It's a tough problem. Unions can and have abused their power. For every anecdote about The Man exploiting workers mercilessly you can come up with another anecdote about corrupt unions bleeding their companies to death.
Pay and performance have to be tied together.
If there was any way for workers to be paid exactly as if they were shareholders in the company for that transaction, maybe there'd be a way. But no one would ever agree as to what the genuine profit and loss was.
Forcing the union pension fund to be invested in the parent company (and giving them corresponding seats on the board of directors to insure that execs don't rape the company in the short term either) would go some way into insuring worker's interests and the corporations interests are aligned.
Whether we like it or not, there is no free lunch and we're all in this game together.
At some point things will get so bad (already 40% of Walmart employees are eligible for food stamps) that unionizing pressures will get to be too much for them. But, hey, if you don't treat your employees well, then you get what's coming to you. And while I think it's possible that unions can effectively exert inappropriate monopoly control over the labor market, right now the balance of power is shifted so strongly in favor of corporations like Walmart that a little unionization would do the situation some good. Better that than armed revolt.
My biggest gripe is that Mom and Pop shops with great service can't hope to obtain the same prices that Walmart does from its suppliers, which are essentially captive and squeezed by the big retailer. If those wholesale prices were made public and Mom and Pop were allowed to buy goods at the same price the situation would be improved.
Everyone agrees that squashing another company (cutting off Netscape's air supply, pissing on Sun's Java, tells Citrix that ICA might not work in the future, etc.) through underhanded tactics is a Bad Thing. Check.
And, everyone agrees that a large company that coerces a smaller one to sell under duress is a Bad Thing.
So where's the harm if Microsoft buys out the small company at a mutually agreeable price?
The marketplace can potentially be hurt when a monopoly assumes control of any additional part of the marketplace.
In fact, what makes sense for the monopoly is to leverage every asset, including the new company, in any way possible, to maximize revenue. They have that obligation to their shareholders and that's fine. What's not fine is that they have the means, monopoly control, to do things that are not fine.
That may mean "bundling" a promising new bought-out technology with some old technology or with some unrelated new technology that needs a push. It may mean putting a wet blanket over the new technology because it could cause significant loss of lucrative revenue from an existing product. It may mean many different things, but it generally means that the new technology is going to enter the marketplace in a different way.
Capitalism works best when there is genuine competition in an informed marketplace. Letting a monopoly buy out a promising young company with a good technology and excellent potential for growth is suboptimal, just as depressing as watching a beautiful young 18 year old girl marry a rich old 75 year old man.
IIRC, a veteran that opposes Kerry's presidential run because of the Senator's anti-war activities upon returning from Vietnam was actively seeking photos showing the two together.
The same creative outfit could produce other works of art worthy of the Weekly World News that would prove profitable:
Lt G. W. Bush jogging a marathon in 100 degree heat in Alabama with 5 other Guard officers during the summer that no one else reports seeing him;
genuine picture of Osama's disembodied head resting on bloodied contract, signed by Saddam, for delivery of WMD to al Qaeda! (Hurry, supplies limited!)
look at where all the tech logic is flowing: "edge servers".
That is not only insightful, but ironic as well.
When PC's first came out, they were at the "edge" (desktops now have logic and aren't dumb terminals anymore), and this edge service market is what drove the early success of Microsoft.
If people would refuse to fill jobs that had questionable consquences
...which would leave questionable people to fill jobs with high responsibility and high consequence.
No, I would much rather have rational, thoughtful people of integrity filling jobs at the FBI and elsewhere.
Now whether Johhn Ashcroft
represents such an individual is a matter of some question, but I'd much rather the worker bees at the various TLA agencies be people of good character, rather than have people of integrity avoid government service because of presence of temporary political hacks and some people of questionable character that will always be with us.
Not only that, Intel are benefiting the consumer by keeping compatability
Amen.
Despite the all caps ranting and whatnot, THIS IS A GOOD THING.
Imagine, for a minute, had Intel come out with a non-x86-64 compatible instruction set, hmm? The yelling and screaming of such a move at this point would be heard round the world. Utterances of an active 800 lb gorilla, etc.
Microsoft just give you the SDK and you run with it however you like.
While things are emerging, MS can treat developers pretty well.
But after they establish 90% control, then what?
From what I've seen, Web site developers crying about broken CSS and other non-standard IE behavior have been put on the back burner; "IE 7 will ship in Longhorn in its own good time..."
Were there some competitive fire lit under their butts, the technically-capable folks in Redmond would be doing some valuable for consumers of its products and not just building cross-leverage mechanisms that increase their revenue.
Not only that, but they aren't sure they are going to have admin privileges on thier own boxes and they are supposed to be Net/Sys Admins?
There are good reasons for giving people vanilla-flavored, locked-down Windows boxes because support techs are easier/cheaper to find and the support costs are as lower than a Windows plus something else environment.
And that works fine if your corporation's needs are largely met by beancounters, managers and secretaries.
But any company that relies on code developers and IT literate people for any part of its bread and butter should know to
keep those developers happy,
give them whatever they want as long as they produce and the cost is reasonable.
Nothing worse than some heavy-handed policy run amok.
I run on Linux, am familiar with it, like it and am happy with it. My experiences trying to develop on Windows have been, uh, mixed. I don't like it. That's just me, though.
OTOH, if I were managing a group of developers and one of them wanted to develop on Windows (a guy in our group learned his craft in a Windows IDE), I'd let them. (Of course, I'd insist on things like ISO compliant C++ instead of Windows-compliant C++, etc., but those issues of standards would be imposed across the board, on people who want to use MacOS X or OpenBSD. The OS, the editor, the compiler should be irrelevant.
Let your people use what works for them and they'll work for you.
Having been in the position a couple of times, I know that I am not suited to being a team lead.
Having said that, I can point out the qualities that are really important.
An appreciation for the bigger picture and larger scale organization. You need to be able to delegate and trust team members to take care of issues, even if they don't do it perfectly the Way You Would Do It.
Communication skills. This includes being able to make people comfortable, let down their defenses, so you'll learn what the bottlenecks are in a project. If you get on people's cases, they'll quickly learn not to bring bad news to you early, but to bury it until it rises up later as a full-fledged stinking zombie that will be much harder to handle.
Communication skills. Yes, it's doubly important. You have to be able to listen as well as speak and write. And, listening, you need to be able to recognize how people's personalities will color their communications. By comparing reality with people's descriptions, you can figure out sooner or later how team members may color what they say.
Linux is still a long way behind Solaris with things like NFS
Behind yes, but not a long way, and the gap has been closing over the past several years.
I'm really looking forward to performance and security of NFSv4, but am apprehensive that the setup appears to be more complicated than just editing a couple files in/etc.
BTW, given all the recent hoopla over Sun's commitment to free and open source software, they ought to be recognized for sponsoring the CITI group at UMich that had a lot to do with Linux NFSv4, and for sponsoring the Connectathon series of conferences that I'm hoping will make my Linux desktop NFS client interact better with my Sun NFS fileserver.
This guy was arrested on a thinly veiled charge of failing to supply ID, and failing to supply ID is not a crime - in fact it's a constitutionally protected right.
Well said.
But even the ability of a public citizen to fail to supply an identification will become moot before long.
Cops will access to networks of fixed and mobile videocameras linked to headquarters with facial recognition software that will return an audio feed to them telling exactly who you are, where you've been recently recently, if you have any record, etc.
So even if the SCOTUS is screwy enough to rule against this guy's right to not supply an ID, the ruling either way will be practically meaningless within a decade.
my X network traffic is nicely hidden taken caer of by ssh; the Solaris box puts X traffic onto a fake local framebuffer DISPLAY like
solarisbox:10.0
before sending it back to my realbox:0.0.
It might be slower than what you suggest, but I think it's a lot more secure. Without ssh doing the job of making your X network traffic secure you'll have to worry about Xauthority. Too many people (and I was one once) get around Xauthority hassles with an
$ xhost +
and I can't begin to tell you just how Bad that is.
I recognize that in a largely rural state that a car is a necessity.
Unfortunately, public transportation is too expensive an option to run one person 10 miles out on a dirt road. The economics can't support it.
But here's my take.
In Scandanavia, there are rural areas and there are people who like to drink (and serious drinking, too, to combat the lack of daylight during the winter months). Yet, they have strict drunk driving laws. Some knowledgeable can correct me, but I seem to recall laws like: first offense means 1 year in jail. Serious penalty. And, AFAIK, there's not a big problem with drunk driving over there.
The problem in NM is that folks like to get together socially at the end of the work day to drink together. Meanwhile, your Scandanavian rural drinking resident is willing to go home and drink alone (but at least not be on the road)? Or, if he drinks, to stay the night within walking distance of the bar?
Face it, in a social group, who wants to volunteer to be left out of the drinking part so they can have the privilege of driving friends home to destinations scattered across 60 miles of rural roads? Not unless they get some serious respect for doing so.
Everyone has to agree to serious consequences in order to get the wholescale society change of behavior. Otherwise, behavior won't change.
Generally, finding scientific proof that someone is saying something isn't much harder than going to news.google.com, in the worst case. Let me know if you need help.
I do need help.
News articles do indeed show that the scientists are saying something. But that's not in dispute.
Where I have difficulty is in finding evidence that:
these scientists are motivated by partisan considerations and are trying to create a political issue.
My point was only that, until I see evidence of partisan motivation and evidence of an attempt to create a political issue, then, as a scientist, I cannot justify that conclusion.
At least in the USA, and probably in other developed countries, is the demise of the old model where a widespread increase in the standard of living was not only possible, but economically sound, as long as wage increases were no larger than worker productivity increases. Letting wages rise faster than productivity was a recipe for inflation.
Lately, productivity has been climbing spectacularly. That's good, very good. But the benefit has not been translated into increased wages.
Why?
Because of globalization of the labor market. It's not just because owners of capital are mean and greedy (although I'm sure some are). Until workers in China and India and every other place with workers capable of doing the same job as workers in developed nations catch up in terms of wages, then the best most developed nation workers can hope for is not to lose too much ground from the status quo.
Unless you're lucky enough to already own a lot of capital, your only recourse is to do something that cannot be done by someone thousands of miles away willing to work for a fraction of your wage.
That means specializing and it means providing local service (eg, cooking, warehouse worker, health care provider, on-site IT support, custom programming for a business).
But it sure doesn't mean working on an assembly line or, increasingly, reviewing health insurance claim forms or debugging some widely-used computer program.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a tough problem. Unions can and have abused their power. For every anecdote about The Man exploiting workers mercilessly you can come up with another anecdote about corrupt unions bleeding their companies to death.
Pay and performance have to be tied together.
If there was any way for workers to be paid exactly as if they were shareholders in the company for that transaction, maybe there'd be a way. But no one would ever agree as to what the genuine profit and loss was.
Forcing the union pension fund to be invested in the parent company (and giving them corresponding seats on the board of directors to insure that execs don't rape the company in the short term either) would go some way into insuring worker's interests and the corporations interests are aligned.
Whether we like it or not, there is no free lunch and we're all in this game together.
At some point things will get so bad (already 40% of Walmart employees are eligible for food stamps) that unionizing pressures will get to be too much for them. But, hey, if you don't treat your employees well, then you get what's coming to you. And while I think it's possible that unions can effectively exert inappropriate monopoly control over the labor market, right now the balance of power is shifted so strongly in favor of corporations like Walmart that a little unionization would do the situation some good. Better that than armed revolt.
My biggest gripe is that Mom and Pop shops with great service can't hope to obtain the same prices that Walmart does from its suppliers, which are essentially captive and squeezed by the big retailer. If those wholesale prices were made public and Mom and Pop were allowed to buy goods at the same price the situation would be improved.
Now I'm wondering how I can timeshift even more.
By eliminating that wasteful period of time called "sleep" from your life?
Seriously, think more about valuing rest and quiet time to think as part of your life.
(Reminds me of my brother-in-law who can't fall asleep without the TV blaring.)
Seeing as how NSA publishes security guides for NT, 2000, XP, 2003Server and Solaris 8, I'd say it is more than just Linux.
And when we all get to see the NSA contributions to the complete source code tree for those other OS's then I'll be as impressed.
I have no problem with a legitimate buy-out.
I do.
Everyone agrees that squashing another company (cutting off Netscape's air supply, pissing on Sun's Java, tells Citrix that ICA might not work in the future, etc.) through underhanded tactics is a Bad Thing. Check.
And, everyone agrees that a large company that coerces a smaller one to sell under duress is a Bad Thing.
So where's the harm if Microsoft buys out the small company at a mutually agreeable price?
The marketplace can potentially be hurt when a monopoly assumes control of any additional part of the marketplace.
In fact, what makes sense for the monopoly is to leverage every asset, including the new company, in any way possible, to maximize revenue. They have that obligation to their shareholders and that's fine. What's not fine is that they have the means, monopoly control, to do things that are not fine.
That may mean "bundling" a promising new bought-out technology with some old technology or with some unrelated new technology that needs a push. It may mean putting a wet blanket over the new technology because it could cause significant loss of lucrative revenue from an existing product. It may mean many different things, but it generally means that the new technology is going to enter the marketplace in a different way.
Capitalism works best when there is genuine competition in an informed marketplace. Letting a monopoly buy out a promising young company with a good technology and excellent potential for growth is suboptimal, just as depressing as watching a beautiful young 18 year old girl marry a rich old 75 year old man.
Changing minds you would hope would be the result of careful rational independent thought on the part of the citizenry.
But the reality is that minds are changed in abrupt knee-jerk realizations, fueled by emotion, and presented sensationally alongside advertisements.
I see no reason to hope for any widespread public consciousness.
IIRC, a veteran that opposes Kerry's presidential run because of the Senator's anti-war activities upon returning from Vietnam was actively seeking photos showing the two together.
The same creative outfit could produce other works of art worthy of the Weekly World News that would prove profitable:
I think a lot of VoIP users would feel fine about emergency 911 locating service being activated and authorized when they dial the 911 sequence.
What they probably don't feel fine about is having remote authorized control of that same locating service with all the loss of privacy implications.
look at where all the tech logic is flowing: "edge servers".
That is not only insightful, but ironic as well.
When PC's first came out, they were at the "edge" (desktops now have logic and aren't dumb terminals anymore), and this edge service market is what drove the early success of Microsoft.
If people would refuse to fill jobs that had questionable consquences
...which would leave questionable people to fill jobs with high responsibility and high consequence.
No, I would much rather have rational, thoughtful people of integrity filling jobs at the FBI and elsewhere.
Now whether Johhn Ashcroft represents such an individual is a matter of some question, but I'd much rather the worker bees at the various TLA agencies be people of good character, rather than have people of integrity avoid government service because of presence of temporary political hacks and some people of questionable character that will always be with us.
Not only that, Intel are benefiting the consumer by keeping compatability
Amen.
Despite the all caps ranting and whatnot, THIS IS A GOOD THING.
Imagine, for a minute, had Intel come out with a non-x86-64 compatible instruction set, hmm? The yelling and screaming of such a move at this point would be heard round the world. Utterances of an active 800 lb gorilla, etc.
Again, this compatibility IS A GOOD THING.
Forunately, it's
where K has higher values for intelligent security policies that balance risk mitigation with costs of implementation.Certainly, if the policies are stupid, you can make K as low as you wish.
Microsoft just give you the SDK and you run with it however you like.
While things are emerging, MS can treat developers pretty well.
But after they establish 90% control, then what?
From what I've seen, Web site developers crying about broken CSS and other non-standard IE behavior have been put on the back burner; "IE 7 will ship in Longhorn in its own good time..."
Were there some competitive fire lit under their butts, the technically-capable folks in Redmond would be doing some valuable for consumers of its products and not just building cross-leverage mechanisms that increase their revenue.
Not only that, but they aren't sure they are going to have admin privileges on thier own boxes and they are supposed to be Net/Sys Admins?
There are good reasons for giving people vanilla-flavored, locked-down Windows boxes because support techs are easier/cheaper to find and the support costs are as lower than a Windows plus something else environment.
And that works fine if your corporation's needs are largely met by beancounters, managers and secretaries.
But any company that relies on code developers and IT literate people for any part of its bread and butter should know to
- keep those developers happy,
- give them whatever they want as long as they produce and the cost is reasonable.
Nothing worse than some heavy-handed policy run amok.I run on Linux, am familiar with it, like it and am happy with it. My experiences trying to develop on Windows have been, uh, mixed. I don't like it. That's just me, though.
OTOH, if I were managing a group of developers and one of them wanted to develop on Windows (a guy in our group learned his craft in a Windows IDE), I'd let them. (Of course, I'd insist on things like ISO compliant C++ instead of Windows-compliant C++, etc., but those issues of standards would be imposed across the board, on people who want to use MacOS X or OpenBSD. The OS, the editor, the compiler should be irrelevant.
Let your people use what works for them and they'll work for you.
Having been in the position a couple of times, I know that I am not suited to being a team lead.
Having said that, I can point out the qualities that are really important.
Linux is still a long way behind Solaris with things like NFS
Behind yes, but not a long way, and the gap has been closing over the past several years.
I'm really looking forward to performance and security of NFSv4, but am apprehensive that the setup appears to be more complicated than just editing a couple files in /etc.
BTW, given all the recent hoopla over Sun's commitment to free and open source software, they ought to be recognized for sponsoring the CITI group at UMich that had a lot to do with Linux NFSv4, and for sponsoring the Connectathon series of conferences that I'm hoping will make my Linux desktop NFS client interact better with my Sun NFS fileserver.
Dear companies running on W2K, please pay for upgrades ASAP. We would like more money. Thanks.
Bullseye.
MyCorp runs Win2K quite happily; it's the first MS OS to have reasonable stability and security (I didn't say perfect, just reasonable).
Given Win2K's adequate service for our needs, we're thinking "Why go through the hassle of upgrading to XP and paying money for the privilege?"
This guy was arrested on a thinly veiled charge of failing to supply ID, and failing to supply ID is not a crime - in fact it's a constitutionally protected right.
Well said.
But even the ability of a public citizen to fail to supply an identification will become moot before long.
Cops will access to networks of fixed and mobile videocameras linked to headquarters with facial recognition software that will return an audio feed to them telling exactly who you are, where you've been recently recently, if you have any record, etc.
So even if the SCOTUS is screwy enough to rule against this guy's right to not supply an ID, the ruling either way will be practically meaningless within a decade.
??
When I do
my X network traffic is nicely hidden taken caer of by ssh; the Solaris box puts X traffic onto a fake local framebuffer DISPLAY like before sending it back to my realbox:0.0.It might be slower than what you suggest, but I think it's a lot more secure. Without ssh doing the job of making your X network traffic secure you'll have to worry about Xauthority. Too many people (and I was one once) get around Xauthority hassles with an
and I can't begin to tell you just how Bad that is.I recognize that in a largely rural state that a car is a necessity.
Unfortunately, public transportation is too expensive an option to run one person 10 miles out on a dirt road. The economics can't support it.
But here's my take.
In Scandanavia, there are rural areas and there are people who like to drink (and serious drinking, too, to combat the lack of daylight during the winter months). Yet, they have strict drunk driving laws. Some knowledgeable can correct me, but I seem to recall laws like: first offense means 1 year in jail. Serious penalty. And, AFAIK, there's not a big problem with drunk driving over there.
The problem in NM is that folks like to get together socially at the end of the work day to drink together. Meanwhile, your Scandanavian rural drinking resident is willing to go home and drink alone (but at least not be on the road)? Or, if he drinks, to stay the night within walking distance of the bar?
Face it, in a social group, who wants to volunteer to be left out of the drinking part so they can have the privilege of driving friends home to destinations scattered across 60 miles of rural roads? Not unless they get some serious respect for doing so.
Everyone has to agree to serious consequences in order to get the wholescale society change of behavior. Otherwise, behavior won't change.
I can appreciate how he defends them in public.
Hey, at least your leader, if defending outrageous policies, is an eloquent speaker and willing to try put together a logical framework to support it.
W. pisses off more people than he needs because he comes across like someone who failed debate class.
Generally, finding scientific proof that someone is saying something isn't much harder than going to news.google.com, in the worst case. Let me know if you need help.
I do need help.
News articles do indeed show that the scientists are saying something. But that's not in dispute.
Where I have difficulty is in finding evidence that:
My point was only that, until I see evidence of partisan motivation and evidence of an attempt to create a political issue, then, as a scientist, I cannot justify that conclusion.
The response to this has been that these scientists are motivated by partisan considerations and are trying to create a political issue.
Do you have a scientific basis for coming to such a conclusion?
At least in the USA, and probably in other developed countries, is the demise of the old model where a widespread increase in the standard of living was not only possible, but economically sound, as long as wage increases were no larger than worker productivity increases. Letting wages rise faster than productivity was a recipe for inflation.
Lately, productivity has been climbing spectacularly. That's good, very good. But the benefit has not been translated into increased wages.
Why?
Because of globalization of the labor market. It's not just because owners of capital are mean and greedy (although I'm sure some are). Until workers in China and India and every other place with workers capable of doing the same job as workers in developed nations catch up in terms of wages, then the best most developed nation workers can hope for is not to lose too much ground from the status quo.
Unless you're lucky enough to already own a lot of capital, your only recourse is to do something that cannot be done by someone thousands of miles away willing to work for a fraction of your wage.
That means specializing and it means providing local service (eg, cooking, warehouse worker, health care provider, on-site IT support, custom programming for a business).
But it sure doesn't mean working on an assembly line or, increasingly, reviewing health insurance claim forms or debugging some widely-used computer program.
I can't say how much I appreciate the automatic tests. This is applying computers to a thankless task that they're suited for.
Now if they only had a web dashboard portal showing the latest results in an easily-assimilated color coded HTML table....