Generally stocks selling for below $5 aren't shortable. AT least through my broker (schwab) they aren't. -Real- stocks won't be manipulable this way, the market is too generally liquid. Also, if you get caught playing games like this with -real- stocks, the SEC will have a fairly unpleasant chat with you.
Speculators provide/add liquidity to the market, by adding buyers and sellers. Liquidity is usually a good thing, because it makes people more willing to participate in the market. This in turn is another good thing, because it means prices move around in reaction to new information, and therefore do a better job of representing value accurately. The more rapidly prices react to new information, the less likely that a purchaser/seller gets screwed out of fair value.
Speculation can certainly get overheated, but in general, speculators are not quite vermin to be shot on sight.
My mom bought us a TRS 80 (remember those?) back in the day, that was a key start into my life in computing. She was too cheap to buy a PC when I got one in '82, so she had her brother in law, who worked for IBM, get her a discounted IBM desktop machine of some sort, whose name I can't recall. It had a tiny little 8 inch CRT, 16k of RAM, a tape drive as the only storage, and APL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_lang uage)/ as an embedded language in it. It didn't do anything, and she wanted a word processor, so, she wrote one. In APL. It was pretty close the first program she ever wrote in her life. It didn't do much, opened a file, allowed you to type into it, position a cursor, etc, but I was impressed, and still am. She inspired me to try things I didn't know how to do or even try, which has been good for me.
in these discussions. I'd look to the business functions themselves, that you support. Each area of the business has that has some IT function supporting it has some type of metric for what it needs. This could be, how long does it take to get a new user up, what is the uptime/response time of the ERP system, is there available space for the document store, etc. You can then define performance metrics, either arithmetic or qualitative, that the user of the service can understand as being meaningful metrics of whether you are serving them well. These can then be used to review the IT team's performance in a meaningful way, and used to quantify the need for additional staffing/equipment.
At the risk of sounding like an MBA type, this is fairly simple management by objective thinking. At the end of the day, what the boss cares about first is, is you business running well. Only after the business is running well, can you consider reducing cost. If you have gone through this process, and you have these metrics in place, then a degradation of service due to a staff reduciton will be very clear, and likely fought by the users.
Actually, the bandages cost so much because of a fundamental pricing imperfection in how the cost of hospitals are recovered. A hospital is expensive to run. A large part of the expenses are capital costs (for the building, the equipment, etc) and period costs for having staff available for that one 2 day period in your life when you need the hospital. Those costs are accumulating all the time, yet the only time the hospital can charge you for anything, is when you happen to be there. This requires that they somehow price those costs to you, through the various piece parts of your treatment. This requires ridiculous levels of markup on the bandages and services rendered to you while you were there, simply to recover the costs of providing the facility.
Economically speaking, there is a good here, the availability of the hospital, which isn't being charged for. We get the benefit of having the hospital available when we need it, yet we don't pay anything over the time of our receiving that good, the latent availability of the hospital. We are enjoying that good all the time. The only time that the hospital has an opportunity to recover the cost of that good is when we actually visit the hospital. This means that the hospital has to recover the costs of maintaining the facility, and paying the staff all those years while we were still healthy, through the cost of those bandages. Obviously there is an averaging function across all of us enjoying the benefit, and all of us using the service, but I hope you get my point.
What would make sense is a more tax based revenue base for the hospital, which would be borne by the community at large, which is the benefiting group. Then you could price the marginal cost of services more closely to the marginal cost of the treatment, and bandages would no longer need to be charged out at 85 bucks each.
The root cause of the problems in the US health care system is two fold. The first piece is our refusal as a society to find a suitable funding mechanism for maintaining the capacity of health care that is period, rather than usage based. This is a cost that is enjoyed by society at large, and it should therefore be funded by society at large. This would make the marginal costs of engaging in health care for a given incident less devastating.
The second problem of health care in the US is we have accepted the industry sponsored definition of the problem, which is that the problem is a lack of health -insurance-. US style health insurance is an idiotic, inefficient, costly mechanism for funding treatment. Health insurance as a funding mechanism that adds about 30-40% to the cost of providing health care. Look at the top line of an insurance company, less the payout for services. The insurance industry is the cause of at least a 20% markup on health services in the US, for no benefit to the populace. It's probably more, when you consider that provider's costs go up to deal with collecting from the insurance industry.
If we stepped back from the paradigm that is best funded through private, competitive insurance companies, and considered it as being more like a utility, perhaps something to be run by a private company, but certainly a function that should be managed to the lowest cost and the best availability for the most people, we could probably greatly lower the costs of providing the level of service we do today.
Re:Valenti's family deserves simple courtesy
on
Jack Valenti, Dead at 85
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· Score: 0, Redundant
I have no mod points to contribute, but sir, well said.
It's not obvious to me that there is any corruption here. If, as is likely, these companies contracted with the government in a public bid process, their legal and ethical obligation is to deliver the stated project for the stated fee. These aren't defense contractors here, where the contracts are cost plus. These contracts are typically granted after lengthy bidding and contracting processes. If the companies violated the contracts, the remedy is in civil court, and should be straighthforward.
If the various partners contract between themselves, there is no obvious reason why that is unethical or dishonest. Accenture has had well publicized relationships with these companies for at least 15 years, and is a VAR for most of them (disclosure, I worked for Accenture for 10 years, back when it was Andersen Consulting). Accenture and Microsoft have a joint venture, Avenade. Accenture resells HP, Cisco, and IBM gear. It isn't clear that cash payments going back and forth in the context of projects indicates anything other than a business partner relationship, which no-one is denying. There may still be a law against what happened, but the putative illegal behavior might not actually be anything wrong.
This really smells like either some prosecutors trying to make a name for themselves, or, if you want to be paranoid, Gonzales trying to whip up another story for the papers to distract us from his butt reaming in Congress today.
My understanding is that the algorithm looks at the relative pace and intervals between keypresses, which appear to be persistant even as your overall typing speed varies. Or so the company says. I looked into this a bit when they were advertising a job I was interested in.
They've been smoking cloned dope for well over 20 years, without much protest or concern. Essentially all, or nearly all, marijuana is grown from cloned stock. You'd think that would assuage their fears somewhat.
I can think of no quicker way to get your school disregarded as an educational institution than the course that CM is taking. The goal of a CS program is to turn out CS experts. While there is a lot to CS in addition to programming, programming, and the ability to invent/design/develop/test good code is pretty much at the heart of the subject. If you don't cover and focus on this as part of the program, the graduates aren't going to compete. Sadly, the message that the market will take from thiswill be that CM's program is weak. Further, since CM's female proportion of the graduate pool is increasing, and since the CM course program is destined to produce weaker professionals, the conclusion that will be drawn is that women can't code as well as men, even if they graduate from a good school like CM. In the long run, this will hurt women's prospects in the field.
You gotta love unintended consequences.
Actually, economically speaking, it's an indication that wage rates in the US are too high, as viewed in the world market. We are oversupplied with wage seekers from overseas. Be careful of what you ask for, these barriers are a partial reason for why those of us who read slashdot get to drive nice cars.
If nothing else, he's making you thnk about both content and presentation, in what appears to me to be a constructive context. I certainly don't think you're being hurt by this. I write a lot for my profession ( consulting in statistical modeling implementations) and it sounds to me like you are being tutored in presenting complex ideas concisely. There are worse skills to have.
Yup, we atheistics are all exactly alike, all believing exactly the same, reading from our Atheist Bible, and listening to Atheist Andy on A-TV.
While I am sure that some folks who choose not to believe in a deity have beliefs that are religious in fervor, the fellow travelers I have met simply refuse to believe in fairy tales. This does not render our disbelief into some sort of alternative holy writ. Religious believers tend to worship in groups, reading from some common tract. I personally think they do this to help overcome the fantastic nature of what they are trying to make themselves continue to believe - it's easier if you do it in groups. Atheists tend to be relatively unique, coming at the topic as they do from a lack of belief, rather than a commonality of belief. It's often hard for the religious to really understand that there isn't some book you go read and study to become a non-believer. All you have to do is start thinking about the ones you've already read.
When a KPI report (Key Performance INdicator, for the acronym challenged) indicates that you are not meeting some goal, it's a very good idea to dig in and figure out why. Key Indicators are supposed to measure the health of a business, so if they have moved, management is very, very, very interested in why.
Reports being what they are, compendiums of data from some source which might fuck up, it's a real good idea to make sure that the numbers work out before you reorganize your business because of those KPI's.
It can be a pain in the ass, but it's important to the functioning of the organization. If you have to do it often, consider rolling up some pre-written reconciliation reports, that break out the sub components of whatever you're tallying up. Do so in ways that let you verify against other reports that use independent sources of data. For example, sales should have some reasonable relation to bank deposits. Units produced ought to be reconcilable against units shipped (+- inventory changes). And so on.
Good KPI's are good because they serve as a leading indicator for problems, and digging into the data is just what good management should do. Wouldn't you rather work for people who go and find out facts before they make a decision?
Now, this rant presupposes that when the numbers are dug into, some interesting information comes out. If it's just an exercise of checking the computer's addition, and the answer is always the same (yes, the numbers total up, and sales ARE really down), then you have something to whine about. However, in my short career (pushing 30 years now), the numbers bear looking into more often than not.
Most specialty retailers don't have a problem with the price maintenance contracts. They give the small guy an even chance against the interent powerhouses. In areas of destination oriented specialty gear, like golf clubs and fly rods, price maintenance programs allow the small shop to stock merchandise and have a shot at making money on it, that wouldn't happen if you were able to get discounted Ping golf clubs over the internet. Price maintenance programs work well for the manufacturers and the widespread retailers, they only hurt consumers and big box/internet retailers.
I'm of a bit of a libertarian mind here. If someone makes a good, and wants to sell it with a price maintenance restriction, I think that they should be able to do that, especially if, as is the case under current US law, the sole retaliation allowed to the manufacturer is simply ceasing to sell the retailer more of the good. I don't think anyone who hasn't paid for the goods has a dog in the hunt.
This was inevitable. Workers that don't perform certain types of duties or have certain types of qualifications HAVE to be treated as hourly as far as both state and federal labor law is concerned. This just isn't optional, and when a company gets to a certain size, they are a delicious target for plaintiff's lawyers.
If Google does not follow these practices, then a plaintiff's attorney can find someone who worked 8.5 hours regularly, get that person as a plaintiff, assert that 1000 other workers are similarly abused, and seek class action status. If the court were to find that those workers averaged.5 hours OT a day, over a 250 day work year, at an average wage of $15 an hour, over three years it could easily find damages of $6,000,000. Assume for a second that the lawyer convinced a jury that it wasa really more like 3 hours a day, or any other distortion, and it could go up dramatically. Since plaintiff's attorneys commonly take these cases for 30% of the award, it's easy to imagine that lawyers would be eager to take this on.
This is, unfortunately, prudent management. Google management has a responsibility to be prudent with their shareholders' money, so this is absolutely ethical. What the moaners are failing to keep in mind is that jobs don't below to the workers, they belong to the company. The company is not to blame for the legal environment that makes this a rational act. The workers have the votes to change Congress, if they don't like what Congress did with the labor law.
Further, again from a management viewpoint, what makes a job humane, satisfying, fun, and all those other fulfilling words usually has little to do with the paycheck and the rules around how you collect it. It has more to do with the quality of the work, the people you are working with, and how your supervisor treats you. This has nothing to do with that.
Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion, posits a simpler theory. He suggests that it is evolutionarily successful for children to believe, uncritically, what their parents tell them. This confers advantage, because it keeps you from eating poisonous plants, getting eaten by tigers, etc. One of the things parents usually teach is what their parents taught them about a god of some sort. This then becomes the tendency of a child to believe. The belief in god doesn't convey advantage, it is just a side affect of a trait that does.
Add to this a trait I call psychic economics. Most people do not have the intellectual energy available to figure out a world view on their own. Coming up with a moral code of ethics from first principals is not easy. It is easy and socially acceptable to accept one from a church. Therefore churches are popular. They solve a perplexing problem easily and cheaply, and let you go on with living your life. Its a luxury, and a bit of a gift, to have the ability to figure these things out on your own. Not everyone comes to it easily.
I encourage everyone to check out Dawkins' book, as well as Sam Harris' The End Of Faith, for further reading.
For all you biblical inerrancy folks out there, read Leviticus, and tell me why you're not burning down seafood restaurants. But please don't waste your time bothering me. Mankind needs to grow up, and leave religion behind, along with other childish thoughts.
The "anonymous reader" was thoughtful enough to name his former employer in the link, in effect smearing the company's name on a website read by hundreds of thousands of people (many in their industry) daily. Assuming this wasn't made up to begin with, the identity of the "anonymous reader" should be easy for the company to discover. If they weren't going to sue before, this may make them angry enough to do so now-- and they might have a better case.
IANAL, but my understanding is that truth is a satisfactory defense to charges of libel. If it happened this way, the OP is safe.
It won't hurt, and it could be interesting. I went back for a second degree when I was 27, in Accounting, of all things. I used it to get a job with Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, which has led to a great career for me.
If you do the degree at the right school, a key benefit will be the availability of the career placement apparatus of the school, which is one of the easiest routes to a quality job with major industry players at the end of the process.
I agree with the person who noted that the more CS'y jobs pay less. I do datawarehousing/data mining/predictive modeling, and make much better money than the average Java/C#/C++ dev, based on watching the job boards. My work isn't as -cool-, but it pays well and I find it interesting. Sure, it'd be cooler to be a game programmer or device driver hack, but I like to play with my kids and golf, and if I have to write SQL and Crystal Reports stuff to make that happen, that's fine with me.
It's also fun to go back to school and babe watch.
Google is likely building the Oregon server facility because the electricity is cheap, and the quality of life is such that hiring will be fairly easy. There is worldclass windsurfing, flyfishing, white water boating, skiing(OK, maybe not world class, but quite good), and some of the most beautiful country in the world. MSFT is doing the same in Moses Lake, an eastern washington town, for similar reasons. The BPA power rates are favorable, and BPA has good PR value, hydropower not being from carbon generating sources. I'm not inclined to think there is much that is nefarious there, but I'm a trusting soul.
As to the bandwidth, I don't think the author considered the simple thought that Google serves a cubic buttload of pages, and maybe company management think it likely that their load will grow. Afterall, YouTube probably uses a little bit. This just says to me that their content businesses are successful.
I tend to prefer Charles Brooks' axiom (from The Mythical Man Month): The number of bugs remaining in a piece of code is proportional to the number of bugs you've already found. Buggy pieces of shit tend to remain that way. I suspect that the security bugs are merely an instance of the general case.
I've been running 64 bit fedora for a couple of years on a stable of servers, and it's been dead stable. We do heavy compute applications, no GUI/graphics. We needed the address space, and it has been great for us. We're running on dual AMD Opterons.
Shocked I am, just shocked! Good lord, this means you'll have to actually, -gasp- develop experience!
Not to worry, my young friend. Your experience is relatively normal, except that you seemed to have moved to self-awareness of your lack of total knowledge rather quicker than some. Realizing that you don't know something is the first step to changing that situation.
As the others have said, a healthy dose of curiosity will take you a long way. So will realizing that you can't know about everything, so you have to focus down a bit. I have tended to read a lot about things that are on the periphery of whatever I am doing professionally at the time, which led me from COBOL to C, from C to various other languages, into the world of GUIs and databases, with some network and web along the way. Focus first on the problems that are problems for your employer, and the odds are good that you'll make more money, and get a reputation for figuring things out, which will cause harder, more interesting problems to come your way.
Also, realize that even though HR departments are asking about some list of technical skills, what the employers really want, and what you need, is the meta skill of figuring out how to get computers to do what your customers want, reliably and economically. This requires a contextual knowledge of the whole ecosystem, the players in the eco system that know things you don't, and a bit of focus on the actual human problems/goals that are motivating whatever project you find yourself on.
One key measure for you is to look around at whatever place you end up, and look at what the more experienced folk do. Ask them for some recommendations of areas to look into, and for materials that they recommend. Odds are pretty good that you'll get some good pointers, and some suck up points as well.;-)
Good luck, and enjoy the industry. Every job has it's down sides, but the whole world of bits and bytes has the advantages that George Bush Sr. once ascribed to the Vice Presidency: " It pays well, it's indoor work, and there's no heavy lifting."
Slashdot Mirror
Generally stocks selling for below $5 aren't shortable. AT least through my broker (schwab) they aren't. -Real- stocks won't be manipulable this way, the market is too generally liquid. Also, if you get caught playing games like this with -real- stocks, the SEC will have a fairly unpleasant chat with you.
Speculators provide/add liquidity to the market, by adding buyers and sellers. Liquidity is usually a good thing, because it makes people more willing to participate in the market. This in turn is another good thing, because it means prices move around in reaction to new information, and therefore do a better job of representing value accurately. The more rapidly prices react to new information, the less likely that a purchaser/seller gets screwed out of fair value.
Speculation can certainly get overheated, but in general, speculators are not quite vermin to be shot on sight.
That is exactly what it was, thanks for the help.
My mom bought us a TRS 80 (remember those?) back in the day, that was a key start into my life in computing. She was too cheap to buy a PC when I got one in '82, so she had her brother in law, who worked for IBM, get her a discounted IBM desktop machine of some sort, whose name I can't recall. It had a tiny little 8 inch CRT, 16k of RAM, a tape drive as the only storage, and APL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_lang uage)/ as an embedded language in it. It didn't do anything, and she wanted a word processor, so, she wrote one. In APL. It was pretty close the first program she ever wrote in her life. It didn't do much, opened a file, allowed you to type into it, position a cursor, etc, but I was impressed, and still am. She inspired me to try things I didn't know how to do or even try, which has been good for me.
Happy Mothers day, Mom.
in these discussions. I'd look to the business functions themselves, that you support. Each area of the business has that has some IT function supporting it has some type of metric for what it needs. This could be, how long does it take to get a new user up, what is the uptime/response time of the ERP system, is there available space for the document store, etc. You can then define performance metrics, either arithmetic or qualitative, that the user of the service can understand as being meaningful metrics of whether you are serving them well. These can then be used to review the IT team's performance in a meaningful way, and used to quantify the need for additional staffing/equipment.
At the risk of sounding like an MBA type, this is fairly simple management by objective thinking. At the end of the day, what the boss cares about first is, is you business running well. Only after the business is running well, can you consider reducing cost. If you have gone through this process, and you have these metrics in place, then a degradation of service due to a staff reduciton will be very clear, and likely fought by the users.
Actually, the bandages cost so much because of a fundamental pricing imperfection in how the cost of hospitals are recovered. A hospital is expensive to run. A large part of the expenses are capital costs (for the building, the equipment, etc) and period costs for having staff available for that one 2 day period in your life when you need the hospital. Those costs are accumulating all the time, yet the only time the hospital can charge you for anything, is when you happen to be there. This requires that they somehow price those costs to you, through the various piece parts of your treatment. This requires ridiculous levels of markup on the bandages and services rendered to you while you were there, simply to recover the costs of providing the facility.
Economically speaking, there is a good here, the availability of the hospital, which isn't being charged for. We get the benefit of having the hospital available when we need it, yet we don't pay anything over the time of our receiving that good, the latent availability of the hospital. We are enjoying that good all the time. The only time that the hospital has an opportunity to recover the cost of that good is when we actually visit the hospital. This means that the hospital has to recover the costs of maintaining the facility, and paying the staff all those years while we were still healthy, through the cost of those bandages. Obviously there is an averaging function across all of us enjoying the benefit, and all of us using the service, but I hope you get my point.
What would make sense is a more tax based revenue base for the hospital, which would be borne by the community at large, which is the benefiting group. Then you could price the marginal cost of services more closely to the marginal cost of the treatment, and bandages would no longer need to be charged out at 85 bucks each.
The root cause of the problems in the US health care system is two fold. The first piece is our refusal as a society to find a suitable funding mechanism for maintaining the capacity of health care that is period, rather than usage based. This is a cost that is enjoyed by society at large, and it should therefore be funded by society at large. This would make the marginal costs of engaging in health care for a given incident less devastating.
The second problem of health care in the US is we have accepted the industry sponsored definition of the problem, which is that the problem is a lack of health -insurance-. US style health insurance is an idiotic, inefficient, costly mechanism for funding treatment. Health insurance as a funding mechanism that adds about 30-40% to the cost of providing health care. Look at the top line of an insurance company, less the payout for services. The insurance industry is the cause of at least a 20% markup on health services in the US, for no benefit to the populace. It's probably more, when you consider that provider's costs go up to deal with collecting from the insurance industry.
If we stepped back from the paradigm that is best funded through private, competitive insurance companies, and considered it as being more like a utility, perhaps something to be run by a private company, but certainly a function that should be managed to the lowest cost and the best availability for the most people, we could probably greatly lower the costs of providing the level of service we do today.
I have no mod points to contribute, but sir, well said.
It's not obvious to me that there is any corruption here. If, as is likely, these companies contracted with the government in a public bid process, their legal and ethical obligation is to deliver the stated project for the stated fee. These aren't defense contractors here, where the contracts are cost plus. These contracts are typically granted after lengthy bidding and contracting processes. If the companies violated the contracts, the remedy is in civil court, and should be straighthforward.
If the various partners contract between themselves, there is no obvious reason why that is unethical or dishonest. Accenture has had well publicized relationships with these companies for at least 15 years, and is a VAR for most of them (disclosure, I worked for Accenture for 10 years, back when it was Andersen Consulting). Accenture and Microsoft have a joint venture, Avenade. Accenture resells HP, Cisco, and IBM gear. It isn't clear that cash payments going back and forth in the context of projects indicates anything other than a business partner relationship, which no-one is denying. There may still be a law against what happened, but the putative illegal behavior might not actually be anything wrong.
This really smells like either some prosecutors trying to make a name for themselves, or, if you want to be paranoid, Gonzales trying to whip up another story for the papers to distract us from his butt reaming in Congress today.
My understanding is that the algorithm looks at the relative pace and intervals between keypresses, which appear to be persistant even as your overall typing speed varies. Or so the company says. I looked into this a bit when they were advertising a job I was interested in.
There you go, introducing reason into the discussion again. Bad poster, no biscuit!
They've been smoking cloned dope for well over 20 years, without much protest or concern. Essentially all, or nearly all, marijuana is grown from cloned stock. You'd think that would assuage their fears somewhat.
I can think of no quicker way to get your school disregarded as an educational institution than the course that CM is taking. The goal of a CS program is to turn out CS experts. While there is a lot to CS in addition to programming, programming, and the ability to invent/design/develop/test good code is pretty much at the heart of the subject. If you don't cover and focus on this as part of the program, the graduates aren't going to compete. Sadly, the message that the market will take from thiswill be that CM's program is weak. Further, since CM's female proportion of the graduate pool is increasing, and since the CM course program is destined to produce weaker professionals, the conclusion that will be drawn is that women can't code as well as men, even if they graduate from a good school like CM. In the long run, this will hurt women's prospects in the field.
You gotta love unintended consequences.
Actually, economically speaking, it's an indication that wage rates in the US are too high, as viewed in the world market. We are oversupplied with wage seekers from overseas. Be careful of what you ask for, these barriers are a partial reason for why those of us who read slashdot get to drive nice cars.
If nothing else, he's making you thnk about both content and presentation, in what appears to me to be a constructive context. I certainly don't think you're being hurt by this. I write a lot for my profession ( consulting in statistical modeling implementations) and it sounds to me like you are being tutored in presenting complex ideas concisely. There are worse skills to have.
Yup, we atheistics are all exactly alike, all believing exactly the same, reading from our Atheist Bible, and listening to Atheist Andy on A-TV.
While I am sure that some folks who choose not to believe in a deity have beliefs that are religious in fervor, the fellow travelers I have met simply refuse to believe in fairy tales. This does not render our disbelief into some sort of alternative holy writ. Religious believers tend to worship in groups, reading from some common tract. I personally think they do this to help overcome the fantastic nature of what they are trying to make themselves continue to believe - it's easier if you do it in groups. Atheists tend to be relatively unique, coming at the topic as they do from a lack of belief, rather than a commonality of belief. It's often hard for the religious to really understand that there isn't some book you go read and study to become a non-believer. All you have to do is start thinking about the ones you've already read.
When a KPI report (Key Performance INdicator, for the acronym challenged) indicates that you are not meeting some goal, it's a very good idea to dig in and figure out why. Key Indicators are supposed to measure the health of a business, so if they have moved, management is very, very, very interested in why.
Reports being what they are, compendiums of data from some source which might fuck up, it's a real good idea to make sure that the numbers work out before you reorganize your business because of those KPI's.
It can be a pain in the ass, but it's important to the functioning of the organization. If you have to do it often, consider rolling up some pre-written reconciliation reports, that break out the sub components of whatever you're tallying up. Do so in ways that let you verify against other reports that use independent sources of data. For example, sales should have some reasonable relation to bank deposits. Units produced ought to be reconcilable against units shipped (+- inventory changes). And so on.
Good KPI's are good because they serve as a leading indicator for problems, and digging into the data is just what good management should do. Wouldn't you rather work for people who go and find out facts before they make a decision?
Now, this rant presupposes that when the numbers are dug into, some interesting information comes out. If it's just an exercise of checking the computer's addition, and the answer is always the same (yes, the numbers total up, and sales ARE really down), then you have something to whine about. However, in my short career (pushing 30 years now), the numbers bear looking into more often than not.
Most specialty retailers don't have a problem with the price maintenance contracts. They give the small guy an even chance against the interent powerhouses. In areas of destination oriented specialty gear, like golf clubs and fly rods, price maintenance programs allow the small shop to stock merchandise and have a shot at making money on it, that wouldn't happen if you were able to get discounted Ping golf clubs over the internet. Price maintenance programs work well for the manufacturers and the widespread retailers, they only hurt consumers and big box/internet retailers.
I'm of a bit of a libertarian mind here. If someone makes a good, and wants to sell it with a price maintenance restriction, I think that they should be able to do that, especially if, as is the case under current US law, the sole retaliation allowed to the manufacturer is simply ceasing to sell the retailer more of the good. I don't think anyone who hasn't paid for the goods has a dog in the hunt.
This was inevitable. Workers that don't perform certain types of duties or have certain types of qualifications HAVE to be treated as hourly as far as both state and federal labor law is concerned. This just isn't optional, and when a company gets to a certain size, they are a delicious target for plaintiff's lawyers.
.5 hours OT a day, over a 250 day work year, at an average wage of $15 an hour, over three years it could easily find damages of $6,000,000. Assume for a second that the lawyer convinced a jury that it wasa really more like 3 hours a day, or any other distortion, and it could go up dramatically. Since plaintiff's attorneys commonly take these cases for 30% of the award, it's easy to imagine that lawyers would be eager to take this on.
If Google does not follow these practices, then a plaintiff's attorney can find someone who worked 8.5 hours regularly, get that person as a plaintiff, assert that 1000 other workers are similarly abused, and seek class action status. If the court were to find that those workers averaged
This is, unfortunately, prudent management. Google management has a responsibility to be prudent with their shareholders' money, so this is absolutely ethical. What the moaners are failing to keep in mind is that jobs don't below to the workers, they belong to the company. The company is not to blame for the legal environment that makes this a rational act. The workers have the votes to change Congress, if they don't like what Congress did with the labor law.
Further, again from a management viewpoint, what makes a job humane, satisfying, fun, and all those other fulfilling words usually has little to do with the paycheck and the rules around how you collect it. It has more to do with the quality of the work, the people you are working with, and how your supervisor treats you. This has nothing to do with that.
Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion, posits a simpler theory. He suggests that it is evolutionarily successful for children to believe, uncritically, what their parents tell them. This confers advantage, because it keeps you from eating poisonous plants, getting eaten by tigers, etc. One of the things parents usually teach is what their parents taught them about a god of some sort. This then becomes the tendency of a child to believe. The belief in god doesn't convey advantage, it is just a side affect of a trait that does.
Add to this a trait I call psychic economics. Most people do not have the intellectual energy available to figure out a world view on their own. Coming up with a moral code of ethics from first principals is not easy. It is easy and socially acceptable to accept one from a church. Therefore churches are popular. They solve a perplexing problem easily and cheaply, and let you go on with living your life. Its a luxury, and a bit of a gift, to have the ability to figure these things out on your own. Not everyone comes to it easily.
I encourage everyone to check out Dawkins' book, as well as Sam Harris' The End Of Faith, for further reading.
For all you biblical inerrancy folks out there, read Leviticus, and tell me why you're not burning down seafood restaurants. But please don't waste your time bothering me. Mankind needs to grow up, and leave religion behind, along with other childish thoughts.
The "anonymous reader" was thoughtful enough to name his former employer in the link, in effect smearing the company's name on a website read by hundreds of thousands of people (many in their industry) daily. Assuming this wasn't made up to begin with, the identity of the "anonymous reader" should be easy for the company to discover. If they weren't going to sue before, this may make them angry enough to do so now-- and they might have a better case.
IANAL, but my understanding is that truth is a satisfactory defense to charges of libel. If it happened this way, the OP is safe.
It won't hurt, and it could be interesting. I went back for a second degree when I was 27, in Accounting, of all things. I used it to get a job with Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, which has led to a great career for me.
If you do the degree at the right school, a key benefit will be the availability of the career placement apparatus of the school, which is one of the easiest routes to a quality job with major industry players at the end of the process.
I agree with the person who noted that the more CS'y jobs pay less. I do datawarehousing/data mining/predictive modeling, and make much better money than the average Java/C#/C++ dev, based on watching the job boards. My work isn't as -cool-, but it pays well and I find it interesting. Sure, it'd be cooler to be a game programmer or device driver hack, but I like to play with my kids and golf, and if I have to write SQL and Crystal Reports stuff to make that happen, that's fine with me.
It's also fun to go back to school and babe watch.
Google is likely building the Oregon server facility because the electricity is cheap, and the quality of life is such that hiring will be fairly easy. There is worldclass windsurfing, flyfishing, white water boating, skiing(OK, maybe not world class, but quite good), and some of the most beautiful country in the world. MSFT is doing the same in Moses Lake, an eastern washington town, for similar reasons. The BPA power rates are favorable, and BPA has good PR value, hydropower not being from carbon generating sources. I'm not inclined to think there is much that is nefarious there, but I'm a trusting soul.
As to the bandwidth, I don't think the author considered the simple thought that Google serves a cubic buttload of pages, and maybe company management think it likely that their load will grow. Afterall, YouTube probably uses a little bit. This just says to me that their content businesses are successful.
I tend to prefer Charles Brooks' axiom (from The Mythical Man Month): The number of bugs remaining in a piece of code is proportional to the number of bugs you've already found. Buggy pieces of shit tend to remain that way. I suspect that the security bugs are merely an instance of the general case.
I've been running 64 bit fedora for a couple of years on a stable of servers, and it's been dead stable. We do heavy compute applications, no GUI/graphics. We needed the address space, and it has been great for us. We're running on dual AMD Opterons.
Shocked I am, just shocked! Good lord, this means you'll have to actually, -gasp- develop experience!
;-)
Not to worry, my young friend. Your experience is relatively normal, except that you seemed to have moved to self-awareness of your lack of total knowledge rather quicker than some. Realizing that you don't know something is the first step to changing that situation.
As the others have said, a healthy dose of curiosity will take you a long way. So will realizing that you can't know about everything, so you have to focus down a bit. I have tended to read a lot about things that are on the periphery of whatever I am doing professionally at the time, which led me from COBOL to C, from C to various other languages, into the world of GUIs and databases, with some network and web along the way. Focus first on the problems that are problems for your employer, and the odds are good that you'll make more money, and get a reputation for figuring things out, which will cause harder, more interesting problems to come your way.
Also, realize that even though HR departments are asking about some list of technical skills, what the employers really want, and what you need, is the meta skill of figuring out how to get computers to do what your customers want, reliably and economically. This requires a contextual knowledge of the whole ecosystem, the players in the eco system that know things you don't, and a bit of focus on the actual human problems/goals that are motivating whatever project you find yourself on. One key measure for you is to look around at whatever place you end up, and look at what the more experienced folk do. Ask them for some recommendations of areas to look into, and for materials that they recommend. Odds are pretty good that you'll get some good pointers, and some suck up points as well.
Good luck, and enjoy the industry. Every job has it's down sides, but the whole world of bits and bytes has the advantages that George Bush Sr. once ascribed to the Vice Presidency: " It pays well, it's indoor work, and there's no heavy lifting."