If it's that expensive the basic concept is the same but it's not really the same thing.
ADP and Paychex (two of the big payroll processing firms in the US) both have a product like this. The cost to the employer is less than the cost of issuing and delivering a paper paycheck, and there's typically no cost to the employee at all.
I'm honestly not even sure what phpbb is but I really doubt the password distribution there is representative of passwords on things people care about.
I have the same, really lame password on almost every forum-type site. Because, you know what? I don't care! Worst case, someone impersonates me on Slashdot. Oh, the humanity! Oh, the horror!
Likewise, the Ubuntu system on my LAN has the password "password" on all accounts, including root. I trust the people who can get into my house, and if I can't trust them, perusing my MP3s or my Quicken backup is the least of my worries.
On the other hand, I have unique passwords on sites like fidelity.com and westsuburbanbank.com - hard passwords, ones I can remember but would never be on one of these lists.
There is a bank of some sort backing the debit card, but it's not necessarily a traditional bank.
This is very common with large employers of low-income people, because a significant percentage of their employees don't have a proper bank account.
It's really very similar to the employer opening a checking account for the employee but not providing the ability to write checks or do deposits.
The employees are issued a card, which they continue to use for the duration of their employment. Every payday, additional funds are available on the card. Sometimes it's strictly an ATM card, but I think it's often a dual-usage card, co-branded Visa or MasterCard and one of the debit networks.
The advantage to the employer is the same as direct deposit - lower costs of pay distribution.
The advantage to the employee is they don't typically have any cost to get at their pay. (Contrast this with taking a paper check to a check-cashing store.)
This is an entry in a design competition. A design competition is roughly equivalent to "artsy people who couldn't engineer their way out of a paper sack making up weird shit that couldn't really be built."
When I started where I work, all the QA systems were reliably named after various cartoon characters - Underdog, Velma, and many others.
That seems to have degraded. First there were other fictional characters (like Aragorn) and now there are systems named after employee pets among other things.
At an earlier job, they were a small-time hardware manufacturer as well as being a software development company, so servers tended to be named the model of hardware they were (like r400 or whatever.) We finally persuaded them that pronounceable names were good, and started working through the phonetic alphabet (since we did some work for Delta Airlines.)
That fell apart too - we skipped Alfa because it was spelled funny, had a Bravo, and the company went out of business before there was a Charlie.
Based on reading the various linked things, it appears that one primary complaint is that it isn't, in fact, sensibly released. There are bits and pieces of it scattered about but AdamWill can't actually find a whole release that actually works.
He clearly doesn't think it was really from President Obama. But his point was about the Obama campaign using modern technology effectively, not about a personal email from Barack.
I got on both the McCain and Obama campaign email lists. The Obama campaign ones were better in most every way.
The important thing about "static" in a global sense - because no global variable gets re-initialized - is that its scope is within that file. The linker doesn't see it.
For our code base, this is very important to understand. We don't really have any static variables within functions of which I am aware. We have a lot of static variables that are global to a file. (This is a very old code base, that originally ran on a 16-bit OS and 80286 processors.)
We didn't keep repeating the question. We did our best to prod him in the right direction and he wouldn't take the clue. Something very much along the lines of, "OK, that addresses what it means for a variable declared within a function. What about a global variable - one not declared within a function?"
We kept on it because we didn't believe he'd given an adequate answer, and the interviewers, not the person applying for a position, get to make that determination. We tried to help him answer correctly. As best we could determine, he was incapable of doing so.
How is time worked at a soup kitchen or doing other volunteer work related to a discussion of H-1B visas and their impact on the economic and employment situation?
Whether or not I have problems with the H-1B program is wholly unrelated to my charitable donations of time or money.
Now, whether I have expressed my opinion to my congress-critters is somewhat more relevant. I haven't. Maybe I'll go do that.
He managed it when applied to a variable within a function.
We specifically asked him what it means when used on a global variable. He gave the same answer as within a function - it means that it doesn't get re-initialized.
He also couldn't say what "*" does in a comprehensible fashion. I know, it also means a lot of things. He said something about de-referencing a pointer (in a peculiar way) but when asked if it did anything else, couldn't come up with either pointer declaration or multiplication.
Both answers sounded like he was reading them from somewhere. He kept using the same words each time we re-asked and didn't seem to be able to go much further.
It may have been a language barrier instead of a knowledge problem - I have no idea. But the position in question did require communications skills, and he was lacking in either just communication or communication and technical skills.
I always feel foolish asking these questions - I mean, the three guys all had fantastic resumes. These should have been easy questions. In fact, I usually do apologize for asking, and tell them quite frankly that we need to be sure that their resumes aren't fictional, that it isn't personal, and please don't be insulted.
I don't care about professional sports, so I have no problem with your suggestion.
I assume that the gentlemen you listed are considered by those who know about such things as superior to others who believe themselves qualified to perform the same task.
Honestly, I had to look them up to find out who the first two are. I have baseball fans in the house, so I recognized Mr. Pujols. (It's hard not to notice when the tv announcer says the name "Alberto poo holes.")
In any case, I doubt professional athletes are here under an H-1B visa. Maybe they are, but it seems unlikely.
Background: I am an American. I have usually voted Republican but not always. I am a Senior Programmer/Analyst by title, a development team lead by actual assigned task, at a Fortune 500 company.
Our company has a mandate to bring in technical consultants people from Patni or HCL. There is no interest in the best and the brightest, or the best for the job; they want the cheap body count. Of the three interviews of Patni folks we've had, two were great and the third couldn't tell me what "static" meant as a C keyword. The bosses would have been fine with any of them - it's just body count to them. In my experience, that's how managers in most big companies think - adequate body count, not best available.
Wikipedia says the H-1B program...
... allows U.S. employers to employ foreign guest workers in specialty occupations. The regulations define a "specialty occupation" as requiring theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor...
A company would at least claim in public that it brought in the H-1B because it couldn't find an adequate citizen. (To do otherwise would be PR suicide.) If they lay off a citizen employee who could perform the H-1B employee's tasks in an adequate fashion, they now know exactly where to find a citizen employee who can perform that H-1B's tasks.
However, assuming Wikipedia has it right, that is not, in fact, the rule of law. To quote:
The DOL's [Strategic Plan http://www.dol.gov/_sec/stratplan/strat_plan_2006-2011.pdf%5D, Fiscal Years 2006-2011 (pg. 35) states: "... H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker."
But it doesn't seem right to me. In fact, it seems like an area where people who don't like the H-1B program should do some lobbying of their elected representatives.
Assuming a roughly equally qualified citizen and H-1B are available for a job in the US, I believe the citizen should be given preference. Maybe that makes me protectionist but it seems morally correct. Citizens of a country should have some preferential treatment in that country over non-citizens, including in matters of employment.
Are there other countries that allow non-citizens to come in to work under such a scheme, specifically allowing them to be employed instead of qualified citizen workers? I really don't know. Someone educate me.
The reason (imho) for x86 is compatibility and ease of development.
The dominant platform in the world for web browsers is x86, be it Windows, Linux or Macintosh.
That means that your best odds for getting a plug-in or similar (or at least one that is current and supported) is x86. And that's true for your end users, too.
I understand that you could build open source stuff yourself for that architecture, but ARM is weird. You will probably have issues and have to figure them out yourself. It's a much bigger development and testing effort than if you download Firefox and Flash for Linux x86 and install them.
If you live in a condo, there's a condo association.
If there's that many APs, maybe the association should look into building-wide WiFi. Depending on what everyone is paying now, it might be cheaper than one-by-one solutions.
I'm not sure how you deal with inter-unit security. Ideally, you want each unit to only be able to see other computers in that unit, but let someone wander the building with their laptop and still be on "their network." I'll bet there's a way, though.
VMware isn't even selling most of their virtualization products any more. VMware Server? Free. ESXi? Free.
VMware Workstation costs money, but that's a dead-end product from an add-on sales perspective. It's for software developers and testers, not for production systems.
What VMware is selling is management of virtual machines. They have a grand vision of virtualization everywhere, doing everything, for all people, and they're building it, with a combination of acquisitions and development. Everyone else is playing catch-up on the stuff that VMware is actually selling.
We've got some really ugly legacy stuff. 90% of the systems are MS-DOS, including the in-store "server." Inventory is handled by a back-office system, not the POS system proper.
We're moving slowly to a Windows-based system (Ooh, shiny!) but still the same basic architecture, - local application, in-store basically file server coordinating.
It's not a feature of private schools, it's a feature of that particular school. They claim to be a "college preparatory school" but things have certainly changed since I went to high school if that's what passes for college prep.
They managed to prepare the kid for junior college which isn't exactly what I would have hoped for. Probably better than the local public schools, but it seems marginal.
We're probably roughly contemporaries. My high school had a whole lab of TRS-80 Model IIIs, networked with what I now think was probably multi-drop serial and a shared printer and floppy drives - the Model IV "server" had the floppy drives, so you'd walk across the room to save your work. Printer contention was resolved by standing up and loudly saying "I'm printing, nobody else print."
My Senior year the school bought some Apple II systems. They were used for typing instruction and Pascal programming.
My department has two or three part time workers. One of them is a part-time, remote worker.
They don't play in-depth technical roles. One is a project manager. She manages a single project that would, with full time people, be one of two or three projects that full time person was managing.
Another does do support, both helping with features and interacting with users about future features they would like to see on the reporting system in question.
I can't remember what the third one does but I'm pretty sure they exist.
I'm a development team lead, and wouldn't have a problem with a part-time developer, so long as they were largely self-managed - if I can give them a vague description of something and get a design and time estimate and then get the work done when they estimated, that would be fine.
I do actually realize that most anything can be broken.
I also realize that, if someone wants to break into my house, it's really pretty easy. All it would take is a brick through the back door window. I still lock the door when I go out.
I'm not proposing filtering software on the laptops. Do filtering on the school network, and explain issues to the parents and let them deal with it. As far as I'm concerned, the best filtering is the kid using the computer where the parent can see what they're doing.
I am proposing that, in Windows terms, the students shouldn't have administrative rights on the laptops.
Keep in mind, that doesn't really restrict them that much from open source software. You can install Firefox, for example, on a Windows system without administrative rights; you just have to install it to your "My Documents" or whatever - somewhere you have write permission.
I don't know how it works on Apple, but I do know Unix in general, and the same probably applies.
Preventing student administrative access results in a more standard computer load. A more standard computer load makes it easier to support and easier to teach with.
It is easier to teach with because (for example) you don't have some students with Quicktime owning the media file associations, others with Real Player, others with Windows Media Player, and others with some other thing. You want the same thing to happen on all the laptops when the student double-clicks on a certain file type.
I realize this is a Windows-centric example but there are probably similar issues in the Mac world. The last time I used one was a Mac SE in 1990.
It is the job of the IT department - whether in a school or a business - to provide computer services to meet a business or educational need.
If there is an educational need for gimp or Firefox or Thunderbird then that should be evaluated and the software installed in a standard way. To do otherwise makes support of those systems extremely difficult. If this guy is asking slashdot what to do, then this is probably one guy trying to support an entire school.
If you want kids to be able to learn about the wealth of software out there - and I'm not disagreeing that there's a lot of great stuff - then maybe you create a class that consists of doing tech support for the rest of the school.
The kids in it that semester learn how to do basic stuff like replace keyboards and reimage the systems, and they evaluate software packages for use by other students, then help figure out how to deploy it to them.
But if you leave the laptops wide open to any software being installed then you leave a wide open door for piracy and support problems.
Not disagreeing, but one teacher, 20 - 30 high school students, I kind of think the teacher could use whatever technical support they can get to keep the kids from screwing around.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's that expensive the basic concept is the same but it's not really the same thing.
ADP and Paychex (two of the big payroll processing firms in the US) both have a product like this. The cost to the employer is less than the cost of issuing and delivering a paper paycheck, and there's typically no cost to the employee at all.
I'm honestly not even sure what phpbb is but I really doubt the password distribution there is representative of passwords on things people care about.
I have the same, really lame password on almost every forum-type site. Because, you know what? I don't care! Worst case, someone impersonates me on Slashdot. Oh, the humanity! Oh, the horror!
Likewise, the Ubuntu system on my LAN has the password "password" on all accounts, including root. I trust the people who can get into my house, and if I can't trust them, perusing my MP3s or my Quicken backup is the least of my worries.
On the other hand, I have unique passwords on sites like fidelity.com and westsuburbanbank.com - hard passwords, ones I can remember but would never be on one of these lists.
I'm ambimoustrous at work.
On the computer on the left side of my desk, the mouse is on the left.
On the computer on the right side of my desk, the mouse is on the right.
I don't remap the mouse buttons though - that's just weird.
Plus I'd be totally confused if I got used to that and then had to use somebody else's mouse (which is fairly common in my job.)
There is a bank of some sort backing the debit card, but it's not necessarily a traditional bank.
This is very common with large employers of low-income people, because a significant percentage of their employees don't have a proper bank account.
It's really very similar to the employer opening a checking account for the employee but not providing the ability to write checks or do deposits.
The employees are issued a card, which they continue to use for the duration of their employment. Every payday, additional funds are available on the card. Sometimes it's strictly an ATM card, but I think it's often a dual-usage card, co-branded Visa or MasterCard and one of the debit networks.
The advantage to the employer is the same as direct deposit - lower costs of pay distribution.
The advantage to the employee is they don't typically have any cost to get at their pay. (Contrast this with taking a paper check to a check-cashing store.)
That's because it isn't real.
This is an entry in a design competition. A design competition is roughly equivalent to "artsy people who couldn't engineer their way out of a paper sack making up weird shit that couldn't really be built."
When I started where I work, all the QA systems were reliably named after various cartoon characters - Underdog, Velma, and many others.
That seems to have degraded. First there were other fictional characters (like Aragorn) and now there are systems named after employee pets among other things.
At an earlier job, they were a small-time hardware manufacturer as well as being a software development company, so servers tended to be named the model of hardware they were (like r400 or whatever.) We finally persuaded them that pronounceable names were good, and started working through the phonetic alphabet (since we did some work for Delta Airlines.)
That fell apart too - we skipped Alfa because it was spelled funny, had a Bravo, and the company went out of business before there was a Charlie.
Based on reading the various linked things, it appears that one primary complaint is that it isn't, in fact, sensibly released. There are bits and pieces of it scattered about but AdamWill can't actually find a whole release that actually works.
He clearly doesn't think it was really from President Obama. But his point was about the Obama campaign using modern technology effectively, not about a personal email from Barack.
I got on both the McCain and Obama campaign email lists. The Obama campaign ones were better in most every way.
That's how big business works too.
The budget for a project my team was working on ran out. Wasn't going to support us to the end of the year but the work had to be done.
My boss talked to another boss, who had a high-profile project with a virtually bottomless well of funding.
Next thing I know, we're all charging to the bottomless well but working on the stuff that's out of money.
You fail too as far as I'm concerned.
The important thing about "static" in a global sense - because no global variable gets re-initialized - is that its scope is within that file. The linker doesn't see it.
For our code base, this is very important to understand. We don't really have any static variables within functions of which I am aware. We have a lot of static variables that are global to a file. (This is a very old code base, that originally ran on a 16-bit OS and 80286 processors.)
We didn't keep repeating the question. We did our best to prod him in the right direction and he wouldn't take the clue. Something very much along the lines of, "OK, that addresses what it means for a variable declared within a function. What about a global variable - one not declared within a function?"
We kept on it because we didn't believe he'd given an adequate answer, and the interviewers, not the person applying for a position, get to make that determination. We tried to help him answer correctly. As best we could determine, he was incapable of doing so.
How is time worked at a soup kitchen or doing other volunteer work related to a discussion of H-1B visas and their impact on the economic and employment situation?
Whether or not I have problems with the H-1B program is wholly unrelated to my charitable donations of time or money.
Now, whether I have expressed my opinion to my congress-critters is somewhat more relevant. I haven't. Maybe I'll go do that.
He managed it when applied to a variable within a function.
We specifically asked him what it means when used on a global variable. He gave the same answer as within a function - it means that it doesn't get re-initialized.
He also couldn't say what "*" does in a comprehensible fashion. I know, it also means a lot of things. He said something about de-referencing a pointer (in a peculiar way) but when asked if it did anything else, couldn't come up with either pointer declaration or multiplication.
Both answers sounded like he was reading them from somewhere. He kept using the same words each time we re-asked and didn't seem to be able to go much further.
It may have been a language barrier instead of a knowledge problem - I have no idea. But the position in question did require communications skills, and he was lacking in either just communication or communication and technical skills.
I always feel foolish asking these questions - I mean, the three guys all had fantastic resumes. These should have been easy questions. In fact, I usually do apologize for asking, and tell them quite frankly that we need to be sure that their resumes aren't fictional, that it isn't personal, and please don't be insulted.
Sigh.
I don't care about professional sports, so I have no problem with your suggestion.
I assume that the gentlemen you listed are considered by those who know about such things as superior to others who believe themselves qualified to perform the same task.
Honestly, I had to look them up to find out who the first two are. I have baseball fans in the house, so I recognized Mr. Pujols. (It's hard not to notice when the tv announcer says the name "Alberto poo holes.")
In any case, I doubt professional athletes are here under an H-1B visa. Maybe they are, but it seems unlikely.
Background: I am an American. I have usually voted Republican but not always. I am a Senior Programmer/Analyst by title, a development team lead by actual assigned task, at a Fortune 500 company.
Our company has a mandate to bring in technical consultants people from Patni or HCL. There is no interest in the best and the brightest, or the best for the job; they want the cheap body count. Of the three interviews of Patni folks we've had, two were great and the third couldn't tell me what "static" meant as a C keyword. The bosses would have been fine with any of them - it's just body count to them. In my experience, that's how managers in most big companies think - adequate body count, not best available.
Wikipedia says the H-1B program...
A company would at least claim in public that it brought in the H-1B because it couldn't find an adequate citizen. (To do otherwise would be PR suicide.) If they lay off a citizen employee who could perform the H-1B employee's tasks in an adequate fashion, they now know exactly where to find a citizen employee who can perform that H-1B's tasks.
However, assuming Wikipedia has it right, that is not, in fact, the rule of law. To quote:
But it doesn't seem right to me. In fact, it seems like an area where people who don't like the H-1B program should do some lobbying of their elected representatives.
Assuming a roughly equally qualified citizen and H-1B are available for a job in the US, I believe the citizen should be given preference. Maybe that makes me protectionist but it seems morally correct. Citizens of a country should have some preferential treatment in that country over non-citizens, including in matters of employment.
Are there other countries that allow non-citizens to come in to work under such a scheme, specifically allowing them to be employed instead of qualified citizen workers? I really don't know. Someone educate me.
The reason (imho) for x86 is compatibility and ease of development.
The dominant platform in the world for web browsers is x86, be it Windows, Linux or Macintosh.
That means that your best odds for getting a plug-in or similar (or at least one that is current and supported) is x86. And that's true for your end users, too.
I understand that you could build open source stuff yourself for that architecture, but ARM is weird. You will probably have issues and have to figure them out yourself. It's a much bigger development and testing effort than if you download Firefox and Flash for Linux x86 and install them.
If you live in a condo, there's a condo association.
If there's that many APs, maybe the association should look into building-wide WiFi. Depending on what everyone is paying now, it might be cheaper than one-by-one solutions.
I'm not sure how you deal with inter-unit security. Ideally, you want each unit to only be able to see other computers in that unit, but let someone wander the building with their laptop and still be on "their network." I'll bet there's a way, though.
VMware isn't even selling most of their virtualization products any more. VMware Server? Free. ESXi? Free.
VMware Workstation costs money, but that's a dead-end product from an add-on sales perspective. It's for software developers and testers, not for production systems.
What VMware is selling is management of virtual machines. They have a grand vision of virtualization everywhere, doing everything, for all people, and they're building it, with a combination of acquisitions and development. Everyone else is playing catch-up on the stuff that VMware is actually selling.
We've got some really ugly legacy stuff. 90% of the systems are MS-DOS, including the in-store "server." Inventory is handled by a back-office system, not the POS system proper.
We're moving slowly to a Windows-based system (Ooh, shiny!) but still the same basic architecture, - local application, in-store basically file server coordinating.
That's fine until you look at the cost of guaranteed connectivity to 13,000 locations.
And guaranteed would be needed, because this is the POS system - if it's down, they're closed.
It's not a feature of private schools, it's a feature of that particular school. They claim to be a "college preparatory school" but things have certainly changed since I went to high school if that's what passes for college prep.
They managed to prepare the kid for junior college which isn't exactly what I would have hoped for. Probably better than the local public schools, but it seems marginal.
We're probably roughly contemporaries. My high school had a whole lab of TRS-80 Model IIIs, networked with what I now think was probably multi-drop serial and a shared printer and floppy drives - the Model IV "server" had the floppy drives, so you'd walk across the room to save your work. Printer contention was resolved by standing up and loudly saying "I'm printing, nobody else print."
My Senior year the school bought some Apple II systems. They were used for typing instruction and Pascal programming.
If it's a one-off program, or a program for in-house use, then throwing hardware at it might make sense.
I have a deployed base of about 13,000 locations, with 5 - 10 systems per location. Spending $100 per on more memory is talking some real money.
My department has two or three part time workers. One of them is a part-time, remote worker.
They don't play in-depth technical roles. One is a project manager. She manages a single project that would, with full time people, be one of two or three projects that full time person was managing.
Another does do support, both helping with features and interacting with users about future features they would like to see on the reporting system in question.
I can't remember what the third one does but I'm pretty sure they exist.
I'm a development team lead, and wouldn't have a problem with a part-time developer, so long as they were largely self-managed - if I can give them a vague description of something and get a design and time estimate and then get the work done when they estimated, that would be fine.
I do actually realize that most anything can be broken.
I also realize that, if someone wants to break into my house, it's really pretty easy. All it would take is a brick through the back door window. I still lock the door when I go out.
I'm not proposing filtering software on the laptops. Do filtering on the school network, and explain issues to the parents and let them deal with it. As far as I'm concerned, the best filtering is the kid using the computer where the parent can see what they're doing.
I am proposing that, in Windows terms, the students shouldn't have administrative rights on the laptops.
Keep in mind, that doesn't really restrict them that much from open source software. You can install Firefox, for example, on a Windows system without administrative rights; you just have to install it to your "My Documents" or whatever - somewhere you have write permission.
I don't know how it works on Apple, but I do know Unix in general, and the same probably applies.
Preventing student administrative access results in a more standard computer load. A more standard computer load makes it easier to support and easier to teach with.
It is easier to teach with because (for example) you don't have some students with Quicktime owning the media file associations, others with Real Player, others with Windows Media Player, and others with some other thing. You want the same thing to happen on all the laptops when the student double-clicks on a certain file type.
I realize this is a Windows-centric example but there are probably similar issues in the Mac world. The last time I used one was a Mac SE in 1990.
It is the job of the IT department - whether in a school or a business - to provide computer services to meet a business or educational need.
If there is an educational need for gimp or Firefox or Thunderbird then that should be evaluated and the software installed in a standard way. To do otherwise makes support of those systems extremely difficult. If this guy is asking slashdot what to do, then this is probably one guy trying to support an entire school.
If you want kids to be able to learn about the wealth of software out there - and I'm not disagreeing that there's a lot of great stuff - then maybe you create a class that consists of doing tech support for the rest of the school.
The kids in it that semester learn how to do basic stuff like replace keyboards and reimage the systems, and they evaluate software packages for use by other students, then help figure out how to deploy it to them.
But if you leave the laptops wide open to any software being installed then you leave a wide open door for piracy and support problems.
Not disagreeing, but one teacher, 20 - 30 high school students, I kind of think the teacher could use whatever technical support they can get to keep the kids from screwing around.