed against an employer. This works the same way for computers as it does for construction equipment, factory machines, etc. Most places are afraid of short timers doing them wrong because in the company's mind, you have a reason to be disgruntled. This all goes back to how they treat their employees.
When I was laid off from my last IT job the managers were all walking on eggshells when they talked to me. They were obviously afraid I might go postal. Perhaps my supervisor should have thought of the possible consequences before I was subjected to months of stress and frustration from her insane decisions..."We'll hardcode all the dropdown lists on the forms instead of using data tables to store them in Oracle. That will make maintenance easier!" No wonder the three year project never saw the light of day. Stupid Bitch.
Didn't Best Buy's CEO say he wanted to fire twenty percent of his customers?
Given the stories at www.bestbuysux.com it rather looks as if he's succeding at it. I know I don't buy anything other than CDs and DVDs from there.
The self apointed user expert who will never use what he designs.
I work for someone who designed an input screen that is light grey in color with field labels that are variously colored: bright yellow; bright red; black (blinking!) and dark grey.
This same person also cannot understand my consernation that data is entered into the same data table in two completely different formats (informix, shudder...) depending on where you enter the information from. He himself didn't design this last part, but he did pay the software vendor to do it.
Please note that this individual designs or writes the specifications for this crap system, but never has to use it himself.
This doesn't even compare to my last supervisor. I was taking zoloft before I got the hell away from that nut job.
I was laid off three years ago. But in my case it was a few months after they tried to set me up for termination on the grounds that I had single handedly endangered the success of the project.
The termination didn't work becuase I came back with eight pages of rebuttal that cited specific meetings where insanely stupid decisions had been made by management with dates, times and direct quotes from those involved. I also let them know that the examples I gave were just the tip of the iceberg from my documentation.
In the end they used down sizing as an excuse to lay me off, along with another employee who had just returned from long term disability.
I didn't sabotage them, but I surely could have. Face it, there are a million ways to screw up your job that could be chalked up to neglegent oversight. And that, I'm sure, is very common among those who feel the need for revenge.
When I was laid off it was obvious they were afraid of any "scenes" so they just wanted me to walk out. They offered to pack my stuff up for me and I could come back later to pick it up, "oh and I believe you have a pager and an ID of ours..." My reply to that last was, "No thanks, I'll pack my stuff up now and take it with me." Meaning you'll get your stuff right after I get mine. Considering the run around I got getting my last paycheck, I can imagine what would have happened with all my property.
What was my immediate thought when they said I was being laid off? "Oh thank god! I don't have to come back here any more!" I was already getting another job anyway, so I got a six week paid vacation. And since no one ever bothered to learn how to work the complex conversion programs I had written (input six different kludged up systems into one new kludged up system), the project did fail. I'm sure they told the client it was all my fault.
With blood tests and mandatory screenings for crime history, blood history, pretty soon genetic history of family disease (company insurance is expensive you know they don't need any cancer heads) there will be no part of a worker's life that isn't controlled by the corporation that employs them.
Twenty-Five years ago, my mother had to jump through hoops during the employment process for Metropolitan Life to prove that her hysterectomy ten years earlier had nothing to do with cancer.
The popular view is to portray Bill Gates as an arrogant, greedy bastard. I've always throught Steve Jobs won that title hands down.
I've certainly heard far more employee horror stories coming out of Apple than out of MS, but that's purely anecdotal.
Yes. Trans Fats are bad
However, they have been used for decades and are quite pervasive in the food supply at this point. To single one company out to punish is absurd. Additionally, they were disclosed. Right on the package. Right were the consumer's rights people lobbied for them to be disclosed.
In the ingredients list.
Lets stop with the bleeding heart protect the people from their own stupidity nonsense already. Good information about trans-fatty acids might not have been as visible as it needed to be, but anyone concerned about the quality of the food they eat had all the tools they needed to make good decisions.
What more do you want? Do you want the food industry to cover the packaging of less healthy food choices in thorny proturbances, the sharpness of which increases in direct relation to the lack of nutritional value? How about some personal responsibility for a change!
Dogs and Cats! Living together!
Two Button Mac Mice!
MASS HYSTERIA!!
I can't take this story at face value, since the UoCS has a history or taking a position and then "proving" the validity the their position with data that was either very selective or just plain fabricated
Given the past exploits of the UoCS, it is quite possible that the pool of respondants was tweaked by throwing out enough negative responses to create the desired end result.
The only thing I would take seriously from these guys, is a treatise on how to lie with statistics
Really I am
If you replaced windows with anything else, it would still be a problem. There is no foolproof way of stopping everything. Any OS with a majority market share will be a target.
Yes, this inludes the sainted linux as well. I used to hear people harp about the mozilla browser being so much more secure than IE. Now that Firefox is gaining market share, it too is becoming a target for all sorts of unpleasant cracks
If you really want to bitch and moan about poor internet security, then why don't you look at the ISPs. Why did it take so long for the 800 lb. gorilla of service providers, AOL, to offer free virus protection? Seeing how it is in their best interest and they are much better situated to push the latest updates to the users.
witness: in school, teachers routinely punish the entire class until the party guilty of a particular offense comes forward. in real life, we would call this sort of activity by authorities "terrorism". in school, the mantra of maintaining order is "i don't care who started it." in the real world, we spend billions of dollars on a justice system to figure out "who started it."
This is a legal concept frequently used in the "real" world known as "The hand of one, is the hand of all." This concept is usually applied to a small group of people in the circumstance where it is obvious that one of them has perpetrated a crime, but no one steps forth to accept responsibility or point out the guilty party. For example, lock six people in a room for an hour. Open the door to find one of them murdered. Without any testimony or confession from the remaining five, they would all be charged with murder.
Its use with a classroom sized group of children is stretching the idea well beyond reasonable limits. With that in mind however, I have to say it is not a form of terrorism at all but more accurately authoritarianism.
First read "The One Minute Manager." This is a very quick read and following this book alone will put you into the top 20% of all managers I have ever seen.
Then read the Dale Carnegie book, or even better take the public speaking course at the local Dale Carnegie branch which heavily involves this book.
You have to really dig to find the information, but the UC had an agreement with the Indian Govt. about how the plant would be run with all the necessary safety precautiouns.
However, the govt. continually forced UC to bypass proper training and safe operating procedures. Gee, I wonder why you never read about these events in the mainstream press?
I mean...naw...well, maybe...
Is it possible that SCO actually believes what they've been peddling? Is it possible that they're so gullible that they actually believe themselves?
They must be gullible if they think anyone will give credance to what they post on their own prosco site.
They have to add something to try and make up all that goodwill they've blown with the customer base over the years. What with snotty customer service reps and a community liason who took every opportunity to insult the players, its a wonder the game has stayed as popular as it has.
Most people are still playing EQ becuase their friends are. They better count on enough of that carrying people over into EQ2 to make it profitable.
These are the same people that wielded the ban stick far too indescriminately in Star Wars recently and then ruthlessly squashed any in game criticism of the same actions by teleporting their own customers into some very bad situations (outer space, in the middle of bases swarming with enemy).
I think the piece has no place on the airwaves. While it is an exercise in free speech, airing an anti Kerry screed like this is no more appropriate than airing F9-11 would be.
Personally I don't think the whole John Kerry war hero image is appropriate. When I think of a purple heart recipient, I think of someone who has sustained injury that results in a great deal of pain and suffering. The wounds Kerry received do not meet my expectation. Certainly there are some truly awful examples of Purple Hearts given out during that period. Kerry's at least did involve some personal risk, one man recieved his becuase he got a splinter from his chair when he jumped up after a bomb went off on the street outside the building he was in.
Far more important to me than John Kerry's conduct in Vietnam was his conduct afterwards. That he came home and helped sustain the fable that U.S. soldiers routinely committed the most heinous of war crimes was inexcusable. Yes, George W. Bush may have been missing some National Guard meetings, but that pales beside a man who regularly made his countrymen out to be murderous savages engaged in a widespread orgy of bloodletting and torture. He destroyed his credibility and respectability there so far as I'm concerned. Given such outrageous lies in the cynical pursuit of political currency, how is it possible to trust responsibility to such a man?
I don't agree with the practice. Its deceptive at the very least and I think we've already got more than enough deception (spin) going on already.
You can always count on a person or group to play up their positive aspects, but its really gotten out of hand in the last few years. Certainly mud slinging has always taken place, but its gotten progressively more vicious over the last thirty years. I mean what does it say when one party habitually refers to their opponents as "mean spirited." Yeah, sure...what exactly does that make you for calling them names then?
Ever see the graphic novel where they both got kidnapped by an alien. They end up on a world where they watch news footage of Earth's superheroes as some kind of horror-reality series.
Grimm gets all dressed up as a disquise and keeps getting recognized, while Hulk just puts some unconcious squidlike alien on his head like a hat and nobody every knows him.
The Thing actually manages to conince Hulk that talking your way out of trouble is a viable alternative which leads to the Hulk putting a load of bad guys to sleep when he bores them for hours with things like "shiney brass buttons in the sun hurt your eyes."
Hilarious!
If you consider that a primary goal of both weapons research and propulsion research is concerned with fitting more energy into a smaller package, then it all makes perfect sense.
If the given quantity of anti-matter can, with its included containment system, occupy less space and weigh less than another type of energy source. Then it will definatly be advantageous to use it. The rest is simply a matter of implementation.
My greatest concern is storage. How do you make something so inherently destructive safe to store in any usable quantity.
You are assuming of course that anything you do is of any interest to anyone.
Switching to Linux, like anything else, boils down to a cost benefit decision. It may be possible to switch to a linux system and save money in the long run, but there are always obstacles to convincing the decision makers that this is so. Here are a few possible obstacles:
The last one is my biggest annoyance. I've run up against this wall so many times I've got a permanant dent in my skull.
The frequent cause of this situation is a long history of technical types who constantly pitch ideas to the non-technical managers that are full of gee-whiz stuff, but have no real monetary benefit. So the tech guy comes off looking like a clueless idiot and the leaders start to think that it might be safer to give a loaded gun to Charles Manson than to listen to anything the tech guys have to say about business planning.
So before you want to start making noise about how an organization should undertake some tech upgrade or project, please stop and think of it in business terms, or at least try to find someone who can do so and will help you. Those of us who have some business training are tired of being ignored out of habit because our predicessors couldn't put a coherent business plan together.
Seatec Astronomy
Has someone finally grasped the trailing thread of the FUD inducing cloak of obfuscation that SCO has thrown over this case from day one?
Will the whole mess finally start to unravel under expert scrutiny that is conversant engough to the non-technical person that they can explain what a load of drek SCO is peddling?
We can only hope!
What's really amazing is how users who consistantly move their task bar to another edge of the screen and can never remember how to move it back, can get around all the safeguards of a managed system and screw it all up.
The computers we have here at the jail are locked out of almost everything. The only two things the average user can access is a terminal program and MS word. Yet these same people, who cannot tell the difference between a monitor and a CPU, manage to find every chink in the armor. They manage to gain access to the internet, play games, and in general screw up the whole operating system.
They may be idiots when it comes to computers, but never underestimate the users abilities to circumvent all your best laid plans of managing the computers they use.
My response to this would be as it has been to the threat to get a time clock in places where I've worked.
GOOD! Do it as soon as possible! Then they'll be forced to pay myself and everyone else for the time we actually work.