Yep,this is a trade organization, so I'd agree with you there.
Raising the price without raising the profit is something I would think that people interested in "trade" would be clearly against
Maybe in the first world. If you are a delegate from the third world you may be interested in tarrifs. Since you can't tax your own people enough to support your government you may have to rely on taxing imports to generate revenue.
On a similar note, we in the first world had to experience the unfair labor laws, child exploitation, and unsanitary and downright lifethreatening work environments as we navigated the industrial revolution. Now that we find ourselves navigating the information revolution we (President Clinton, the Seattle protesters, silent first-world citizens nodding in affirmation) believe that we can impose labor standards on these developing countries despite their cost of implemenation. Why would we think another country must implement our standards and not have to go through the same growing pains we had to in order to get to where we are?
Finally...
you've got to be pretty evil to get a super-apathetic American public so pissed off as to go into the streets and protest in those numbers.
It's not an apathetic public that is protesting. You have a very organized protest that has been in the making for months. They annouced their objectives months ago, and Seattle has no one to blame except themselves for the crisis. They could have planned better. Still, the AFL-CIO is helping to organize the protesters, and why not? Labor standards (read socialism) is their goal. If they can export their beliefs perhaps they can have a voice in the rule of government which adopt those beliefs.(NY Times) include the Sierra Club, United Steelworkers of America, and various smaller groups.
They are definitely a well-organized group with a self-serving message to be heard.
I'm a PowerBuilder developer in the midwest with about 1 year of real object-oriented design experience and 1 year of real coding experience.
As a public service here's my salary history w/experience
Years 1 & 2 ('93-'94) - college grad English lit degree. $22,000 seting up hardware. Good healthcare benefits cost me $120/month. Company rental car.
Years 3 & 4 ('95-'96) - moved to IS dept coding on proprietary systems that would give me no real world experience except working through simple logic. Started at $28,000 left at $33,000. Same company as above. No rental car.
Year 5 ('97) - Changed companies and moved into PowerBuilder development. This company had no idea what it was doing with client/server stuff and had no idea how to design software. In any case they paid me $41,000 to do it. I learned practically zero. They were on AS400's using low-level C programs to move data in and out, so I didn't even get to use a standard DB or SQL. Benefits sucked, though. I had to pay out the nose for health care, and in a few months I would have paid up to $5000 to have a child cuz the benefits really sucked.
Year 6 ('98 to date) - Changed companies again, thank God. I'm now working for an INCREDIBLE company that lets me learn just about anything I want. I work with people who really understand software design, and I'm learning a ton. Benefits are great with practically no out of pocket expenses. They throw monthly parties with open bar for their employees. Quarterly they have these incredible parties that the whole family is invited to. Christmas party is Filet Mignon, etc. I'm now at $54,000.
I hope that helps at least for this part of the country. And this comes from someone who started out knowing absolutley nothing.
Actually, anyone serious about investing will buy and hold for a long period of time - say 10 to 15 years or more. MS even broken up will probably continue to generate high rates of return for stockholders even after taking an inital, short-term hit in its stock price.
I have to say that I create text files in notepad when working in windows because I hate working around the preformatting commands in Word.
But to their credit, if you take the time working through all the options you can usually turn all that stuff off and create a pretty decent text editor.
Simply knowing a number of undergraduates have designed and built an intrinsicly complex sattelite would make this submission worthy.
Given quite a bit of talk about women's role and contribution to the technical world around here lately, though, I wonder if that's the reason for it's posting.
In previous discussions on/. we find comments about not having the women's perspective, we (men) are not even conscious of what we're missing in our projects if we don't have the women's perspective, etc. As I read through the links I noticed that these women faced and overcame the same technical challenges, answered the same technical questions, and completed a technical project in much the same way any man would.
I applaud them for their amazing work. I'm just a software developer, I couldn't comprehend developing a project of their scope as an undergraduate, and certainly not in 10 months with other classes and projects to take care of at the same time. Perhaps our concern with underrepresentation of women in the technical fields is unwarranted. We all face the same challenges and overcome them in similar, analytical ways.
I'll be there are geeks up there somewhere, just not in office. Someone's gotta run the networks. This just shows that no geek will ever be able to outsmart the most ignorant users - Geeks have a vision of how the system should be used, ignorant users don't.
Since the actual representatives probably never see or use the email system, congressional aides provide a layer of abstraction and encapsulation, even huge email outages probably won't make a legislative difference.
Sometimes I think the low level discussions bantered about here can lose sight of the high level business that need to survive and thrive from day to day. These are businesses that support and provide for (as our beloved Clinton would say) our families, neighborhoods, and children.
At the same time these businesses pay taxes. Taxes support the FCC and other (IMO useless and needless) regulatory agencies. You can derive the rest of the story. Obviously I'm a capitalist (hope that doesn't kill moderation).
FYI an investment of about $30 even one year ago in NYSE:AOL would be worth about $110 today, almost 300% rise. NASD:ATHM a year ago was $22 and is now $45, over 100%. Contrast that to most corporations where raises are managed to 3.5% across the board. I'd take stock ownership over a job any day.
I however have a choice because I am connected to the system, if nothing else through my friends, my job, and through Slashdot
Which systems are you not connected to? I would suppose many more than you, or any of us, are connected to. As you stated quite well, our choices of friends, jobs, and sources of information are part of what connect us to particular systems.
if everyone is part of the system, everyone is affected
I would debate that everyone may not be part of the system. If everyone is part of the system perhaps some participants interact with the very outer fringe with no need or desire to understand why the system evolves.
Within the systems we choose to monitor we can act on a particular sphere of influence. Outside of these influences we are ignorant of strengths and deficiencies of an infinite number of other systems.
Deficiencies exist in every system, and they cause or drive a system's evolution. If there were balanced participation by men and women some deficiencies may be addressed, some strenghts may atrophy into deficiency. And again a strength and a deficiency are only so from the perspective of the particular audience.
Sorry about all the abstract language. I guess if I think about the women I know their not going to allow us to close the world off to women.
I wouldn't say this is a correction more than an adjustment. At the risk of sounding chauvenistic I suppose women would have to want to contribute to the open source movement.
slightly better in the EE department, of like 8:1, but that's still pretty bad
I don't think that bad adequately describes the ratios here. Perhaps lopsided, and lopsided may not be bad. When my team (Browns, Indians, pretty much everything Cleveland) has a lopsided victory I'm pretty fired up. I suppose the losing teams fans may describe it as a bad loss. So bad, I guess, is a matter of perspective and the vision of the end result.
If women don't participate in this exciting new revolution, the internet, e-commerce, and Open Source, among others, will they be left behind? Will there be a missing perspective? How do we change this?
I (a man) graduated with an English Lit degree and the ratios in my major were probably in the neighborhood described above. I suppose similar ratios exist in education.
I don't recall the women trying to figure out what to do to change this, no one wondered if the men would be left behind or if they could provide a missing perspective. In fact I would argue that those so absorbed in science and technology may be missing out in the fascinating world of literature (or maybe not).
Back to my original point of wanting to participate in the open source revolution, perhaps they just have better things to do. Only recently has my wife decided to learn how to email, and that's only because her friends asked her if she got their email. My wife got tired of asking if I'd received the email yet and then having me describe what it said.
I would never discount her contribution to society as a wonderful mother. I would never discount the contributions of women teachers and journalists (ok, well maybe the journalists). It took other women to motivate my wife to get barely interested in computers. If we really need women then perhaps the women contributors are the best advocates for change. Perhaps the men shouldn't concern themselves with deficiencies in the system.
The arguments are well stated, so from that perspective I'm not just sitting here looking for something to disagree with...
But the proverbial "they" said the same types of things about the horseless carriage, electricity, html framesets, and pretty much every new technology to come along.
In the course of human events I'm sure the videophone will find its place, grow in size, and be useful for at least half of the things it proponents advocate.
The jist is that the aggregate auction sites continuously spider the 2.8 million items on ebay's site multiple times each day. Given their current scaling problems I can see why ebay would like to go it alone.
Obviously, if they can't solve the scaling problems and the public chooses auction portals over the single ebay site then ebay may have problems. For now they certainly have name recognition to get 'em through the short term.
I understand the feelings here. Some time ago I read a book on C algorithims and wished I had some reason to write binary tree code. Because many of us are Linux users we enjoy low-level detail. How can we make our software work better, how fast can we *really* run our processors, what fancy code can we create to save the extra millisecond. Meanwhile the rest of the first world curses the need to do such things. In the second world you would be lucky to see a computer. Never mind the third world. Could these other worlds even understand the issues we debate here - mainstream citizens and not the techies that I'm sure exist on some level in every society. Yet we look to the future (sci-fi such as Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.) and no one there debates this technology vs. that except to the extent that shields may be comprimised. And even on this point the solution is timing or raw power and not necessarily a particular type of shield, i.e. "raise shields...NOW" and not raise the Microsoft Shileds TM...NOW or the Oracle Shields, etc. Technology is simply expected to work. If I use a tricorder I expect a connection to be established over perhaps thousands of miles. Granted, the companies don't exist at this point for the users to debate one implementation vs. another. I guess a good opposing example of this would be the original RoboCop movie. This movie has cutting edge technology developed by two companies battling it out for the metropolian dollar. After the battle is won, though, we get RoboCop II and RoboCop III (bad movies IMHO) where the technology simply works and the RoboCop does its job fighting crime. RoboCop no longer has to justify its worth over another implementation. But back to the main point, why if we can say to our computer, "Computer...get me a chocolate chip milkshake" a la Star Trek wouldn't we also, as programmers, someday be able to tell the computer to build its own software to create someone a chocolate chip milkshake. Through iterative develoment over time (meaning generations and not years), similar to the industrial revolution, we may be programmers hundreds of years in the future wondering how we could have ever lived doing the low-level coding that we do now. Just a thought. Andy
Slashdot Mirror
Raising the price without raising the profit is something I would think that people interested in "trade" would be clearly against
Maybe in the first world. If you are a delegate from the third world you may be interested in tarrifs. Since you can't tax your own people enough to support your government you may have to rely on taxing imports to generate revenue.
On a similar note, we in the first world had to experience the unfair labor laws, child exploitation, and unsanitary and downright lifethreatening work environments as we navigated the industrial revolution. Now that we find ourselves navigating the information revolution we (President Clinton, the Seattle protesters, silent first-world citizens nodding in affirmation) believe that we can impose labor standards on these developing countries despite their cost of implemenation. Why would we think another country must implement our standards and not have to go through the same growing pains we had to in order to get to where we are?
Finally...
you've got to be pretty evil to get a super-apathetic American public so pissed off as to go into the streets and protest in those numbers.
It's not an apathetic public that is protesting. You have a very organized protest that has been in the making for months. They annouced their objectives months ago, and Seattle has no one to blame except themselves for the crisis. They could have planned better. Still, the AFL-CIO is helping to organize the protesters, and why not? Labor standards (read socialism) is their goal. If they can export their beliefs perhaps they can have a voice in the rule of government which adopt those beliefs.(NY Times) include the Sierra Club, United Steelworkers of America, and various smaller groups.
They are definitely a well-organized group with a self-serving message to be heard.
+ 25 pts. on the stock and $50 billion in market cap.
As a public service here's my salary history w/experience
I hope that helps at least for this part of the country. And this comes from someone who started out knowing absolutley nothing.
*They* don't call it Black Monday for nuthin'.
Actually, anyone serious about investing will buy and hold for a long period of time - say 10 to 15 years or more. MS even broken up will probably continue to generate high rates of return for stockholders even after taking an inital, short-term hit in its stock price.
We all laugh at Dave Barry (and if you don't you've been at your crt too long), and this is nothing but the same.
Perhaps we won't *see* nanotechnology. That's the scary part.
But to their credit, if you take the time working through all the options you can usually turn all that stuff off and create a pretty decent text editor.
Given quite a bit of talk about women's role and contribution to the technical world around here lately, though, I wonder if that's the reason for it's posting.
In previous discussions on /. we find comments about not having the women's perspective, we (men) are not even conscious of what we're missing in our projects if we don't have the women's perspective, etc. As I read through the links I noticed that these women faced and overcame the same technical challenges, answered the same technical questions, and completed a technical project in much the same way any man would.
I applaud them for their amazing work. I'm just a software developer, I couldn't comprehend developing a project of their scope as an undergraduate, and certainly not in 10 months with other classes and projects to take care of at the same time. Perhaps our concern with underrepresentation of women in the technical fields is unwarranted. We all face the same challenges and overcome them in similar, analytical ways.
- Colnago
I'll be there are geeks up there somewhere, just not in office. Someone's gotta run the networks. This just shows that no geek will ever be able to outsmart the most ignorant users - Geeks have a vision of how the system should be used, ignorant users don't.
Since the actual representatives probably never see or use the email system, congressional aides provide a layer of abstraction and encapsulation, even huge email outages probably won't make a legislative difference.
Sometimes I think the low level discussions bantered about here can lose sight of the high level business that need to survive and thrive from day to day. These are businesses that support and provide for (as our beloved Clinton would say) our families, neighborhoods, and children.
At the same time these businesses pay taxes. Taxes support the FCC and other (IMO useless and needless) regulatory agencies. You can derive the rest of the story. Obviously I'm a capitalist (hope that doesn't kill moderation).
FYI an investment of about $30 even one year ago in NYSE:AOL would be worth about $110 today, almost 300% rise. NASD:ATHM a year ago was $22 and is now $45, over 100%. Contrast that to most corporations where raises are managed to 3.5% across the board. I'd take stock ownership over a job any day.
In the meantime,
I however have a choice because I am connected to the system, if nothing else through my friends, my job, and through Slashdot
Which systems are you not connected to? I would suppose many more than you, or any of us, are connected to. As you stated quite well, our choices of friends, jobs, and sources of information are part of what connect us to particular systems.
if everyone is part of the system, everyone is affected
I would debate that everyone may not be part of the system. If everyone is part of the system perhaps some participants interact with the very outer fringe with no need or desire to understand why the system evolves.
Within the systems we choose to monitor we can act on a particular sphere of influence. Outside of these influences we are ignorant of strengths and deficiencies of an infinite number of other systems.
Deficiencies exist in every system, and they cause or drive a system's evolution. If there were balanced participation by men and women some deficiencies may be addressed, some strenghts may atrophy into deficiency. And again a strength and a deficiency are only so from the perspective of the particular audience.
Sorry about all the abstract language. I guess if I think about the women I know their not going to allow us to close the world off to women.
Andy
You are so weird.
Only if I get to be the first to push you down the hill...
Chill, no sweat, whatever you say! Some of us want an earlier retirement, but we won't get it, even if we ask the right people.
Hmmm....interesting....but looks like fun!
You must be on break.
If I get one of those, I'm keeping it for myself!! :-)
What in the world IS that?
Where do you find these things? :)
What in the world is that thing? And don't tell me it's a Zorb!
you're nuts.
I wouldn't say this is a correction more than an adjustment. At the risk of sounding chauvenistic I suppose women would have to want to contribute to the open source movement.
slightly better in the EE department, of like 8:1, but that's still pretty bad
I don't think that bad adequately describes the ratios here. Perhaps lopsided, and lopsided may not be bad. When my team (Browns, Indians, pretty much everything Cleveland) has a lopsided victory I'm pretty fired up. I suppose the losing teams fans may describe it as a bad loss. So bad, I guess, is a matter of perspective and the vision of the end result.
If women don't participate in this exciting new revolution, the internet, e-commerce, and Open Source, among others, will they be left behind? Will there be a missing perspective? How do we change this?
I (a man) graduated with an English Lit degree and the ratios in my major were probably in the neighborhood described above. I suppose similar ratios exist in education.
I don't recall the women trying to figure out what to do to change this, no one wondered if the men would be left behind or if they could provide a missing perspective. In fact I would argue that those so absorbed in science and technology may be missing out in the fascinating world of literature (or maybe not).
Back to my original point of wanting to participate in the open source revolution, perhaps they just have better things to do. Only recently has my wife decided to learn how to email, and that's only because her friends asked her if she got their email. My wife got tired of asking if I'd received the email yet and then having me describe what it said.
I would never discount her contribution to society as a wonderful mother. I would never discount the contributions of women teachers and journalists (ok, well maybe the journalists). It took other women to motivate my wife to get barely interested in computers. If we really need women then perhaps the women contributors are the best advocates for change. Perhaps the men shouldn't concern themselves with deficiencies in the system.
But the proverbial "they" said the same types of things about the horseless carriage, electricity, html framesets, and pretty much every new technology to come along.
In the course of human events I'm sure the videophone will find its place, grow in size, and be useful for at least half of the things it proponents advocate.
The jist is that the aggregate auction sites continuously spider the 2.8 million items on ebay's site multiple times each day. Given their current scaling problems I can see why ebay would like to go it alone.
Obviously, if they can't solve the scaling problems and the public chooses auction portals over the single ebay site then ebay may have problems. For now they certainly have name recognition to get 'em through the short term.
Andy
I understand the feelings here. Some time ago I read a book on C algorithims and wished I had some reason to write binary tree code. Because many of us are Linux users we enjoy low-level detail. How can we make our software work better, how fast can we *really* run our processors, what fancy code can we create to save the extra millisecond. Meanwhile the rest of the first world curses the need to do such things. In the second world you would be lucky to see a computer. Never mind the third world. Could these other worlds even understand the issues we debate here - mainstream citizens and not the techies that I'm sure exist on some level in every society. Yet we look to the future (sci-fi such as Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.) and no one there debates this technology vs. that except to the extent that shields may be comprimised. And even on this point the solution is timing or raw power and not necessarily a particular type of shield, i.e. "raise shields...NOW" and not raise the Microsoft Shileds TM...NOW or the Oracle Shields, etc. Technology is simply expected to work. If I use a tricorder I expect a connection to be established over perhaps thousands of miles. Granted, the companies don't exist at this point for the users to debate one implementation vs. another. I guess a good opposing example of this would be the original RoboCop movie. This movie has cutting edge technology developed by two companies battling it out for the metropolian dollar. After the battle is won, though, we get RoboCop II and RoboCop III (bad movies IMHO) where the technology simply works and the RoboCop does its job fighting crime. RoboCop no longer has to justify its worth over another implementation. But back to the main point, why if we can say to our computer, "Computer...get me a chocolate chip milkshake" a la Star Trek wouldn't we also, as programmers, someday be able to tell the computer to build its own software to create someone a chocolate chip milkshake. Through iterative develoment over time (meaning generations and not years), similar to the industrial revolution, we may be programmers hundreds of years in the future wondering how we could have ever lived doing the low-level coding that we do now. Just a thought. Andy