Doesn't matter much, IIRC. You can just go back to a v2 GPL version, fork it off under v2 GPL, and take it from there. Of course, if the fork is so long ago that you'd be reinventing the wheel then it might work.
The only people who need unions are lazy folks, people without foresight, or people without initiative.
You're either willfully ignoring the historic effects of the labor movement, or you're ignorant of what those effects actually were:
40 hour week/8 hour day (35 hours in much of Europe)
Overtime pay
Child labor laws
Equal pay for equal work
Right to a living wage
Paid holidays
Weekends
Health, life, and dental benefits
Expectation of a safe work environment (OSHA in the US)
Right to quit your job (it was not unheard of for employment contracts to be as strict as today's cellular agreements)
Protection from unwarranted dismissal (can't be fired without reasonable cause)
Right to organize (form unions)
Those would not have happened without the labor movement and, specifically, unionized labor. I don't know if you value any of those, but I do. You can certainly argue that trade unions are causing harm today and have reached the end of their usefullness, but I'm not going to stand by while you spit on the men who -- often quite literally -- died for those rights which you now seem to dismiss so readily.
Of course, some "Right to Work" states in the US have revoked some of these worker rights (yes, it was a misnomer to trick people into voting for it). I'm not even going to touch the stupidity of that one.
Sounds like the Canadian IT members are looking to do the same thing I'm thinking of here. That's good.
Obviously letters after your name don't mean you don't have to work and do a good job. We've all met those A+ guys who can't even find the CPU in the system, or the MCSE who doesn't know what a domain controller is. For that matter, we've also all probably met or heard of the PhD without a lick of sense about how things work in the real world, or the M.D. who is incapable of treating patients because he hasn't got the patience to connect with them.
I don't know how the NSPE is structured internally, or what checks they have to ensure their members are competent. Nevertheless, engineering is a field that is at least as diverse as Computer Science has become, and they're obviously managing quite well. It's a model I think we could emulate with some benefit.
I dunno. I'm not a coder, I'm a sysadmin with 2 years experience. Asking me to design the reqirements to qualify as a "professional application developer" makes as much sense as asking me what the new features in Linux 2.8 ought to be.
No, it's not easy to set up. Things that are meaningful and useful are often difficult to do.
Yes, because we certainly don't want to improve the quality of IT workers or have any means to show that certain people are actually in IT as a profession instead of a second career they fell into. I mean, it's not like employers are looking for competence.
Not every Engineer is a member of NSPE (or the respective state affiliates). PEs are like the Registered Nurses of the Engineering world. They have more respect, more authority, get better jobs, and get better pay.
I grew up in Michigan, too. I would very much argue that auto unions combined with poor corporate management have resulted in the terrible state of the auto industry in the state. Greed on both sides of the table has ruined the pie.
However, I can point to one group of workers who desperately *should* have a union: Wal-Mart employees. Wal-Mart has a consistent track record of scheduling people for 39 hours, of paying very low wages, and generally treating their employees like disposable robots. A union would help resolve this problem, however whenever Wal-Mart employees begin to found such a union, Wal-Mart closes the store to prevent it from happening. Wal-Mart knows they're being unfair to their workers, and they close stores to keep it that way.
It's also important to remember what trade unions got us:
40 hour work week
Weekends off
Child labor laws
Expectations of a safe work environment (OSHA)
Living wages (this one has fallen off since the mid 70's)
Basic workers rights (Like, oh, the right to strike or quit at no penalty. Employment contracts used to have default clauses as bad as today's cellular agreements. Want to quit? Nope, you signed on for 5 years no matter what. You quit and you owe us money. That'll land you in debtor's prison.)
It is possible that unions have begun to outlive their purpose, but we do enjoy the benefits of their existence today.
What we need is an equivalent of the National Society of Professional Engineers. Engineers represent the best analogy to IT. There are Chem Engineers, Mechanical, Civil, etc. A multitude of very technical and highly trained professionals.
From the About page:
"Founded in 1934, NSPE strengthens the engineering profession by promoting engineering licensure and ethics, enhancing the engineer image, advocating and protecting PEs' legal rights at the national and state levels, publishing news of the profession, providing continuing education opportunities, and much more."
I play games because they're fun. I don't much care what they look like. I demand enjoyable gameplay, intuitive controls, replayability addictiveness, multiplayer, etc), and graphics that let me identify what something is 10 feet from the screen. Good music is always a bonus, too.
Nintendo has been the only game developer (yes game developer) to consistently provide a high level of quality in all of those areas. I will buy the Wii because Nintendo studios makes amazing games I can't get elsewhere. Mario and Zelda only continue to be popular because of the consistent quality and innovation of the games.
I think IBM is leery of developing a desktop OS. They didn't do to well with PC-DOS (entirely their fault). OS/2 never got much market presense. For server systems, they still have AIX. Couple that with the ongoing IBM/SCO court battle (IBM is obviously favored, but, hey, who knows what a jury might do?) and I don't see IBM developing a Linux distro any time soon. After SCO tanks and Linux starts gaining some desktop acceptance, most definitely.
Microsoft will probably never release a Linux-based OS as they exist now, but the market presence for Linux servers will only increase. Eventually, forced by market pressure, kicking and screaming, MS will develop an AD client for Linux systems.
And then old Bill will stand up. He'll look at all the Linux distributions spread out before him, he'll take out his wallet, and he'll say "Say, who would like be an exclusive parter with Microsoft?". And Linspire's hand will shoot up, waving back and forth wildly.
Linspire will still be a separate company -- well, a wholly owned subsidiary of MS. That will be the case just to keep that nasty GPL and FOSS legal stuff sandboxed away from all the proprietary code MS will still develop. MS will release the Linspire AD connector, and you won't see any code for that, I tell you what. Next we'll see Linspire Server. Then we'll see MS Office for Linspire (not Linux, just Linspire). And there'll be DRM and Trusted Computing added to Linspire in just the right places and just the right ways to make it illegal to reverse engineer (or even look at).
Yes, but we're not discussing something that requires an opinion on whether X is a microkernel is or a monolithic kernel. We're discussing whether the idea of a microkernel continues to be feasible.
Do you waste time arguing about MIT Kerberos vs MS Kerberos when discussing the need for a password policy? You might, but it doesn't really help the fact that your users have had the same password for 6 years and it's the one you assigned them when they were hired on: "changeMe".
I'm not saying I can't switch gears. I do all the time. I'm a sysadmin, and I do all the technical documentation for software installation and maintenance for about 300 applications (and I do it very well, thank you). If the topic of discussion is confiiguring a Cisco router or using Active Directory or any of a thousand other technical topics, then I can discuss them with you at length.
If, on the other hand, the discussion is about how, say, Active Directory changed network management and someone jumps in saying that AD isn't really LDAP, well, that might be true (it certainly is an arguable position) but it really doesn't matter if AD is LDAP or not if we want to discuss how it changed being sysadmin.
My complaint is that I keep finding people who themselves can't switch gears to have the discussion on the level that I want. Or, more often, the one I'm already having.
Here, the topic is whether the microkernel is a good design. Arguing about whether or not WinNT is a microkernel or a monolithic kernel is irrelevant. Does calling it a microkernel change the way it behaves? What about labelling it a monolithic design? Did you change the executable at all? And does labelling it change the fact that it has characteristics of both? And the fact that the phrase "hybrid kernel" has been used in ways you personally disagee with means that the phrase is dead to you? It's a massive foray off topic.
Ideas vs details, yes, that's it exactly. Many technical people either have trouble distinguishing one type of discussion from the other, or they tend to always argue against the details when they're irrelevant to the discussion. I consistently get exposed to people who just don't switch gears.
It's like discussing programming a BitTorrent protocol library and having someone say "but what is BitTirrent going to do to society?". You'd give such a person a pretty strange look, yes? Now imagine it's the other way. You're discussing the impact of the WWW on society, and someone comes up to you saying you should use HTTP 1.1. It's not quite that blatant, of course. (And if that disclaimer actually dissuaded you from posting a reply, you're guilty of being caught up in the semantics and ignoring the meaning.)
You're trying to use my metaphor as you wish to use it rather than trying to understand why I used it in the way I did. It's a metaphor. It's not a perfect metaphor. It's just intended to give you an idea of what I'm saying, not how the OSI model or the TCP/IP stack works.
Context and overall meaning are more important than petty semantics. That's all I'm saying. A semantic argument is a disagreement on terms, and it doesn't really serve to further the discussion.
It's rather like arguing the screw thrading on the Saturn V when the discussion is about the affects of the Apollo missions. It's relevant to the discussion, but only tangentally. And it's trivial to the core of the actual discussion.
Hey, as long as the CEO is willing to stake his SOX compliance on it. But don't come crying to me when he gets sent to PMITA prision for letting your financial information get mucked about with by some fifteen-year-old in Idaho.
You don't expect a carpenter to build a house with just a hammer. Don't expect me to protect your data with just a router and a tape backup.
Communication is a two-party affair. The listener is just as responsible for communicating an understandable message as the sender. In fact, it's almost exactly like TCP vs UDP. If you message is of any importance, you use TCP so that the recipient responds saying that it is recieved and understood (at least at the Transport layer).
You can choose to be like MS, I suppose, and require that everyone speak your language without telling us what that is, but that's rather rude.
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Doesn't matter much, IIRC. You can just go back to a v2 GPL version, fork it off under v2 GPL, and take it from there. Of course, if the fork is so long ago that you'd be reinventing the wheel then it might work.
How about buffer overflows, hash security, and ethical programming (no spyware/malware/viruses/piracy)? Is that a good start?
Those would not have happened without the labor movement and, specifically, unionized labor. I don't know if you value any of those, but I do. You can certainly argue that trade unions are causing harm today and have reached the end of their usefullness, but I'm not going to stand by while you spit on the men who -- often quite literally -- died for those rights which you now seem to dismiss so readily.
Of course, some "Right to Work" states in the US have revoked some of these worker rights (yes, it was a misnomer to trick people into voting for it). I'm not even going to touch the stupidity of that one.
[Note: Yes, I posted a similar list elsewhere.]
Obviously letters after your name don't mean you don't have to work and do a good job. We've all met those A+ guys who can't even find the CPU in the system, or the MCSE who doesn't know what a domain controller is. For that matter, we've also all probably met or heard of the PhD without a lick of sense about how things work in the real world, or the M.D. who is incapable of treating patients because he hasn't got the patience to connect with them.
I don't know how the NSPE is structured internally, or what checks they have to ensure their members are competent. Nevertheless, engineering is a field that is at least as diverse as Computer Science has become, and they're obviously managing quite well. It's a model I think we could emulate with some benefit.
No, it's not easy to set up. Things that are meaningful and useful are often difficult to do.
Not every Engineer is a member of NSPE (or the respective state affiliates). PEs are like the Registered Nurses of the Engineering world. They have more respect, more authority, get better jobs, and get better pay.
However, I can point to one group of workers who desperately *should* have a union: Wal-Mart employees. Wal-Mart has a consistent track record of scheduling people for 39 hours, of paying very low wages, and generally treating their employees like disposable robots. A union would help resolve this problem, however whenever Wal-Mart employees begin to found such a union, Wal-Mart closes the store to prevent it from happening. Wal-Mart knows they're being unfair to their workers, and they close stores to keep it that way.
It's also important to remember what trade unions got us:
It is possible that unions have begun to outlive their purpose, but we do enjoy the benefits of their existence today.
Hey, it worked for Enron!
From the About page:
I'd like to get me some of that.Nintendo has been the only game developer (yes game developer) to consistently provide a high level of quality in all of those areas. I will buy the Wii because Nintendo studios makes amazing games I can't get elsewhere. Mario and Zelda only continue to be popular because of the consistent quality and innovation of the games.
I think IBM is leery of developing a desktop OS. They didn't do to well with PC-DOS (entirely their fault). OS/2 never got much market presense. For server systems, they still have AIX. Couple that with the ongoing IBM/SCO court battle (IBM is obviously favored, but, hey, who knows what a jury might do?) and I don't see IBM developing a Linux distro any time soon. After SCO tanks and Linux starts gaining some desktop acceptance, most definitely.
Well, you see, they're all at E3.
And then old Bill will stand up. He'll look at all the Linux distributions spread out before him, he'll take out his wallet, and he'll say "Say, who would like be an exclusive parter with Microsoft?". And Linspire's hand will shoot up, waving back and forth wildly.
Linspire will still be a separate company -- well, a wholly owned subsidiary of MS. That will be the case just to keep that nasty GPL and FOSS legal stuff sandboxed away from all the proprietary code MS will still develop. MS will release the Linspire AD connector, and you won't see any code for that, I tell you what. Next we'll see Linspire Server. Then we'll see MS Office for Linspire (not Linux, just Linspire). And there'll be DRM and Trusted Computing added to Linspire in just the right places and just the right ways to make it illegal to reverse engineer (or even look at).
Windows is dead. Long live Windows!
Linux people don't go outside. Their weather is always 65 F with 30% humidity.
You're getting your news from a site that currently has a Pirate vs Ninja poll on the front page.
It's not the size that counts! It's how you use it!
Yes, the phrase for scientific study is "statistically significant".
Do you waste time arguing about MIT Kerberos vs MS Kerberos when discussing the need for a password policy? You might, but it doesn't really help the fact that your users have had the same password for 6 years and it's the one you assigned them when they were hired on: "changeMe".
I'm not saying I can't switch gears. I do all the time. I'm a sysadmin, and I do all the technical documentation for software installation and maintenance for about 300 applications (and I do it very well, thank you). If the topic of discussion is confiiguring a Cisco router or using Active Directory or any of a thousand other technical topics, then I can discuss them with you at length.
If, on the other hand, the discussion is about how, say, Active Directory changed network management and someone jumps in saying that AD isn't really LDAP, well, that might be true (it certainly is an arguable position) but it really doesn't matter if AD is LDAP or not if we want to discuss how it changed being sysadmin.
My complaint is that I keep finding people who themselves can't switch gears to have the discussion on the level that I want. Or, more often, the one I'm already having.
Here, the topic is whether the microkernel is a good design. Arguing about whether or not WinNT is a microkernel or a monolithic kernel is irrelevant. Does calling it a microkernel change the way it behaves? What about labelling it a monolithic design? Did you change the executable at all? And does labelling it change the fact that it has characteristics of both? And the fact that the phrase "hybrid kernel" has been used in ways you personally disagee with means that the phrase is dead to you? It's a massive foray off topic.
It's like discussing programming a BitTorrent protocol library and having someone say "but what is BitTirrent going to do to society?". You'd give such a person a pretty strange look, yes? Now imagine it's the other way. You're discussing the impact of the WWW on society, and someone comes up to you saying you should use HTTP 1.1. It's not quite that blatant, of course. (And if that disclaimer actually dissuaded you from posting a reply, you're guilty of being caught up in the semantics and ignoring the meaning.)
You're trying to use my metaphor as you wish to use it rather than trying to understand why I used it in the way I did. It's a metaphor. It's not a perfect metaphor. It's just intended to give you an idea of what I'm saying, not how the OSI model or the TCP/IP stack works.
Context and overall meaning are more important than petty semantics. That's all I'm saying. A semantic argument is a disagreement on terms, and it doesn't really serve to further the discussion.
It's rather like arguing the screw thrading on the Saturn V when the discussion is about the affects of the Apollo missions. It's relevant to the discussion, but only tangentally. And it's trivial to the core of the actual discussion.
It's rather telling that what you've just said is exactly what I've been trying to say.
You don't expect a carpenter to build a house with just a hammer. Don't expect me to protect your data with just a router and a tape backup.
You can choose to be like MS, I suppose, and require that everyone speak your language without telling us what that is, but that's rather rude.