Judging from the article this does nothing to limit the "Doing something that everybody has been doing for years... over the Internet"; "Doing something that everybody has been doing for years... wirelessly" kind of patents.
Or the "Get a bunch of specialists in a room and ask them 'How would you solve problem X' and then patent the solutions" approach to "innovation".
Not to mention that the change from a "Prior-art has precedence" system to a "First to patent wins" one means the anybody that has loads of ideas but no money to patent them will loose against "Big corp with loadsa money for whom the costs of filling a patent are short change".
Couple this with the ability to patent business methods (whether encoded as a software/hardware mix or not) and you'll see things like "selling ice-cream on a beach" being patented.
The real revolution would be dropping patents for business methods (software encoded or not) altogether.
The fact that BSA is for it (read: the big boys in the software world), should be ringing alarm bells in everybodies minds.
- Which kind of medicine will maximize revenue for a drugs company: something that cures a sickeness or something that removes the symptoms as long as you keep taking it (ie something you take for the rest of your life)?
Now couple this with the fact that the current patent system will grant patents on chemical compound and all compounds derived from it (in other words, in a whole family of compounds). In some countries they even give patents for specific genes.
So what do you get when you couple the motivation to make more money with the ability to close off a whole area of chemistry for several years????
Retailers can't "not carry" Sony pictures, because people will notice the gaping holes in the collection and buy them elsewhere--the general public might be annoyed with Sony, but they're not going to stop buying their products. The retailer has to carry them, or they will suffer reduced sales elsewhere (because most people will shop where they have a full selection). The manufacturer won't eat their own products that work exactly as designed unless the PR gets really bad (like the CD rootkit) or they're forced to recall them by a regulatory body.
Yeah, but said retailers can also separate Sony DVDs from the other ones and put big boards above the "Sony DVD box" saying "Beware: Some Sony DVDs contain DRM and might not work with your DVD Player"
Buyers can then make their own decision on wether to take the risk or not. The retailer lets customers know up front of the problem, so they're much less likelly to have angry customers demanding a refund. The number of customers buying Sony DVDs decreases.
... as demanding a refund for a product that is an incorrect size or they just don't like (there is no legal provision for this, some shops offer a courtesy exchange, an offer to be accepted with gratitude)...
Actually, if you buy over the phone or from the Internet you ARE intitled to return the item within 7 days and get a refund if you change your mind. Things like software, DVDs and CDs are excluded though.
As the parent pointed above, if you buy from a shop you have no such right.
More in general, here is some information on consumer rights in the UK: Consumer advice
In my experience: - The "company" values the getting of the right "shit" done (remember those times when you spent weeks/months doing something that turns out wasn't what was really needed? - That work is worthless for the company) - Managers value looking good to their managers and to key persons that can influence their career progression (think prompty solving critical problems, giving extra help to some specific persons, covering up fuck-ups from the team/managers) - Employees (should) value being seen getting shit done. It doesn't matter how hard you work, how gifted or how experienced you are - your chances of success in a company are a lot more tightly coupled to the perception people have of you than to what you actually are/do. Sad but true.
I work as an IT contractor in the UK (previously in Holland)
One of the great things of being one is that nobody will look twice if your CV says you've been changing assignments every 6 months.
It is true that as a contractor i work via an agency, and they take a cut. The thing is, they get a 20% cut and I get the other 80%. If i was working as a permanent employee for a company that then placed me at their clients (for example a consultancy or a "human resources" company) then it would be the other way around (they would get the 80%) and i would still be doing the same work.
Oh yeah, did i mention my income more than doubled when i moved to contracting and went up another 40% during 2 years (even before i moved to the UK).
The funny part is that if you're really good at what you do, companies are so keen to keep you around (since even as a contrator you're good value for the money) that they keep renewing your contract as long as you want. It's almost the level of job security of being a permanent employee plus having 2-3 times the income of a perm plus the added freedom of no-consequences-moving out of assignments when your're fed up with them (personally, when i want to leave i don't stop in the middle of a contract, i just don't accept the next renewal).
Honestly, becoming a contractor was the best move i ever did.
There's a couple of downsides to it (vacations = no pay; sick leave = no pay) and you have to be prepared to take on the risk of a market downturn at which point you might be out of work for several months and might even have to go permanent for a couple of years. Also, if like me you change assignments every 6 months - 1 year, you have to become a bit of a salesment since you will be selling yourself to a bunch of prospective clients anytime you want to change assignments: think of your as CV being your marketing brochure and the job interview as the place and time where you give your sales pitch (just don't overdo it).
All and all, if you've got the guts (and the savings on the side), the (proven) technical skills and a bit of social/interpersonal skills, contracting is pretty much the only way to stay in the technical career path and still get (middle) management level rewards.
Oh, yeah, we also get less crap from managers than the permanent employes (sad but true).
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
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The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 4, Funny
Another way is to click on the reboot modal dialog box in an morse code pattern that says "SOS" (that's 3 longs, 3 shorts, 3 longs), then pull out our keyboard connector and wistle Dixie into the thus freed port and finally turn your chair 3 times counter-clockwise, click your heels and say "i wish i was back in Munich".
This is not documented anywhere but i heard it from a guy who knows a guy whose father-in-law used to work with someone whose sister worked at Microsoft, so it must be true.
Here in UK, it turns out that the bigguest group of users of SUVs are.... married women with kids.
Also car manufacturers around here definitely don't sell cars on "more power" or "more room": Most cars around here are sold on "safety", "confort", "affordability" and "fuel efficiency" (with the notable exception of sports cars, which are sold mostly on "style" and "power").
This not a UK only thing, it's the same all accross Europe.
Frankly, i think this difference in how we appreciate cars in both sides of the Atlantic boils down mostly to the difference in the price of gas (much more expensive in Europe due to fuel taxes), a different sense of style and the lack of driving and parking room in the typical European city street (most of our cities are older that the US and city planning for 15th century road usage isn't exactly right for the 20th century)
Similar experience here: I just got fed-up with buying games which were overhype by game review sites in the pockets of their advertisers (hi IGN) and turned out to be riddled with bugs and/or fast becoming boring and repetitive and/or have little more replayability than the demo.
Also i use Windows 2000 and although many Windows XP-only games will work fine on 2000, some don't.
On top of this, here in the UK the law that allows you to return unwanted items within 7 days explicitly excludes software, CDs and DVDs (way to go guys!) - so no way to return a game that turns out to be crap or not work in 2000.
So i just download games and try them. Those i like make a point of buying (at full price), those i don't like, i don't use and also don't buy.
Just recently this has saved me from spending my hard earned money on "Supreme Commander" which has been overhyped by the press (89% average rate) and it turns out it's almost a perfect clone (very little new here) of a successfull 1990s game (Total Annihilation - one of the first 3D RTSs). Guess most of present day game reviewers weren't gamers when Total Annihilation came out...
Personally i block most games at my PC's firewall.
Simply put, i don't trust any games publisher to refrain from sending my personal information down from my PC to their servers.
An easy example: the vast majority of games nowadays tries to phone home even those with no online multiplayer component. Now, what exactly is a valid purpose for a single player game to "phone home" everytime i start the game?
I will allow a game to contact the internet (though i often block some addresses) only when it has an online playing component and i want to play it online.
This move by Funcom just tells me not buy their games anymore: my personal information (such as my gaming habits) has monetary value (as in it can be sold and resold for $$$) and i don't see why i should give them access to it free of charge and pay for their games.
The funny part is that for future Funcom games, any pirated copies out there will probably be beter than the official version since this "phone home to authenticate" crap will be disabled by a crack kindly provided with the pirate distribution.
The government is stepping in to keep the consumer from harm and/or to ensure the market is functioning properly by attempting to regulate some degree of interoperability. The government has done this many times to very positive effect. In many cases such interoperability leads to much greater choice and much lower cost. If the government failed to do that choice would exist but it would be expensive and difficult to obtain because alternatives would have a significant market disadvantage. So, in summary, the whole point here is to give you choice, not to butt into your business.
For an example of how this works compare the mobile telephony market in Europe (where GSM was a mandated standard) versus the mobile telephony market in the US (where no standard was enforced).
During the 20 years i've been doing Software Development (first as hobby, then as a job), this discipline (and me) passed through all the generations of programming languages and frameworks (in my case Assembly, C, C+, Java and J2EE stages).
During that time, programming languages became easier to use and more powerful, while more and more advanced functionality was distributed in the standard libraries or standard frameworks.
At the same time as Software Developers got empowered to do more, bigger and faster, users and companies kept requiring even more and bigger and faster Software.
The truth is, componentization and pre-packaged domain-specific software are just another step in the same ladder. The typical big company nowadays has hundreds of different systems, thousands of software components, all directly or indirectly connected to each other, the vast majority of which either depends on information provided by other system and/or provides information to other systems. Consider the software which has been developed to integrate all these systems and communicate with external 3rd party systems and add to this in-house custom systems developed for specific purposes (for which no appropriate off the shelf system is available) and there're still loads of things to do in traditional Software Development, not counting related disciplines such as Software Design, Technical Analysis and Technical Architecture.
Teachers don't have any inherent right to being more or less respected than anybody else.
Good teachers have a right to be respected, bad teachers deserve to be shunned. Just like with say, doctors.
Teachers are one of the most important forces in shapeing tomorrow's adults, their work is not only important, it's essencial to assure continued prosperity in any society.
And yet, while good teachers can help shape a child into a successful, productive adult, bad teachers can contribute to turn a child into an inept and immature adult.
I'm all for paying good teachers more, as long a bad teachers get payed less or get fired. The thing is, teacher's unions are against any sort of selection or pay-per-performance in their profession. This has made sending your kids to public school a bit like playing russian roulette - there's always a risk that they come out of it inept and even thraumatized.
It's not by chance that those that can will send their kids to private schools.
It's all down to Supply and Demand for people with the right qualifications in Mathematics and Science: a) There are fewer people qualified for teaching Mathematics and Science than there are say, people qualified for teching Philosophy or History. b) People which have the right qualifications to teach Science or Mathematics are also usually qualified for quite a number of beter paying positions in the private sector. The demand for say, trained philosophers, isn't quite as big as for trained mathematicians (think finance)
So what it boils down to is that, if schools don't pay extra for Science and Mathematics teachers, very few people with the right qualifications will be willing to be Science or Mathematics teachers.
At time, humans seem to be a lot closer to herbivorous than carnivorous: good old herd mentality - follow the crow, try to look in.
Then again, the population density of present day cities would not be possible if it wasn't for this kind of mentality (imagine a world where each person fiercly defended their "territory").
On a different track, some recent studies show that people are more and more ignoring the adverts - the more we are exposed to it, the more we switch them out of our minds. The increase of in-your-face and unorthodox advertising are the responses from the advertisers to this trend.
So we're talking about roughly 20% of managers here, right?
I've seen a lot in my industry (software development) which seems to contradict your "enlighted manager" theory:
Most companies state that their employees are in the top 10% of their industry. Since this is a mathematical impossibility, it indicates either a high level of self delusion or a lot of bullshiting
Many managers bring in "good enough" people because "we need more people but we don't have the budget". I work as a freelancer nowadays and often end up cleaning up the mess made by these "good enough" programmers
As many senior developers around here can attest, many managers proclaim that they value experience and quality but in practice aren't willing to pay for it. When you reach a certain level of expertise you find that in many companies there is a ceiling to what a technical person can earn - those are the companies whose salary scales (especially at the top of the technical career) look bad by comparisson to those that are willing to pay for the added value of experience
A very common situation is somebody that has entered a company as a junior "whatever", gained experience and expertise and some years later finds himself/herself a medior/senior "whatever" but still on a junior salary. A widespred practice out there is to increase salaries faster than inflation but slower than the increase in value of an employee, especially in the beginning of one's career
The truth is, salary negotiations are business decisions. Salaries are not raised because managers are highly sensitive, enlightened, moral beings which based their decisions on concepts such as "fairness" - they are raised because an employee who brings more value to the company than what he/she is being payed is unhappy about his/her compensation and will probably leave if that isn't addressed.
From the point of view of any manager (sensible or not), the ideal employee is the one that gets payed a low salary and is happy with working there.
Employers that don't know they're being payed shit compared to the rest of the industry will stay content and not ask for a salary raise.
Employers that do know they're being payed shit compared to the rest of the industry will become unhappy at the unfainess of their situation and demand a salary raise.
Naturally, from the point of view of the bottom line (keeping costs down and margins up) it's beter for a manager that employees don't know the real value that the industry is willing to pay for their work - this is why this kind of site is bad for any manager: it impacts their bottom line.
One belief that C.S. Lewis espoused was that one can only go to Hell if one, in fact, chooses to. Since (to Christians) God is the source of all goodness, if you choose to isolate yourself from God you isolate yourself from all that is good and pure. He phrased it something like this: "There are two kinds of people in this world - those who tell God 'Thy will be done,' and those who God tells 'Thy will be done.' The gates of hell are locked from *the inside*." People who end up in Hell choose to consign themselves to the outer darkness of non-entity rather than submit themselves to God.
Just about all religions state that if you don't believe in their Deity you won't get to their version of Heaven (consignation to a Hell or Purgatory is optional) independently of you being a righteous person that lived a good life and never hurt a fly (i reckon Mother Teresa has a 90% change of ending in some kind of hell or other).
So, just out of curiosity, me being a non-believer (agnostic, please do not confuse with anti-religion: atheist) and thus undecided, please tell me which Deity is the right one to belief in. If applicable, don't forget to include the specific profets i'm supposed to believe in (for example Islamism, Judaism and Cristianism are all born from the same original religion but differ in their profets) and which is the right version of the sacred book(s) i should read and the correct language to read them in.
Also please let me know what kind of Deity condemns good and fair people to eternal damnation simply because they happen to not believe in that Deity (with a weak argument as "it's your fault for not believing in me"), and why should i follow such a selfish and unfair Deity.
For a while now, i've been entertaining the theory that religion is at it's core a refuge from complexity.
Basically, the world is a complex place: - Nature is infinitly varied. - Human societies are complicated, semi-chaotic systems. - Many life changing events (for example, accidents) result in one outcome or another based quite a lot on luck.
The harder it is for someone to intelectually concieve and/or emocionally accept that the seemingly complex can grow from quasi-infinite combinations of the simple, the more likelly it is that said person will be overwelmend by the complexity of the results.
Many people feel powerless and overwelmed by all this. Most of those cannot bring themselfs to live life as a small boat in the middle of a big storm.
Those are the ones more likelly to believe in a Deity or Pantheon. The belief in the mere exitence in this higher Being(s) gives confort because He/She/They give logic to the complexites of the world ("it is the will of $Deity") thus providing a form of emotional shelter. A Belief also gives a sense of purpose and, when shared with others, can create a comunity of individuals which support each other. Life is simpler if there is a "Greater Truth" which us simple mortals cannot comprehend.
Hence believers find shelter from the storms of life in the arms of a shared belief on a "Higher Purpose" which acts as a guiding light and an "All knowing, all powerfull $Deity(ies)" which is responsible for making things as they are.
[PS: I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to fit the emotional shock of the death of a loved one or the fear of death in this theory]
I did, except you insist on piracy because it is "free" (without cost). When presented an alternative (technical merits aside) that doesn't involve "free" you then complain you can get it for "free", even if it is illegal (in most jurisdictions).
Actually he pointed out that pirating the movies was more convenient and he had a much beter selection.
He even pointed out that he could get the movies available on that site for free (by pirating them) and still he wouldn't do it.
You're the once concentration on the money aspect when, as it the GP pointed and as has been pointed again and again, what really makes DRMed anything a hard sale is the reduced convenience (and often, the reduced choice).
Now, judging by your response i guess you are thouroughly convinced that your set of morals (piracy is really, really bad) is the beter one. Well, i got news for you - everybody has their own set of morals, and your's ain't beter or worse than everybody else's.
As for your supporting argument that illegal means immoral it fails the real world test: helping escaped slaves was once illegal and yet few would now argue that such an act was immoral.
I suggest you open your mind to the possibility that people will knowingly brake the law by pirating things not because they're bad people, but because the laws are wrong and monopolies have been granted to those which abuse the system (you do know that IP is all based in granting mnopolies to people, right???)
Actually you should be skeptical of the claim from the USPTO Head that every country wants to model their patent system to the image of the US one.
In all honesty, the guy is full of it.
I live in Europe and i can tell you that things have been turning distinctly in the direction of "The US patent system has problems and we should avoid modeling our patent system on theirs".
Even at the pinacle of our "admiration" for the US patent system, when an attempt was made to introduce software patents in the EPO, the majority of the industry was against it, the only ones lobbying for it were big (mostly US based) software companies and it got defeated in the European Parliement (whose members are elected). Inside the EU machine, the only ones trying to make the EPO accept software patents were the European Comission whose members are not elected, but nominated by national governments and which is much more likelly to side with big corporate interests.
Even the countries that are moving in a direction of stronger intellectual property protection (such as China and many african countries) are doing so because it's a condition of their WTO membership. One can say that they are moving closer to a US like patent system, though with the same logic one can also say they are moving closer to the German patent system, or the Jordanian patent system or the Singapore patent system or basically any patent system at all (since they're starting from NO patent system)
The amazing thing to me is that the system is robust enough that transactions can survive the loss of their main computer system and bringing up a secondary one. That's database, networking, and coding voodoo, all wrapped into something pretty awe-inspiring.
Pretty much the number one consideration when designing a technical architecture for a mission critical is to guarantee that no transaction is lost.
Such an architecture is not too hard to design.
The really hard part is to make one that can process millions of transactions per minute.
Actually in by slapping the wrists of those which try to bypass the proper channels, your boss is actually the reason why only those that trully have urgent maters contact your directly.
The behaviour that you observe ("very few of them violate protocol more than once in a great while [...] if they are violating protocol, it's urgent enough") happens because in the past those that did "violate protocol" for "minor crisis" got slapped on the wrist by your boss for it (and thus stopped trying to using that specific backchannel).
There are two very important ways in which people behave that you have to keep in mind when doing support:
People will almost always take the easy way out - if they have a small problem that they can fix themselfs (with a little work) but they can even more easilly (eg almost no work) get somebody else to fix it for them, they will choose the last option.
A person's own problems are almost always more important (for that person) than everybody else's problems - when a team has to support multiple people, everybody will call saying they have a major problem, even though the problems of some can wait while the problems of other really need to be fixed ASAP
Your boss' approach compensates for these behaviours in people that your group supports as follows:
By forcing people to go through the moves he places a (in business terms) "barrier to entry". In other words asking your team for support is not the easiest choice for the user for all problems, only for the harder to solve problems. For the users, since getting support is harder than "just calling some bloke", their mental consideration of "which is the easieast path to take" gets altered so that for easy problems (those that they can sort out themselfs) it's not worth it to get support from you guys, while for hard problems they still ask your support.
By forcing all problems to go through single points of entry at each level (L1 and then L2 and then escalation), he makes sure that all open support cases are visible, evaluated and prioritized in the global context (we have X man hours today to support Y problems, not enough time. which problems do we fix first?). By doing this, he makes sure that the most important (for the company) problems are always solved first
By doing this your boss has made sure that your groups isn't swamped with "shitty shit problems" and always solves first the problems which need to be solved first (eg, the ones that can potentially cost the company more $$$)
Your boss probably learned this from experience (probably the painfull kind). You, on the other hand, seem to have not yet reach the point of detecting the patterns. You probably need to work in a place were you don't have a boss that knows the ropes before you see for yourself the problems that your boss' behaviour is preventing.
You do know you can't really multitask, right? Any multitasking requires context switching. Any additional task makes you 20% slower and dumber than you'd be if you concentrated at just one task. So I'd rather live in a future that took this into account and at least tried to serialize tasks for individuals somewhat. That's where the next productivity boost will come from.
I'd like to add something to this: - The most efficient mental state to execute a task is called "Flow". Being in "Flow" can more or less be described as being so perfectly attuned and concentrated on doing the task at hand that the brain is working at it's maximum perfomance, you loose consciousness of your sorroundings and time just flows by without it being noticed.
If you're interrupted when in this mental state you loose it.
Two conditions are required to get into this mental state: - A task which is at the border of one's abilities (e.g. challenging but not impossible). - Uninterrupted concentration on the task for a period of time (at least 10 - 15 minutes) to get into "Flow".
--
Multitasking as it is done nowadays pretty much guarantees that one rarelly gets into "Flow" and/or is often interrupted out of that mental state. The end result is that most people almost never use their mental abilities at their peak efficiency.
For those people whose work consist pretty much of doing unchallenging "pap", being great multi-taskers might be an advantage since they would never get into the "Flow" state anyways, but for anybody which tries to be a peak performer in any one of the many challenging intelectual areas out there, continuous heavy multitasking will pretty much guarantees (as the parent poster pointed out) that you will be dumber all the time.
The funny thing in seing the ability to multitask publicly being praise is that some of the best thinkers and managers of our time are the kind of people who other have "time to think" and/or know when to create such time (eg the CEO that locks himself in his office for an hour and tells his secretary to hold all calls).
The true value of multi-tasking can only be demonstrated for people doing monkey work, where the gains with multi-tasking (e.g. fillin-in empty time that you would otherwise not have used if only doing one task) outweight the losses from their brains never performing at peak efficiency (since they would never get into "Flow" anyways on account of their work being boring and meaningless). For everybody else, if you don't do it already, learn to control your environment (repeat with me: "I control my Blackberry, my Blackberry doesn't control me") and to create the time for stints of uninterrupted concentration - you will notice that you are now doing feats of intelectual achievmente which before you thought impossible.
You see - it's all a conspiracy to make some humans believe in evolution.
DNA, microevolution, artifical selection, fossils: all that was put in place to fool us.
The thing is, since God is omnipotent He/She doesn't actually need anybody else's help to pull this one out.
Actually, the world was created 5 seconds ago. It's just that God set everything (our memories, material things, etc) in such a way that it "seems" like the world existed before that.
Actually, if you're reading this post and it says it was posted more than 5 seconds ago, it was made by God when he created the world 5 seconds ago.
When choosing to buy an iPhone the question one asks is not "Are the features on the iPhone worth $500?" but instead "Are the features it has that i want in a mobile phone worth the $500 and can i get the same features for less?"
For all the glazed eyed drooling of the Apple fanatics out there at the "coolness" and "superior UI design" of the iPhone, most people will value the iPhone mostly on "does it do what i want cheaper or beter than the competition". Coolness and good-UI have a value, but they ain't overriding factors when it comes to mobile phones for most people.
My current phone has a UI that sucks (big time). However it is (somewhat) "cool" looking and, more importantly: - It's small enough to put in a pocket in my pants without causing an unseemly bulge. - It has bluetooth so i can easilly load stuff into it. - I works well as a mobile phone.
Add MP3 playing to it's list of relevant features and you've got my next mobile phone.
Cool UI has a value but it's much less than $200 ($200 roughly being the difference between what i want and the iPhone)
Slashdot Mirror
Judging from the article this does nothing to limit the "Doing something that everybody has been doing for years ... over the Internet"; "Doing something that everybody has been doing for years ... wirelessly" kind of patents.
Or the "Get a bunch of specialists in a room and ask them 'How would you solve problem X' and then patent the solutions" approach to "innovation".
Not to mention that the change from a "Prior-art has precedence" system to a "First to patent wins" one means the anybody that has loads of ideas but no money to patent them will loose against "Big corp with loadsa money for whom the costs of filling a patent are short change".
Couple this with the ability to patent business methods (whether encoded as a software/hardware mix or not) and you'll see things like "selling ice-cream on a beach" being patented.
The real revolution would be dropping patents for business methods (software encoded or not) altogether.
The fact that BSA is for it (read: the big boys in the software world), should be ringing alarm bells in everybodies minds.
Allow me to point out a small thing:
- Which kind of medicine will maximize revenue for a drugs company: something that cures a sickeness or something that removes the symptoms as long as you keep taking it (ie something you take for the rest of your life)?
Now couple this with the fact that the current patent system will grant patents on chemical compound and all compounds derived from it (in other words, in a whole family of compounds). In some countries they even give patents for specific genes.
So what do you get when you couple the motivation to make more money with the ability to close off a whole area of chemistry for several years????
*think about it*
Yeah, but said retailers can also separate Sony DVDs from the other ones and put big boards above the "Sony DVD box" saying "Beware: Some Sony DVDs contain DRM and might not work with your DVD Player"
Buyers can then make their own decision on wether to take the risk or not.
The retailer lets customers know up front of the problem, so they're much less likelly to have angry customers demanding a refund.
The number of customers buying Sony DVDs decreases.
Actually, if you buy over the phone or from the Internet you ARE intitled to return the item within 7 days and get a refund if you change your mind. Things like software, DVDs and CDs are excluded though.
As the parent pointed above, if you buy from a shop you have no such right.
More in general, here is some information on consumer rights in the UK:
Consumer advice
What matters to whom?
In my experience:
- The "company" values the getting of the right "shit" done (remember those times when you spent weeks/months doing something that turns out wasn't what was really needed? - That work is worthless for the company)
- Managers value looking good to their managers and to key persons that can influence their career progression (think prompty solving critical problems, giving extra help to some specific persons, covering up fuck-ups from the team/managers)
- Employees (should) value being seen getting shit done. It doesn't matter how hard you work, how gifted or how experienced you are - your chances of success in a company are a lot more tightly coupled to the perception people have of you than to what you actually are/do. Sad but true.
I work as an IT contractor in the UK (previously in Holland)
One of the great things of being one is that nobody will look twice if your CV says you've been changing assignments every 6 months.
It is true that as a contractor i work via an agency, and they take a cut. The thing is, they get a 20% cut and I get the other 80%. If i was working as a permanent employee for a company that then placed me at their clients (for example a consultancy or a "human resources" company) then it would be the other way around (they would get the 80%) and i would still be doing the same work.
Oh yeah, did i mention my income more than doubled when i moved to contracting and went up another 40% during 2 years (even before i moved to the UK).
The funny part is that if you're really good at what you do, companies are so keen to keep you around (since even as a contrator you're good value for the money) that they keep renewing your contract as long as you want. It's almost the level of job security of being a permanent employee plus having 2-3 times the income of a perm plus the added freedom of no-consequences-moving out of assignments when your're fed up with them (personally, when i want to leave i don't stop in the middle of a contract, i just don't accept the next renewal).
Honestly, becoming a contractor was the best move i ever did.
There's a couple of downsides to it (vacations = no pay; sick leave = no pay) and you have to be prepared to take on the risk of a market downturn at which point you might be out of work for several months and might even have to go permanent for a couple of years. Also, if like me you change assignments every 6 months - 1 year, you have to become a bit of a salesment since you will be selling yourself to a bunch of prospective clients anytime you want to change assignments: think of your as CV being your marketing brochure and the job interview as the place and time where you give your sales pitch (just don't overdo it).
All and all, if you've got the guts (and the savings on the side), the (proven) technical skills and a bit of social/interpersonal skills, contracting is pretty much the only way to stay in the technical career path and still get (middle) management level rewards.
Oh, yeah, we also get less crap from managers than the permanent employes (sad but true).
Another way is to click on the reboot modal dialog box in an morse code pattern that says "SOS" (that's 3 longs, 3 shorts, 3 longs), then pull out our keyboard connector and wistle Dixie into the thus freed port and finally turn your chair 3 times counter-clockwise, click your heels and say "i wish i was back in Munich".
This is not documented anywhere but i heard it from a guy who knows a guy whose father-in-law used to work with someone whose sister worked at Microsoft, so it must be true.
I think that's a cultural US thing.
.... married women with kids.
Here in UK, it turns out that the bigguest group of users of SUVs are
Also car manufacturers around here definitely don't sell cars on "more power" or "more room": Most cars around here are sold on "safety", "confort", "affordability" and "fuel efficiency" (with the notable exception of sports cars, which are sold mostly on "style" and "power").
This not a UK only thing, it's the same all accross Europe.
Frankly, i think this difference in how we appreciate cars in both sides of the Atlantic boils down mostly to the difference in the price of gas (much more expensive in Europe due to fuel taxes), a different sense of style and the lack of driving and parking room in the typical European city street (most of our cities are older that the US and city planning for 15th century road usage isn't exactly right for the 20th century)
Similar experience here: I just got fed-up with buying games which were overhype by game review sites in the pockets of their advertisers (hi IGN) and turned out to be riddled with bugs and/or fast becoming boring and repetitive and/or have little more replayability than the demo.
...
Also i use Windows 2000 and although many Windows XP-only games will work fine on 2000, some don't.
On top of this, here in the UK the law that allows you to return unwanted items within 7 days explicitly excludes software, CDs and DVDs (way to go guys!) - so no way to return a game that turns out to be crap or not work in 2000.
So i just download games and try them. Those i like make a point of buying (at full price), those i don't like, i don't use and also don't buy.
Just recently this has saved me from spending my hard earned money on "Supreme Commander" which has been overhyped by the press (89% average rate) and it turns out it's almost a perfect clone (very little new here) of a successfull 1990s game (Total Annihilation - one of the first 3D RTSs). Guess most of present day game reviewers weren't gamers when Total Annihilation came out
Personally i block most games at my PC's firewall.
Simply put, i don't trust any games publisher to refrain from sending my personal information down from my PC to their servers.
An easy example: the vast majority of games nowadays tries to phone home even those with no online multiplayer component. Now, what exactly is a valid purpose for a single player game to "phone home" everytime i start the game?
I will allow a game to contact the internet (though i often block some addresses) only when it has an online playing component and i want to play it online.
This move by Funcom just tells me not buy their games anymore: my personal information (such as my gaming habits) has monetary value (as in it can be sold and resold for $$$) and i don't see why i should give them access to it free of charge and pay for their games.
The funny part is that for future Funcom games, any pirated copies out there will probably be beter than the official version since this "phone home to authenticate" crap will be disabled by a crack kindly provided with the pirate distribution.
For an example of how this works compare the mobile telephony market in Europe (where GSM was a mandated standard) versus the mobile telephony market in the US (where no standard was enforced).
During the 20 years i've been doing Software Development (first as hobby, then as a job), this discipline (and me) passed through all the generations of programming languages and frameworks (in my case Assembly, C, C+, Java and J2EE stages).
During that time, programming languages became easier to use and more powerful, while more and more advanced functionality was distributed in the standard libraries or standard frameworks.
At the same time as Software Developers got empowered to do more, bigger and faster, users and companies kept requiring even more and bigger and faster Software.
The truth is, componentization and pre-packaged domain-specific software are just another step in the same ladder. The typical big company nowadays has hundreds of different systems, thousands of software components, all directly or indirectly connected to each other, the vast majority of which either depends on information provided by other system and/or provides information to other systems. Consider the software which has been developed to integrate all these systems and communicate with external 3rd party systems and add to this in-house custom systems developed for specific purposes (for which no appropriate off the shelf system is available) and there're still loads of things to do in traditional Software Development, not counting related disciplines such as Software Design, Technical Analysis and Technical Architecture.
Teachers don't have any inherent right to being more or less respected than anybody else.
Good teachers have a right to be respected, bad teachers deserve to be shunned. Just like with say, doctors.
Teachers are one of the most important forces in shapeing tomorrow's adults, their work is not only important, it's essencial to assure continued prosperity in any society.
And yet, while good teachers can help shape a child into a successful, productive adult, bad teachers can contribute to turn a child into an inept and immature adult.
I'm all for paying good teachers more, as long a bad teachers get payed less or get fired. The thing is, teacher's unions are against any sort of selection or pay-per-performance in their profession. This has made sending your kids to public school a bit like playing russian roulette - there's always a risk that they come out of it inept and even thraumatized.
It's not by chance that those that can will send their kids to private schools.
It's all down to Supply and Demand for people with the right qualifications in Mathematics and Science:
a) There are fewer people qualified for teaching Mathematics and Science than there are say, people qualified for teching Philosophy or History.
b) People which have the right qualifications to teach Science or Mathematics are also usually qualified for quite a number of beter paying positions in the private sector. The demand for say, trained philosophers, isn't quite as big as for trained mathematicians (think finance)
So what it boils down to is that, if schools don't pay extra for Science and Mathematics teachers, very few people with the right qualifications will be willing to be Science or Mathematics teachers.
At time, humans seem to be a lot closer to herbivorous than carnivorous: good old herd mentality - follow the crow, try to look in.
Then again, the population density of present day cities would not be possible if it wasn't for this kind of mentality (imagine a world where each person fiercly defended their "territory").
On a different track, some recent studies show that people are more and more ignoring the adverts - the more we are exposed to it, the more we switch them out of our minds. The increase of in-your-face and unorthodox advertising are the responses from the advertisers to this trend.
So we're talking about roughly 20% of managers here, right?
I've seen a lot in my industry (software development) which seems to contradict your "enlighted manager" theory:
The truth is, salary negotiations are business decisions. Salaries are not raised because managers are highly sensitive, enlightened, moral beings which based their decisions on concepts such as "fairness" - they are raised because an employee who brings more value to the company than what he/she is being payed is unhappy about his/her compensation and will probably leave if that isn't addressed.
From the point of view of any manager (sensible or not), the ideal employee is the one that gets payed a low salary and is happy with working there.
Employers that don't know they're being payed shit compared to the rest of the industry will stay content and not ask for a salary raise.
Employers that do know they're being payed shit compared to the rest of the industry will become unhappy at the unfainess of their situation and demand a salary raise.
Naturally, from the point of view of the bottom line (keeping costs down and margins up) it's beter for a manager that employees don't know the real value that the industry is willing to pay for their work - this is why this kind of site is bad for any manager: it impacts their bottom line.
Just about all religions state that if you don't believe in their Deity you won't get to their version of Heaven (consignation to a Hell or Purgatory is optional) independently of you being a righteous person that lived a good life and never hurt a fly (i reckon Mother Teresa has a 90% change of ending in some kind of hell or other).
So, just out of curiosity, me being a non-believer (agnostic, please do not confuse with anti-religion: atheist) and thus undecided, please tell me which Deity is the right one to belief in. If applicable, don't forget to include the specific profets i'm supposed to believe in (for example Islamism, Judaism and Cristianism are all born from the same original religion but differ in their profets) and which is the right version of the sacred book(s) i should read and the correct language to read them in.
Also please let me know what kind of Deity condemns good and fair people to eternal damnation simply because they happen to not believe in that Deity (with a weak argument as "it's your fault for not believing in me"), and why should i follow such a selfish and unfair Deity.
For a while now, i've been entertaining the theory that religion is at it's core a refuge from complexity.
Basically, the world is a complex place:
- Nature is infinitly varied.
- Human societies are complicated, semi-chaotic systems.
- Many life changing events (for example, accidents) result in one outcome or another based quite a lot on luck.
The harder it is for someone to intelectually concieve and/or emocionally accept that the seemingly complex can grow from quasi-infinite combinations of the simple, the more likelly it is that said person will be overwelmend by the complexity of the results.
Many people feel powerless and overwelmed by all this. Most of those cannot bring themselfs to live life as a small boat in the middle of a big storm.
Those are the ones more likelly to believe in a Deity or Pantheon. The belief in the mere exitence in this higher Being(s) gives confort because He/She/They give logic to the complexites of the world ("it is the will of $Deity") thus providing a form of emotional shelter. A Belief also gives a sense of purpose and, when shared with others, can create a comunity of individuals which support each other. Life is simpler if there is a "Greater Truth" which us simple mortals cannot comprehend.
Hence believers find shelter from the storms of life in the arms of a shared belief on a "Higher Purpose" which acts as a guiding light and an "All knowing, all powerfull $Deity(ies)" which is responsible for making things as they are.
[PS: I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to fit the emotional shock of the death of a loved one or the fear of death in this theory]
Actually he pointed out that pirating the movies was more convenient and he had a much beter selection.
He even pointed out that he could get the movies available on that site for free (by pirating them) and still he wouldn't do it.
You're the once concentration on the money aspect when, as it the GP pointed and as has been pointed again and again, what really makes DRMed anything a hard sale is the reduced convenience (and often, the reduced choice).
Now, judging by your response i guess you are thouroughly convinced that your set of morals (piracy is really, really bad) is the beter one. Well, i got news for you - everybody has their own set of morals, and your's ain't beter or worse than everybody else's.
As for your supporting argument that illegal means immoral it fails the real world test: helping escaped slaves was once illegal and yet few would now argue that such an act was immoral.
I suggest you open your mind to the possibility that people will knowingly brake the law by pirating things not because they're bad people, but because the laws are wrong and monopolies have been granted to those which abuse the system (you do know that IP is all based in granting mnopolies to people, right???)
Actually you should be skeptical of the claim from the USPTO Head that every country wants to model their patent system to the image of the US one.
In all honesty, the guy is full of it.
I live in Europe and i can tell you that things have been turning distinctly in the direction of "The US patent system has problems and we should avoid modeling our patent system on theirs".
Even at the pinacle of our "admiration" for the US patent system, when an attempt was made to introduce software patents in the EPO, the majority of the industry was against it, the only ones lobbying for it were big (mostly US based) software companies and it got defeated in the European Parliement (whose members are elected). Inside the EU machine, the only ones trying to make the EPO accept software patents were the European Comission whose members are not elected, but nominated by national governments and which is much more likelly to side with big corporate interests.
Even the countries that are moving in a direction of stronger intellectual property protection (such as China and many african countries) are doing so because it's a condition of their WTO membership. One can say that they are moving closer to a US like patent system, though with the same logic one can also say they are moving closer to the German patent system, or the Jordanian patent system or the Singapore patent system or basically any patent system at all (since they're starting from NO patent system)
As i said, the guy is full of it.
Pretty much the number one consideration when designing a technical architecture for a mission critical is to guarantee that no transaction is lost.
Such an architecture is not too hard to design.
The really hard part is to make one that can process millions of transactions per minute.
The behaviour that you observe ("very few of them violate protocol more than once in a great while [...] if they are violating protocol, it's urgent enough") happens because in the past those that did "violate protocol" for "minor crisis" got slapped on the wrist by your boss for it (and thus stopped trying to using that specific backchannel).
There are two very important ways in which people behave that you have to keep in mind when doing support:
Your boss' approach compensates for these behaviours in people that your group supports as follows:
By doing this your boss has made sure that your groups isn't swamped with "shitty shit problems" and always solves first the problems which need to be solved first (eg, the ones that can potentially cost the company more $$$)
Your boss probably learned this from experience (probably the painfull kind). You, on the other hand, seem to have not yet reach the point of detecting the patterns. You probably need to work in a place were you don't have a boss that knows the ropes before you see for yourself the problems that your boss' behaviour is preventing.
I'd like to add something to this:
- The most efficient mental state to execute a task is called "Flow". Being in "Flow" can more or less be described as being so perfectly attuned and concentrated on doing the task at hand that the brain is working at it's maximum perfomance, you loose consciousness of your sorroundings and time just flows by without it being noticed.
If you're interrupted when in this mental state you loose it.
Two conditions are required to get into this mental state:
- A task which is at the border of one's abilities (e.g. challenging but not impossible).
- Uninterrupted concentration on the task for a period of time (at least 10 - 15 minutes) to get into "Flow".
--
Multitasking as it is done nowadays pretty much guarantees that one rarelly gets into "Flow" and/or is often interrupted out of that mental state. The end result is that most people almost never use their mental abilities at their peak efficiency.
For those people whose work consist pretty much of doing unchallenging "pap", being great multi-taskers might be an advantage since they would never get into the "Flow" state anyways, but for anybody which tries to be a peak performer in any one of the many challenging intelectual areas out there, continuous heavy multitasking will pretty much guarantees (as the parent poster pointed out) that you will be dumber all the time.
The funny thing in seing the ability to multitask publicly being praise is that some of the best thinkers and managers of our time are the kind of people who other have "time to think" and/or know when to create such time (eg the CEO that locks himself in his office for an hour and tells his secretary to hold all calls).
The true value of multi-tasking can only be demonstrated for people doing monkey work, where the gains with multi-tasking (e.g. fillin-in empty time that you would otherwise not have used if only doing one task) outweight the losses from their brains never performing at peak efficiency (since they would never get into "Flow" anyways on account of their work being boring and meaningless).
For everybody else, if you don't do it already, learn to control your environment (repeat with me: "I control my Blackberry, my Blackberry doesn't control me") and to create the time for stints of uninterrupted concentration - you will notice that you are now doing feats of intelectual achievmente which before you thought impossible.
No, no, no - you guys got it all wrong.
You see - it's all a conspiracy to make some humans believe in evolution.
DNA, microevolution, artifical selection, fossils: all that was put in place to fool us.
The thing is, since God is omnipotent He/She doesn't actually need anybody else's help to pull this one out.
Actually, the world was created 5 seconds ago. It's just that God set everything (our memories, material things, etc) in such a way that it "seems" like the world existed before that.
Actually, if you're reading this post and it says it was posted more than 5 seconds ago, it was made by God when he created the world 5 seconds ago.
Sneaky, heh?
When choosing to buy an iPhone the question one asks is not "Are the features on the iPhone worth $500?" but instead "Are the features it has that i want in a mobile phone worth the $500 and can i get the same features for less?"
For all the glazed eyed drooling of the Apple fanatics out there at the "coolness" and "superior UI design" of the iPhone, most people will value the iPhone mostly on "does it do what i want cheaper or beter than the competition". Coolness and good-UI have a value, but they ain't overriding factors when it comes to mobile phones for most people.
My current phone has a UI that sucks (big time). However it is (somewhat) "cool" looking and, more importantly:
- It's small enough to put in a pocket in my pants without causing an unseemly bulge.
- It has bluetooth so i can easilly load stuff into it.
- I works well as a mobile phone.
Add MP3 playing to it's list of relevant features and you've got my next mobile phone.
Cool UI has a value but it's much less than $200 ($200 roughly being the difference between what i want and the iPhone)