The costs for the London 2012 Olympics have already spiraled to 2 or 3 time the original budget. Actually this was the case already 6 months ago BEFORE the credit crunch started to bit.
That said, they might open most venues in time... just WAY over budget.
Some of the worst technology X zealots I've found during my career where passionate technology people (actually it's pretty much a requirement for a zealot to be passionate about their believes). They were important factors in spoiling the social environment at work for everybody else.
Although the bright-eyed, technology passionate young puppies just out of college can be cute at first and remind you of your old self, they get old fast once you've had to to fix one their stupid/ignorant/naif mistakes for the tenth time (even more so if it's a repeat mistake, and they've done it again because they think they know best).
It's all very nice and neat for a person to be a passionate quarry worker that spends countless hours discussing their tools and testing new tools, but in really life, when your job is to make gravel, the guy that uses a jackhammer because it's what's best for the job always outproduces the passionate one that uses a weird manual drill which was invented in Nepal by a hermit that never did a real days work in his lief, 'cause it's the latest and greatest, it looks cool and it produces gravel stones with a smoother surface.
'The new MacBook now comes with built-in "pull user pants down" and enhanced "user bend over functionality" that really help users to quickly and effortlessly prepare themselves for the big RIAA/MPAA gang-bang. The superior new MacBook smoothly brings a new and enhanced multi-media experience to your (back)door.'
In the UK the police has arrest/conviction targets, so getting prosecuted for returning the USB stick to the police or not really depends on whether they've reached their monthly target for that kind of convictions already or not.
The point of going to Mars is to eventually have a self-sustaining colony in there so that, if and when a major cataclismic event (either natural or man-made) wipes out humanity on Earth, our species might survive.
It's also a (possible) steping stone for further exploration of the solar system and to create viable economic use of non-terrestrial resources (for example, by exploiting mineral wealth in other planets or from asteroids)
If what you want is to design multi-threaded applications (thus, more than just coding multi-threaded apps), then the book you want is: Concurrent Programming in Java
A little on the stuffy side at times (not quite as easy a read as Design Patterns) it still provides a deep understanding of the trade-offs and techniques used when designing multi-threaded applications. Personally, I found myself again and again using the lessons and many of the patterns of that book when designing new systems (or fixing systems designed by people who were not used to multi-threading).
One of the best value for money books I have for Java.
PS: The concepts and lessons, being at a software design level, are easily portable to other languages.
WD My Book Essential Edition External 1TB Hard Drive - $166.99 (link), enough to store 80 hours of High-Definition video (Lord of the Rings "extended edition" should fit in one).
That's $16.70 each 100 GB - I bet that both: the player is more expensive that this external HD and each disk is more expensive that $16.70.
The only reason one cannot easily use an external HDs to store and play video content is because the mainstream Movie Industry won't sell their movies in a non-DRM-encumbered format (say, XVid in an AVI wrapper) - after all, how would they force people to buy the same movies again and again with each new format if they went with an open data format...
That said, get a "Digital Media Player" with XVid/DivX support and HD capability and attach one of these external HDs. Then Rip and re-encode your movies (or don't re-encode - there's enough space for high-bitrate files in there) or get the HD version of the movie/tv-series from the Internet in a non-DRM-encumbered format (funny how the pirates provide a better product) and voila - days worth of movies and TV series at the touch of a button (with no pay-per-view charges).
PS: Yes, I am sour that the dream of having your personal movie library accessible from you remote without moving anything but a finger is being hindered by the big studios...
So why are you here? I'm considering leaving (to somewhere else in the EU), but I know a lot of EU (non-UK) people who've chosen to live here, so I'm not sure if it's the right decision.
Money: In the UK I get a very good pay for what I do and my taxes are low since I'm a freelancer and have my own company. Also the language makes it easy to adjust to the place fast (for example, it took me some years to learn Dutch, but English I could speak fluently already before I got here).
That said, given the current status and direction of the UK economy, I've been thinking of moving to better pastures (the pay is better in Switzerland already). Either that or I'll get involved in politics around here and try and change things. (I'm starting to get fed-up with jumping from country to country)
In the meanwhile I'll keep a low profile and keep my old bank accounts open outside the UK just in case.
I'm actually from an European country which has ID cards and i'm living in the UK at the moment.
My ID card is actually quite handy as means of identification since it's basically a plastified card with my photo and thumbprint on it, small enough to fit in my wallet and accepted everywhere in Europe as means of identification.
That said, here is why i am firmly against ID cards in the UK:
The UK has the most duplicitious set of politicians I've seen in all the countries in Europe i've lived in. These guys will say one thing one day, a different thing the next day and yet a third thing the following day. The top politicians have few boundaries and will make and pass laws not on the merits of the law but for reasons like "to get more votes" or "to project an image of being a strong Prime-Minister". This is how, for example, the 30 days detention without trial law was extended to 45 days (the PM needed to look strong and shore up votes)
Small powers are constantly abused around here. City councils using anti-terrorist laws to spy on people suspected of letting their dogs foul the pavement, people forced to pay on the spot fines for "dirtying the street" when their little child let a piece of cake fall to the pavement, Health and Safety rules used to stop perfectly legit gatherings 'cause "there is a danger that people might hurt themselfs", traffic cameras and payed parking setup all over the place purelly (often openly admited) for the purposed of making money from the fines.
The top police officers are power hungry and currupt (not currupt in a "getting payed by crooks currupt" but instead currupt in a "doing whatever i takes to get and keep personal previledges" kind of way)
The UK electorate is shallow, ignorant, clueless and easy to deceive with light and mirrors shows. This is the country of the "celeb" (celebrity) cult where being on Big Brother can propel you from being a nobody to being constantly followed by the local papparazzi. Local newspapers have by far the largest amount of space dedicated to celeb and gossip "news" of all Europe - and yet the vast majority of celebs are actually nobodies. IMHO, this is why local politicians say the most outrageous lies (and contradict themselfs the next day) and people still vote for them.
There is no space for freedom and privacy in the laws around here: 45 days of detention without trial; anti-terrorist laws so open that you can be detained just by looking sideways at a cop or criticizing a politician at an open meeting (real case); a circle of 1 mile around the parliement where you can be detained for "unlawfull demonstration" if you simply raise your voice while criticising anything; a DNA database with the DNA of everybody ever detained by the police (including children) even if not prosecuted for anything; the highest density of surveilance cameras per-capita of the whole world
The problem aren't the ID cards, the problem is that the local institutions and politicians cannot be trusted with anything that can be (mis-)used for surveilance or constrol of people.
If you're in the UK the magic words are "Trading Standards" and "Not Fit For Purpose".
If you're in the US you'll probably just get shafted by EA and/or expensive lawyers.
Re:You could at least explain what you mean
on
Tech Vs. Business?
·
· Score: 1
My experience in investment banking as a freelancer is that almost universally the "Business Analysts" are incompetent and inept. This has been confirmed by other freelancers I met working in the same industry.
As far as I can tell, Business Analysts are ex-Secretaries, ex-Sales or ex-Marketing people - they're people's people, great talkers and social animals but they are completely incapable of assembling and transmitting a complete, coherent and internally consistent picture of the needs of the real business.
Since investment banks seem to have no technical analysts at all (the techie-side senior guys that create the Analysis Document and in the process typically force the Requirements Document to be hammered down until it actually is half-decent), you pretty much always end up with vague-ish, long-winded, talkative, incomplete and internally contradictory documents being given to the developers as "The Spec"
Personally I'm not at all surprised that just about all IT projects in Investment Banking fall below the business' expectations, are late and incomplete.
I don't know how old the EE people that made you form this opinion were, but I've graduated as an EE almost 14 years ago (I work as a software engineer nowadays) and we were doing C programs in Unix from our first year.
Also were I studied, the hardest discipline on offer at the undergrad level was a Degree in Physics (done a bit of that too) and even there in our first year we had to implement a virtual processor for a short assembly like language.
This a joke - why should people need to install a (bloated) program just to copy files to an MP3 player?
There's plenty of players out there that simply implement the USB Mass Storage Device protocol and thus look like a plain old USB flash disk: plug it in to the USB port on a Mac, Windows or Linux machine (even XBox360 and PSP3) and just copy files to and from the player.
Instead with the iPod we get the privilege of installing the iTunes bloatware and can't even copy files out from the player.
- The plane is full, 250+ people, middle aged business men, kids, fathers, mothers, grannies, granpas,... - Middle eastern looking guy gets up from his seat to go to the bathroom passes nervous passenger. - Nervous passenger spots that middle eastern looking guy has a gun, pulls his own gun and in his nervousness misfires. - Multiple people pull out their guns, shots all over, no place to run, everybody is shouting. - Several people get hit, pilot is dead, co-pilot is wounded, one engine is down due to a stray bullet. A kid is crying, grabbing his mother which is bleeding to death.
The things is, the barrier to entry for other people to send you an e-mail is lower than to phone you and much, much lower than to walk to you cube.
So you're a lot less likely to get e-mails for unimportant things.
Then there's the fact that many e-mails are pieces of conversations that spread over multiple e-mails (e.g. question e-mail, answer e-mail, thanks e-mail)
On top of this there are things like mailing lists and automated e-mails that pretty much mean you're pretty much being spammed by your colleagues or automated agents.
The end result is that the information to noise ratio of e-mails is much, much worse than in traditional means of communication.
Which is why so much time is wasted with e-mails: checking if an e-mail is meant for you or important for you consumes time (even if you don't care about that e-mail) and the huge numbers of non-relevant or unimportant e-mails one gets at work thus translate into significant amounts of time being wasted.
Your scenario has a little problem: "IT architects"
As far as i can tell, in IT finance around here, any experienced IT architects they might have had (there are some signs that at some point in the far past somebody actually though about things like code reusability) have long been fired (many years ago) or maybe left in disgust.
Even if they still have any IT Architects they're either:
Powerless: forever condemned to make documents nobody reads
Incompetent: mediocre people raised from the ranks of the mediocre in a system where IT people are selected first and foremost by "having worked many years in investment banking" not actual technical competence
Both
Around here the typical IT career path for a technical person usually ends at a Senior Developer kind of position - you need to become a manager to go above a certain pay level - and there are no advanced technical positions like Technical Analyst or Technical Architect (the closest is Business Analyst, but around here those are usually filled by people promoted from Secretarial positions).
They have no insider highly qualified/experienced technical IT people which are respected enough to even talk to the Bean Counters.
That's a big part of the problem and that's why unholy alliances like Accenture-Microsoft can push Windows and.NET as appropriate for high-availability mission critical systems - there is no qualified, respected insider technical voice that will say "This is not going to work and here is why".
Firstly, employers of home workers, for the same reasons as office workers benefit.
In my experience in IT here in the UK, if most/all of your work can be done from home then it will likely be outsourced to India, in which case the speed of household Internet connections in the UK is of little importance.
Secondly, businesses that stand to gain from this are ones that are feeding rich content to home Internet users. Whether it's ad-supported Flash games, e-commerce sites with lots of supporting movies/sounds/images, or retailers of online content (e.g. iTunes), the faster your customer's pipe, the more enjoyable their experience becomes, and the more they're likely to spend (or gain you in ad revenue).
Online distribution of rich content kinds of entertainment (such as movies and TV series) could really take off with this. However the main things holding back an explosion of high quality Net-based digital media are:
Content owners are wrapping their content in proprietary/incompatible DRM-heavy formats (or worse, not making the content available at all online).
Internet access providers are themselves trying to become content distributors, creating fenced and proprietary solutions (setup-box + own DRM) so as to add a higher margin business (overcharged Pay-per-view and content distribution) to the increasingly commoditised business of providing Interned access and to increase customer lock in.
This is hindering the spread of simple, cheap net-connected PVRs and similar devices that connect directly to the TV.
Until people can buy a generic £30 online digital media box at Tesco (like they buy a PVR or DVD player) which works with any ISP and lets them play most movies and TV series on their TV directly from the Net, there will be no real consumer market for 100Mbs plus Internet access.
I work in London as a freelancer in IT in Investment Banking. My professional experience was mostly with IT Products/Services companies.
Although I haven't worked in the LSE, from the places I've worked in around here I came out with the impression that most people in IT in this industry are amateurs (and that includes those in other geographical locations).
Any kind of more advanced IT concepts such as technical analysis, software/hardware architecture, iterative software development processes are pretty much either not done or done by people you don't have clue about what they're doing.
I'm hardly surprised with what happened in the LSE.
Slashdot Mirror
I was hopping for something like a roll-up OLED screen with in a bendable plastic base.
Instead what we get is basically 2 traditional color LCD screens mounted on a swivel.
Nothing to see here ....
The costs for the London 2012 Olympics have already spiraled to 2 or 3 time the original budget. Actually this was the case already 6 months ago BEFORE the credit crunch started to bit.
That said, they might open most venues in time ... just WAY over budget.
Preparation
Some of the worst technology X zealots I've found during my career where passionate technology people (actually it's pretty much a requirement for a zealot to be passionate about their believes). They were important factors in spoiling the social environment at work for everybody else.
Although the bright-eyed, technology passionate young puppies just out of college can be cute at first and remind you of your old self, they get old fast once you've had to to fix one their stupid/ignorant/naif mistakes for the tenth time (even more so if it's a repeat mistake, and they've done it again because they think they know best).
It's all very nice and neat for a person to be a passionate quarry worker that spends countless hours discussing their tools and testing new tools, but in really life, when your job is to make gravel, the guy that uses a jackhammer because it's what's best for the job always outproduces the passionate one that uses a weird manual drill which was invented in Nepal by a hermit that never did a real days work in his lief, 'cause it's the latest and greatest, it looks cool and it produces gravel stones with a smoother surface.
Ah yes, I can see the upsides already:
'The new MacBook now comes with built-in "pull user pants down" and enhanced "user bend over functionality" that really help users to quickly and effortlessly prepare themselves for the big RIAA/MPAA gang-bang. The superior new MacBook smoothly brings a new and enhanced multi-media experience to your (back)door.'
One thing that life and the world has taught me is that:
- Intelligence (as measured by IQ) is not the same as smarts
Some of the most intelligent people I've met where also the most clueless, naive and social inept people I've ever met.
There's a reason why EQ correlates a lot better with success than IQ.
In the UK the police has arrest/conviction targets, so getting prosecuted for returning the USB stick to the police or not really depends on whether they've reached their monthly target for that kind of convictions already or not.
The point of going to Mars is to eventually have a self-sustaining colony in there so that, if and when a major cataclismic event (either natural or man-made) wipes out humanity on Earth, our species might survive.
It's also a (possible) steping stone for further exploration of the solar system and to create viable economic use of non-terrestrial resources (for example, by exploiting mineral wealth in other planets or from asteroids)
If what you want is to design multi-threaded applications (thus, more than just coding multi-threaded apps), then the book you want is: Concurrent Programming in Java
A little on the stuffy side at times (not quite as easy a read as Design Patterns) it still provides a deep understanding of the trade-offs and techniques used when designing multi-threaded applications. Personally, I found myself again and again using the lessons and many of the patterns of that book when designing new systems (or fixing systems designed by people who were not used to multi-threading).
One of the best value for money books I have for Java.
PS: The concepts and lessons, being at a software design level, are easily portable to other languages.
WD My Book Essential Edition External 1TB Hard Drive - $166.99 (link), enough to store 80 hours of High-Definition video (Lord of the Rings "extended edition" should fit in one).
That's $16.70 each 100 GB - I bet that both: the player is more expensive that this external HD and each disk is more expensive that $16.70.
The only reason one cannot easily use an external HDs to store and play video content is because the mainstream Movie Industry won't sell their movies in a non-DRM-encumbered format (say, XVid in an AVI wrapper) - after all, how would they force people to buy the same movies again and again with each new format if they went with an open data format ...
That said, get a "Digital Media Player" with XVid/DivX support and HD capability and attach one of these external HDs. Then Rip and re-encode your movies (or don't re-encode - there's enough space for high-bitrate files in there) or get the HD version of the movie/tv-series from the Internet in a non-DRM-encumbered format (funny how the pirates provide a better product) and voila - days worth of movies and TV series at the touch of a button (with no pay-per-view charges).
PS: Yes, I am sour that the dream of having your personal movie library accessible from you remote without moving anything but a finger is being hindered by the big studios ...
Money: In the UK I get a very good pay for what I do and my taxes are low since I'm a freelancer and have my own company. Also the language makes it easy to adjust to the place fast (for example, it took me some years to learn Dutch, but English I could speak fluently already before I got here).
That said, given the current status and direction of the UK economy, I've been thinking of moving to better pastures (the pay is better in Switzerland already). Either that or I'll get involved in politics around here and try and change things. (I'm starting to get fed-up with jumping from country to country)
In the meanwhile I'll keep a low profile and keep my old bank accounts open outside the UK just in case.
I'm actually from an European country which has ID cards and i'm living in the UK at the moment.
My ID card is actually quite handy as means of identification since it's basically a plastified card with my photo and thumbprint on it, small enough to fit in my wallet and accepted everywhere in Europe as means of identification.
That said, here is why i am firmly against ID cards in the UK:
The problem aren't the ID cards, the problem is that the local institutions and politicians cannot be trusted with anything that can be (mis-)used for surveilance or constrol of people.
EULA's are not valid in most of the civilized world.
They are considered an attempt at changing the implicit contract which is the sale, after that actual sale is closed.
If BEFORE you actually pay and get the game you are made to read through a contract and then sign it, that would be valid.
If you're in the UK the magic words are "Trading Standards" and "Not Fit For Purpose".
If you're in the US you'll probably just get shafted by EA and/or expensive lawyers.
My experience in investment banking as a freelancer is that almost universally the "Business Analysts" are incompetent and inept. This has been confirmed by other freelancers I met working in the same industry.
As far as I can tell, Business Analysts are ex-Secretaries, ex-Sales or ex-Marketing people - they're people's people, great talkers and social animals but they are completely incapable of assembling and transmitting a complete, coherent and internally consistent picture of the needs of the real business.
Since investment banks seem to have no technical analysts at all (the techie-side senior guys that create the Analysis Document and in the process typically force the Requirements Document to be hammered down until it actually is half-decent), you pretty much always end up with vague-ish, long-winded, talkative, incomplete and internally contradictory documents being given to the developers as "The Spec"
Personally I'm not at all surprised that just about all IT projects in Investment Banking fall below the business' expectations, are late and incomplete.
I don't know how old the EE people that made you form this opinion were, but I've graduated as an EE almost 14 years ago (I work as a software engineer nowadays) and we were doing C programs in Unix from our first year.
Also were I studied, the hardest discipline on offer at the undergrad level was a Degree in Physics (done a bit of that too) and even there in our first year we had to implement a virtual processor for a short assembly like language.
This a joke - why should people need to install a (bloated) program just to copy files to an MP3 player?
There's plenty of players out there that simply implement the USB Mass Storage Device protocol and thus look like a plain old USB flash disk: plug it in to the USB port on a Mac, Windows or Linux machine (even XBox360 and PSP3) and just copy files to and from the player.
Instead with the iPod we get the privilege of installing the iTunes bloatware and can't even copy files out from the player.
But hey, it's Apple .... uuuh, shinny
I can just see the scenario:
- The plane is full, 250+ people, middle aged business men, kids, fathers, mothers, grannies, granpas, ...
- Middle eastern looking guy gets up from his seat to go to the bathroom passes nervous passenger.
- Nervous passenger spots that middle eastern looking guy has a gun, pulls his own gun and in his nervousness misfires.
- Multiple people pull out their guns, shots all over, no place to run, everybody is shouting.
- Several people get hit, pilot is dead, co-pilot is wounded, one engine is down due to a stray bullet. A kid is crying, grabbing his mother which is bleeding to death.
Yupes, that really makes me feel safe ...
Space to store filter definitions in Outlook is limited. Where I am now I long ago used all available memory for filters in Outlook....
The things is, the barrier to entry for other people to send you an e-mail is lower than to phone you and much, much lower than to walk to you cube.
So you're a lot less likely to get e-mails for unimportant things.
Then there's the fact that many e-mails are pieces of conversations that spread over multiple e-mails (e.g. question e-mail, answer e-mail, thanks e-mail)
On top of this there are things like mailing lists and automated e-mails that pretty much mean you're pretty much being spammed by your colleagues or automated agents.
The end result is that the information to noise ratio of e-mails is much, much worse than in traditional means of communication.
Which is why so much time is wasted with e-mails: checking if an e-mail is meant for you or important for you consumes time (even if you don't care about that e-mail) and the huge numbers of non-relevant or unimportant e-mails one gets at work thus translate into significant amounts of time being wasted.
I guess maybe my experience in Investment Banking around here has colored my view on the subject of outsourcing of IT in the UK ...
Your scenario has a little problem:
"IT architects"
As far as i can tell, in IT finance around here, any experienced IT architects they might have had (there are some signs that at some point in the far past somebody actually though about things like code reusability) have long been fired (many years ago) or maybe left in disgust.
Even if they still have any IT Architects they're either:
Around here the typical IT career path for a technical person usually ends at a Senior Developer kind of position - you need to become a manager to go above a certain pay level - and there are no advanced technical positions like Technical Analyst or Technical Architect (the closest is Business Analyst, but around here those are usually filled by people promoted from Secretarial positions).
They have no insider highly qualified/experienced technical IT people which are respected enough to even talk to the Bean Counters.
That's a big part of the problem and that's why unholy alliances like Accenture-Microsoft can push Windows and .NET as appropriate for high-availability mission critical systems - there is no qualified, respected insider technical voice that will say "This is not going to work and here is why".
In my experience in IT here in the UK, if most/all of your work can be done from home then it will likely be outsourced to India, in which case the speed of household Internet connections in the UK is of little importance.
Online distribution of rich content kinds of entertainment (such as movies and TV series) could really take off with this. However the main things holding back an explosion of high quality Net-based digital media are:
This is hindering the spread of simple, cheap net-connected PVRs and similar devices that connect directly to the TV.
Until people can buy a generic £30 online digital media box at Tesco (like they buy a PVR or DVD player) which works with any ISP and lets them play most movies and TV series on their TV directly from the Net, there will be no real consumer market for 100Mbs plus Internet access.
The why this:
The Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which uses the LSE's trading platform TradElect, also suspended trading.
If the problem was one of market fairness, then why was a different market altogether affected?
I work in London as a freelancer in IT in Investment Banking. My professional experience was mostly with IT Products/Services companies.
Although I haven't worked in the LSE, from the places I've worked in around here I came out with the impression that most people in IT in this industry are amateurs (and that includes those in other geographical locations).
Any kind of more advanced IT concepts such as technical analysis, software/hardware architecture, iterative software development processes are pretty much either not done or done by people you don't have clue about what they're doing.
I'm hardly surprised with what happened in the LSE.