> I have no idea how come religion (specifically, christianism)
Calvinism, in a word.
If you're rich, it's because God has seen fit to bestow His favors upon you. If you're poor, it's because God has withheld His favors.
Once again: Rich==Good Poor==Bad
Because of this, you can never have enough, and in particular, you can never have a big enough gap between you and then next rung on the ladder. Competitiveness is literally for Father's Love.
Anything that inhibits the pursuit of happiness (i.e. property) oppresses the ability for God to bestow grace, and thus is sacrilege. Also, it's only okay to provide charity to people who are truly in miserable straights, because you are insulting others if you assume they need your help. And while you're providing charity you should probably mention that all their hardship would go away if they'd just be more the way God wants 'em to be.
What he's really saying is the same old "two for $5!" mentality: having cheap labor would help the economy (because the profits would be higher... so be advised that "cheap labor solves all problems" assumes you believe in trickle-down). He's actually NOT saying a thing about quality. This was already shown the last time there was a "shortage" of programmers. What there was, in fact, was a shortage of people who knew how to vett business concepts.
The reality is that those people who have been suckered by low-cost "wow-they're-just-the-same-as-here-or-even-better! " foreign skilled labor have learned the hard way what Michael Porter said over a decade ago: the people in the firm have to have some connection to the markets they serve in order for the company to create and maintain a competitive advantage. So: fine to outsource overseas lower-level customer-irrelevant jobs to markets those employees have zero familiarity with -- um, assuming you're not trying to cultivate internal talent and that you actually do have such jobs. Strategically idiotic to outsource leadership, creative control, or customer-interactive jobs.
I agree that in principle open is better than proprietary, and anything that actually works is better than Microsoft, but do you not understand that there's one big risk to "open" and that's instability. Not catastrophic instability, just change, and what to do about it, and who is going to be able to fix anything, and what are we doing, and how do I sell my Board on this, and....
It's not "cost of ownership," it's the cost of utter confusion. When you're perpetually under-resourced financially, the only thing you can use is time and relationships. If you have to use your time and relationships pulling in people to deal with Linux and Linux-based "openness issues" (if that's the *perception*, not necessarily the reality), then that's a huge cost.
If you want to hasten the adoption of open source software, volunteer your time to help people set up open systems. I can't stress this enough: technology people are NOTORIOUS for avoiding commitment to organizations. The organizations have to pay them actual money. Everything else, you can find a volunteer in a pinch. But technology? Hardly ever.
Technologists do volunteer to work with other technologists, but for an organization that has already made the fatal gaffe of even CONSIDERING Microsoft products? Feh, you know everyone ran away and left them stranded.
Look there's nothing in this world that's without money pressure other than (some peoples') childhood.
The fact is, even in Bell Labs of yesteryear -- which, don't forget, was a monopoly utility -- you'd better believe that there was a lot of competition. It may not have been explicitly for money, but just simply for "resources," like lab space and good people, the smart people had best be smart - at least widely recognized to be so by their peers if not the "bean-counters."
What you're confusing here is a first-job vs. a career. You want a career where, once you've proven yourself, it's relatively easy to be "valued" in a financial sense -- someone said something like this earlier, with respect of being to raise your children in the style you were raised; though I think that's not 100% controllable, that's the right idea.
So you need to think about not what you'll be doing 3 years out of school, but what you'll be doing in 15 years. See if you can visualize your life. If you want to be an expert in an intellectual domain, that's going to be in academia, because as yet you can't PUBLISH openly from within corporate labs, and so any impressive things you do will have to be obvious via patent search or word of mouth, but not because other academic departments request you to come travel to their conference and speak to their students about your current thoughts.
Still if you're working for government contract, you might not be able to say much. It's about openness and dialog, not about money. You will have to convince people throughout your life that you're worth money until your reputation has built to the point where everyone, pretty much, is convinced. That's just the way it goes.
There are Technology Transfer entities that reside between academia and corporations specifically in order to facilitate openness, and these might be helpful to you.
If you're female, you also might want to check out pay disparity research based on having procreated -- which reflect in part an idea surrounding a "good mother" in the U.S. being obessed with their child (i.e. not being obsessed => not a good mother) something that is not evidently assumed elsewhere in the world, notably in Europe. You don't mention whether you definitely must be in the United States.
It's also noteworthy that, to the best of my knowledge, only Stanford is willing to "time-out" the ticking clock of achieving tenure because of childbirth -- this is a very recent development on their part due to examining attracting top-notch faculty who are women. Implicit virtually throughout the US employment scene is the assumption that there's no one else in the universe a caring and loving mom would be willing to allow to take care of offspring and thereby lop off all kinds of opportunities and thereby financial remuneration to moms - up to 44% of pay, in fact. Or, of course, women just opt out and forego a challenging career because they don't perceive any alternative to fighting biased employment policies since the bias is only implicit. There's a (male) economist from Harvard who is also studying this phenomenon for non-white male cultures: that it's so much easier to succeed in an environment that doesn't require constantly fighting that people forego pay, status, and future career visibility in order to avoid constantly bumping up against implicit bias.
There is no good solution to this, but you should be aware of it in your negotiations particularly if you're female but also if you're married to a woman for whom this type of situation would be relevant.
The bottom line is that MySpace has surpassed everyone in hits. Hilarious, actually - has google been hoist by its own petard? Are conversations in MySpace coming up high in a google search BECAUSE MySpace is ginormous?
Google has to do a deal because its very algorithms are designed to create beauty queens that are worshipped by all while leaving the lovely and brilliant also-rans completely impossible to find.
Really, it's a game of telephone! Information distorted at every repetition.
The original work said that the number of intimate ties (best friends) went from 3 to 2. It didn't talk about good friends who are nevertheless not intimate friends. In fact, one of my closest friends in the world I talk with every 5 years or so, and it would be more frequently if only she were willing to use email (I had no idea she was a luddite when I befriended her at age 3).
For example, the cited article says,
Increased use of the Internet, along with the number of hours people are spending at work, are factors contributing to a drastic decline in the number of close friends that Americans have. [...]The average number of people who respondents said they discuss important matters fell from about three to two.
OK, so there's your drastic decline: three to two. Seems like we're talking a very elite level of friendship, even though the headline was phrased as though it was a social circle. Maybe it has something to do with the integrity of extended families that adults in 1984 were thinking about vs. those that we, in 2006 are thinking about, which has nothing to do with technology at all, but with workforce mobility and the increase in the divorce rate in the 70's -- and they were bitter, awful divorces.
And btw the "along with the number of hours people are spending at work," I believe is from another article ABOUT the research, based on a quote by Bowling Alone author, Putnam.
Well, the problems with the budget are embedded in which programs are being cut and which are being promoted. If we weren't funding an enormous war due to (being generous) "poor planning," and if we had a tax policy that didn't believe allowing people with 100's of millions of dollars to retain a bit more was a good way to increase economic activity, we'd have significantly more funding to invest domestically in things like education.
I agree - after being in the Midwest for 15 years, you'd better be well prepared to assume it's a provincial life, be a yes-man if you're lucky enough to be a northern-European derived male, and take a 30% pay cut if you're a woman or look like you might have a heritage from another part of the globe.
Frankly my experience is the old saw: A people hire A people (and their high standards of excellence and inherent need to express them); B people hire C people (and their willingness to subsume what they believe to be right in favor of short-term goals).
The US economy will recover on not based on how many businesses in the US recover. They won't recover when managers crush dissent.
The guy did all kinds of analysis on every variable except one: the value of the trade-in (about $4000) and the amount owed on the current car ($0).
All he was basically saying was that he and his wife couldn't afford a whole new car out of the gas savings.
If he'd have stated that as his question up front, I wouldn't have bothered to waste time reading it.
> I have no idea how come religion (specifically, christianism)
Calvinism, in a word.
If you're rich, it's because God has seen fit to bestow His favors upon you.
If you're poor, it's because God has withheld His favors.
Once again:
Rich==Good
Poor==Bad
Because of this, you can never have enough, and in particular, you can never have a big enough gap between you and then next rung on the ladder. Competitiveness is literally for Father's Love.
Anything that inhibits the pursuit of happiness (i.e. property) oppresses the ability for God to bestow grace, and thus is sacrilege. Also, it's only okay to provide charity to people who are truly in miserable straights, because you are insulting others if you assume they need your help. And while you're providing charity you should probably mention that all their hardship would go away if they'd just be more the way God wants 'em to be.
What he's really saying is the same old "two for $5!" mentality: having cheap labor would help the economy (because the profits would be higher... so be advised that "cheap labor solves all problems" assumes you believe in trickle-down). He's actually NOT saying a thing about quality. This was already shown the last time there was a "shortage" of programmers. What there was, in fact, was a shortage of people who knew how to vett business concepts.
The reality is that those people who have been suckered by low-cost "wow-they're-just-the-same-as-here-or-even-better! " foreign skilled labor have learned the hard way what Michael Porter said over a decade ago: the people in the firm have to have some connection to the markets they serve in order for the company to create and maintain a competitive advantage. So: fine to outsource overseas lower-level customer-irrelevant jobs to markets those employees have zero familiarity with -- um, assuming you're not trying to cultivate internal talent and that you actually do have such jobs. Strategically idiotic to outsource leadership, creative control, or customer-interactive jobs.
I agree that in principle open is better than proprietary, and anything that actually works is better than Microsoft, but do you not understand that there's one big risk to "open" and that's instability. Not catastrophic instability, just change, and what to do about it, and who is going to be able to fix anything, and what are we doing, and how do I sell my Board on this, and....
It's not "cost of ownership," it's the cost of utter confusion. When you're perpetually under-resourced financially, the only thing you can use is time and relationships. If you have to use your time and relationships pulling in people to deal with Linux and Linux-based "openness issues" (if that's the *perception*, not necessarily the reality), then that's a huge cost.
If you want to hasten the adoption of open source software, volunteer your time to help people set up open systems. I can't stress this enough: technology people are NOTORIOUS for avoiding commitment to organizations. The organizations have to pay them actual money. Everything else, you can find a volunteer in a pinch. But technology? Hardly ever.
Technologists do volunteer to work with other technologists, but for an organization that has already made the fatal gaffe of even CONSIDERING Microsoft products? Feh, you know everyone ran away and left them stranded.
Look there's nothing in this world that's without money pressure other than (some peoples') childhood.
The fact is, even in Bell Labs of yesteryear -- which, don't forget, was a monopoly utility -- you'd better believe that there was a lot of competition. It may not have been explicitly for money, but just simply for "resources," like lab space and good people, the smart people had best be smart - at least widely recognized to be so by their peers if not the "bean-counters."
What you're confusing here is a first-job vs. a career. You want a career where, once you've proven yourself, it's relatively easy to be "valued" in a financial sense -- someone said something like this earlier, with respect of being to raise your children in the style you were raised; though I think that's not 100% controllable, that's the right idea.
So you need to think about not what you'll be doing 3 years out of school, but what you'll be doing in 15 years. See if you can visualize your life. If you want to be an expert in an intellectual domain, that's going to be in academia, because as yet you can't PUBLISH openly from within corporate labs, and so any impressive things you do will have to be obvious via patent search or word of mouth, but not because other academic departments request you to come travel to their conference and speak to their students about your current thoughts.
Still if you're working for government contract, you might not be able to say much. It's about openness and dialog, not about money. You will have to convince people throughout your life that you're worth money until your reputation has built to the point where everyone, pretty much, is convinced. That's just the way it goes.
There are Technology Transfer entities that reside between academia and corporations specifically in order to facilitate openness, and these might be helpful to you.
If you're female, you also might want to check out pay disparity research based on having procreated -- which reflect in part an idea surrounding a "good mother" in the U.S. being obessed with their child (i.e. not being obsessed => not a good mother) something that is not evidently assumed elsewhere in the world, notably in Europe. You don't mention whether you definitely must be in the United States.
It's also noteworthy that, to the best of my knowledge, only Stanford is willing to "time-out" the ticking clock of achieving tenure because of childbirth -- this is a very recent development on their part due to examining attracting top-notch faculty who are women. Implicit virtually throughout the US employment scene is the assumption that there's no one else in the universe a caring and loving mom would be willing to allow to take care of offspring and thereby lop off all kinds of opportunities and thereby financial remuneration to moms - up to 44% of pay, in fact. Or, of course, women just opt out and forego a challenging career because they don't perceive any alternative to fighting biased employment policies since the bias is only implicit. There's a (male) economist from Harvard who is also studying this phenomenon for non-white male cultures: that it's so much easier to succeed in an environment that doesn't require constantly fighting that people forego pay, status, and future career visibility in order to avoid constantly bumping up against implicit bias.
There is no good solution to this, but you should be aware of it in your negotiations particularly if you're female but also if you're married to a woman for whom this type of situation would be relevant.
The bottom line is that MySpace has surpassed everyone in hits. Hilarious, actually - has google been hoist by its own petard? Are conversations in MySpace coming up high in a google search BECAUSE MySpace is ginormous?
Google has to do a deal because its very algorithms are designed to create beauty queens that are worshipped by all while leaving the lovely and brilliant also-rans completely impossible to find.
Really, it's a game of telephone! Information distorted at every repetition.
The original work said that the number of intimate ties (best friends) went from 3 to 2. It didn't talk about good friends who are nevertheless not intimate friends. In fact, one of my closest friends in the world I talk with every 5 years or so, and it would be more frequently if only she were willing to use email (I had no idea she was a luddite when I befriended her at age 3).
For example, the cited article says,
Increased use of the Internet, along with the number of hours people are spending at work, are factors contributing to a drastic decline in the number of close friends that Americans have.
[...]The average number of people who respondents said they discuss important matters fell from about three to two.
OK, so there's your drastic decline: three to two. Seems like we're talking a very elite level of friendship, even though the headline was phrased as though it was a social circle. Maybe it has something to do with the integrity of extended families that adults in 1984 were thinking about vs. those that we, in 2006 are thinking about, which has nothing to do with technology at all, but with workforce mobility and the increase in the divorce rate in the 70's -- and they were bitter, awful divorces.
And btw the "along with the number of hours people are spending at work," I believe is from another article ABOUT the research, based on a quote by Bowling Alone author, Putnam.
Really awful journalism.
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?Arti cleID=6101
"Overall, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) would receive $54.4 billion next year, down from $57.6 billion in 2006."
I agree - after being in the Midwest for 15 years, you'd better be well prepared to assume it's a provincial life, be a yes-man if you're lucky enough to be a northern-European derived male, and take a 30% pay cut if you're a woman or look like you might have a heritage from another part of the globe. Frankly my experience is the old saw: A people hire A people (and their high standards of excellence and inherent need to express them); B people hire C people (and their willingness to subsume what they believe to be right in favor of short-term goals). The US economy will recover on not based on how many businesses in the US recover. They won't recover when managers crush dissent.
The guy did all kinds of analysis on every variable except one: the value of the trade-in (about $4000) and the amount owed on the current car ($0). All he was basically saying was that he and his wife couldn't afford a whole new car out of the gas savings. If he'd have stated that as his question up front, I wouldn't have bothered to waste time reading it.