When I lived in Holland I was told that the basic rule of the road with regards to bicycles is that they always have priority.
Having regularly used my bycicles (yes, plural) for pretty much any kind of inner-city travel and car for any kind of inter-city travel (such as long commutes) in Holland, my experience is that people do behave as if this is the rule.
That said, Dutch society does put a large emphasis on behaving in a social way (as opposed to individual selfishness), so people do not tend to "abuse the system".
Another thing with Holland is that the country is pretty much flat and thus ideal for bycicle travel.
This example comes from part of an expose in BBC, I believe it was with Panorama.
Basically the lady in question was just being loud and unpolite. Had the case gone to court they would have let her go with a "stern warning". Instead, the cops convinced her to sign a "Caution" without explaining her that it was in fact a formal admission of guilt that goes into one's Criminal Record.
A little look at the user reviews in Amazon for the PC version (here) and by contrast the XBox version (here) is quite enlightening.
Basically if you've played Online FPSs in the PC in the last 10 years (with large matches, low lag, effective banning of cheaters and user maps and mods) this game will seem mediocre to you at best: people complain of lag (due to no dedicate servers), unpunished cheating (like aimbots) and pestering behaviour (teenagers playing music in voice), no user extendability (as per choice of the maker: no user mods or maps, only paid for - DLC - extensions) and second-hand market killing measures (online activation mandatory on the PC).
This means that this game should be really be seen as two separate games "Modern Warfare 2 XBox" and "Modern Warfare 2 PC" with the first being quite successful (thanks in in no small part to hype and slick marketing) for the target platform and audience and versus the competition in that platform (console games tend to be simpler and played by a younger audience) and the second being very mediocre from the point of view of that target audience and versus the competition in that platform.
It's thus not surprising that you have two almost completely opposite sets of reviews, since the game really has two faces...
For a long while, the police in the UK has been set targets for number of arrests/convictions, number of crimes within certain categories and other such targets.
The natural change of the behaviour of the police officers as a followup of these targets was: - The police started arresting people for things that previously were dealth with informally, for example, if a kid throws a stone and breaks a glass window he can now end in court: in the past, the local copper would typically have a serious talk with him, take him to his parents, get them to pay for repairs and that was it. - The police started pushing people to accept "Cautions" which are a formal admission of guild for minor crimes which does not require going to Court: this does create a Criminal Record for a person which might very well ruin their lives (for example, a Nursing Student got one of those because she was drunk and misbehaving, which resulted in her not being able to find any work as a nurse since she now had a criminal record). - The police started misreporting crimes (as being in a less serious category) or even avoiding reporting them altogether (I know of a at least one case where a bag was snatched from a baby-buggy which was left unattended and the police refused to file the case because "nobody saw the bag being taken from the baby-buggy, so how do we know you didn't lost it").
At the same time, the increased bureaucratic overhead of keeping track of all those targets meant more time behind the desk and less time on the beat of the cops.
This resulted in people loosing trust in the Police. The familiar, well-liked and trusted local "bob" (the police officer that does the rounds in a neighbourhood) that knew and was known by the people in his beat (usually having a "fair but firm" image) was replaced by a group of guys in uniform which don't know you and you don't know them, with most people not wanting to interact with unless they really have to (they way the law is now, they can pretty much arrest you for not being properly polite). The cops themselfs have become distant and distrusting in reaction - they adopted a Us vs Them mentality.
The cops were taken out of the community and the community was taken out of the cops.
Under this environment, is hardly surprising that most good people don't want to join the Police Force anymore: while in the past police officers were respected and trusted as wise users of the power they had (mostly prefering persuasion rather than force), nowadays they're mostly feared, distrusted and disliked.
The sad bit is that the old soft target of "making people fell safe" was much better than whatever hard targets they set for the police nowadays.
Dumb, fashion-following, uncritical people fuck it all up for everybody else: Welcome to Democracy in a nation where education is all geared up to turn kids into make tomorrows working drones instead of empowering them as self-thinking and self-opinied individuals.
As a foreigner that lives in the UK, I'm not at all surprised that the greatest assault on privacy and freedom in the whole Western world is hapenning in the country of celebrity culture and political spin. (the only claim to Cultural prowness that modern Britain has is BBC)
Some people around here do to try to turn their kids into true individuals (and they have my respect for paddling against the tide), but the vast unwashed masses just leave their kids' education as persons to the (mosly cheap and superficial) Tele and a state school system which is so in thrall of Political Correctness and Health & Safety Regulations that kids are not allowed to explore and are taught to not critcise anything or anyone).
This is very much in the best interest of the local politicians (whose kids go to private schools) since unthinking and uncritical people are easier to decieve with Smoke and Mirrors games.
Actually my experience from when I was young and innocent is that if you work extra hard a do achieve the impossible, next time around they will ask you for something even more impossible.
Unfortunatly, part of managing expectations is to avoid that other people set their expectations too high.
Also note that a company provided notebook is not a perk: it's just a way for the company to set you up to do out-of-hours (unpaid) work (such as out-of-hours support or weekend releases). Keep in mind that anything you do in that notebook can be watched by the company. Also if you do personal projects in it, they are the property of the company: don't work on your own personal latest and greatest software idea on it since the company does in fact get the ownership on all intellectual property developed using their equipment.
Company provided mobile phones and blackberries are given out for the same reason: they're there to make work reach you out of hours.
A company that has it's data "in the cloud" is quite likelly exposed to the laws in other jurisditions/countries. Wherever the data is hosted, the local law enforcement authorities, based on the local laws can get a warrant to get that data out. This even if said company does not do business there.
Plenty of opportunities for the competition to file a lawsuit in the appropriate place and get valuable trade information during the "discovery process".
Bigger companies even have to worry about foreign intelligence services: there are plenty of know cases of intelligence services helping their country's companies with industrial espionage and if a company's data ends up in in a location within the reach of the intelligence services of a nation where a competing company has a strong influence, that data will likelly be quietly passed onwards to them.
I think we need to split what is meant by "IT" here into two streams: - Systems administration, Database administration, Network administration and all kinds of systems and services administration tasks. - Software development (and by this I also mean software design and architecture).
What you say applies to the first but not that much to the later: there are still a lot of exciting things going on in the Software Development world, although not quite as much as during the Internet boom.
Software Development is still far from a proper Engineering discipline (standardized and predictable) and there's plenty of evolution going on in there everyday.
The jobs of half of your colleagues have been outsourced to India or replaced with Indian "consultants" in temporary placement, your "time flexibility" is always seen as "you need to work more hours today" never as "you can go home earlier today" and, especially in these times, you know that you can be fired for any reason whatsoever that has nothing to do with your performance.
Mosty of us working in IT know for sure that the company will not be there for you, so why should you be there for the company above and beyond the call of duty?
(I do know one or two examples of small companies in which the Directors are close enough to the employees to actually care about them. In big companies, however, you're just another number in the ledger).
I long ago left "traditional" employement in IT for freelancing: I came to the conclusion that "the company" didn't care when the technology bubble burst when companies started firing the same people that just months before had been working their asses of giving their 110%.
Everyday when I come to work I'm surprised how so many of my colleagues still settle for getting less that half as much as I do in exchange for the illusion of job safety and a fickle bonus which has little relation to their actual performance (I work in the Finance industry now, bonuses are mostly dependent on the performance of the business unit you work for which pretty much just follows the market for the types of instruments they trade).
... and having worked in at least 12 different companies by now, i can tell you that:
a) It depends on the company - company culture, profit margins and the business the company are in all make for more or less hectic enviroments in the IT areas (and others). b) It depends on the morale of the employees. Recessions actually mean that there are more unmotivated workers around since many which would otherwise left will stay put until "the storm passes". c) It the depends on the point of the development cycle you are on. For all you know, a week before you joined people were over-stressed and working long hours to make a release and now they are in the decompression period before a new major project is started.
Also and to put it plainly: as a recent graduate you know nothing working in IT.
Let me break this too you now before you learn it the hard way:
You'll have to unlearn a lot before you're a proper professional
Activity is not the same as Productivity. To give you an easy to understand example: if a guy is breaking stone in a quarry with a hammer the whole day without stopping, he still vastly underproduces the guy that does it for 2 hours with a jackhammer and then loafs about the rest of the day. Working smart always beats working hard.
If you're really good, people will take advantage of your innocence, ignorance and eagerness to overwork you to death. The funny bit is that, because you have no real professional experience (and due to overwork), you will make all the mistakes in the book and somebody (maybe you yourself) will inherit a POS that they will have to fix.
It's not hubris, it's simple probability. The energy levels of the LHC are not that impressive, they are just several times greater than we have ever before produced in a controlled lab environment. The LHC is only rated for operation at 14TeV (1.4e13), while the highest energy cosmic rays recorded are on the order of 100EeV (1e20). If these particles have hit Earth at sufficient frequency that we have detected them on several occurrences, and we haven't yet collapsed into a black hole, what are the chances that the LHC will do so?
but... but... but... the LHC is on the French-Swiss border: that must affect the laws of physics somehow...
I recently went to a trip to Budapest, Hungary. I downloaded apps which included an offline map of the city (so no data use), maps of the metro system, and an audio tourist guide. It was like having my own personal tourist guide. When back at the hotel I used Skype over wifi to call home cheap. Sure beat having a big clunky book + large foldout map that screamed "tourist please rob me".
Interestingly enough my Nokia E51 has most of the same features and here in the UK it costs 1/3 of the price of an iPhone 3G (without a contract).
As a matter of fact, in my summer vacations in Canada I loaded it with the map of the whole country for free from Nokia themselfs and then used it (offline) while I went from Vancouver to Montreal both in-city and outside (i do have to confess that the rail-line information in the middle of the Rockies was incomplete).
The reason why the iPhone looks so good to Americans is not that the iPhone is that great, it's that most of the other phones you get there are Charlie Romeo Alpha Papa.
(which explains why the iPhone has a much larger marketshare in the US that anywhere else - and all marketshare comparissons outside the US are against "smartphones": my Nokia E51 aparently isn't one)
Actually in the EU all state owned telecoms have been privatised several years ago and don't get an euro-cent of taxpayer's money.
The reason why Internet is so cheap around here compared to the US is that in the EU laws have been passed forcing the telecoms to open up the "last mile" of phone lines so that any ISP could provide access on top of those lines.
I still remember a couple of years ago when I lived in Holland where the the incumbent telecom had by law been forced to open up access to their lines for any and all ISPs and as a result broadband Internet access in Holland was excelent and cheap (for that time), so much so that due to competition my ISP (the cable company) kept doubling my access speed about once a year for free to remain competitive against all those ISPs on ADSL. At the time the UK still did not had passed any such law and Internet access was slow and pricey. Fast forward a couple of years and now I'm living in the UK. In the meanwhile a similar law as the one in Holland was passed here and now you see in the UK the exact same results as in Holland: broadband Internet access is cheap (even free sometimes when bundled with things like pay-TV) and fast.
It took a law to be passed to force the incumbent telecoms (which many years before had been state owned and had built their networks with public money) to open up their de facto monopoly on providing anything on top of those copper cables.
So yeah, sometimes State intervention does work.
Another good example is GSM which was a EU-wide State enforced standard on mobile communications versus the free for all in North America: anybody that has used a mobile phone in Europe and in North America can easilly see which had a better outcome for consumers.
... so the argument for eugenics is not only unethical/immoral...
Actually the GP never made any argument in favor of eugenics - his whole line of argument was that the current way we try to help hungry people in Africa and other such places isn't helping.
Point 2)
You should know that most of the places we are talking about are farming villages and were sustainable until *someone* fucked up their water supply. Manpower is required in order for the village to sustain itself, which requires workers.
Actually your example is false. Here's a counter example: - In some areas in the south of Ethiopia, due to the way land is split to all male descendants when the owner dies, the average plot size has shrunk in size to a point that it is not big enough to sustain a whole family.
More in general By instantly pulling out the emotional card, you pretty much prove the point of the GP and the GP before it: - Emotionally driven "charity" is not solving the problem, in fact it only makes it worse.
There's a phylosophical theory that says "We are all selfish": even those that do seemingly unselfish acts do so because they derive something positive from it even if it's just the pleasure of giving or the approval of others.
I would say that those that do "easy charity" are extremelly selfish - the easy chain of "see emotional appeal on the TV (say, images of malnurished children in Africa)" -> "give money to charity" -> "feel immediate pleasure of helping the needy" is a much simpler and direct route to feeling good than actually trying to figure out the underlying problem and helping solve it.
Things like improving contraception, improving irrigation techniques, improving access to drinkeable water, empowering women (which helps reduce birth rates) are much slower to give results and so do not provide an instant boost to the ego of the "giver"...
What's really needed is that people don't just "think of the children" but also "think of tomorrows children": I suspect this would require a deeper change to society since as a group we seem to be unable to figure out that behind the next hill there is always another hill.
I do software development in both Java and C# (mostly Java) and what i see happening is that C# is winning in the GUI/Desktop environment (mostly by replacing VB and VS.MFC) while Java is winning in the server space (mostly because in the server space with non-GUI applications Write-Once-Run-Anywhere is mostly true).
Nowadays, almost nobody does GUI development in Java, while at the same time C# never managed to get traction in the server space largelly because in parallel Linux has replaced Windows as the OS of choice for cheap servers.
That said Sun has done little for the success of Java and as of late might in fact have hindered it's adoption by going for increasingly complex, heavy and underperformant libraries/frameworks, making the learning curve for Java in the server steeper and harder to overcome.
The success of Java in the server space has come thanks to Open Source and in spite of Sun - there are now thousands of open source tools, libraries and frameworks for Java which improve the software development process and free developers from having to waste time in "infrastructure" work. As a mater of fact, in the last 4 or 5 years, the Java world has been moving steadilly away from Sun's heavy and complex approach to the server space (J2EE) and towards less monolitic approaches and lightweight frameworks and libraries (such as Spring) designed specifically to replace J2EE.
Actually my experience is mostly in the corporate software space, where we code much further away from the raw hardware, on top of well estabilished programatical interfaces.
In this space, hardware variations are of little importance and yet I see countless situations where we knowingly ship-out/deploy improperly tested software.
My rant was not about software that has "some" bugs in out of the way, rarelly exercised code paths: my rant was about software with glaring bugs in often-exercise functional use-cases, said bugs not having been caught because nobody has created/exercised a proper set of regression tests based on the functional requirements for that software before release (or worse, was told to ship it out with known bugs).
This is as much true in games as it is for this kind of software: most bugs rarelly have anything to do with hardware.
The way I see it, making sure that people can return and be refunded for software (any software) that does not work properly in their system is the only way to change the motivations of software houses so that they test their software properly and against the most widelly deployed hardware configurations since they risk having to eat up the return costs costs for any configuration they did not test against: to put it in another way, they will be highly motivated to make sure that their software works correctly in the majority of cases (compare this with the recent situation in which a game was released that didn't work properly in a PC with an ATI card) since they will loose money otherwise.
I strongly suspect there is a strong cultural component at play here.
I've worked for 12 years in IT across 3 different countries (Portugal, Holland and the UK) often (but not always) with female colleagues.
What I see happen is that in software development teams, proven technical competence tends to be the main factor in terms of getting respect from others. This might differ from the US for different reasons in all 3 countries: - In Portugal there is a tradition of "respect" towards people in "intelectual" professions (such as Doctors, Engineers, Architects, Lawyers). This has naturally extended to women in those positions (nowadays more women graduate from University than men). - The Dutch society has a strong equality streak to it. This is seen not only in axis of wealth equality (where, for example, extravagant displays of wealth are frowned upon) but also in gender equality and others. - It the UK, more specifically in London where I work, things are all over the place. London is a huge melting pot of cultures and this results in environments where everybody is just a little bit extra carefull in their behaviour towards others to avoid giving offence. That said, the level of sexist behaviour in people here is very much tightly coupled with were they grew up: I've noticed that for example my colleagues that come from the Indian sub-continent tend to treat women in a less-equal fashion than those that come from (say) Northern Europe: this extends to the women's behaviour also, my Indian female colleagues tend to behave in a more submissive/passive way than Western European women (to be honest this kind of gets in my nerves since I actually much prefer strong-willed women).
From the stories I read here i suspect the US has a strong "jock" culture going on, which would explain an extra "macho" style environment in there.
That said, in all those environments having women in the team does shift things away from a the geek-macho type environment. The more women there are, the more things move towards a more moderate, less macho-type-posturing-and-swearing type of group dynamics.
A single woman coming into a mostly guys team (say, 8 guys) will be a lot more strongly pressured to play by the rules of the existing game, than 2 or 3 women in that same team or, for example, a single woman in a team with 2 or 3 guys. Also management makes a lot of difference - male managers are often the source of a lot of the macho posturing and in a team with a female manager overall behaviour will be much more moderated and much easier for a woman to come in and feel confortable (about 1/3 of the teams I worked in were managed by women).
A world without restrictions on the free movement of workers would have salaries and thus the quality of life (which is strongly correlated with average income which in turn is strongly correlated with average salaries) of everybody converging to the average quality of life in the world.
Given the distribution of population in the world, this would be somewhere slightly above the current average quality of life in China and India.
As selfish as it might seem, many of us in the "rich" world would rather not see our quality of life go down the a level slightly above your average Chinese city dweller.
It's not just games: most consumer electronics nowadays are a mix of software and hardware and often enough it's the software part that is released unfinished (read: buggy).
Software on non-life-critical applications has been given a free ride for two long - if it's not acceptable that a DVD player refuses to start at odd moments or randomly stops working, why would the same be acceptable in a computer game (which is just another for of entertainment) or an OS?
As somebody working in IT, who has worked in the industry in both IT Services and IT Products, I've seen again and again the main behaviours that lead to buggy software releases: a) No real software development process resulting in unpredictability with regards to the real finish date. b) Bad requirements definitions, stuffed with incomplete, inconsistent and unclear "desires", with way too much time wasted in "would be nice" requirements leading to last minute requirements changes as people discover the missing/bad bits. c) Little or no real testing, mostly done by amateurs (or worse, developers). d) Hard deadlines set by sales and marketing which, coupled with the points above, results in releases of unfinished products.
The reason why this happen is very simple: companies can get away with this, so management (from top to bottom) can get away with being disorganized, unstructured, "shoot-from-the-hip" cowboy-like, non-proactive and outright incompetent.
(yes, I AM sour about this)
Funny enough, buyers of software products and services are so used to be royally done by the industry that some of the worst offenders in this space are actually the larger IT companies, not the smaller ones: in a playing field were buyers expected and valued quality in software, the higher-quality companies would outcompete and outgrow the low-quality ones, and yet what we see is the opposite.
precisely because insurance only makes sense for big-ticket items, the effect of an economic downturn and concern about future finances should be to reduce purchases, not to make the purchases and then add insurance.
We are where we are (in a downturn following a bubble) exactly because the vast majority of people does not act in a rational way.
It's thus hardly surprising that most people react the way they do. Instead of curtailing their purchases, they follow the same old habits of unthinking consumerism (the same ones from one or two years ago that meant that people spent more than they earned and which inflated the bubble that just burst) were they "really have to have that brand new plasma TV", so they: - Buy the TV instead of postponing the purchase. - Buy themselves some piece of mind by paying for insurance in the form of an extended warranty.
PS: Interestingly enough, governments keep pushing the "spend, spend, spend" message as the way to pull us out of the recession. The "interesting" part is that, taken to it's natural conclusion the "spend, spend, spend" will inflate a bubble just like the last one followed by a recession just like the current one...
True democratic systems with proportional vote do not lead to 2 party systems.
Things like first-past-the-post, electoral circles and other such shenanigans are what leads to 2 party systems.
One could almost think that some point in the past the dominant parties of the time got together and "tweaked" democracy to make sure they always won....
To avoid this, careful group membership selection, or harsh enforcement are required.
At which point all those "someone [who] will be selfish enough to game the system for his own advantage" will gravitate to positions where they are the ones doing the selection and/or harsh enforcement.
Which is what happened in all so called communist countries.
More in general, communism (the utopia where everybody is equal and has the same) is a metastable state: even if a completely equal society was magically created in an instant, sooner or later, somebody smarter/sneakier would outsmart/deceive somebody which was less so and end up with more and the other with less. Said person, seeing his/her own success and the benefits of that action would do it again, while other smart/sneaky people also seeing it would copy it. Eventually the whole thing society would move to a state where some have more and some have less.
Scenario: Movie studio office, 1930's style. Large expensive looking desk, semi-naked woman lying in it. Big fat movie executive wearing a 1930's style suit, holding a large lit cigar in his hand sitting on a chair behind the desk. Behind him, a window shows a sunny Californian day, with some palm-trees and an expensive sports car visible. Around the office, other similar looking man are sitting in sofas surrounded by beautiful semi-claded women. Expensive looking sculptures and paintings are spread all over the office (possibly including one or two well known paintings).
Action: Camera pans around the office, centers on the executive sitting in the chair with the desk (and woman) in front and the window behind. Executive snorts a line of coke from the woman's belly, turns to the camera and says: "I can't feed my family. Because thieves steal my work online."
Slashdot Mirror
When I lived in Holland I was told that the basic rule of the road with regards to bicycles is that they always have priority.
Having regularly used my bycicles (yes, plural) for pretty much any kind of inner-city travel and car for any kind of inter-city travel (such as long commutes) in Holland, my experience is that people do behave as if this is the rule.
That said, Dutch society does put a large emphasis on behaving in a social way (as opposed to individual selfishness), so people do not tend to "abuse the system".
Another thing with Holland is that the country is pretty much flat and thus ideal for bycicle travel.
This example comes from part of an expose in BBC, I believe it was with Panorama.
Basically the lady in question was just being loud and unpolite. Had the case gone to court they would have let her go with a "stern warning". Instead, the cops convinced her to sign a "Caution" without explaining her that it was in fact a formal admission of guilt that goes into one's Criminal Record.
A little look at the user reviews in Amazon for the PC version (here) and by contrast the XBox version (here) is quite enlightening.
Basically if you've played Online FPSs in the PC in the last 10 years (with large matches, low lag, effective banning of cheaters and user maps and mods) this game will seem mediocre to you at best: people complain of lag (due to no dedicate servers), unpunished cheating (like aimbots) and pestering behaviour (teenagers playing music in voice), no user extendability (as per choice of the maker: no user mods or maps, only paid for - DLC - extensions) and second-hand market killing measures (online activation mandatory on the PC).
This means that this game should be really be seen as two separate games "Modern Warfare 2 XBox" and "Modern Warfare 2 PC" with the first being quite successful (thanks in in no small part to hype and slick marketing) for the target platform and audience and versus the competition in that platform (console games tend to be simpler and played by a younger audience) and the second being very mediocre from the point of view of that target audience and versus the competition in that platform.
It's thus not surprising that you have two almost completely opposite sets of reviews, since the game really has two faces ...
For a long while, the police in the UK has been set targets for number of arrests/convictions, number of crimes within certain categories and other such targets.
The natural change of the behaviour of the police officers as a followup of these targets was:
- The police started arresting people for things that previously were dealth with informally, for example, if a kid throws a stone and breaks a glass window he can now end in court: in the past, the local copper would typically have a serious talk with him, take him to his parents, get them to pay for repairs and that was it.
- The police started pushing people to accept "Cautions" which are a formal admission of guild for minor crimes which does not require going to Court: this does create a Criminal Record for a person which might very well ruin their lives (for example, a Nursing Student got one of those because she was drunk and misbehaving, which resulted in her not being able to find any work as a nurse since she now had a criminal record).
- The police started misreporting crimes (as being in a less serious category) or even avoiding reporting them altogether (I know of a at least one case where a bag was snatched from a baby-buggy which was left unattended and the police refused to file the case because "nobody saw the bag being taken from the baby-buggy, so how do we know you didn't lost it").
At the same time, the increased bureaucratic overhead of keeping track of all those targets meant more time behind the desk and less time on the beat of the cops.
This resulted in people loosing trust in the Police. The familiar, well-liked and trusted local "bob" (the police officer that does the rounds in a neighbourhood) that knew and was known by the people in his beat (usually having a "fair but firm" image) was replaced by a group of guys in uniform which don't know you and you don't know them, with most people not wanting to interact with unless they really have to (they way the law is now, they can pretty much arrest you for not being properly polite). The cops themselfs have become distant and distrusting in reaction - they adopted a Us vs Them mentality.
The cops were taken out of the community and the community was taken out of the cops.
Under this environment, is hardly surprising that most good people don't want to join the Police Force anymore: while
in the past police officers were respected and trusted as wise users of the power they had (mostly prefering persuasion rather than force), nowadays they're mostly feared, distrusted and disliked.
The sad bit is that the old soft target of "making people fell safe" was much better than whatever hard targets they set for the police nowadays.
Dumb, fashion-following, uncritical people fuck it all up for everybody else: Welcome to Democracy in a nation where education is all geared up to turn kids into make tomorrows working drones instead of empowering them as self-thinking and self-opinied individuals.
As a foreigner that lives in the UK, I'm not at all surprised that the greatest assault on privacy and freedom in the whole Western world is hapenning in the country of celebrity culture and political spin.
(the only claim to Cultural prowness that modern Britain has is BBC)
Some people around here do to try to turn their kids into true individuals (and they have my respect for paddling against the tide), but the vast unwashed masses just leave their kids' education as persons to the (mosly cheap and superficial) Tele and a state school system which is so in thrall of Political Correctness and Health & Safety Regulations that kids are not allowed to explore and are taught to not critcise anything or anyone).
This is very much in the best interest of the local politicians (whose kids go to private schools) since unthinking and uncritical people are easier to decieve with Smoke and Mirrors games.
Actually my experience from when I was young and innocent is that if you work extra hard a do achieve the impossible, next time around they will ask you for something even more impossible.
Unfortunatly, part of managing expectations is to avoid that other people set their expectations too high.
Also note that a company provided notebook is not a perk: it's just a way for the company to set you up to do out-of-hours (unpaid) work (such as out-of-hours support or weekend releases). Keep in mind that anything you do in that notebook can be watched by the company. Also if you do personal projects in it, they are the property of the company: don't work on your own personal latest and greatest software idea on it since the company does in fact get the ownership on all intellectual property developed using their equipment.
Company provided mobile phones and blackberries are given out for the same reason: they're there to make work reach you out of hours.
A company that has it's data "in the cloud" is quite likelly exposed to the laws in other jurisditions/countries. Wherever the data is hosted, the local law enforcement authorities, based on the local laws can get a warrant to get that data out. This even if said company does not do business there.
Plenty of opportunities for the competition to file a lawsuit in the appropriate place and get valuable trade information during the "discovery process".
Bigger companies even have to worry about foreign intelligence services: there are plenty of know cases of intelligence services helping their country's companies with industrial espionage and if a company's data ends up in in a location within the reach of the intelligence services of a nation where a competing company has a strong influence, that data will likelly be quietly passed onwards to them.
I think we need to split what is meant by "IT" here into two streams:
- Systems administration, Database administration, Network administration and all kinds of systems and services administration tasks.
- Software development (and by this I also mean software design and architecture).
What you say applies to the first but not that much to the later: there are still a lot of exciting things going on in the Software Development world, although not quite as much as during the Internet boom.
Software Development is still far from a proper Engineering discipline (standardized and predictable) and there's plenty of evolution going on in there everyday.
The jobs of half of your colleagues have been outsourced to India or replaced with Indian "consultants" in temporary placement, your "time flexibility" is always seen as "you need to work more hours today" never as "you can go home earlier today" and, especially in these times, you know that you can be fired for any reason whatsoever that has nothing to do with your performance.
Mosty of us working in IT know for sure that the company will not be there for you, so why should you be there for the company above and beyond the call of duty?
(I do know one or two examples of small companies in which the Directors are close enough to the employees to actually care about them. In big companies, however, you're just another number in the ledger).
I long ago left "traditional" employement in IT for freelancing: I came to the conclusion that "the company" didn't care when the technology bubble burst when companies started firing the same people that just months before had been working their asses of giving their 110%.
Everyday when I come to work I'm surprised how so many of my colleagues still settle for getting less that half as much as I do in exchange for the illusion of job safety and a fickle bonus which has little relation to their actual performance (I work in the Finance industry now, bonuses are mostly dependent on the performance of the business unit you work for which pretty much just follows the market for the types of instruments they trade).
... and having worked in at least 12 different companies by now, i can tell you that:
a) It depends on the company - company culture, profit margins and the business the company are in all make for more or less hectic enviroments in the IT areas (and others).
b) It depends on the morale of the employees. Recessions actually mean that there are more unmotivated workers around since many which would otherwise left will stay put until "the storm passes".
c) It the depends on the point of the development cycle you are on. For all you know, a week before you joined people were over-stressed and working long hours to make a release and now they are in the decompression period before a new major project is started.
Also and to put it plainly: as a recent graduate you know nothing working in IT.
Let me break this too you now before you learn it the hard way:
but ... but ... but ... the LHC is on the French-Swiss border: that must affect the laws of physics somehow ...
Interestingly enough my Nokia E51 has most of the same features and here in the UK it costs 1/3 of the price of an iPhone 3G (without a contract).
As a matter of fact, in my summer vacations in Canada I loaded it with the map of the whole country for free from Nokia themselfs and then used it (offline) while I went from Vancouver to Montreal both in-city and outside (i do have to confess that the rail-line information in the middle of the Rockies was incomplete).
The reason why the iPhone looks so good to Americans is not that the iPhone is that great, it's that most of the other phones you get there are Charlie Romeo Alpha Papa.
(which explains why the iPhone has a much larger marketshare in the US that anywhere else - and all marketshare comparissons outside the US are against "smartphones": my Nokia E51 aparently isn't one)
Actually in the EU all state owned telecoms have been privatised several years ago and don't get an euro-cent of taxpayer's money.
The reason why Internet is so cheap around here compared to the US is that in the EU laws have been passed forcing the telecoms to open up the "last mile" of phone lines so that any ISP could provide access on top of those lines.
I still remember a couple of years ago when I lived in Holland where the the incumbent telecom had by law been forced to open up access to their lines for any and all ISPs and as a result broadband Internet access in Holland was excelent and cheap (for that time), so much so that due to competition my ISP (the cable company) kept doubling my access speed about once a year for free to remain competitive against all those ISPs on ADSL. At the time the UK still did not had passed any such law and Internet access was slow and pricey.
Fast forward a couple of years and now I'm living in the UK. In the meanwhile a similar law as the one in Holland was passed here and now you see in the UK the exact same results as in Holland: broadband Internet access is cheap (even free sometimes when bundled with things like pay-TV) and fast.
It took a law to be passed to force the incumbent telecoms (which many years before had been state owned and had built their networks with public money) to open up their de facto monopoly on providing anything on top of those copper cables.
So yeah, sometimes State intervention does work.
Another good example is GSM which was a EU-wide State enforced standard on mobile communications versus the free for all in North America: anybody that has used a mobile phone in Europe and in North America can easilly see which had a better outcome for consumers.
Two points:
Point 1)
Actually the GP never made any argument in favor of eugenics - his whole line of argument was that the current way we try to help hungry people in Africa and other such places isn't helping.
Point 2)
Actually your example is false. Here's a counter example:
- In some areas in the south of Ethiopia, due to the way land is split to all male descendants when the owner dies, the average plot size has shrunk in size to a point that it is not big enough to sustain a whole family.
More in general
By instantly pulling out the emotional card, you pretty much prove the point of the GP and the GP before it:
- Emotionally driven "charity" is not solving the problem, in fact it only makes it worse.
There's a phylosophical theory that says "We are all selfish": even those that do seemingly unselfish acts do so because they derive something positive from it even if it's just the pleasure of giving or the approval of others.
I would say that those that do "easy charity" are extremelly selfish - the easy chain of "see emotional appeal on the TV (say, images of malnurished children in Africa)" -> "give money to charity" -> "feel immediate pleasure of helping the needy" is a much simpler and direct route to feeling good than actually trying to figure out the underlying problem and helping solve it.
Things like improving contraception, improving irrigation techniques, improving access to drinkeable water, empowering women (which helps reduce birth rates) are much slower to give results and so do not provide an instant boost to the ego of the "giver" ...
What's really needed is that people don't just "think of the children" but also "think of tomorrows children": I suspect this would require a deeper change to society since as a group we seem to be unable to figure out that behind the next hill there is always another hill.
I do software development in both Java and C# (mostly Java) and what i see happening is that C# is winning in the GUI/Desktop environment (mostly by replacing VB and VS.MFC) while Java is winning in the server space (mostly because in the server space with non-GUI applications Write-Once-Run-Anywhere is mostly true).
Nowadays, almost nobody does GUI development in Java, while at the same time C# never managed to get traction in the server space largelly because in parallel Linux has replaced Windows as the OS of choice for cheap servers.
That said Sun has done little for the success of Java and as of late might in fact have hindered it's adoption by going for increasingly complex, heavy and underperformant libraries/frameworks, making the learning curve for Java in the server steeper and harder to overcome.
The success of Java in the server space has come thanks to Open Source and in spite of Sun - there are now thousands of open source tools, libraries and frameworks for Java which improve the software development process and free developers from having to waste time in "infrastructure" work. As a mater of fact, in the last 4 or 5 years, the Java world has been moving steadilly away from Sun's heavy and complex approach to the server space (J2EE) and towards less monolitic approaches and lightweight frameworks and libraries (such as Spring) designed specifically to replace J2EE.
Actually my experience is mostly in the corporate software space, where we code much further away from the raw hardware, on top of well estabilished programatical interfaces.
In this space, hardware variations are of little importance and yet I see countless situations where we knowingly ship-out/deploy improperly tested software.
My rant was not about software that has "some" bugs in out of the way, rarelly exercised code paths: my rant was about software with glaring bugs in often-exercise functional use-cases, said bugs not having been caught because nobody has created/exercised a proper set of regression tests based on the functional requirements for that software before release (or worse, was told to ship it out with known bugs).
This is as much true in games as it is for this kind of software: most bugs rarelly have anything to do with hardware.
The way I see it, making sure that people can return and be refunded for software (any software) that does not work properly in their system is the only way to change the motivations of software houses so that they test their software properly and against the most widelly deployed hardware configurations since they risk having to eat up the return costs costs for any configuration they did not test against: to put it in another way, they will be highly motivated to make sure that their software works correctly in the majority of cases (compare this with the recent situation in which a game was released that didn't work properly in a PC with an ATI card) since they will loose money otherwise.
I strongly suspect there is a strong cultural component at play here.
I've worked for 12 years in IT across 3 different countries (Portugal, Holland and the UK) often (but not always) with female colleagues.
What I see happen is that in software development teams, proven technical competence tends to be the main factor in terms of getting respect from others. This might differ from the US for different reasons in all 3 countries:
- In Portugal there is a tradition of "respect" towards people in "intelectual" professions (such as Doctors, Engineers, Architects, Lawyers). This has naturally extended to women in those positions (nowadays more women graduate from University than men).
- The Dutch society has a strong equality streak to it. This is seen not only in axis of wealth equality (where, for example, extravagant displays of wealth are frowned upon) but also in gender equality and others.
- It the UK, more specifically in London where I work, things are all over the place. London is a huge melting pot of cultures and this results in environments where everybody is just a little bit extra carefull in their behaviour towards others to avoid giving offence. That said, the level of sexist behaviour in people here is very much tightly coupled with were they grew up: I've noticed that for example my colleagues that come from the Indian sub-continent tend to treat women in a less-equal fashion than those that come from (say) Northern Europe: this extends to the women's behaviour also, my Indian female colleagues tend to behave in a more submissive/passive way than Western European women (to be honest this kind of gets in my nerves since I actually much prefer strong-willed women).
From the stories I read here i suspect the US has a strong "jock" culture going on, which would explain an extra "macho" style environment in there.
That said, in all those environments having women in the team does shift things away from a the geek-macho type environment. The more women there are, the more things move towards a more moderate, less macho-type-posturing-and-swearing type of group dynamics.
A single woman coming into a mostly guys team (say, 8 guys) will be a lot more strongly pressured to play by the rules of the existing game, than 2 or 3 women in that same team or, for example, a single woman in a team with 2 or 3 guys. Also management makes a lot of difference - male managers are often the source of a lot of the macho posturing and in a team with a female manager overall behaviour will be much more moderated and much easier for a woman to come in and feel confortable (about 1/3 of the teams I worked in were managed by women).
A world without restrictions on the free movement of workers would have salaries and thus the quality of life (which is strongly correlated with average income which in turn is strongly correlated with average salaries) of everybody converging to the average quality of life in the world.
Given the distribution of population in the world, this would be somewhere slightly above the current average quality of life in China and India.
As selfish as it might seem, many of us in the "rich" world would rather not see our quality of life go down the a level slightly above your average Chinese city dweller.
It's not just games: most consumer electronics nowadays are a mix of software and hardware and often enough it's the software part that is released unfinished (read: buggy).
Software on non-life-critical applications has been given a free ride for two long - if it's not acceptable that a DVD player refuses to start at odd moments or randomly stops working, why would the same be acceptable in a computer game (which is just another for of entertainment) or an OS?
As somebody working in IT, who has worked in the industry in both IT Services and IT Products, I've seen again and again the main behaviours that lead to buggy software releases:
a) No real software development process resulting in unpredictability with regards to the real finish date.
b) Bad requirements definitions, stuffed with incomplete, inconsistent and unclear "desires", with way too much time wasted in "would be nice" requirements leading to last minute requirements changes as people discover the missing/bad bits.
c) Little or no real testing, mostly done by amateurs (or worse, developers).
d) Hard deadlines set by sales and marketing which, coupled with the points above, results in releases of unfinished products.
The reason why this happen is very simple: companies can get away with this, so management (from top to bottom) can get away with being disorganized, unstructured, "shoot-from-the-hip" cowboy-like, non-proactive and outright incompetent.
(yes, I AM sour about this)
Funny enough, buyers of software products and services are so used to be royally done by the industry that some of the worst offenders in this space are actually the larger IT companies, not the smaller ones: in a playing field were buyers expected and valued quality in software, the higher-quality companies would outcompete and outgrow the low-quality ones, and yet what we see is the opposite.
We are where we are (in a downturn following a bubble) exactly because the vast majority of people does not act in a rational way.
It's thus hardly surprising that most people react the way they do. Instead of curtailing their purchases, they follow the same old habits of unthinking consumerism (the same ones from one or two years ago that meant that people spent more than they earned and which inflated the bubble that just burst) were they "really have to have that brand new plasma TV", so they:
- Buy the TV instead of postponing the purchase.
- Buy themselves some piece of mind by paying for insurance in the form of an extended warranty.
PS: Interestingly enough, governments keep pushing the "spend, spend, spend" message as the way to pull us out of the recession. The "interesting" part is that, taken to it's natural conclusion the "spend, spend, spend" will inflate a bubble just like the last one followed by a recession just like the current one ...
True democratic systems with proportional vote do not lead to 2 party systems.
Things like first-past-the-post, electoral circles and other such shenanigans are what leads to 2 party systems.
One could almost think that some point in the past the dominant parties of the time got together and "tweaked" democracy to make sure they always won ....
At which point all those "someone [who] will be selfish enough to game the system for his own advantage" will gravitate to positions where they are the ones doing the selection and/or harsh enforcement.
Which is what happened in all so called communist countries.
More in general, communism (the utopia where everybody is equal and has the same) is a metastable state: even if a completely equal society was magically created in an instant, sooner or later, somebody smarter/sneakier would outsmart/deceive somebody which was less so and end up with more and the other with less. Said person, seeing his/her own success and the benefits of that action would do it again, while other smart/sneaky people also seeing it would copy it. Eventually the whole thing society would move to a state where some have more and some have less.
Here's a suggestion:
Scenario:
Movie studio office, 1930's style. Large expensive looking desk, semi-naked woman lying in it. Big fat movie executive wearing a 1930's style suit, holding a large lit cigar in his hand sitting on a chair behind the desk. Behind him, a window shows a sunny Californian day, with some palm-trees and an expensive sports car visible.
Around the office, other similar looking man are sitting in sofas surrounded by beautiful semi-claded women. Expensive looking sculptures and paintings are spread all over the office (possibly including one or two well known paintings).
Action:
Camera pans around the office, centers on the executive sitting in the chair with the desk (and woman) in front and the window behind.
Executive snorts a line of coke from the woman's belly, turns to the camera and says:
"I can't feed my family. Because thieves steal my work online."
Thanks a lot for that!
Your mentioning of "panda poop" ready dovetailed nicely with me eating lunch while reading /.
EA is well known for forcing game developers to release Beta and even Alpha quality software as final.
Another thing EA is well known for is the, after release, quick redirection of resources from bug-fixing/patching to making (paid for) expansions.
I strongly suspect that EA's recent "downsizing" simply exacerbated the negative-effects of their usual pattern of behavior.
As long as people keep buying their games, EA will keep doing the same thing again and again and people will keep getting shafted.