I suspect I know more than you realise. I'm quite happy to note that the vast majority of insurgent fighting is limited to a very defined region and that large swathes of Iraq are pretty peaceful now with people getting on with their daily jobs etc.
It would actually be physically impossible for the majority of the geografical area of Iraq to be seeing insurgent fighting - it's one big country: plenty of space. I reckon in most of it, there are only element of one side, or the other side or maybe only unallied people.
The places where most people are located (say Bagdahd, Bashra) are the places where insurgent fighting occurs and hundreds of people are killed every week (sometimes daily).
Now, if you really, really want to keep patting yourself in the back and keep believing that the US/UK coalition has done a great job there, i suggest you concentrate on the Kurdish only areas: last i heard there no real insurgent movements there.
Please do not allow me to stand in they way of your self-delusional feeling of success by way of selective blindness.
I've played EVE Online in the past and although it's interesting at first, sooner or later one figures out that it overwelmingly consists of time sinks (eg travelling, mining, missions).
I find it highly suspicious that it has 1st place. I seem to remember a "Vote for EVE Online at mmorpg.com" campaign (i still receive EVE Online newsleter e-mails).
If the 1st place is suspect i reckon the rest of the list is suspect too.
I would expect that "paper" made with e-ink would be much more suitable for the role of "Temporary display of digital information" than specially coated paper - not only is e-paper reusable, but the user can choose when to erase the old "printout".
I kinda doubt that e-paper will ever replace books but for applications such as the one stated in the OP, it seems ideal.
Maybe the problem is that you're sitting too close to your television?
I believe the ideal distance to sit from a TV was between 6 and 8 times the diagonal. For your 42" set that's roughly 6 to 8m.
If, for example, you're sitting 4m from the TV (a common distance in a living room in an appartment), it's not that surprising that you see the pixels on the image.
I just want to add that i myself, about 2 years ago, moved from permanent to contractor for very much the same reasons.
Since i'm in Europe, there's also the additional reason that in practice permanent jobs don't really offer that much job security (during the recession i saw friends of mine getting fired while many of the companies where i had worked as a permanent - were they had the expectation of us being loyal to the company - downsized much of their staff), and the reason that around here being a contractor pays 3 times as much than doing the same work as a permanent.
Finally, i've also seen in action the effect described in the parent post: When you're payed by the hour most "need for your to work extra hours" suddenly vanishes - only the ones that really need it pay, the other ones are managers trying to get out of budget hours to cover-up their mistakes or increase the profits (and their bonuses) on a project.
In Holland i worked for several small sized companies and the only ones that had chronic overwork problems were the ones with the most amateurish management (some of those guys didn't even had a standardized release process).
Being very senior and having worked in many different places (i'm a freelancer), i have yet to see a case of unpaid overwork which did not boil down to management failure. Some examples of chronic overwork i saw: - In one of the companies i worked for we developed a software application which was sold as a product. Overwork came into play (and lasted months) when releasing a new version. This was due both to the fact that the application was developed in multiple parts while the need to integrate those parts and test that integration was not take into account in the planning of the new version and to the lack of clear documentation on everything from requirements to the interfaces between the parts. When everything was brought together and the application was tested as a whole, subtle bugs would pop-up and stuff was always missing in one part or another. Thus came the speach "we need to make an extra effort to finish this release" only after the extra effort the release wasn't finished yet because nobody had a clear view of all that it was supposed to have and how all parts shoudl fit together after the new functionality was added - so the "sprint to the finish" carried on for months. - The other company were i worked for had managers which were also salesmen. These were not only inferior managers (being disorganized in most things, from writting down the requirements to setting down clear objectives) but, as salesmen, they would bring in new requirements from the customer at the last minute to be included in the release (eg requirements creep). This was to such a level that the kick-off meeting in a new project would already include the "these are tight deadlines and we're going to have to work extra hours and maybe at weekends to make it" speach.
I've also worked in small companies were the directors were wise enough to, from very early, choose and put in place a quality process. The only "overworking" i ever saw done there was staying late (as in, till 8pm) once in a while to remotelly install a new release in the customers production environment.
Small companies are indeed less prone to have a clear software development process in place and to have true design/architecture in the applications they develop - thus being more likelly to have screwups and needing to use overtime. However this is not the case for all of them. In my opinion, this is due to the fact that many companies start without having any real senior person amongst the founders which then hire the cheapest (read junior) developers/managers they can find. This results in all sorts of learning mistakes being done in both the software development process in the developing itself, resulting in loads of time wasted, which in turn results in overworking to try and keep within the budget. However, this is a problem caused by the ineptitude of the company founders themselfs, not an implicit property of small companies.
I've recently worked under such an environment. Although it's beter that open space, it's still far more noisier and a bit more disruptive than team offices.
In a sense, that environment is a bit like a cubicle farm, only the cubicles are team-sized.
PS: In my experience, the beneficts of the iteraction with members of the other sections are far outweighted by the disruption of hearing the other groups having meetings and discussing what to do next.
In IT (at least in software development) chronic overworking not only decreases efficiency, it actually makes projects be even later than working only normal working times.
In the software development process, there's a negative feedback loop that affects the productivity of those developing the software. It goes like this: - Those that constantly work long hours get more tired - Tired people do more errors (bugs in the code, bugs in the design, incorrectly documented requirements) - Fixing the extra errors consumes a disproportionatly big ammount of time - the problem has to be found (sometimes only on production), then tracked down to the root cause and then fixed (which in the case of design/requirements errors can include re-writting huge sections of the code).
I my experience from working both 8h/day and 10/day, the total daily productivity (as measured by requirement features successfully implemented) of those working 10h/day is actually lower than those working 8h/day. In other words, it takes more time to develop and deliver and application that fits the client's requirements if developers work 10h/day than it would if they work 8h/day.
From what i've observed, a similar effect might also be in play in other intelectual professions: - From what i've seen, overworked managers are less organized, tend to forget things more easilly and do not as easilly recognize important information than those managers that work more reasonable work hours. In practice this means that they will make wrong decisions, will not make decisions on time or will not pass on all the necessary information to those that execute their decisions which results in a lot of fires and a lot of time and work (by the manager and also by those under his/her management) spent putting down the fires.
From my experience working in several countries, both with and without chronic overworking i believe the fault lies with two factors, often in conjunction: a) Bad managers. These are usually people that are not experienced enough to realize that the negative implications of overworking in intellectual occupations and thus keep demanding long working hours from those they manage (and often themselfs) under the wrong impression that more-hours-at-work = faster-results. Also, management errors often result in a lot of extra work on the development side (say, for example, because a "simple looking" new requirement from the customer was blindly accepted) which means that in practice everybody in the group is pressured into overworking to cover up the incompetence of the manager. One can often spot this kind of managers, even during a job interview, because they are more disorganized and relly heavilly on giving soft rewards (examples: the team's night out; "ultra-flexible" hours; extra relaxed clothing standards). b) Consultancies doing fixed priced projects for external customers. They sell a project to do "something" for $x. Bad estimations, incorrect requirements, time lost waiting for things (examples: interface specifications from the client; hardware required for the project), time lost due to issues in the choosen technologies - all these things mean more time spent working in the project. If the extra time is payed then the profit goes down. Making people work more hours seems at first sight to be a way to "keep on target" without extra costs (as to why this isn't true, see explanation above).
If you have a closely-knit, efficient team of 6 people and their office is full, what do you do if you want to hire 1-2 more people for the same team?
- You reorganized the office if there's available space so that it sits one or two more persons Or - You move the whole team to another office Or - You trade places with a team that has more office space Or - You split your team. Preferably along low-connecting function lines (example: the testers go to one room, the developers to another) or application lines (example: the guys working on the core application go to one room, the ones doing customer specific add-ons go to another).
In general, the bigger the team, the more the lines of comunications and the more the chaos. In practice, projects are split into manageable size parts and so are teams. Big project are done by multiple interconnected teams - don't fall into the trap of believing the whole "we are all a big team" bullshit spewd by management on such a project: each group in the project is in practice a team.
All this to say there is in practice a ceiling to the size of an efficient team and office space can be setup talking this in account.
You could start by adjusting your pitch: - Sounding angry doesn't help - Teleworking is a whole different ball game. There's a lot more factors in teleworking that just offering a potential work environment. - Going for private offices with Aeron chairs is a long shot and it weakens your whole argument.
I'll explain: - Nobody negociates with angry people - Teleworking can decrease communication within the team. In my experience phoneing the guy working from home is harder than just turning your head and talking to him - this does not affect discussion of "immediate and important" factors/issues but does affect all others. Above all, the person working from home will be much less likelly to "absorve knowledge from the shared knowledge pool of his collegues" (in other words, that person is less part of the gestalt that is the team). Also, some people work beter out of home, either because of their personality (some people work beter working alongside other people) or because their home environment is not conducent to concentration (for example, due to noisy kids). - Two points: a) In our current corporate culture, private offices are still seen a symbol of status, which in practice means they're a management perk. b) Why are you going for expensive chair associated with the excesses of the dot-com bust?
I sugest aiming for group offices - closed spaces with 5 or 6 people. Big enough for a team, small enough to significantly reduce noise and visual distractions. Best of all, it helps build team spirit.
Yves (not his real name), a 31- year-old software developer from Seattle, often doesn't have time for a full night's sleep. So he swallows something to make sure he doesn't need one.'
After reading the parent post (actually even before), me being a software developer too and having had a mental breakdown in the past due to overworking and bad working conditions, i started asking myself:
"What kind of company is so great that you would risk frying your brains (possibly loosing mental faculties for good, maybe even turning into a retard or even a vegetable) for them?"
Is this pure, sheer, unadulterated stupidity of the highest degree, or those this guy know something i don't know?
Somebody wise in the ways of self-sacrifice for the greater financial good of somebody else please enlighten me.
[...]but atheists are the last, most-oppressed group on this planet[...]
I've lived in 2 different countries in Europe up to now (Portugal and Holland), and just moved to the third (UK).
In my experience, atheists are not discriminated against (much less oppressed) in none of these countries. Even in Portugal (the most religious of the 3), your lack of belief in the majority religion does not have any influence in your employability (even in the state)
In my generation and social class (30 y.o, university educated) people rarelly talk about religion and when they do you find out that the atheists are the majority and the religious ones keep a low profile (religion is treated as a private matter) - this is both true in Portugal and in Holland.
In the UK i've already had two conversations about religion (and i'm hardly looking to talk about it) and in both the other people turned out to be non-believers (one was even a true atheist - i.e. anti-religion).
From what i've read and what i've seen, the higher the average level of education in a society, the lower the number of people with religious beliefs. Here in the UK, religious belief is decaying amongst the natives, and only the influx of people from african countries has kept the Church of England going. Religion is also in decay in both Holland and Portugal - in the last one it was still strong 40 years ago, but the post-revolution generation (those born around or after 1974) has mostly rejected religion.
In all these countries the only influence that the Church still has seems to come from its old connections to society in general (i.e. the left overs from the time when the Church was strong and officially protected by the State) and by the fact that believers are (implicitly) more organized than non-believers.
Thus, in western societies, the oppression of atheists is mostly concentrated in the U.S.... which brings me back to my point about the U.S. somehow having an excess of idiots...
Why are there so many americans acting in ways that make all americans look like morons to the rest of the world?
- Do you have an extra high percentage of people with a low IQ and/or education? - Is stupidity a side effect of excessive consumption of junk food? - Are there so many americans brainwashed by the constant "America is great" message from the mainstream US media that you are blind to the things that are not so great in America?
The americans i known never fitted the dumb/ignorant/loud stereotype - in fact one off the more intelligent, knowledgeable, wise and mature persons i know comes from the US. Then again, the americans i know are university educated people that emigrated out of the US to a non-english speaking country: hardly a typical bunch.
What's so wrong with the US that it produces such a disproporcionatelly big share of western countries' idiots???
Please disable "screen saver" feature altogether. DPMS sleep modes work much, much better for "screen saving" (and screen saver of course do not save energy at all). Flying shits and "nice" landscapes may be kinda fun for a first time but that time ended about 20 years ago.
Screen savers where introduced to save the screens.
To be more precise, in the old days and with the early CRT screens, if the same static image was displayed for too long in the screen, said image would be engraved in the phospurous layers in the cathode tube (burn-in) and the screen whould then show it as a ghost image supperimposed on all other images.
Screen savers avoided this problem by either making the whole screen dark (before energy saving standards for the PC this was literally done by showing a black image covering the whole screen) or by showing a moving image on a black background which was more or less equally likelly to be shown anywhere on the screen.
Nowadays, with newer CRT and LCD screens, burn-in is not a problems anymore. Also, the introduction of a standard way of switching the image off the screen (as part of the energy saving standards), meant saving the screen from burn-in could be achived by just switching the image off (with the added benefict that energy would be saved).
Thus nowadays screen savers have lost their original purposed (save the screen) and are mostly a curiosity from the old days.
I have two drives installed on my PC (w/ Windows) one is the applications drive and the other the data drive (though the biggest usually has two Linux partitions on it) and usually replace the smallest whenever it starts to get full often AND the price sweetspot for HDDs (i.e. the drives for which the price per Giga is lowest) is at a capacity two or more times bigger.
Since i mostly use my PC for gaming (hence using Windows), the size of games usually dictates the amount of space used in both drives (since the game is installed in the apps drive and i rip the CD/DVD image to the data drive to mount as a virtual CD/DVD).
I've only bought a desktop PC once (a long time ago - 386DX 20) and have been upgrading it myself ever since (only thing left from the original is the keyboard - with no windows key!!!!), so i've gone through the HDD (and other major components) upgrade process often.
In my experience, since i buy my HDDs at the sweet spot (thus never the biggest in the market) i get a new HDD roughly about every 1,5 years.
I've recently discovered external HDDs as a great cost-and-time-effective means of external data storage but i'm not including those in my calculation.
The article goes about how oil will not just suddenly peak, but instead, following the current tendencies in terms of size of existing field, frequency and size of discovery of new fields and viability of using non-conventional sources of oil as prices go up, is expected to plateau and then start decreasing. Also their point is not that we should just put our worries away and relax - it's actually that we should not get distracted with doomsday scenarios in the quest to solve the current and future energy problems. From the article:
The report emphasizes the importance of focusing on the critical issues. "It is not helpful to couch the debate in terms of a superficial analysis of reservoir constraints. It will be aboveground factors such as geopolitics, conflict, economics and technology that will dictate the outcome."
Also the part about
The report, which suggests that world reserves are enough to last 122 years at our current rate of consumption
is actually nowhere to be seen in the CERA News Press Release and seems to have been introduced by either MSNBC, the slashdot editors or the article posters (all of which are not exactly known by the high quality of their journalistic work).
The report itself (as seen in the CERA News Press Release) concerns itself only with the prediction off how much oil will be produced in the next decades and neither addresses the need for oil in the coming decades nor the price of oil in the coming decades.
Given the continued growth and thirst for oil of both China and India expect prices to go up.
The report actually accepts the possibilities of both that demand will continue to increase faster than supply and that prices will go up: non-conventional sources of oil are included in the forecasts of the repport and these will only be exploited when prices are high enough for it to be economically viable.
In other words: - No, oil production has not and will not just suddenly peak and start to go down. - Expect prices to go up even so. - Realistically plan and begin phasing out use of oil for satisfying our energy needs.
Yeah, you can also pull out a Hustler magazine and read it
Even beter, you can: loudly comment on the boobs of the models; tell everybody around you how last month's centerfold was much beter and proceed to explain why; comment on how you can just see that "that one ain't a real blonde"; digress into a loud monologue about the difficulties of masturbating on an airplane bathroom while holding a Hustler.
At the moment in London there's a couple of contracting (freelancing) assignments in my area of IT in "governmental institutions".
They're all paying about half what the investment banks around here would pay for the someone with the same skill-set and about 2/3 of what the rest of the industry pays.
Today there was even an urgent request for a senior developer offering less than most non-urgent assignments out there for junior developers.
Here's a sugestion: Stop wasting money on studies of studies of studies, layers upon layers of management and feeding the blood-sucking big IT consultancies and their "all talk no action" "consultants" and instead invest on getting good people to manage the projects and do the work.
PS: It'll never happen - governments are the worst kind of monopoly and as such they're big, fat, have enormous overhead and are extremelly susceptible to influence peddling and feeding all sorts of private industry leeches (leeches like the kind of "consultants" from the big IT consultancies whose real work is producing vaguelly worded documents about how more study is needed before a solution can be found and to get the client to pay for even more salesmen-consultants and for projects solving problems that don't exist).
[I've worked for a consultancy AND also been on the other side. They do have some people that do a great job, but their business model, business practice and mindset - especially in consultancies with a "big name" - is to send high-payed consultants with instructions to "stay there as long as you can" and "bring us more projects from that customer". I also know (from inside) how much selling services to governmental institutions goes around "knowing the right people", "having a big name" and "giving them the light and mirrors show"]
- When two philosophers fight each other with fishing rods - A trout slapping competition in Greece - What happens when a dolphin with a slight identity crisis gets fed-up with hearing the other dolphins sing Batman - A form of violence between spelling-challenged fishmongers in an open air market....
stupidity involved in regarding dolphins as fish beats my ignorance with regard to the English language
He meant fishy. As in "There's no way they could teach normal dolphins to sing Batman so there must be something fishy about this ones".
Saying that dolphins are fish is like saying that bats are birds! [Though some birds are actually mammals, but that's a whole different class of birds]
Well, some years ago when i had the time for it i would actually let the jehovah whitnesses in and engage in logical discussions with them.
It was majorly entertaining: faith in any deity (or phanteon) is impossible to prove by logic - you either have it or not - so i was guaranteed a win;)
Unfortunatly the quality of them varied a lot, from the salesman type of person that could actually engage in a (somewhat) logical discussion (always using circular logic) to the pitifull pair of old ladies i once got on my door and which had only one argument "It says so on the Bible".
Unfortunatly, after doing this 4 or 5 times they stopped coming to my door. I guess in their Jehovah Witnesses Headquarters they added my address to a black list under the title "Hard-core non-believer, keep away".
Slashdot Mirror
It would actually be physically impossible for the majority of the geografical area of Iraq to be seeing insurgent fighting - it's one big country: plenty of space. I reckon in most of it, there are only element of one side, or the other side or maybe only unallied people.
The places where most people are located (say Bagdahd, Bashra) are the places where insurgent fighting occurs and hundreds of people are killed every week (sometimes daily).
Now, if you really, really want to keep patting yourself in the back and keep believing that the US/UK coalition has done a great job there, i suggest you concentrate on the Kurdish only areas: last i heard there no real insurgent movements there.
Please do not allow me to stand in they way of your self-delusional feeling of success by way of selective blindness.
I hereby suggest that the OP spends a couple of months using the "right" words for mobile phones.
...
For example: He will "punch people's phone numbers" in his "networked mobile communication device".
Sure, people will start avoiding him, but at least he will have that warm fuzzy feeling of using the "right" words
I've played EVE Online in the past and although it's interesting at first, sooner or later one figures out that it overwelmingly consists of time sinks (eg travelling, mining, missions).
I find it highly suspicious that it has 1st place. I seem to remember a "Vote for EVE Online at mmorpg.com" campaign (i still receive EVE Online newsleter e-mails).
If the 1st place is suspect i reckon the rest of the list is suspect too.
I would expect that "paper" made with e-ink would be much more suitable for the role of "Temporary display of digital information" than specially coated paper - not only is e-paper reusable, but the user can choose when to erase the old "printout".
I kinda doubt that e-paper will ever replace books but for applications such as the one stated in the OP, it seems ideal.
Maybe the problem is that you're sitting too close to your television?
I believe the ideal distance to sit from a TV was between 6 and 8 times the diagonal. For your 42" set that's roughly 6 to 8m.
If, for example, you're sitting 4m from the TV (a common distance in a living room in an appartment), it's not that surprising that you see the pixels on the image.
I just want to add that i myself, about 2 years ago, moved from permanent to contractor for very much the same reasons.
Since i'm in Europe, there's also the additional reason that in practice permanent jobs don't really offer that much job security (during the recession i saw friends of mine getting fired while many of the companies where i had worked as a permanent - were they had the expectation of us being loyal to the company - downsized much of their staff), and the reason that around here being a contractor pays 3 times as much than doing the same work as a permanent.
Finally, i've also seen in action the effect described in the parent post: When you're payed by the hour most "need for your to work extra hours" suddenly vanishes - only the ones that really need it pay, the other ones are managers trying to get out of budget hours to cover-up their mistakes or increase the profits (and their bonuses) on a project.
In Holland i worked for several small sized companies and the only ones that had chronic overwork problems were the ones with the most amateurish management (some of those guys didn't even had a standardized release process).
Being very senior and having worked in many different places (i'm a freelancer), i have yet to see a case of unpaid overwork which did not boil down to management failure. Some examples of chronic overwork i saw:
- In one of the companies i worked for we developed a software application which was sold as a product. Overwork came into play (and lasted months) when releasing a new version. This was due both to the fact that the application was developed in multiple parts while the need to integrate those parts and test that integration was not take into account in the planning of the new version and to the lack of clear documentation on everything from requirements to the interfaces between the parts. When everything was brought together and the application was tested as a whole, subtle bugs would pop-up and stuff was always missing in one part or another. Thus came the speach "we need to make an extra effort to finish this release" only after the extra effort the release wasn't finished yet because nobody had a clear view of all that it was supposed to have and how all parts shoudl fit together after the new functionality was added - so the "sprint to the finish" carried on for months.
- The other company were i worked for had managers which were also salesmen. These were not only inferior managers (being disorganized in most things, from writting down the requirements to setting down clear objectives) but, as salesmen, they would bring in new requirements from the customer at the last minute to be included in the release (eg requirements creep). This was to such a level that the kick-off meeting in a new project would already include the "these are tight deadlines and we're going to have to work extra hours and maybe at weekends to make it" speach.
I've also worked in small companies were the directors were wise enough to, from very early, choose and put in place a quality process. The only "overworking" i ever saw done there was staying late (as in, till 8pm) once in a while to remotelly install a new release in the customers production environment.
Small companies are indeed less prone to have a clear software development process in place and to have true design/architecture in the applications they develop - thus being more likelly to have screwups and needing to use overtime. However this is not the case for all of them.
In my opinion, this is due to the fact that many companies start without having any real senior person amongst the founders which then hire the cheapest (read junior) developers/managers they can find. This results in all sorts of learning mistakes being done in both the software development process in the developing itself, resulting in loads of time wasted, which in turn results in overworking to try and keep within the budget.
However, this is a problem caused by the ineptitude of the company founders themselfs, not an implicit property of small companies.
I've recently worked under such an environment. Although it's beter that open space, it's still far more noisier and a bit more disruptive than team offices.
In a sense, that environment is a bit like a cubicle farm, only the cubicles are team-sized.
PS: In my experience, the beneficts of the iteraction with members of the other sections are far outweighted by the disruption of hearing the other groups having meetings and discussing what to do next.
In IT (at least in software development) chronic overworking not only decreases efficiency, it actually makes projects be even later than working only normal working times.
In the software development process, there's a negative feedback loop that affects the productivity of those developing the software. It goes like this:
- Those that constantly work long hours get more tired
- Tired people do more errors (bugs in the code, bugs in the design, incorrectly documented requirements)
- Fixing the extra errors consumes a disproportionatly big ammount of time - the problem has to be found (sometimes only on production), then tracked down to the root cause and then fixed (which in the case of design/requirements errors can include re-writting huge sections of the code).
I my experience from working both 8h/day and 10/day, the total daily productivity (as measured by requirement features successfully implemented) of those working 10h/day is actually lower than those working 8h/day. In other words, it takes more time to develop and deliver and application that fits the client's requirements if developers work 10h/day than it would if they work 8h/day.
From what i've observed, a similar effect might also be in play in other intelectual professions:
- From what i've seen, overworked managers are less organized, tend to forget things more easilly and do not as easilly recognize important information than those managers that work more reasonable work hours. In practice this means that they will make wrong decisions, will not make decisions on time or will not pass on all the necessary information to those that execute their decisions which results in a lot of fires and a lot of time and work (by the manager and also by those under his/her management) spent putting down the fires.
From my experience working in several countries, both with and without chronic overworking i believe the fault lies with two factors, often in conjunction:
a) Bad managers. These are usually people that are not experienced enough to realize that the negative implications of overworking in intellectual occupations and thus keep demanding long working hours from those they manage (and often themselfs) under the wrong impression that more-hours-at-work = faster-results. Also, management errors often result in a lot of extra work on the development side (say, for example, because a "simple looking" new requirement from the customer was blindly accepted) which means that in practice everybody in the group is pressured into overworking to cover up the incompetence of the manager. One can often spot this kind of managers, even during a job interview, because they are more disorganized and relly heavilly on giving soft rewards (examples: the team's night out; "ultra-flexible" hours; extra relaxed clothing standards).
b) Consultancies doing fixed priced projects for external customers. They sell a project to do "something" for $x. Bad estimations, incorrect requirements, time lost waiting for things (examples: interface specifications from the client; hardware required for the project), time lost due to issues in the choosen technologies - all these things mean more time spent working in the project. If the extra time is payed then the profit goes down. Making people work more hours seems at first sight to be a way to "keep on target" without extra costs (as to why this isn't true, see explanation above).
- You reorganized the office if there's available space so that it sits one or two more persons
Or
- You move the whole team to another office
Or
- You trade places with a team that has more office space
Or
- You split your team. Preferably along low-connecting function lines (example: the testers go to one room, the developers to another) or application lines (example: the guys working on the core application go to one room, the ones doing customer specific add-ons go to another).
In general, the bigger the team, the more the lines of comunications and the more the chaos. In practice, projects are split into manageable size parts and so are teams. Big project are done by multiple interconnected teams - don't fall into the trap of believing the whole "we are all a big team" bullshit spewd by management on such a project: each group in the project is in practice a team.
All this to say there is in practice a ceiling to the size of an efficient team and office space can be setup talking this in account.
You could start by adjusting your pitch:
- Sounding angry doesn't help
- Teleworking is a whole different ball game. There's a lot more factors in teleworking that just offering a potential work environment.
- Going for private offices with Aeron chairs is a long shot and it weakens your whole argument.
I'll explain:
- Nobody negociates with angry people
- Teleworking can decrease communication within the team. In my experience phoneing the guy working from home is harder than just turning your head and talking to him - this does not affect discussion of "immediate and important" factors/issues but does affect all others. Above all, the person working from home will be much less likelly to "absorve knowledge from the shared knowledge pool of his collegues" (in other words, that person is less part of the gestalt that is the team). Also, some people work beter out of home, either because of their personality (some people work beter working alongside other people) or because their home environment is not conducent to concentration (for example, due to noisy kids).
- Two points:
a) In our current corporate culture, private offices are still seen a symbol of status, which in practice means they're a management perk.
b) Why are you going for expensive chair associated with the excesses of the dot-com bust?
I sugest aiming for group offices - closed spaces with 5 or 6 people. Big enough for a team, small enough to significantly reduce noise and visual distractions. Best of all, it helps build team spirit.
After reading the parent post (actually even before), me being a software developer too and having had a mental breakdown in the past due to overworking and bad working conditions, i started asking myself:
"What kind of company is so great that you would risk frying your brains (possibly loosing mental faculties for good, maybe even turning into a retard or even a vegetable) for them?"
Is this pure, sheer, unadulterated stupidity of the highest degree, or those this guy know something i don't know?
Somebody wise in the ways of self-sacrifice for the greater financial good of somebody else please enlighten me.
I've lived in 2 different countries in Europe up to now (Portugal and Holland), and just moved to the third (UK).
In my experience, atheists are not discriminated against (much less oppressed) in none of these countries. Even in Portugal (the most religious of the 3), your lack of belief in the majority religion does not have any influence in your employability (even in the state)
In my generation and social class (30 y.o, university educated) people rarelly talk about religion and when they do you find out that the atheists are the majority and the religious ones keep a low profile (religion is treated as a private matter) - this is both true in Portugal and in Holland.
In the UK i've already had two conversations about religion (and i'm hardly looking to talk about it) and in both the other people turned out to be non-believers (one was even a true atheist - i.e. anti-religion).
From what i've read and what i've seen, the higher the average level of education in a society, the lower the number of people with religious beliefs.
Here in the UK, religious belief is decaying amongst the natives, and only the influx of people from african countries has kept the Church of England going.
Religion is also in decay in both Holland and Portugal - in the last one it was still strong 40 years ago, but the post-revolution generation (those born around or after 1974) has mostly rejected religion.
In all these countries the only influence that the Church still has seems to come from its old connections to society in general (i.e. the left overs from the time when the Church was strong and officially protected by the State) and by the fact that believers are (implicitly) more organized than non-believers.
Thus, in western societies, the oppression of atheists is mostly concentrated in the U.S.
Why are there so many americans acting in ways that make all americans look like morons to the rest of the world?
- Do you have an extra high percentage of people with a low IQ and/or education?
- Is stupidity a side effect of excessive consumption of junk food?
- Are there so many americans brainwashed by the constant "America is great" message from the mainstream US media that you are blind to the things that are not so great in America?
The americans i known never fitted the dumb/ignorant/loud stereotype - in fact one off the more intelligent, knowledgeable, wise and mature persons i know comes from the US. Then again, the americans i know are university educated people that emigrated out of the US to a non-english speaking country: hardly a typical bunch.
What's so wrong with the US that it produces such a disproporcionatelly big share of western countries' idiots???
Please enlighten me.
Screen savers where introduced to save the screens.
To be more precise, in the old days and with the early CRT screens, if the same static image was displayed for too long in the screen, said image would be engraved in the phospurous layers in the cathode tube (burn-in) and the screen whould then show it as a ghost image supperimposed on all other images.
Screen savers avoided this problem by either making the whole screen dark (before energy saving standards for the PC this was literally done by showing a black image covering the whole screen) or by showing a moving image on a black background which was more or less equally likelly to be shown anywhere on the screen.
Nowadays, with newer CRT and LCD screens, burn-in is not a problems anymore. Also, the introduction of a standard way of switching the image off the screen (as part of the energy saving standards), meant saving the screen from burn-in could be achived by just switching the image off (with the added benefict that energy would be saved).
Thus nowadays screen savers have lost their original purposed (save the screen) and are mostly a curiosity from the old days.
I have two drives installed on my PC (w/ Windows) one is the applications drive and the other the data drive (though the biggest usually has two Linux partitions on it) and usually replace the smallest whenever it starts to get full often AND the price sweetspot for HDDs (i.e. the drives for which the price per Giga is lowest) is at a capacity two or more times bigger.
Since i mostly use my PC for gaming (hence using Windows), the size of games usually dictates the amount of space used in both drives (since the game is installed in the apps drive and i rip the CD/DVD image to the data drive to mount as a virtual CD/DVD).
I've only bought a desktop PC once (a long time ago - 386DX 20) and have been upgrading it myself ever since (only thing left from the original is the keyboard - with no windows key!!!!), so i've gone through the HDD (and other major components) upgrade process often.
In my experience, since i buy my HDDs at the sweet spot (thus never the biggest in the market) i get a new HDD roughly about every 1,5 years.
I've recently discovered external HDDs as a great cost-and-time-effective means of external data storage but i'm not including those in my calculation.
Also the part about is actually nowhere to be seen in the CERA News Press Release and seems to have been introduced by either MSNBC, the slashdot editors or the article posters (all of which are not exactly known by the high quality of their journalistic work).
The report itself (as seen in the CERA News Press Release) concerns itself only with the prediction off how much oil will be produced in the next decades and neither addresses the need for oil in the coming decades nor the price of oil in the coming decades.
Given the continued growth and thirst for oil of both China and India expect prices to go up.
The report actually accepts the possibilities of both that demand will continue to increase faster than supply and that prices will go up: non-conventional sources of oil are included in the forecasts of the repport and these will only be exploited when prices are high enough for it to be economically viable.
In other words:
- No, oil production has not and will not just suddenly peak and start to go down.
- Expect prices to go up even so.
- Realistically plan and begin phasing out use of oil for satisfying our energy needs.
Even beter, you can: loudly comment on the boobs of the models; tell everybody around you how last month's centerfold was much beter and proceed to explain why; comment on how you can just see that "that one ain't a real blonde"; digress into a loud monologue about the difficulties of masturbating on an airplane bathroom while holding a Hustler.
The possibilities are limitless!!!
At the moment in London there's a couple of contracting (freelancing) assignments in my area of IT in "governmental institutions".
They're all paying about half what the investment banks around here would pay for the someone with the same skill-set and about 2/3 of what the rest of the industry pays.
Today there was even an urgent request for a senior developer offering less than most non-urgent assignments out there for junior developers.
Here's a sugestion:
Stop wasting money on studies of studies of studies, layers upon layers of management and feeding the blood-sucking big IT consultancies and their "all talk no action" "consultants" and instead invest on getting good people to manage the projects and do the work.
PS: It'll never happen - governments are the worst kind of monopoly and as such they're big, fat, have enormous overhead and are extremelly susceptible to influence peddling and feeding all sorts of private industry leeches (leeches like the kind of "consultants" from the big IT consultancies whose real work is producing vaguelly worded documents about how more study is needed before a solution can be found and to get the client to pay for even more salesmen-consultants and for projects solving problems that don't exist).
[I've worked for a consultancy AND also been on the other side. They do have some people that do a great job, but their business model, business practice and mindset - especially in consultancies with a "big name" - is to send high-payed consultants with instructions to "stay there as long as you can" and "bring us more projects from that customer". I also know (from inside) how much selling services to governmental institutions goes around "knowing the right people", "having a big name" and "giving them the light and mirrors show"]
Well, if you say it in a different way: "cocktard flambe'" it sounds like a french chicken dish.
Hence the "identity crisis" ...
A phishfight is ..
...
- When two philosophers fight each other with fishing rods
- A trout slapping competition in Greece
- What happens when a dolphin with a slight identity crisis gets fed-up with hearing the other dolphins sing Batman
- A form of violence between spelling-challenged fishmongers in an open air market.
Actually it's not at all uncommon to see both words together.
It's the absense of the word not in between that really stands out.
He meant fishy. As in "There's no way they could teach normal dolphins to sing Batman so there must be something fishy about this ones".
Saying that dolphins are fish is like saying that bats are birds!
[Though some birds are actually mammals, but that's a whole different class of birds]
Well, some years ago when i had the time for it i would actually let the jehovah whitnesses in and engage in logical discussions with them.
;)
It was majorly entertaining: faith in any deity (or phanteon) is impossible to prove by logic - you either have it or not - so i was guaranteed a win
Unfortunatly the quality of them varied a lot, from the salesman type of person that could actually engage in a (somewhat) logical discussion (always using circular logic) to the pitifull pair of old ladies i once got on my door and which had only one argument "It says so on the Bible".
Unfortunatly, after doing this 4 or 5 times they stopped coming to my door. I guess in their Jehovah Witnesses Headquarters they added my address to a black list under the title "Hard-core non-believer, keep away".