I have always pondered this question. I ponder it seemingly every week when I listen to the news. No matter how large of a crime a lawyer participates in, it seems they never get disbarred. Let’s take a story most of you have been familiar with.

Back in 2005 we started seeing articles like the summary posted here:

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud093005.htm

(search for Navistar once you get to the page.)

In a 2006 Business Wire press release we read the following:

As part of the review of accounting issues, the company’s audit committee has completed an independent investigation into the propriety of accounting and auditing confirmation matters relating to vendor rebates in fiscal year 2005. T he investigation was conducted by an independent law firm and found no evidence of fraud or intentional misconduct.

You can find the article here:

http://ir.navistar.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=199251

Not long after this, October of 2007 in fact, we started seeing articles which contained the following:

The independent investigation also identified instances of intentional misconduct that resulted in some of the company’s smaller, but in some cases material, restatement adjustments. “ Most of the individuals who were involved in instances of misconduct are no longer employed by the company,” Navistar said.

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10045683/c_10023908

In October of 2009 we started seeing articles like the following:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Navistar-SEC-settle-apf-2643276182.html?x=0&.v=2

One cannot follow this progression without asking why did the SEC not disbar all of the attorneys involved in the 2006 statement. It’s rather obvious they were either willing participates in a cover up, or simply saying what they were paid to say without performing much (if any) of an investigation. The timing of the 2006 article made it appear as a rather obvious attempt to stop investors from bailing on the stock. It soon became obvious nobody was buying the bullshit, hence the back peddling in 2007.

My concern here isn’t with the sear sizzled books fresh from the barbecue, nor with the “deal” the SEC did on our behalf allowing the company to not admit any wrong doing (even after the company issued a statement saying evidence of it had been found.) No, My issue here is that the SEC didn’t serve the public interest by forcing disbarment of all lawyers involved in the 2006 release. We are never going to stop corporate fry cooks (accountants) from serving up mouth watering financial statements which have no basis in fact until we make it a death penalty offense. That is simply a given. We cannot begin to hope such frauds will be uncovered if the offenders can simply pay lawyers to say things which have no basis in fact in order to continue duping investors. At a minimum, the SEC settlement should have demanded disbarment for all.

So, even though you know better than to weight down an editor with a project environment bolted onto it, you have decided to learn/use Eclipse. At least, for some project (perhaps a Source Forge project) someone has mandated that you use Eclipse. Since your desktop OS is Ubuntu, that means you need to get Eclipse running on Ubuntu. You open up Synaptic and see quite a few packages with Eclipse in the name or description. Most importantly, you find the Java Development Tools and know that you will be doing your development with Java.

You try installing this, and click OK on the additional dependencies which are flagged as needed. After a bit you exit Synaptic and find Eclipse on your KUbuntu menu. It starts up. You tweak a few settings (like changing delete line from CTRL-D to CTRL-K so it matches Kate) then decide you are ready to start learning. You’ve already done a bit of Java coding and really aren’t into plunking down yet another $40 on a Java book which is going to burn half of its pages regurgitating the free Java language information, so you search around and find the free Eclipse and Java tutorials here:

http://eclipsetutorial.sourceforge.net/

Mark Dexter has done quite a job putting together this tutorial. While I have a few issues with some of the things taught, I find this to be a completely remarkable effort. As someone who authors advanced technical books, I know the level of effort it took to create such a series of lessons. (My issues are more philosophical than technical.)

You download and run the first tutorial without problems. There are some minor differences between the version of Eclipse he is using and the current 3.5.1 shipping with Ubuntu, but you manage to work your way through the tutorial as long as you don’t leave it on pause too long or run too many in sequence since there seems to be some kind of resource leakage in the video playback software used by both Opera and FireFox. (It appears you need to restart the browser after every fourth lesson or so. Putting a lesson on pause while you go to lunch is a definite no-no.)

Once you have complete this tutorial, you feel pretty good about your Eclipse installation. It seems that things went well and you believe you have all of the correct packages installed. Then you start the persistence tutorial. Once you get to the portion of the tutorial which tells you to open the generated XML file and view it in Design mode, the wheels come off the cart. The file gets opened up in raw text mode, not even “source” mode. There is no syntax highlighting nor is there a pair of tabs which will let you toggle between modes. Frantically you pause and back up the lesson to see if you happened to have missed something. No, even after you watch that little piece five times, you cannot find anything you didn’t do correctly. Life is sad.

Desperation sends you searching on the Web to find any and all places mentioning Eclipse, XML, and Ubuntu together. You find quite a few message threads with a phrase like “Are you using the version of Eclipse found in the distro? That has never worked for me…” Life is sadder still.

You download the Eclipse Java kit from the actual Eclipse Web site and install it into a local directory. This kind of sucks because it is no longer on the KUbuntu (or Ubuntu) menu and you need to create a shell script in your bin directory to invoke it. You also have to nuke your hidden “.eclipse” folder since the two versions don’t like to play nice. After you start it up though, the XML file opens just like it should. Thinking that it is simply a missing jar file you painstakingly compare the jar files in the Ubuntu distro plugins directory with the local version. A lot more than one are missing. It’s more than 50 and less than 200 which simply aren’t there. More angst. Do you just try to copy them in via sudo, or do they need other files in other parts of the tree?

More frantic Web searching, but now you are searching for Eclipse, Ubuntu, and missing files. If the deities your worship choose to smile on you, one of your searches will lead you to this site:

http://blog.yogarine.com/2009/10/eclipse-plugin-packages-for-ubuntu.html

There you will find someone who really went above and beyond the call. The went out and created debian packages for all of the missing files they could identify, and they did it for the current version of Ubuntu/KUbuntu. In case the blog is not accessible for some reason the source you add to Synaptic is:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/yogarine/eclipse/ubuntu karmic main

Then you need to import his key from the command line:

wget http://www2.yogarine.com/eclipse-ppa.key -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

Finally you can perform the installation from the command line:

sudo apt-get install eclipse-pdt

Something like 111Meg later, your installation completes. This installs a lot more than you need for the tutorial, but everything you need for the tutorial will finally be where it is supposed to be. You find this out when you start up Eclipse from the KUbuntu menu, open the XML file, and see the designer come up.

Whoever Yogarine is, they are awesome!

One thing worthy of note: Even after you apply all of these patches/fixes/missing files, when you click on Help → Software Updates → Find and Install, the process will die with the following:

Network connection problems encountered during search.

Unable to access “http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo”.

Error accessing site stream. [Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd]

Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

Error accessing site stream. [Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd]

Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

Unable to access “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″.

Unable to access site: “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″ [Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.]

Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.

Unable to access site: “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″ [Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.]

Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.

Hopefully someone will find a work around for this.

There have been many disturbing trends in IT lately. It seems nearly every firm on the planet is using illegal aliens flown in on vacation visas instead of legally authorized workers. Even those companies selling super secret armored vehicles and other technology to the DOD have their entire IT department awash with non-citizens which haven’t even applied for a security clearance, let alone been granted one. It appears that high value military technology is there for the taking if you have an operative willing to work for $10/day.

Oh, there have been many arguments made that the super secret stuff is off on double password protected encrypted drives, but when the regular systems have had to have modifications to handle black ops shipments and warehousing, is there really any portion of the system that doesn’t need full security? I mean, just how smart does the $10/day terrorist spy have to be when the bill of lading module has a comment in the source like:

20090401 rrr Modifications to support black ops warehouse in Kuwait City

They simply have to know how to search with a text editor to find all of the modifications made to support that warehouse and they know how to identify any other black ops or DOD warehouses. Hell, they even know the city to begin looking in if they want to blow up an awful lot of supplies. Since most shops have a standard requiring most developers to put their initials or name in the main comments at the top, they even know who to get friendly with to find out more information.

What is even more disturbing now is that the argument “oh the directory is encrypted and requires an account with access they don’t have” is about to become completely bogus for most installations. The trend the Gartner Group is paid to market now is “data center outsourcing.” If any of you have read “Infinite Exposure” you will have a good understanding of the war and de-evolution that brings to the world. Even “Infinite Exposure” didn’t take into account just how little military suppliers actually care about the lives of those in the service. You will find most of these shops already in the process of whoring out 100% of their data centers to a third party which uses non-citizen labor.

We are not talking about swapping out staff, but the physical migration of the data centers into one or more monster data center owned by the company with the outsourcing contract. The people working in that data center have the IT operations of multiple companies, and some equipment for training/hot spare situations. Now, the al-Qaeda operatives don’t run any risk of getting caught stealing sensitive information like the complete schematics for all of the new armored vehicles. They are the people performing the disk to disk backups on the SAN. They simply take one of the backup copies (or an extra one they made) and plug it into the SAN used for training/hot spare. On that SAN, their account has the privs of God. No security alarms will go off as they burn their free time attempting to crack the encryption. Those directories which relied on super secret accounts with super secret privileges as protection are sent to other cells in a matter of seconds once the drive is mounted.

They might even download an OpenSource tool to crack the encryption. It won’t be hard. Most companies have paid the Gartner Group for the marketing glossies packaged as “industry analysis” which tells them they should be running their entire company on low powered $800 PCs. This means the drives on the SAN which actually are encrypted aren’t going to have 512 bit encryption because the hardware can’t do it. While the SAN itself may not offer up the encryption password, it may very well offer up the length of this password as a string of “*” characters. If you can tell the downloaded encryption hacking tool exactly how many characters are in the root encryption password (or seed) as some call it, you dramatically shorten the cracking time.

When does the DOD step in and stop these data center migrations? Are they even aware of the security breach which is about to happen? (if it hasn’t already)

Since the “moderators” on the Publish-L newsgroup wouldn’t allow this post unless the correct descriptions of certain companies were removed, I have posted it here.

eBooks are pretty useless for any information which requires more than one font, an image, or anything resembling formatting. I have had many “professional” services attempt to convert books from “The Minimum You Need to Know” book series into ebook format and the final product was a useless puddle of bits.

The current “industry standard” is to use EPUB. I’m sure EPUB will succeed because like PDF, it is the poorest possible choice for a “standard”. Industry leaders and MBAs alike always embrace the poorest possible decision. The EPUB format we have now will not be compatible with the EPUB format we will use in 2011. The standard was rushed and from an IT/Geek standpoint it is bad bad bad bad unforgivably bad. Even Microsoft, father of most bad things to hit IT in the past 20 years, hasn’t written a poorer specification.

In this economy, people who spend $300+ on a reader are going to spend the bulk of their time reading through the 200,000+ “free” titles which come “bundled” with the reader. Unless there is _specific_ information they need from a book you have put out only in EPUB format, they aren’t going to spend any money on an EPUB format. “If” you happen to have a novel or other “lit” type book which happens to be getting a weekly mention on both Oprah and CNN (think “High on Arrival”) you will see “some” eReader owners plunking down cash on it.

Most books will be “zero value” which get put out via EPUB format. The readers are currently being hawked as portals to this large free library. Most marketers for the devices are also promising to continue expanding the “free” library. In less than two years each eReader supporting the EPUB format will have in excess of one million titles available for “free”. There are currently over 200,000 “classics” available. Each year there will be a new round of books which fall off the copyright protection merry go round plus there will be a new batch of books cranked out by publishers/authors which are released “free” in EPUB format.

Some of the new “free” books will be released in their entirety, and others will be released as a group of chapters. Those of you who think the current tech weenies will continue to be appeased by “first chapter free” sites are smoking something that isn’t sold over the counter. I have one technical book I will be releasing for free in PDF format once it has gone through editing. This will be the entire book. Due to the horrible limitations of EPUB, it will not be released in EPUB format. The book supports/covers an OpenSource Java class library which currently has over 5000 users/downloaders on SourceForge. The PDF will be bundled with the next major release of the library so new developers will have a much easier time getting up to speed with the library. Why did I spend 4 months of my time writing the book? I needed to use the library for a project and there wasn’t a single stitch of usable documentation. Why would I give such a book away for free? OpenSource users pay for nothing. Period. If it has anything to do with an OpenSource project on SourceForge, they expect it to be free and will simply look for a different library or tool rather than pay for a book. The book, however, is another book in “The Minimum You Need to Know” series. The rest of the series doesn’t cover OpenSource libraries from SourceForge. When the PDF gets bundled with the next downloadable update, I will have 5000+ developers that are now familiar with “The Minimum You Need to Know” book series. It may be two weeks or five years, but eventually they will need information on one of the topics covered by the series. If they liked the book they got for free, they will first look at my book series because they “know” it.

My current novel “Infinite Exposure” has been released in eBook form. I give away the first 18 chapters in both EPUB and PDF format. That version ends with a paragraph explaining that the readers have been reading a promotional version and they must purchase a retail version to find out how the book ends. Those who are curious enough about the book will spend the money. $4 for the eBook version or $24 for the hard cover (there will never be a paperback version.) Once you upload a “free” PDF version of your book to a couple of the “free” book sites you will find a strange thing happens. Set up a Google or other monitor for your title and have it send you updates. Every couple of weeks I find a new “free” book site has not only the PDF copy of the book, but has taken the time to either scrape and paste reviews of the book onto their site, or to provide links to book reviews. Some of the sites are kind enough to provide some kind of download count information. The “I want everything for free” crowd appears to number in the hundreds of thousands, if the counters are accurate. How many were simply download bots as opposed to actual people reading? No idea. When was the last time any of you put out a marketing packet/kit which was willingly _pulled_ 100,000 or more times? I’ll wager many of you paid money to send marketing out via one or more email marketing services only to see no sales and be completely unable to verify the hit counts they were sending to you in the weekly emails. I spent about half an hour chopping the novel off at a logical point, generating the PDF, and uploading it to two sites. Every couple of weeks I find it listed somewhere else. More importantly though, I find the glowing reviews listed along with it.

Microsoft, a company which has produced absolutely worthless software for decades, has trained most people to accept “good enough” as the way it is. Hell, Microsoft has to have years of great days all back to back along with the alignment of critical star configurations in order to have a product which can aspire to be “good enough”. Anybody who has had to endure pathetic products like Word, Windows, Vista, (the we are gonna charge you for these bug fixes Windows 7 “release”), Bob, Money, or the countless other “products” pushed out the door by Microsoft has found their attitude adjusting towards “good enough” being a forward looking goal rather than a fall back position.

The only publishers I see making anything at all out of the current EPUB trend are the publishers with a “long tail.” This “tail” can extend both forward and backward, if you happen to have some kind of trademarked series such as my “The Minimum You Need to Know” or, as other publishers have with “for dummies”, “for idiots”, etc. (I haven’t checked lately, but I believe “for Complete MBAs” is still available. That would cover dummies, idiots, and Godless genetic misfits without infringing on the other trademarks.) I expect it will take up to a year for all 5000+ current users of that OpenSource library to pull down updates. I haven’t done much tracking to see how many new adopters are coming along, but there are continued improvements to the library, so there will be at least a trickle of new users each year. Every copy of my $45-$90 titles which goes out the door after the release will pretty much be payback for the time I put into generating this marketing material. Note that I didn’t write the book specifically to be a marketing tool. I had to do the research anyway, so why not do just a little bit more and write a book? The application I was going to write got done inside of four months instead of one month, but it got done, and I wasn’t on a delivery schedule.

Roland Hughes, President

Logikal Solutions

http://www.logikalsolutions.com

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com

http://www.infiniteexposure.net

I read Mark Peters article in “the Writer” magazine today and had to take some time to comment. It’s not that I’m offended by the definition of this phrase:

http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/metric_buttload/

I just think the definition is completely wrong. You see, I’m a child that is old enough to remember the 70s because I wasn’t old enough to actually live it at the time. I missed out on the summer of love and the “free love” craze, and haven’t quite gotten over missing out on a time when you could have all the sex you wanted without dying from it. Life just isn’t fair!

More importantly, I remember the gas rationing, gas lines on the news, and the governments ill-fated attempt to force the God-awful metric system down our throats. I believe it was during eighth grade math when they really started to shove that at us. Once the national test scores for math plummeted through the floor boards, they quickly re-adjusted the curriculum so we didn’t have to be bothered with such things again. It wasn’t that we couldn’t learn it, we just outright refused. Trying to force a bunch of farm kids who can tell you the acre size of a patch of ground by glancing at it to start talking in square kilometers was a bad idea from the beginning. We dealt with CCs and grams because we had to get through physical science, and, if the scale already had the notches cut in it, we simply didn’t care about the units. We had grown up all our lives knowing that a bushel of soybeans and a bushel of corn were different sizes. We had no trouble wrapping our minds around the fact 16 fluid ounces was only a pound when you were talking about water or something very close to it. If you wanted us to start weighing herbicide in grams and pesticides in CCs we could care less, just provide the correct scale and measuring cup and 24 will be 24 to us.

No, where the “gubmint” really screwed the pooch was making the auto industry start using metric. This was a classic government operation, meaning, it was a debacle from start to finish. A “ phased in” approach meant that we now had to have two sets of sockets and wrenches with us at all times. Yes, we probably each owned four sets, but they were scattered out across multiple tractors and trucks around the farm. On a good day you could find a complete set in the tool shed where they belonged, but we didn’t have that many good days. Even today, more than 20 years later, you still have to have two complete sets of tools to work on a %*&%(*ing car, on top of the specialty tools!

Ah, but the “gubmint”, in its infinite wisdom, was thinking about all of the European tourist dollars they could get if the speedometers all had kilometers on them. They were also thinking about how wonderful it would be to export American cars to European markets. Obviously they weren’t forward thinking enough to simply mandate every vehicle sold abroad come with a complete set of SAE wrenches and sockets. I mean, at the time, $40 would get you a pretty nice set in a carrying case. Today, roughly $20 will get you a Walmart special set of knuckle skinners. I’m sure if Ace Hardware had suddenly started moving 70,000 sets per year of its Ace brand wrench and socket sets via Detroit that the prices would have come down even sooner.

No, the “gubmint” didn’t think this whole “metric conversion” thing through. Randomly changing nuts and bolts on the vehicles we had to fix pissed us off, but putting Kilometers Per Hour on the speedometer along with MPH told us just how screwed we where. You see, we had just had the gas rationing, endured the Chevy Citation, and watched the incendiary Ford Pinto on numerous news reels. Our “ gubmint” had just told us we couldn’t have a Chrysler 300 with a massive V8 engine which came stock with factory installed dual quad carbs. We had just been told we could no longer have a car, under factory warranty, which would seat six comfortably and do close to 180MPH. That was simply un-American. Now they were trying to play the numbers game with us and change the units at the same time. They wanted us to only have the capability to go 160, but they always ran out of air when they said the units…trying to get us to agree that trimming the limit 20 wouldn’t be so bad. All we had to do was get behind the wheel to know we would never have a fast car again. There before us in blue and white on black was living proof that 160 was only about 120 MPH, and that was considered a ho-hum family sedan, not a fast car, let alone a muscle car.

Shortly after that, they tried to make every car ride like a rail. Detroit kept cutting corners and using more “European Engineering” to lighten the load rather than make a more efficient engine. First came the coil springs, then the struts. Kids these days have probably never ridden in a car that rides like a real car. No matter how much money you throw at it, coil springs and struts do not give you the ride of four leaf springs and a shock. I still have a full sized Jeep Grand Wagoneer with an AMC 360 V8. I can fire that thing up and take it, unfeeling, down roads which throw drivers of modern vehicles through the windshield. Even my 2006 Buick Rendezvous rides like sh*t compared to that thing and a Buick is supposed to have the “boatiest” old-man ride on the planet.

No, I think you need to update the definition of “metric buttload” to what it really is. Something trying to sound like a whole lot more than what it is. Distance runners love the metric system! It’s a lot easier to run 8K than it is 8 miles. HR people love talking about salaries in terms of K meaning a thousand when those of us in the computer field know that K = 1024 and we know they stiffed us on our paycheck because we only made 80,000 instead of the 80K we were promised.

Perhaps we could call “Metric Buttload” a Maadoff Performance Measurement?

Most of us, even when we aren’t gainfully employed, get at least some satisfaction looking at our retirement account balances these days. The vast majority of us still have a long way to go before the balance reaches our pre-recession amounts (if it ever will), but it is at least moving in the right direction…or is it.

There is a clear and present threat of a complete collapse and it isn’t that far off. To understand why, you have to understand why the averages have been going up. Here are a few headline grabbers which should let you see a trend.

• Domino’s Pizza. Third-quarter revenue down 6 percent; net earnings up 77 percent.

• Abbott Labs. Third-quarter revenue up 3.5 percent; net earnings up 36.5 percent.

• Pepsi. Third-quarter revenue down 1.5 percent; net earnings up 9.5 percent.

• Alcoa. Third-quarter revenue up 9 percent, compared with the second quarter; net earnings swung from a $459 million loss to a $124 million profit.

All of these companies have laid people off over the past two years and instituted other “cost cutting” measures, very few of which reduced the total take home for upper management. Surviving by cannibalism is never a good idea, which would explain why so many MBAs reach for that technique instinctively. It doesn’t take any vision to lay people off, but it does take vision to grow a company. You get an MBA to prove you have been purged of morals, ethics, and dignity. All of that memorization also purges you of vision.

I don’t mean to single out just these companies. The vast majority of publicly traded corporations are surviving by cannibalism today and that is why we have an implosion coming. The unemployment rate is currently around 10% and some talking heads are trying to say it will go down. Personally, I believe it is going to hit 25% unless the government takes the lead out of its ass and abolishes the L1 and H1 visas. When you visit sites like http://www.americanworker.org you read headlines about 15 million workers out of work and 1.5 million workers brought in legally (by visa programs) each year. The only way to stop the current trend is to stop the importing on January 1. Allow no new visas to be issued and expire all of the existing ones, then actually round up the people and send them home. Yes, it is drastic and sounds like protectionism, but it won’t after the Christmas numbers come in. American consumers aren’t spending due to the survival by cannibalism technique having gone too far. They simply don’t have the money to spend.

We have months, not years, to correct this problem. The summit currently going on in China is talking about this very problem now. China fails when we fail because China holds a whopping chunk of our debt and has tied their currency to ours. This implosion isn’t very far off, and it will make the housing crisis seem like nothing more than a bad day at the office. Most economists agree that once you factor in those who have fallen off the unemployment rosters along with those who are “under employed” the current rate of unemployment is closer to 17% right now. Once we exceed 25% for any length of time, the implosion cannot be stopped. America cannot easily get more credit in the world market and we are very close to being unable to repay the existing debt.

Perhaps you have noticed many of the contract postings now requiring W-2 consultants, even though you are an employee, not a consultant, when you work W-2. The industry went through this during the late 80’s when there was a change to the tax law which mandated companies with more than X employees had to pay the withholding tax right away instead of hanging onto it until the end of the quarter. That was about the same time the IRS got all fire and brimstone with “The 20 Questions” http://bridgenex.com/irs-guidelines.html in an attempt to crack down on tax cheats and tax defaults.

There were a lot of “consultants” who were simply called a consultant so companies could avoid paying them any kind of benefit. These people had no concept of how to run a business. The main concept they were lacking was the payment of estimated taxes. When it came time to file annual tax returns, these people were used to getting a big tax refund from Uncle Sam because they would declare fewer exemptions than they were entitled. Imagine the shock and horror they felt when they found out they owed Uncle Sam 38% of money they had already spent. Most made some big purchase just before filing in anticipation of getting the refund in time to pay it off.

Uncle Sam doesn’t like having to wait for his money. The problem got out of hand and a crack down ensued. Many large corporations, most notably Microsoft, http://www.trudelgroup.com/mscase.htm abused the benefits loop hole to no end, hence, the crack down. It made life quite miserable for contractors for a few years. Most companies wouldn’t consider using any consultant who wasn’t paid on a W-2 through some other firm. This made it very difficult for person to become an independent consultant. In time, new consulting firms came along and they would work with consultants on a 1099. Life got a little better.

Some consulting companies, notably Cap Gemini, split themselves up into hundreds, if not thousands, of sub-companies which were just below the X limit so they got to hang onto the withholding dollars until the end of the quarter. When short term interest rates were relatively good, the money to be made putting the withholding dollars in a short term interest bearing note was quite good. It’s a volume game. A 38% withholding for 100,000 consultants earning $60K-$120K is a tidy little sum even when divided out over 12 months. Back when money market accounts would pay 6% or higher interest, this was a major income stream for upper management. I don’t know if the company is still organized in such a manner today. I would think the concept would be a major cash loser today given the non-existent interest rates.

Why then, do we have a sudden resurgence of consulting firms demanding W-2? It’s because the clients demand it now. Clients aren’t driven by IRS fear these days, they are driven by fear of The USA Patriot Act. Most consulting firms are flying over illegal aliens by the plane load. These people have went through little in the way of background checks. Many are flown over here are the completely abused L1 visa, but a large quantity still come over on tourist/vacation visas to do billable work.

The fear has been building over the course of the year, but seems to have come to a frenzy ever since the Denver story broke. http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_13383720 It wasn’t until corporations found out Homeland Security was in the business of performing preemptive strikes that they really got scared. When they were only in the business of cleaning up after an attack, companies weren’t too scared. I mean, it was just decided to try the 9/11 suspects in New York. If they wanted, a good set of lawyers could keep that trial going for another 8-12 years via procedures and appeals. Most of the people who would have been in charge of or had their name on visa documents for a terrorist would either be retired or dead. The company would dissolve and reform over night under a new name and avoid paying any fines. When most of the people involved in a crime are dead, it’s a lot more difficult to make a case. You have to have a lot of other evidence.

Preemptive strikes have changed the lay of the land. The USA Patriot Act made it a crime to harbor or conceal terrorists, and those who do are subject to a fine or imprisonment of up to 10 years, or both. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2339.html All that is required now is for Homeland Security to prove that one individual in this group was a terrorist. They don’t have to actually have committed an act of terrorism. All that must be proven is that they were terrorists intent on either committing or facilitating such an act. This is a much easier case. It will be based upon volumes of surveillance data and the contents of computers owned by the individuals. It will be much more difficult to appeal such a case, especially since the individuals are looking at only 8 years, not life or the death penalty as will be the case of the 9/11 suspects should they be found guilty.

I have complained repeatedly that the news outlets never say who employed or sponsored a terrorist suspect. It looks like we may finally find out thanks to the Denver case.

Why is there such a push to have consultants work W-2 again? I’m not the only one who believes the Denver case is finally going to exercise section 2339 of the Patriot Act.

The mad rush to hire $10/day illegals has finally gotten its second wind. I’m not talking about the thousands of failed IT projects all fraudulently claimed to be successes or the millions of dollars being buried in the books trying to show investors just how much the company is saving…no…I’m talking about the pimps this time.

We can thank Vonage and every other voice over IP service which allows a resident in a foreign country to get a local U.S. phone number for this little ditty. Now we have thousands of non-citizens obtaining U.S. phone numbers and plucking company names out of the air. Within a matter of a couple of weeks they are on every bottom feeding Vendor Management System list in the business (most notably the EDS vendor list) and subscribing to some form of opening spamming service which allows them to paste in one job opening and have it appear on 7-50 different job boards.

Ah, this is truly a Utopia for those criminal enterprises hawking and using the Vendor Management Systems. Now they blatantly disregard the Department of Labor prevailing wage numbers they are supposed to pay attention to, instead, using an “averaged survey” of what each pimp on the vms system claims they will charge for each type of person. Of course, the pimps, which aren’t even based in this country, have no concept of what local talent actually costs and even less of an idea that they are helping to commit a federal crime. Nope, they continue to quote $10-20/hr billing rates since that is way more than the non-qualified workers in their area make, thus aiding and abetting a criminal activity.

Personally, I believe there are now more of these pimps listed on the job boards than there are legitimate IT workers in the United States of America. The Justice Department and the FBI have done absolutely nothing about curtailing the rampant wire fraud committed by these companies. Each of them is in such a mad frenzy to accumulate resumes they are posting openings which do not exist. Those of us who are seasoned IT veterans went through this in the late 80’s. We had to deal with unscrupulous technical recruiters who would spam ads in the newspaper just to gather resumes which they would later completely rewrite and present to clients. Thankfully, the English skills of this new generation of pimps are so low that they physically cannot rewrite resumes to match job openings. No, instead, they mass submit without contacting the consultant or even getting any form of approval or billing rate agreement.

Remember how Vendor Management Systems were going to cut costs by 20% and reduce management workload when it came to finding qualified talent? Was that ever a load of bullshit! Yes, you are getting people submitted for 1/10 ^th what you were paying, trouble is, they are the same people you won’t hire to work the loading dock. How’s that reduced workload going for you? Remember, the biggest selling point for Vendor Management Systems when they first came out was they were going to weed out the worthless recruiters who simply ran ads and forwarded their entire resume database to a hiring manager for them to weed through…How’s that working for you now? Most companies waste three weeks to six months with their Tier-1 vendors being restricted to two resumes at a time and a ridiculously low billing rate, then they open it up to Tier-2. By the time it gets out to Tier-6/cattle call, they are being spammed by every illegal alien vendor on the planet. Not one of the resumes is even remotely qualified.

The problem is so bad most companies have taken to putting positions “on-hold” instead of closing them. Most positions which go out to the bottom feeders are now only open for a few minutes. I’m not kidding. You can watch this happen yourself on the bottom feeding job boards like Corp-Corp.com. Simply choose a widely known skill set like Java and set up an Indeed.com search on a Web browser. Search first thing in the morning to clear out all of the entries. Look for contracts/jobs which are posted by multiple pimps and save a few links. Try clicking those links again after lunch. Many will come back with the “no longer available” error page. Most will simply sit there until they rot.

Your next task is to find a phone number on one of the openings which still showed up. Call it and ask for more information about the opening. You will quickly be told “I have to check to see if the position is still open” even though the position only appeared on the site a couple of hours ago. Be sure they have all of your contact information and tell them to get back to you…don’t worry, that follow up phone call will never happen. Even when the ad states it is a job is for a direct client, don’t bother believing it. Press them on this issue and you will ultimately find that EDS or some other large bottom feeding company is the one actually dealing with the client and that this pimp is simply subbing through that company. This is what qualifies as a “direct client” in their eyes.

Why such a different (and illegal) definition? It’s not a cultural thing, it’s a fraud thing. Each one of these companies generally gets on one major company vendor list. They then sub those openings out to roughly 20-500 other “companies” with Vonage or other voice over IP phone numbers and in return those companies (all on different vendor lists) sub their openings out to the rest of this group. Usually each of these companies is nothing more than a different family member. If any one of them places a person, they all try to get their own $5/hr cut of the billing rate. These are the “elite” groups because once they place one low skilled IT worker for $10/day, they are making more than the majority of the low skilled IT workers in the business. Once they have placed a third such person, even if they have to fly them over on a vacation Visa to work on site, they are the Donald Trump of their locality. None of them worry the least little bit about any laws which are being broken.

Now, the companies who made the horrible mistake of listening to that marketing company known as The Gartner Group are even worse off than before. They are getting slammed with more confetti, aren’t seeing any qualified candidates because the money being offered is way below the legal bottom end allowed by the Department of Labor for that skill set and that location. A good many companies who never were under the federal regulation aren’t even smart enough to know that once they took Tarp money, they had to comply with all prevailing wage labor laws.

Of course, nothing beats the professional image displayed when a qualified candidate calls a number for a contract and hears three different people pass the phone around using a variety of languages before they hear “hello?” in broken English. No company name. No phone extensions. Just three different “companies” all using the same voice over IP phone with different phone numbers.

All of the college professors who have never worked in the real world oooh and aaahhh over Java. I’ve never been a big fan of the language, in part because it is one of the most inefficient languages on the planet, but mostly, because any tool in the marketplace with that much hype surrounding it generally turns out to be a shiny new turd. (How many of you are old enough to remember PowerBuilder? How about all of those different “Case Tool” products which were going to completely eliminate programmers?)

I was forced to use Java on a recent project and came face to face with a known bug which has been allowed to exist for a very long time. Please examine the following:

badDateBug.java

1. import java.io.*;

2. import java.util.Date;

3. import java.util.Calendar;

4. import java.text.*;

5. public class badDateBugs {

6. public static void main(String args[]){

7. DateFormat screenFmt = new SimpleDateFormat( “yyyy/MM/dd”);

8. DateFormat badScreenFmt = new SimpleDateFormat( “yyyy/mm/dd”);

9. String original_date_str = “2008/09/01″;

10. System.out.println( “Original date ” + original_date_str);

11. System.out.println( “Result when good date format string used”);

12. Calendar d1 = Calendar.getInstance();

13. try {

14. d1.setTime( screenFmt.parse( original_date_str));

15. d1.add( Calendar.DATE, -7); // last week

16. System.out.println( “One week prior was ” + screenFmt.format( d1.getTime()));

17. } catch( ParseException p) {

18. System.out.println( “Error parsing date1″);

19. }

20. Calendar d2 = Calendar.getInstance();

21. System.out.println( “\n\nResult when bad date format string used”);

22. try {

23. d1.setTime( badScreenFmt.parse( original_date_str));

24. d1.add( Calendar.DATE, -7); // last week

25. System.out.println( “One week prior was ” + screenFmt.format( d1.getTime()));

26. } catch( ParseException p) {

27. System.out.println( “Error parsing date2″);

28. }

29. } // end main method

30. } // end class badDateBugs

You probably don’t even notice the subtle typo which causes this problem. Listing lines 11 and 12 contain it. All you have to do is enter “mm” instead of “MM” and this bug rears its ugly head.

roland@logikaldesktop:~/java_date_example$ java badDateBugs

Original date 2008/09/01

Result when good date format string used

One week prior was 2008/08/25

Result when bad date format string used

One week prior was 2007/12/25

roland@logikaldesktop:~/java_date_example$

You will notice that none of the much vaulted “exceptions” were thrown. The parse engine simply went on its way, and Java was happy to give you the wrong answer without any indication of a problem. Nice, very nice.

Most of you don’t encounter document portability problems directly. You use either OpenOffice or Symphony on a Windows based platform, choose from a few of the simplistic default fonts installed there, and only send the document to another machine which is exactly like yours. Some of you are still trapped using that horrific puddle of bits called MS Word, so you have even fewer options.

Eons ago, back when there were other commercial word processors, some of them had a grand idea. Create a document format which embeds everything needed to render the document in that file. Sadly, this was a proprietary format they didn’t share with competitors or the OpenSource community. Most of those word processors don’t exist anymore, or have such a tiny market share that they might as well not exist. They had a great idea, they were just ^)(*&(*&%^ing stupid about it.

Today we have the industry standard Open Document Format. While the standard is widely supported platform wise, it is somewhat feeble. I believe the root cause of its feebleness is the fact that few, if any, involved in coming up with the standard ever worked for or with those high end proprietary formats. Instead, they strove to find the least common denominator supportable by their favorite Linux distros. Not cool.

This problem was first encountered before we had either OpenOffice or Symphony. The problem was so severe it lead to most Linux distros providing access to something called MS Core Fonts. Web sites couldn’t work with different browsers unless the fonts they used were supported by the browsers. When everyone had dial-up, you couldn’t let your site try to download font files to a host browser. We also didn’t have cross platform capabilities with fonts. Unix and Linux used only Postscript fonts while Windows used only True Type Fonts. You had to buy expensive products from Adobe if you wanted to use Postscript fonts on Windows. I know, I was writing books then and I had to do it. The publishing/printing processes all used Postscript fonts. Most of this is hidden from the average user by “Export to PDF” capabilities in todays word processors. Many of you are also quite pissed to find out that the PDF created by your export function cannot be edited because the “ fonts” were exported as a series of graphic images rather than an internal conversion to a Postscript font.

Most of you won’t bother getting worked up over a word processor substituting a font on the destination end, after all, the document looked good on your end, so who cares, right? You do if it is a proposal or a document which will be published. Not only can the font look completely different, it can be a different physical size when the rendering engine gets done with it.

This is a test line.

This is a test line.

This is a test line.

Above are three “roman” style fonts. The first is Nimbus Roman as it exists on my Ubuntu desktop. The second is Times New Roman, and the third is FreeBookman. I wrote this document using FreeTimes. All of these are “roman” fonts and all of them can/could be the default “roman” font mapped to on a target platform. I have used 10pt for all of this document, yet notice how every line is a little different. For some it is the required spacing above and below, for others it is the physical character size, but every font has some trait which makes it different from the font you used on your platform.

I’m not talking about artsy type issues here. I’m talking about things which impact page margins, page breaks, and image alignment. Of all these errors, image alignment is the worst, not because it is difficult to fix, but because it is the most likely to slip through a proofing session when people are only skimming.

The first edition of “The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer” ISBN 0-9770866-0-7 used a flavor of Century Schoolbook for its font. I chose that font because the “ Schoolbook” family is what millions of children grow up reading in their text books (assuming they actually open their textbooks). I assumed that a font so widely used in the education system would be directly supported throughout the entire publishing process. Ah, but since I said “assumed” you know what happened. I found out the hard way that every printing company supported a different flavor of that font because every text book publisher wanted to keep other textbook publishers from using printers they used for overflow work.

On page 1-2 of that book (Chapter 1, page 2 for those who don’t understand technical book page numbering) I had a nice little picture I took of the keypad on a modern VT keyboard. Next to it I had a paragraph explaining the differences between it and the keypad on a PC keyboard. Not a complex layout, just something very beneficial for those who have only used a PC. Getting that to line up in my word processor was a cake walk. Getting it to line up in a printed proof, not so easy. In the end, I choose a printer that had former DEC employees running it, not just because they could do a better job proofing the output, but because they also supported the exact font I was using.

I, and most of the authoring/publishing industry, fight this battle every time we get ready to turn a book out. Most of us end up establishing long term relationships with a printing house not because of phenomenal pricing, but because we have adapted to the equipment and processes they have on their end. It is true that you could job out to all of the low end printing firms every time if you always used a graphic PDF export from a word processor. Everything has to be absolutely perfect coming from you though, because that kind of print file cannot be edited or repaired by the printer. They can shrink or enlarge it to fit a different page size, but they cannot go in and fix a typo found at the last minute after a proof has been sent out. If you don’t understand why, use Gimp or some other screen capture tool. Capture an image of a page displayed in your favorite word processor and save it to disk. Now open that image in Gimp or some other image editor and try to change a single letter inside of a word on that image. You have to be damned good to make that happen without it looking quite odd.

Even the United Nations has gotten into the act on this font transportability issue. Most government agencies around the world have banned or are in the process of banning the use of Microsoft products. (Some governments were simply too poor to afford them in the first place.) Most of the fonts out there support only a subset of the international character sets, which adds to the transportability issues. Red Hat and Fedora have been working on the Liberation font set. Even the Debian based distributions have added these fonts to their releases. An Open Font project exists and is producing the Libertine font set. You can find more information on these two font projects here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts

Debian has had the t1-cyrillic font set (which I use for most of my book writing these days). The problem with t1-cyrillic has been that it was Postscript only and the build process long ago tossed out the ZIP file it used to create for installation into Windows environments. Today I got good news on that front.

Inside the new source package you can find cyrfonts-win.zip and cyrfonts-X.tar.gz. The first one contains TTF fonts that can be used on MS Windows.

http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/scalable-cyrfonts/scalable-cyrfonts_4.13.tar.gz

One thing I find interesting is that none of these Open Source font projects seem to be working on a free version of the Schoolbook font family. I understand that Times Roman is the font most used in business, but Schoolbook is the font family most used by people. The Libertine font family seems to be straddling the difference between the two font families and may ultimately win out. Schoolbook has a century or more of psychological training behind it. If you actually read your textbooks when going to school, you adopted a mindset along with your study skills. After years of training by the educational system, you have been conditioned to automatically get into that mindset when you see a document using a Schoolbook font. You can read a bit more about that here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Schoolbook

All that is now left to accomplish is to have the OpenDocument standards people realize that embedding the fonts into the document file is a good idea. Once that happens, we will actually have a portable editable document format.