That's truly awful design for this kind of application. I suppose you're going to tell us next that's it's also statically linked!
The original's still the best!
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The Mac version of Office is IMHO quite superior to the Windows version. It just works and it is much more unobtrusive. My main gripes with the Windows version have been it offering a little too much help when I just want to get some work done and the sometimes seemingly random manner that it shows special toolbars. Never had any of these problems in the Mac version.
I hope someday they port it to Windows, even!;)
I've noticed that if I change the settings on my video card (I have a GeForce FX 5900XT) under "Digital Flat Panel" to "Video Card Scaling" (actually, I prefer "Aspect Ratio Scaling" even better), the picture at sub-optimal resolutions looks outstanding. Apparently what it does is use the scaling features of the video card to output a lower resolution to the monitor at the monitor's optimal resolution. Seriously, you need to try it and see it for yourself, but it can be night and day for certain monitors.
I was paying more than $10k/year rent living in South Jamaica, Queens... $10k/year you can't even afford to live in one of the most crime-ridden, disgusting places in America!
You can't compare apples and oranges here. World per capita income may be $10k/year, but the cost of living, largely driven by taxation and greed, is much different in the US than in other places.
I have an internet connection because it costs $70 plus the cost of calls to have Verizon phone service. Or, I can get cable internet for $50 plus unlimited calling on VoIP for $20. Do the math. A telephone is a necessity.
The problem is that no one wants to fix the educational system in this country. No one wants to be told that their kid isn't "good enough"/"smart enough" to study academics. So everyone goes to college, even the less intelligent who would be better off learning a manual trade. What this does is water down the academic environment and dumb it down so that the ones who probably ought to be pursuing higher studies don't bother. I have a 144 IQ and I became totally disillusioned with the whole idea of going to school when I realized that I was taking harder classes than other students in my school, but you know what? We would end up with the same grades and the same diploma in the end. I worked harder and probably had more talent, yet I don't get any advantage by that. The only thing that really acts as any sort of real qualifier for higher learning are standardized test scores because they are standardized. But now you have this whole movement trying to discredit the SAT and make it so that the playing field is more even. The problem is that not everyone has the same intellectual potential. But in America, "all men are created equal." A real problem.
Not to mention that education is way too expensive. Too many high-priced private institutions and even the public institutions that are academically decent cost thousands of dollars to attend.
If we had the same educational standards in place that are seen abroad, things would be much better for us here in the US.
Actually I've been posting on/. for years. I don't know why it took me this long to actually register. It never really bothered me being "Anonymous Coward". Actually, it's one of the things that drew me to/. because I always hate registering.:-)
But you make an interesting point about MCSA salary being on average $47k (in 2003). The problem is that no one seems to care that I have years of experience as a NetWare/UNIX administrator. Because I don't feel like spending a couple thousand dollars to get the all-holy certification that puts those magic letters "CNE" or "CSA" next to my name, my resume probably goes right into the round file. It used to kill me years ago when I would go on interviews and potential employers would ask me if I had MCSE certification for NT 4.0. And I would ask them why I should spend my hard-earned cash to have some instructor with probably 3 months experience with Windows NT certify me in an operating system I have been doing installations and maintenance of since Advanced Server 3.1.
I've been programming since 1981. I know just about every operating system that runs on an x86 processor inside and out (and quite a few that don't run on x86). The problem is that no one wants to hire a hacker. They want to hire alphabet soup!
God forbid you should actually know what you're doing. It's more important that you pay into the system and shell out big bucks to Microsoft, Novell, Sun, et al. I've been hacking on Linux since the.99 kernel for crying out loud. I remember the fscking SLS distribution and how Patrick Volkerding started Slackware as an improvement upon SLS, back when your choices of Linux distro were basically SLS and TAMU or hack your own. Why on earth should I have to pay Red Hat money to get certified when I've been on Linux since before there was a Red Hat?!
Actually, one of the things I probably had going for me at my government job was that they had an old VAX that everyone was afraid of that had been inherited from the previous administration. They seemed to like the fact that I actually knew my way around VMS. But I suppose that's probably a unique thing in the public sector. In the corporate world, they'd probably just shell out for a support contract from whoever Digital's successor is these days (Intel?) and have them deal with it rather than hiring someone in house to maintain it.
taxes contribute nothing..
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Of course, you're probably used to the idea that in a socialist country, your taxes actually go towards contributing to society. Here in America, your paying taxes does nothing but offset tax breaks given to the wealthy, incentives for companies to do business abroad, and pursue a foreign policy of domination and world hegemony. In the meantime, most of us are forced to take jobs that we are overqualified for and underpaid at just to get some kind of health insurance for our families. After all, the poverty level is set ridiculously low in this country. You have to be almost penniless to qualify for any kind of government assistance (or super-rich, then the government will gladly throw tax breaks and incentives your way). There are days when I have actually had to miss work because I couldn't afford gas to put in the car because I spent it on food. I miss qualifying for food stamps by something like $2000 a year income. Think about that. Between my wife and myself, we have three jobs, and still every last penny we earn goes to pay rent, utilities, gas, and food. I am three months behind paying bills because we had some emergency medical and dental bills come up, and we have insurance! Only in America!
Honestly, look at it from my perspective. I'd love to get a job in Germany and have all the benefits a German citizen would have while I'm there. And I speak better German than most guest workers in the US speak English! But it would never happen... it doesn't work like that. We are entirely too accommodating to other peoples of the world without any sort of reciprocation. We are being taken advantage of, and we are the ones hurting from it.
Forget Germany for a second. Do you think that Chinese companies are going to try to hire out-of-work American programmers? And do you think the Chinese government is going to provide all the benefits of society to the American guest worker, including equal protection under the law, that America provides to its guests? No!!
It's about time that we started demanding an even playing field on the world labor stage. American workers have a right to the same standard of living as European workers. And we also have the same right as the Europeans to keep foreigners from taking our livelihoods away from us.
Excuse me if you think I'm being a little harsh on foreign workers. I don't mean to be. My wife is a very recent immigrant from Africa. The problem is not the foreign workers. The problem is America. And the H1B program is just one more symptom of a larger problem of America selling out its own people so that the elite can amass greater fortune.
It really pains me to say this, since my wife is an immigrant from Angola. But I seriously think we need to close the borders. And we need to penalize (tax heavily) any company that has a presence abroad. Set high tariffs. Let's not subsidize the rest of the world anymore. They want us to consume, consume, consume. Well, two things here: A) If we don't have jobs, we won't have money to spend. B) If you want our money, then keep your business here, hire Americans, and contribute to our society rather than leeching from it. Do you think China would put up with this crap if they were in our position? Hell no! And we shouldn't either!
and that's exactly why you _shouldn't_ be hired
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
You contribute nothing to this country. You take the money and leave and bring your experience and money back to Europe. Meanwhile, poor Joes like us have to struggle unemployed or underemployed trying to keep our families fed, bills paid, and a roof over our heads so that we can live here!
which are you, a manager or a foreigner?
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
I have 8 years of tech experiences, including 6 as an IT administrator/help desk specialist. I left my job to join the Army, got hurt in basic training. When I returned, I could not find tech work anywhere. I did Monster.com, I did CareerBuilder, I sent my resume to everyone, civil service, you name it. I did this for almost a year, no results. In the meantime, I had to work at Staples for $8/hour. Of course, it took me over a month just to get this job. I was so desperate, I was applying at McDonald's, local supermarkets, you name it because I was getting literally no calls back for any tech work other than temp jobs. I have a wife and kid and I wanted a permanent position. Eventually, I was able to get a $34k job through a temp agency, which ended up being a permanent position, but it is in a call center as a compliance investigator for a pharmaceutical company. I was discharged from the Army in June 2004. I used to make $63k working for the federal government in IT before I left. Now my wife has to work full-time at Taco Bell for $7/hr plus do weekend work as a home health aide for $8/hr just so we can keep up with all the debt incurred during the 9 months I was stuck with no job or with Staples.
Don't tell me that H1B has no bearing on availability of jobs. I called the IT department at one place I used to work at to get a reference, and no one was still there from when I worked there (1997-1998). Every single name on the greeting was Russian or Chinese.
I'm very well qualified, but not hireable because why would someone pay me $60k-70k when they can get someone who doesn't have the experience, but might have a little more education and get them to work for $40k-50k? It's simple economics.
Slashdot Mirror
Now Exxon/Esso has merged with Mobil.
Amoco was acquired by British Petroleum (bp)... that's outrageous! Didn't we fight the War of 1812 to prevent such a thing?!
I'm soooo glad that OOo 2.0 only uses 211 MB of RAM as opposed to 221 megs for 1.1.14. Now I can get rid of that swap partition...
That's truly awful design for this kind of application. I suppose you're going to tell us next that's it's also statically linked!
The Mac version of Office is IMHO quite superior to the Windows version. It just works and it is much more unobtrusive. My main gripes with the Windows version have been it offering a little too much help when I just want to get some work done and the sometimes seemingly random manner that it shows special toolbars. Never had any of these problems in the Mac version. I hope someday they port it to Windows, even! ;)
heck.. who even needs OpenOffice, when you have ex!
I've noticed that if I change the settings on my video card (I have a GeForce FX 5900XT) under "Digital Flat Panel" to "Video Card Scaling" (actually, I prefer "Aspect Ratio Scaling" even better), the picture at sub-optimal resolutions looks outstanding. Apparently what it does is use the scaling features of the video card to output a lower resolution to the monitor at the monitor's optimal resolution. Seriously, you need to try it and see it for yourself, but it can be night and day for certain monitors.
I was paying more than $10k/year rent living in South Jamaica, Queens... $10k/year you can't even afford to live in one of the most crime-ridden, disgusting places in America!
You can't compare apples and oranges here. World per capita income may be $10k/year, but the cost of living, largely driven by taxation and greed, is much different in the US than in other places.
I have an internet connection because it costs $70 plus the cost of calls to have Verizon phone service. Or, I can get cable internet for $50 plus unlimited calling on VoIP for $20. Do the math. A telephone is a necessity. The problem is that no one wants to fix the educational system in this country. No one wants to be told that their kid isn't "good enough"/"smart enough" to study academics. So everyone goes to college, even the less intelligent who would be better off learning a manual trade. What this does is water down the academic environment and dumb it down so that the ones who probably ought to be pursuing higher studies don't bother. I have a 144 IQ and I became totally disillusioned with the whole idea of going to school when I realized that I was taking harder classes than other students in my school, but you know what? We would end up with the same grades and the same diploma in the end. I worked harder and probably had more talent, yet I don't get any advantage by that. The only thing that really acts as any sort of real qualifier for higher learning are standardized test scores because they are standardized. But now you have this whole movement trying to discredit the SAT and make it so that the playing field is more even. The problem is that not everyone has the same intellectual potential. But in America, "all men are created equal." A real problem. Not to mention that education is way too expensive. Too many high-priced private institutions and even the public institutions that are academically decent cost thousands of dollars to attend. If we had the same educational standards in place that are seen abroad, things would be much better for us here in the US.
Actually I've been posting on /. for years. I don't know why it took me this long to actually register. It never really bothered me being "Anonymous Coward". Actually, it's one of the things that drew me to /. because I always hate registering. :-)
But you make an interesting point about MCSA salary being on average $47k (in 2003). The problem is that no one seems to care that I have years of experience as a NetWare/UNIX administrator. Because I don't feel like spending a couple thousand dollars to get the all-holy certification that puts those magic letters "CNE" or "CSA" next to my name, my resume probably goes right into the round file. It used to kill me years ago when I would go on interviews and potential employers would ask me if I had MCSE certification for NT 4.0. And I would ask them why I should spend my hard-earned cash to have some instructor with probably 3 months experience with Windows NT certify me in an operating system I have been doing installations and maintenance of since Advanced Server 3.1.
I've been programming since 1981. I know just about every operating system that runs on an x86 processor inside and out (and quite a few that don't run on x86). The problem is that no one wants to hire a hacker. They want to hire alphabet soup!
God forbid you should actually know what you're doing. It's more important that you pay into the system and shell out big bucks to Microsoft, Novell, Sun, et al. I've been hacking on Linux since the .99 kernel for crying out loud. I remember the fscking SLS distribution and how Patrick Volkerding started Slackware as an improvement upon SLS, back when your choices of Linux distro were basically SLS and TAMU or hack your own. Why on earth should I have to pay Red Hat money to get certified when I've been on Linux since before there was a Red Hat?!
Actually, one of the things I probably had going for me at my government job was that they had an old VAX that everyone was afraid of that had been inherited from the previous administration. They seemed to like the fact that I actually knew my way around VMS. But I suppose that's probably a unique thing in the public sector. In the corporate world, they'd probably just shell out for a support contract from whoever Digital's successor is these days (Intel?) and have them deal with it rather than hiring someone in house to maintain it.
Of course, you're probably used to the idea that in a socialist country, your taxes actually go towards contributing to society. Here in America, your paying taxes does nothing but offset tax breaks given to the wealthy, incentives for companies to do business abroad, and pursue a foreign policy of domination and world hegemony. In the meantime, most of us are forced to take jobs that we are overqualified for and underpaid at just to get some kind of health insurance for our families. After all, the poverty level is set ridiculously low in this country. You have to be almost penniless to qualify for any kind of government assistance (or super-rich, then the government will gladly throw tax breaks and incentives your way). There are days when I have actually had to miss work because I couldn't afford gas to put in the car because I spent it on food. I miss qualifying for food stamps by something like $2000 a year income. Think about that. Between my wife and myself, we have three jobs, and still every last penny we earn goes to pay rent, utilities, gas, and food. I am three months behind paying bills because we had some emergency medical and dental bills come up, and we have insurance! Only in America! Honestly, look at it from my perspective. I'd love to get a job in Germany and have all the benefits a German citizen would have while I'm there. And I speak better German than most guest workers in the US speak English! But it would never happen... it doesn't work like that. We are entirely too accommodating to other peoples of the world without any sort of reciprocation. We are being taken advantage of, and we are the ones hurting from it. Forget Germany for a second. Do you think that Chinese companies are going to try to hire out-of-work American programmers? And do you think the Chinese government is going to provide all the benefits of society to the American guest worker, including equal protection under the law, that America provides to its guests? No!! It's about time that we started demanding an even playing field on the world labor stage. American workers have a right to the same standard of living as European workers. And we also have the same right as the Europeans to keep foreigners from taking our livelihoods away from us. Excuse me if you think I'm being a little harsh on foreign workers. I don't mean to be. My wife is a very recent immigrant from Africa. The problem is not the foreign workers. The problem is America. And the H1B program is just one more symptom of a larger problem of America selling out its own people so that the elite can amass greater fortune.
It really pains me to say this, since my wife is an immigrant from Angola. But I seriously think we need to close the borders. And we need to penalize (tax heavily) any company that has a presence abroad. Set high tariffs. Let's not subsidize the rest of the world anymore. They want us to consume, consume, consume. Well, two things here: A) If we don't have jobs, we won't have money to spend. B) If you want our money, then keep your business here, hire Americans, and contribute to our society rather than leeching from it. Do you think China would put up with this crap if they were in our position? Hell no! And we shouldn't either!
You contribute nothing to this country. You take the money and leave and bring your experience and money back to Europe. Meanwhile, poor Joes like us have to struggle unemployed or underemployed trying to keep our families fed, bills paid, and a roof over our heads so that we can live here!
I have 8 years of tech experiences, including 6 as an IT administrator/help desk specialist. I left my job to join the Army, got hurt in basic training. When I returned, I could not find tech work anywhere. I did Monster.com, I did CareerBuilder, I sent my resume to everyone, civil service, you name it. I did this for almost a year, no results. In the meantime, I had to work at Staples for $8/hour. Of course, it took me over a month just to get this job. I was so desperate, I was applying at McDonald's, local supermarkets, you name it because I was getting literally no calls back for any tech work other than temp jobs. I have a wife and kid and I wanted a permanent position. Eventually, I was able to get a $34k job through a temp agency, which ended up being a permanent position, but it is in a call center as a compliance investigator for a pharmaceutical company. I was discharged from the Army in June 2004. I used to make $63k working for the federal government in IT before I left. Now my wife has to work full-time at Taco Bell for $7/hr plus do weekend work as a home health aide for $8/hr just so we can keep up with all the debt incurred during the 9 months I was stuck with no job or with Staples.
Don't tell me that H1B has no bearing on availability of jobs. I called the IT department at one place I used to work at to get a reference, and no one was still there from when I worked there (1997-1998). Every single name on the greeting was Russian or Chinese.
I'm very well qualified, but not hireable because why would someone pay me $60k-70k when they can get someone who doesn't have the experience, but might have a little more education and get them to work for $40k-50k? It's simple economics.
Think about this next time you vote Republican.