Modern RPGs are still Role Play Games: - You play the role of a Courier - You play the role of a Pest Control Man (Dwarf/Elf/Whatever) and if you're lucky you can even play the role of a junior hero in training tasked with dealing with all the pesky details real heroes don't worry about.
You have to forgive the GP. He/she is a product of the Western school systems and media which are more interested in producing obedient consumers than citizens.
Obedience to the authorities and blind belief in the law are all hammered into people from the tenderest of ages and constantly reinforced by the media (consider how many TV series are about the "hero-like-cops enforcing the law" vs "hero-like-rebels challenging the law").
Some of us, when we get to adulthood become aware of how dirty and corrupt the process of making laws is and how many laws out there serve purposes which are in fact "prop-up the business model of my buddies" and against the best interests of society.
Some of the great heroes of our times (like Ghandi) actually broke the law again and again and in fact, in his time, grand figures of the US history like Washington and his co-revolutionaries where busy breaking the laws of the crown.
Blindly following unfair laws is the way of the Sheep, not of Man.
They hope that other news sites will follow suit. If and after they do, you will not be able to get the story on any other web site. Subsequently, subscribers should increase and revenue should increase.
And yet what we would have then is a typical Prisioner's Dilema: even if all newspapers where behind paywalls, the first newspaper to go back to free access whould take most readers.
In fact, it wouldn't even need to be a newspaper - in a world where all the news are behind paywalls, a business model where you pay Reuters, FP and others for news feeds and then publish them in a free website with adds would be incredibly successful.
Without any laws forcing it (Murdock's objective might be ultimatly to get some laws passed to benefit his business), an "all news behind paywalls" model is not at all inherently stable business-wise.
Actually in most of Europe Internet access is not subsidized by taxes.
What's different from the US and the reason why Internet access is cheaper/faster in most of Europe is that in here we usually have laws in place forcing the telcos that own the last mile to open up access to any ISPs at competitive rates. Before those laws came to be, Internet access in all of Europe was slow and expensive.
All that is needed are laws that create an open competitive market on top of a natural monopoly.
Has it been happening and is it continuing to happen?
Will it hurt/cost us and how much?
What options do we have to stop/reverse it and how much do they cost us?
The consensus amongst specialists is that 1) is "Yes to both", 2) is "Yes, there is a significant risk that it will be potentially a lot but maybe it will be alright". The big questions are on 3) as in "Is an almost exclusive focus on a Carbon Free Economy the economically best way to go about insuring ourselves against the risks of the worst scenario in 2?"
All the AGW/anti-AGW bullshit flying around is just a smoke screen pushed on by special interests on both sides (plenty of money in both the status quo and in green technologies), picked-up by a minority of (tree-hugger and "you can pry my gas-guzzler SUV out of my cold, dead hands") tribalist idiots who will never be swayed from their position by reason and believe that "He who shouts the loudest must be right".
Even sadder that listening to the spectacle of adult (but clearly immature) people behaving like 5-year-olds ("Yes it is! Not it's not! Yes it is! No it's not!") is to see that the media gives a voice to the shoutters, not thhe thinkers.
Clearly no amount of information will ever convince those who look at climate change as an "Us against Them" subject (it's all tribalism for them, logic has no bearing) instead of approaching it as a social/economic risk-cost analysis.
The purpose of free education in a Western nation is create/maintain a highly qualified pool of manpower so that the kind of jobs that pay enough to maintain a Western style of living remain in the country.
Jobs requiring no education or specialization are easilly moved to cheaper countries - no country can maintain a high-income style of living while having a large percentage of unskilled manpower.
It makes sense for countries to invest in education for the purelly selfish reason that a highly educated pool of workers means beter paying jobs which in turn means a higher tax take.
It makes sense for individuals to pay for their a countries to invest in education for the purelly selfish reason that todays kids in school will be tomorrow's tax payers, just in time to help pay for retirement, medical costs and other social costs of old-age.
For a couple of years now the US has managed to maintain a growth economy along with poor investment in education mostly because it imports more than half of it's workers with higher education. This might not be sustainable in the future thanks to the extra barriers to entry after 9/11, the spread of information about the reality of the societal problems in the US (as opposed to the beautified view from movies and TV) and the spread of information about the sometimes slave-like conditions of working under a temporary work visa in the US.
To summon that link: - Blizzard boss says that Blizzard doesn't do restrictive DRM but... - Starcraft 2 still requires a Battle.Net account and online activaction even for Single Player - LAN play has been removed from Starcraft 2 and for multiplayer players are forced to be logged-in to and use Battle.Net
In other words: his "non-Restrictive DRM" is about as or more restrictive than anybody but Ubisoft (forget about resale, computer upgrades, later reinstalls and pray that your computer does not die) and way more restrictive that anything from 5 years ago.
I'm a firm believer that high-schools should teach students some basic principles of psychology (self-analysis comes to mind) and philosophy (think Skepticism and Critical Thinking), not as subject maters to be memorized but as tools to be used.
I doubt that this will ever come to be though, since creating trully self-aware and critical citizens out of our children would eat away at some of the foundations of our current society (for starters it would defeat most forms of marketing and misinformation)
For most people, Politics, like Sports and Religion is all about having an emotional attachment to something - they're for/with/believe a group/ideology because they feel like "one of the group" and one cannot be against oneself.
A high level of intelectual abilities (i.e. IQ) is no defense against it: just look at all the religious-like flamewars around things like editors and operating systems.
In order to do trully informed judgements one must first be aware of one's inner-self, one's drives and fears and be capable of analysing one's motives. One must be capable of separating the "logic" from the "feelings" and the "habits" in the way things are perceived, interpreted and reasoned about.
Unfortunatly this requires a level of inner maturity that seems to be far above that of most people...
The loan shark only breaks the arms of their late-paying clients.
The (international) banks on the other hand will gladly wipe-out the retirement savings of countless old-ladies if that means paying fatter bonuses to management and traders.
In all cases, the kids in homes with computers improved their...
... wait for it...
... computer skills.
One would almost think that the main purposed of giving poor kids access to computers at home should be to increase their computer skills (given that in today's and future society one can pretty much forget about any kind of specialized non-physical work if one doesn't have computer skills).
That said, what these studies seem to indicate is how important some form of supervision is for limiting the negative impact of computers (i.e. increase in time wasted on leisure activities) for kids.
I bet if a study was done involving getting TVs for TV-less poor families with kids, we would get the same negative results without the positive one.
Let me explain: - There are two types of people, those who think "My set of moral and ethic rules should be followed by everybody" and those who thinks "Everybody should find and follow their personal moral and ethical compass" - The first type, being incapable of immediatly forcing their morals on the majority of people will instead start by trying to have them enforced on a minority, preferably an group which is considered "different" by most other people and thus will not be naturally defended by the majority.
Moralistic laws that discriminate against a specific group, for example gay couples, are not an end in itself but just a stepping stone into further laws imposing a given set or moral rules to a bigger group of people - in any country where a battle to impose moral rules on a specific group is won by the moralists, the war just moves on into imposing yet further moral rules to the same group or even on a bigger minority group: the final objective really is to force everybody to follow a specific set of moral rules (whether they agree with it or not).
Just look at the most pious islamic countries where, having achieved things like prison sentences (or even death sentences) for "sodomy", the local moralists went further into things like forbiding women to show their faces in public.
At the moment, the biggest source of "moral rules" are certain religious groups (for example certain Cristian groups in the US, Ultra-Orthox Jewish groups in Israel and Wahabist/Salafist groups in North-Africa and Asia) but religion is not the only source of those people, look at the more extreme examples of political ideologies (such as Communism, Capitalism, Anti-statism) and you will find plenty of people with a similar "i know best how everybody should conduct themselves" mind-set.
I am surprised that he didn't ask the police officer for identification.
Once the encounter went from the stage of being just a chat to the stage the police officer physically tries to stop you and/or tells you that you must do something and/or asks for your identification then the natural step is to ask the officer to ascertain that he is indeed a police officer (not just somebody dressed as one).
While the ID itself would be pretty damn useless (this being the UK and the Met police which never had an officer convicted of abuse of power even when do so and people die) the act of getting the officer's ID should change the dynamic of the discussion from the "Copper trying to get somebody to do what he wants" to the "Properly identified Police officer enforcing the law" which in this specific case, given that the law was in the side of the freelance photographer, would actually constraint the officer's actions.
That said, in the UK and given the anti-terrorist laws that we have in the books, the only real restriction by law that Police officers have is that at most they can only fuck-up somebody's life for 28 days by keeping them in jail without charge for that length of time.
Actually the above average income earning adult is exactly the kind of people that advertisers most want to reach and of these average income earning adults that play games online, a large slice are the "part geek & interested in technology". In fact, said "part geek & interested in technology" gamers are the juiciest target for online in-game advertising since teenagers have comparitivelly little money while non-techological savvy people do not play online games.
For the "part geek & interested in technology", being exposed to obnoxious advertising of a brand in one of their favorite means of entertainment will hardly endear them to that brand...
Seems to me that in this case "the weak" are clearly not that unhappy with the rulling of the "strong".
As long as China continues to grow fast from the poor Asian country it was 50 years ago, most chinese people will happilly accept the "excentricies" of the local political and judiciary systems (besides, Democracy does not magically make a system fairer or more honest, there are plenty of corrupt democratic countries out there) - after all, for most people in China, their life is way much better than it was 30 years ago.
That said, when that growth cannot be sustained anymore, changes to the political system will likelly be on the menu - which is why chinese leaders are so concerned about maintaining growth and a "harmonious society".
It's thus not surprising that they do whatever it takes to keep growth going, including forcing foreign companies to pass intellectual, process and management know-how to chinese companies if they want to have access to the chinese market. After all, to continue growing Chinese companies must go beyond of the stage of being just no-name sub-contracted assemblers or makers of low value products relying on cheap man-power and become world class designers and producers of branded high-value products which use state of the art high-tech production and marketing processes.
The Chinese are doing just the right thing for their people.
It's Western nations that are busy reinforcing progress-hindering IP systems and proping up pyramid-scheme-like financial services systems all the while Western companies are busy making today's bonus-excuses for high-level management by "breaking into the huge and promising Chinese market" with the full knowledge that it is temporary and that today in China they are nurturing tomorrow's international market competitors.
Software patents hinder progress because they give existing slow-moving, dinossaur-like large companies the tools to kill small innovative IT companies before they outcompete them and turn into the large companies of the future.
In Software there are no basic concepts which are trully new or innovative and require patent protection - pretty much any software concept can and will be independently reinvented again and again because all professionals in the field will come up with similar solutions when trying to solve similar problems.
All software which is sufficiently complex for being non-obvious is already protected by copyright due to it's sheer size - no patents needed.
Any country that adopts Software Patents creates the conditions for the stagnation of their own Software industry - Software Patents are used by large companies to kill, while they're still young, any and all companies which might've one day turn out into something like Google.
For a country like New Zeeland, which has no large software companies, enacting Software Patents will just kill local software companies for the benefit of larger foreign ones. This is pretty much the pinacle of stupidity.
As an European I tell you New-Zeelanders: don't follow-up on the footsteps of the EU and the US - in 20 years time all new and innovative ideas will be coming up in countries where, thanks to weaker IP enforcement, the cauldron of innovation and unfettered competition continues to bubble at full strength, while places like the US and the EU will see their economies continuing stagnate and decay because the few new ideas they still manage to produce are being killed in the cradle.
The UK has a huge public debt (and growing) at the moment because of lack of fiscal probity in the last years of the previous government and because a lot taxpayer's money was used to "saved the banks" (the same banks that in the years before that payed billions in bonuses to traders).
The Chancellor (i.e. the Government Minister that takes care of Finances) has just announced a new budged where cuts are all over the place and Value Added Tax (i.e. Sales Tax) has gone up, all this to try and control the public debt.
Let's get some perspective - there have been cuts in spending in things like Education and Social Services: as a tax payer in the UK, no mater how much I like gaming, I don't care that a meaningless, non-strategic industry is not getting a hand-over of taxpayer's money anymore. (In fact, why should they be given taxpayer's money at all even in the good years?)
So this story is: a) Not really news, since everybody is getting cuts b) Really just saying that a wrong (giving my money to a special interest group) has been righted.
Some requirements reviewing, analysis and design up-front are an essential part of working smart instead of hard: - You review requirements to make sure that you don't end up implementing what you think is needed instead of what actually is needed. - You do analysist to make sure all the data that you need is there and all the data that you show/produce can be shown/produced and all the methods for handling data are defined and well understood. This is so that you don't have surprises later like finding out 2 weeks before release that you need to create a whole sub-module to retrieve certain kinds of data from a different system. - The designing bit is to make sure you have a sturdy framework for you code that does what's needed in the right way, is easy to maintain and has a performance within the boundaries specified in the requirements.
As much as we like to code and remain in our confort zone by doing it exclusivelly, the truth of the mater is that a successful project is successful because it does what is needed (from requirements), correctly using the available resources and external systems (from analysis), implemented in a reasonable predictable timeframe (from analysis and design) and is not costly to maintain and extend (from design). The quality of the code/coders is just one part on the success of a project and can easilly be negated by wrong requirements, data/logic coverage surprises or a bad design.
That said, my experience with reviewing, analysis and design meetings is that often most of the participants don't really know what they're doing, so the results are far from perfect.
(PS: Learning Technical Analysis and some Business Analysys - in other words the most important external bits that shape the development of a system - is the natural evolution path beyond Senior Designer)
I produce more results (as measured in meaningfull ways, such as # of functional requirement points implemented) per-week nowadays working 40h/week than I ever did when I worked 60h/week.
A tired developer rushing his work because he's already late will just code in many more bugs and create harder to maintain and update code, thus causing the kind of problems that make him run late and work longer hours to try and catch up - it's actually a vicious cycle.
In fact, at the moment, working with an international team, compared with other people of an equivalent seniority in geographical location where working long hours is traditional (US), my personal productivity is 2 or 3 times better because I work smart and steady while they just work hard and dumb.
This is an insight that experience brings to you as long as you get a change to work in an environment where management is wise enough to be knowledgeable about the impact of the side-effects of working long hours in intellectual professions.
Fifteen years ago I also used to think that I was so "elite" thanks to my capability of doing lots of work fast - nowadays I can see how such a huge percentage of that work was wasted becuase I didn't ask the right questions up front, because I didn't carefully checked a design decision up-front and went down a wrong path and had to throw down weeks of work, because I produced crappy code that later I had trouble to maintain and extend or simply because my rate of introduction of bugs was so much higher due to being tired all the time.
Wisdom is something you gain, not something that can be taught: I'm afraid that those with only a couple of years of experience in software development don't even know enough to understand how little they know.
The way the tech market is going at the moment, thanks outsourcing to India and other such locations, anybody in a Western nation which has managed to reach a Senior Designer/Developer type of position by now will have work guaranteed for the rest of their life.
This is simply because most of those graduating now will not be able to find entry/mid-level positions paying more than burger-flipping jobs (almost all of that work is now done in India) and will thus not gain experience up to the senior level.
Slashdot Mirror
Modern RPGs are still Role Play Games:
- You play the role of a Courier
- You play the role of a Pest Control Man (Dwarf/Elf/Whatever)
and if you're lucky you can even play the role of a junior hero in training tasked with dealing with all the pesky details real heroes don't worry about.
You have to forgive the GP. He/she is a product of the Western school systems and media which are more interested in producing obedient consumers than citizens.
Obedience to the authorities and blind belief in the law are all hammered into people from the tenderest of ages and constantly reinforced by the media (consider how many TV series are about the "hero-like-cops enforcing the law" vs "hero-like-rebels challenging the law").
Some of us, when we get to adulthood become aware of how dirty and corrupt the process of making laws is and how many laws out there serve purposes which are in fact "prop-up the business model of my buddies" and against the best interests of society.
Some of the great heroes of our times (like Ghandi) actually broke the law again and again and in fact, in his time, grand figures of the US history like Washington and his co-revolutionaries where busy breaking the laws of the crown.
Blindly following unfair laws is the way of the Sheep, not of Man.
And yet what we would have then is a typical Prisioner's Dilema: even if all newspapers where behind paywalls, the first newspaper to go back to free access whould take most readers.
In fact, it wouldn't even need to be a newspaper - in a world where all the news are behind paywalls, a business model where you pay Reuters, FP and others for news feeds and then publish them in a free website with adds would be incredibly successful.
Without any laws forcing it (Murdock's objective might be ultimatly to get some laws passed to benefit his business), an "all news behind paywalls" model is not at all inherently stable business-wise.
This is not funny but a valid question.
That said, why Indian?
How about Chinese, Polinesian, Eskimo, African, Amerindian?
I'd vote for Polinesian myself.
Actually in most of Europe Internet access is not subsidized by taxes.
What's different from the US and the reason why Internet access is cheaper/faster in most of Europe is that in here we usually have laws in place forcing the telcos that own the last mile to open up access to any ISPs at competitive rates. Before those laws came to be, Internet access in all of Europe was slow and expensive.
All that is needed are laws that create an open competitive market on top of a natural monopoly.
More than "Who's done it?" what maters is:
The consensus amongst specialists is that 1) is "Yes to both", 2) is "Yes, there is a significant risk that it will be potentially a lot but maybe it will be alright". The big questions are on 3) as in "Is an almost exclusive focus on a Carbon Free Economy the economically best way to go about insuring ourselves against the risks of the worst scenario in 2?"
All the AGW/anti-AGW bullshit flying around is just a smoke screen pushed on by special interests on both sides (plenty of money in both the status quo and in green technologies), picked-up by a minority of (tree-hugger and "you can pry my gas-guzzler SUV out of my cold, dead hands") tribalist idiots who will never be swayed from their position by reason and believe that "He who shouts the loudest must be right".
Even sadder that listening to the spectacle of adult (but clearly immature) people behaving like 5-year-olds ("Yes it is! Not it's not! Yes it is! No it's not!") is to see that the media gives a voice to the shoutters, not thhe thinkers.
You remind me about the story on slashdot a little while ago http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/07/14/1235220/Given-Truth-the-Misinformed-Believe-Lies-More
Clearly no amount of information will ever convince those who look at climate change as an "Us against Them" subject (it's all tribalism for them, logic has no bearing) instead of approaching it as a social/economic risk-cost analysis.
The purpose of free education in a Western nation is create/maintain a highly qualified pool of manpower so that the kind of jobs that pay enough to maintain a Western style of living remain in the country.
Jobs requiring no education or specialization are easilly moved to cheaper countries - no country can maintain a high-income style of living while having a large percentage of unskilled manpower.
It makes sense for countries to invest in education for the purelly selfish reason that a highly educated pool of workers means beter paying jobs which in turn means a higher tax take.
It makes sense for individuals to pay for their a countries to invest in education for the purelly selfish reason that todays kids in school will be tomorrow's tax payers, just in time to help pay for retirement, medical costs and other social costs of old-age.
For a couple of years now the US has managed to maintain a growth economy along with poor investment in education mostly because it imports more than half of it's workers with higher education. This might not be sustainable in the future thanks to the extra barriers to entry after 9/11, the spread of information about the reality of the societal problems in the US (as opposed to the beautified view from movies and TV) and the spread of information about the sometimes slave-like conditions of working under a temporary work visa in the US.
To summon that link: ...
- Blizzard boss says that Blizzard doesn't do restrictive DRM but
- Starcraft 2 still requires a Battle.Net account and online activaction even for Single Player
- LAN play has been removed from Starcraft 2 and for multiplayer players are forced to be logged-in to and use Battle.Net
In other words: his "non-Restrictive DRM" is about as or more restrictive than anybody but Ubisoft (forget about resale, computer upgrades, later reinstalls and pray that your computer does not die) and way more restrictive that anything from 5 years ago.
I'm a firm believer that high-schools should teach students some basic principles of psychology (self-analysis comes to mind) and philosophy (think Skepticism and Critical Thinking), not as subject maters to be memorized but as tools to be used.
I doubt that this will ever come to be though, since creating trully self-aware and critical citizens out of our children would eat away at some of the foundations of our current society (for starters it would defeat most forms of marketing and misinformation)
For most people, Politics, like Sports and Religion is all about having an emotional attachment to something - they're for/with/believe a group/ideology because they feel like "one of the group" and one cannot be against oneself.
A high level of intelectual abilities (i.e. IQ) is no defense against it: just look at all the religious-like flamewars around things like editors and operating systems.
In order to do trully informed judgements one must first be aware of one's inner-self, one's drives and fears and be capable of analysing one's motives. One must be capable of separating the "logic" from the "feelings" and the "habits" in the way things are perceived, interpreted and reasoned about.
Unfortunatly this requires a level of inner maturity that seems to be far above that of most people ...
The loan shark only breaks the arms of their late-paying clients.
The (international) banks on the other hand will gladly wipe-out the retirement savings of countless old-ladies if that means paying fatter bonuses to management and traders.
In all cases, the kids in homes with computers improved their ...
One would almost think that the main purposed of giving poor kids access to computers at home should be to increase their computer skills (given that in today's and future society one can pretty much forget about any kind of specialized non-physical work if one doesn't have computer skills).
That said, what these studies seem to indicate is how important some form of supervision is for limiting the negative impact of computers (i.e. increase in time wasted on leisure activities) for kids.
I bet if a study was done involving getting TVs for TV-less poor families with kids, we would get the same negative results without the positive one.
Stake through the heart or decapitation, depending if it's a vampire or a zombie.
Let me explain:
- There are two types of people, those who think "My set of moral and ethic rules should be followed by everybody" and those who thinks "Everybody should find and follow their personal moral and ethical compass"
- The first type, being incapable of immediatly forcing their morals on the majority of people will instead start by trying to have them enforced on a minority, preferably an group which is considered "different" by most other people and thus will not be naturally defended by the majority.
Moralistic laws that discriminate against a specific group, for example gay couples, are not an end in itself but just a stepping stone into further laws imposing a given set or moral rules to a bigger group of people - in any country where a battle to impose moral rules on a specific group is won by the moralists, the war just moves on into imposing yet further moral rules to the same group or even on a bigger minority group: the final objective really is to force everybody to follow a specific set of moral rules (whether they agree with it or not).
Just look at the most pious islamic countries where, having achieved things like prison sentences (or even death sentences) for "sodomy", the local moralists went further into things like forbiding women to show their faces in public.
At the moment, the biggest source of "moral rules" are certain religious groups (for example certain Cristian groups in the US, Ultra-Orthox Jewish groups in Israel and Wahabist/Salafist groups in North-Africa and Asia) but religion is not the only source of those people, look at the more extreme examples of political ideologies (such as Communism, Capitalism, Anti-statism) and you will find plenty of people with a similar "i know best how everybody should conduct themselves" mind-set.
I am surprised that he didn't ask the police officer for identification.
Once the encounter went from the stage of being just a chat to the stage the police officer physically tries to stop you and/or tells you that you must do something and/or asks for your identification then the natural step is to ask the officer to ascertain that he is indeed a police officer (not just somebody dressed as one).
While the ID itself would be pretty damn useless (this being the UK and the Met police which never had an officer convicted of abuse of power even when do so and people die) the act of getting the officer's ID should change the dynamic of the discussion from the "Copper trying to get somebody to do what he wants" to the "Properly identified Police officer enforcing the law" which in this specific case, given that the law was in the side of the freelance photographer, would actually constraint the officer's actions.
That said, in the UK and given the anti-terrorist laws that we have in the books, the only real restriction by law that Police officers have is that at most they can only fuck-up somebody's life for 28 days by keeping them in jail without charge for that length of time.
Actually the above average income earning adult is exactly the kind of people that advertisers most want to reach and of these average income earning adults that play games online, a large slice are the "part geek & interested in technology". In fact, said "part geek & interested in technology" gamers are the juiciest target for online in-game advertising since teenagers have comparitivelly little money while non-techological savvy people do not play online games.
For the "part geek & interested in technology", being exposed to obnoxious advertising of a brand in one of their favorite means of entertainment will hardly endear them to that brand ...
Seems to me that in this case "the weak" are clearly not that unhappy with the rulling of the "strong".
As long as China continues to grow fast from the poor Asian country it was 50 years ago, most chinese people will happilly accept the "excentricies" of the local political and judiciary systems (besides, Democracy does not magically make a system fairer or more honest, there are plenty of corrupt democratic countries out there) - after all, for most people in China, their life is way much better than it was 30 years ago.
That said, when that growth cannot be sustained anymore, changes to the political system will likelly be on the menu - which is why chinese leaders are so concerned about maintaining growth and a "harmonious society".
It's thus not surprising that they do whatever it takes to keep growth going, including forcing foreign companies to pass intellectual, process and management know-how to chinese companies if they want to have access to the chinese market. After all, to continue growing Chinese companies must go beyond of the stage of being just no-name sub-contracted assemblers or makers of low value products relying on cheap man-power and become world class designers and producers of branded high-value products which use state of the art high-tech production and marketing processes.
The Chinese are doing just the right thing for their people.
It's Western nations that are busy reinforcing progress-hindering IP systems and proping up pyramid-scheme-like financial services systems all the while Western companies are busy making today's bonus-excuses for high-level management by "breaking into the huge and promising Chinese market" with the full knowledge that it is temporary and that today in China they are nurturing tomorrow's international market competitors.
You never know, it might've been a rebelion by the Bruces
Feel free to use it anyway you want. Not attribution needed.
My ideas are free for all to take and used or discard as they see fit.
Software patents hinder progress because they give existing slow-moving, dinossaur-like large companies the tools to kill small innovative IT companies before they outcompete them and turn into the large companies of the future.
In Software there are no basic concepts which are trully new or innovative and require patent protection - pretty much any software concept can and will be independently reinvented again and again because all professionals in the field will come up with similar solutions when trying to solve similar problems.
All software which is sufficiently complex for being non-obvious is already protected by copyright due to it's sheer size - no patents needed.
Any country that adopts Software Patents creates the conditions for the stagnation of their own Software industry - Software Patents are used by large companies to kill, while they're still young, any and all companies which might've one day turn out into something like Google.
For a country like New Zeeland, which has no large software companies, enacting Software Patents will just kill local software companies for the benefit of larger foreign ones. This is pretty much the pinacle of stupidity.
As an European I tell you New-Zeelanders: don't follow-up on the footsteps of the EU and the US - in 20 years time all new and innovative ideas will be coming up in countries where, thanks to weaker IP enforcement, the cauldron of innovation and unfettered competition continues to bubble at full strength, while places like the US and the EU will see their economies continuing stagnate and decay because the few new ideas they still manage to produce are being killed in the cradle.
The UK has a huge public debt (and growing) at the moment because of lack of fiscal probity in the last years of the previous government and because a lot taxpayer's money was used to "saved the banks" (the same banks that in the years before that payed billions in bonuses to traders).
The Chancellor (i.e. the Government Minister that takes care of Finances) has just announced a new budged where cuts are all over the place and Value Added Tax (i.e. Sales Tax) has gone up, all this to try and control the public debt.
Let's get some perspective - there have been cuts in spending in things like Education and Social Services: as a tax payer in the UK, no mater how much I like gaming, I don't care that a meaningless, non-strategic industry is not getting a hand-over of taxpayer's money anymore. (In fact, why should they be given taxpayer's money at all even in the good years?)
So this story is:
a) Not really news, since everybody is getting cuts
b) Really just saying that a wrong (giving my money to a special interest group) has been righted.
Some requirements reviewing, analysis and design up-front are an essential part of working smart instead of hard:
- You review requirements to make sure that you don't end up implementing what you think is needed instead of what actually is needed.
- You do analysist to make sure all the data that you need is there and all the data that you show/produce can be shown/produced and all the methods for handling data are defined and well understood. This is so that you don't have surprises later like finding out 2 weeks before release that you need to create a whole sub-module to retrieve certain kinds of data from a different system.
- The designing bit is to make sure you have a sturdy framework for you code that does what's needed in the right way, is easy to maintain and has a performance within the boundaries specified in the requirements.
As much as we like to code and remain in our confort zone by doing it exclusivelly, the truth of the mater is that a successful project is successful because it does what is needed (from requirements), correctly using the available resources and external systems (from analysis), implemented in a reasonable predictable timeframe (from analysis and design) and is not costly to maintain and extend (from design). The quality of the code/coders is just one part on the success of a project and can easilly be negated by wrong requirements, data/logic coverage surprises or a bad design.
That said, my experience with reviewing, analysis and design meetings is that often most of the participants don't really know what they're doing, so the results are far from perfect.
(PS: Learning Technical Analysis and some Business Analysys - in other words the most important external bits that shape the development of a system - is the natural evolution path beyond Senior Designer)
I produce more results (as measured in meaningfull ways, such as # of functional requirement points implemented) per-week nowadays working 40h/week than I ever did when I worked 60h/week.
A tired developer rushing his work because he's already late will just code in many more bugs and create harder to maintain and update code, thus causing the kind of problems that make him run late and work longer hours to try and catch up - it's actually a vicious cycle.
In fact, at the moment, working with an international team, compared with other people of an equivalent seniority in geographical location where working long hours is traditional (US), my personal productivity is 2 or 3 times better because I work smart and steady while they just work hard and dumb.
This is an insight that experience brings to you as long as you get a change to work in an environment where management is wise enough to be knowledgeable about the impact of the side-effects of working long hours in intellectual professions.
Fifteen years ago I also used to think that I was so "elite" thanks to my capability of doing lots of work fast - nowadays I can see how such a huge percentage of that work was wasted becuase I didn't ask the right questions up front, because I didn't carefully checked a design decision up-front and went down a wrong path and had to throw down weeks of work, because I produced crappy code that later I had trouble to maintain and extend or simply because my rate of introduction of bugs was so much higher due to being tired all the time.
Wisdom is something you gain, not something that can be taught: I'm afraid that those with only a couple of years of experience in software development don't even know enough to understand how little they know.
The way the tech market is going at the moment, thanks outsourcing to India and other such locations, anybody in a Western nation which has managed to reach a Senior Designer/Developer type of position by now will have work guaranteed for the rest of their life.
This is simply because most of those graduating now will not be able to find entry/mid-level positions paying more than burger-flipping jobs (almost all of that work is now done in India) and will thus not gain experience up to the senior level.