I was at IBM when the Somerset initiative was announced.
I think IBM's grand plan back then was to create a chipset (the PowerPC) that would be able to go head-to-head as an alternative platform to the x86. In order to sell this platform to PC manufacturers, they wanted to have MacOS available as the Windows alternative.
Problem was, Apple didn't play ball the way that IBM hoped for...MacOS was never instrumented to run on the PPC reference platform, so that Apple could keep control of the Mac hardware. The PPC reference platform died in childbirth.
But Apple got fast new hotness chips to replace the old busted Moto 68Ks in the first generation Macs, so they made out okay.
I believe there are three different classes of contractor.
An outside expert who is brought in as a consultant for his/her knowledge of a particular field. This kind of contractor may work alongside regular employees, but usually makes more money, receives no benefits (he pays for them himself or through his firm), and is not subject to employee restrictions of the company. Darn good, lucrative work if you can get it.
An outside job shop that does work for the company. (Coincidentally, I have done this for HP's printer division in past.) The contractors do not work at the company site, are managed separately, and usually get salary and benefits from the subcontracting company, who pays for them out of their billable hours. Can be good work.
Contractors who are brought in as temps. They usually get lower salaries (out of which their temp agency takes a cut), no benefits except those granted through their temp agency, are subject to the same management and reviews as regular company employees that they work alongside, and are subject to immediate termination at any time. In other words, their jobs suck big time.
These guys are at the bottom of the tech food chain, and it sounds like they're the ones that are suing, based on recent court decisions that give them precedent.
My observation is that nobody forces anyone to be part of the third group against their will; so it is somewhat disturbing that the trend has been for the courts to throw out the terms of contracts that have been entered into willingly, where no violation of the terms have been found -- if that's what is happening. Personally, if my job sucked that much, I would just up and quit before I would resort to lawsuits, unless the company was clearly violating criminal statutes.
Unfortunately, neither the new Bush space initiatives, nor a new spaceship design will fix all the things that are wrong with the federal space program. Key among these problems is the lack of clear leadership and good management on NASA's Board of Directors, a.k.a. the US Congress.
Congress has never been able to give NASA a set of clear goals, and then provided it with the long-term funding to meet those goals. This has forced NASA into sort of bureaucratic survival mode, lurching along from fiscal year to fiscal year, trying to keep moving the ball forward without a long-term roadmap to follow.
My father-in-law, Dr. Alan Adler, was on the STRP team and did the original blood work on the Shroud.
Before he died, his two favorite statements about the Shroud were, "It's BLOOD! B-L-U-D!" and "There is no test for Christness."
...the Product Managers of the named products would probably very much like to support Solaris, but can't get approval from their superiors to purchase any Sun h/w or s/w licenses to compile and test on.
In the real world 1/2 the stuff he asked for would probably be on an old Unisys machine (not supported since 1989) that thinks it is dumping records to a printer that is actually an old OS/2 machine connected to the serial port running a Pascal program that was written by a summer intern back in 1992 to parse the printer data and write it to a csv file so that he could pull it into Lotus 123 and do a report with it.
Dude, I worked my ass off on that Pascal program.;-)
No lie, years ago when Apple came out with IR keyboards and mice for Macs, there was this column in MacWeek where the columnist got all torqued off that there was no wireless power for the Mac. Seems he wanted his Mac to just kinda hang out in the middle of his desk with no unsightly wires or cables anywhere in sight, and he was annoyed that Apple wasn't catering to this need.
I should have clipped that column, it perfectly captured my personal stereotype of hardcore Mac users.
King has a hilarious quote about books being made into movies being like children going off to college...you hope they do well, get good grades, and don't get gangbanged like Children of the Corn.
The problem is the way in which the money is allocated.
School districts basically break down into three groups: Urban, suburban, and rural. The urban districts are orders of magnitude bigger than the other two kinds. Here in NYS, we have hundreds of school districts across the state, but 70% of the kids in the state public education system are "warehoused" in just five: NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany.
You might not be surprised to learn that those five districts don't receive anywhere near 70% of the school spending that the state government hands out every year. Suburban and rural districts are given disproportianately high per-student spending.
When the statistics of all three kinds of school districts are averaged together, you get highly distorted and misleading results.
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I was at IBM when the Somerset initiative was announced.
I think IBM's grand plan back then was to create a chipset (the PowerPC) that would be able to go head-to-head as an alternative platform to the x86. In order to sell this platform to PC manufacturers, they wanted to have MacOS available as the Windows alternative.
Problem was, Apple didn't play ball the way that IBM hoped for...MacOS was never instrumented to run on the PPC reference platform, so that Apple could keep control of the Mac hardware. The PPC reference platform died in childbirth.
But Apple got fast new hotness chips to replace the old busted Moto 68Ks in the first generation Macs, so they made out okay.
An outside expert who is brought in as a consultant for his/her knowledge of a particular field. This kind of contractor may work alongside regular employees, but usually makes more money, receives no benefits (he pays for them himself or through his firm), and is not subject to employee restrictions of the company. Darn good, lucrative work if you can get it.
An outside job shop that does work for the company. (Coincidentally, I have done this for HP's printer division in past.) The contractors do not work at the company site, are managed separately, and usually get salary and benefits from the subcontracting company, who pays for them out of their billable hours. Can be good work.
Contractors who are brought in as temps. They usually get lower salaries (out of which their temp agency takes a cut), no benefits except those granted through their temp agency, are subject to the same management and reviews as regular company employees that they work alongside, and are subject to immediate termination at any time. In other words, their jobs suck big time.
These guys are at the bottom of the tech food chain, and it sounds like they're the ones that are suing, based on recent court decisions that give them precedent.
My observation is that nobody forces anyone to be part of the third group against their will; so it is somewhat disturbing that the trend has been for the courts to throw out the terms of contracts that have been entered into willingly, where no violation of the terms have been found -- if that's what is happening. Personally, if my job sucked that much, I would just up and quit before I would resort to lawsuits, unless the company was clearly violating criminal statutes.
Unfortunately, neither the new Bush space initiatives, nor a new spaceship design will fix all the things that are wrong with the federal space program. Key among these problems is the lack of clear leadership and good management on NASA's Board of Directors, a.k.a. the US Congress.
Congress has never been able to give NASA a set of clear goals, and then provided it with the long-term funding to meet those goals. This has forced NASA into sort of bureaucratic survival mode, lurching along from fiscal year to fiscal year, trying to keep moving the ball forward without a long-term roadmap to follow.
My father-in-law, Dr. Alan Adler, was on the STRP team and did the original blood work on the Shroud.
Before he died, his two favorite statements about the Shroud were, "It's BLOOD! B-L-U-D!" and "There is no test for Christness."
...the Product Managers of the named products would probably very much like to support Solaris, but can't get approval from their superiors to purchase any Sun h/w or s/w licenses to compile and test on.
"Help me, O-BitTorrent Kenosis, you're my only hope."
"The extinction event will not be televised."
No lie, years ago when Apple came out with IR keyboards and mice for Macs, there was this column in MacWeek where the columnist got all torqued off that there was no wireless power for the Mac. Seems he wanted his Mac to just kinda hang out in the middle of his desk with no unsightly wires or cables anywhere in sight, and he was annoyed that Apple wasn't catering to this need.
I should have clipped that column, it perfectly captured my personal stereotype of hardcore Mac users.
Does Stephen King have this problem?
King has a hilarious quote about books being made into movies being like children going off to college...you hope they do well, get good grades, and don't get gangbanged like Children of the Corn.
School districts basically break down into three groups: Urban, suburban, and rural. The urban districts are orders of magnitude bigger than the other two kinds. Here in NYS, we have hundreds of school districts across the state, but 70% of the kids in the state public education system are "warehoused" in just five: NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany.
You might not be surprised to learn that those five districts don't receive anywhere near 70% of the school spending that the state government hands out every year. Suburban and rural districts are given disproportianately high per-student spending. When the statistics of all three kinds of school districts are averaged together, you get highly distorted and misleading results.