An interesting way to look at one's salary is to, instead of look at it per-month or per-year, measure it per-hour.
It can be a real eye opener when two persons compare their salary and they figure out that the one that has a salary which is 10% higher per-month than the other one, still makes 13% less per-hour since the first one works 10h/day and the other one only works 8.
This even before you take in account that not all hours have the same value for someone - that next hour working after having worked 10 hours is way much harder that if it would be if it was after only 3 hours work.
For those that are keen on maximizing their income, consider that the person working 8h/day has, by comparisson with the one working 10h/day, 2 available hours per-day to use in other income generating activities (such as setting up your own company).
For everybody else, you can look at your salary per-hour as a reverse scale of how much you are being done by the Man.
As someone which has worked as a software developer under both a "8 hours a day, 5 days a week" system and a "10+ hours a day 5-7 days a week depending on how lucky you are" one i can categorically state that the first is at least twice (maybe more) times more productive than the last.
Overworking makes for tired people, tired people make many more bugs than rested people. Bug solving can cost up to 10000x more man-hours that doing it properly in the first place. (No kidding, bugs that go all the way to production can be REALLY THAT COSTLY to fix)
In other words, a couple of bugs done by a tired developer can easilly wipe out any (theoretical) gains to be had by having him work an extra 4 hours a day for many months.
Additionaly, software made by stressed people, because it has way more hacks and inconsistencies that software done by people with clear ideas and rested minds, ages way much faster than software done by rested people. This means that in the long run it will faster reach the stage were maintaining it is more costly than just writting it up again from scratch.
Still, giving the quality of many of the managers in this industry, i'm hardly surprised that any productivity affecting relations which either require more than one mental step to figure out (as in long ours = tired people = more bugs = more time lost) or are not directly measurable (workers level of tireness, workers motivation) almost ALWAYS are ignored with by comparisson to in-your-face productivity affecting relations (more hours worked = more work done) and or easeally measureble factors (how long are people at work).
The good news (for many of us) is that this is mostly a cultural problem - in the country were i am working at now (Holland) overworking is actually the exception, NOT the rule.
It doesn't have to be effective. If they did it five times and killed one person each time the population would be effectively terrorized. The purpose of terrorism isn't to kill people per-se. It's to scare them into some sort of action. Most people are perfectly happy to let any situation ride as long as it doesn't effect their daily lives. The terrorists seeks to effect the daily life of a fat dumb and happy or at least create the perception of the effect.
In that case, why go to the trouble of developing bioweapons at all?
They can just as easilly achieve the same results with conventional explosives. Or guns. Or knifes. Or hand-to-hand combat specialists.
Blowing up trains and buses, crashing planes into buildings, murdering famous persons - all much more effective ways of terrorising people (and of getting governments to pass draconian security laws and invading other countries).
As long as creating and using bio-weapons is a high-cost and low-result way of terrorising people, there are gazillions of cheaper ways for terrorists to spread terror.
Do not confuse a misguided, brain-washed, mentally disturbed person with no respected for human life and bent on killing "those that are not like us" with a stupid person.
If you read the article you will notice that this is aimed at saving costs for the mobile companies themselfs, NOT the users.
Notice that the "seamless transition" from of having your mobile communicating over the mobile network to having it use the WiFi network requires a server on the mobile network to support it.
The point here is that many mobile companies also own WiFi hotspot networks. With this kind of phone available they will be able to re-use those networks for mobile coverage, thus freeing more slots on the mobile network (and/or requiring less towers). Commercial WiFi hotspots are typically installed in areas with many potential users around (airports, train-stations, city centers) which are also the areas more congested in terms of mobile calls traffic, thus the potential for savings are very big. If they can get people to also use their own private WiFi hotspots at some, even beter for them.
Maybe some savings will be passed on to the consumers or maybe not. As always, companies try to make as much money as possible, thus they will only pass the savings on to consumers (via reduced prices) if: a) They still make more money out of it. So for example, expect cheaper (but not free) "home" minutes if you use your own personal WiFi hotspot. b) They are being squezed by other technologies and need to reduce prices in order to stay competitive.
Hopefully the technology will be implemented in such a way that it might be possible to use it WITHOUT support from the side of the mobile network operator. Quite possibly this first generation won't support it out-of-the-box. Don't expect quite a seamless transition of calls between networks though.
- Evolution states that the structure of natural systems results from a continuous process whereby random structure changes occur within a species, and at the same time those structure variations which provide more beneficts to individuals of the species are replicated more often (i.e. reproduction) than those which provide less beneficts or even are nefarious (i.e. natural selection)
I can state any one of: A) an "inteligent" non-natural entity, having beforehand full and prefect knowledge the workings of the evolutionary process and the mental ability to predict the outcome at any point in time has of any starting conditions, in the far past and with full intention of achieving a specific outcome, setup the initial conditions in such a way that the evolutionary process has made life on earth be like it is today.
B) an "inteligent" non-natural entity created the world 5 seconds ago, so perfectly that all the memories in our brains and all physical characteristics make us believe the world is older than 5 seconds.
C) the universe moves back and forth through time and we are actually moving back in time at the moment (i.e. we are experiencing time backwards). In the "real" direction, life on earth is not evolving from simple to complex but instead disassembling from a complex state to a simple (thus exactly the inverse of what we percieve).
All 3 of these statements are all consistent with the evolution theory (even if C implicitly states that evolution is just the "real" devolution being percieved backwards).
For none of these 3 statement an experiment can be build which would either directly or indirectly prove or disprove it.
Thus none of the three statements are scientific.
Both A) and B) are explanations in which ID does not conflict with evolution. Given that neither A) or B) can be proven or disproven, trully believing in any of them is a question of faith.
In other words, it's prefectly possible to find an explanation to how life on earth is which includes both ID and evolution. It however still a religious (or at the very least philosophycal) explanation.
The most productive mental state for doing something is called "flow".
Being in "flow" is when you are so absorved at doing something that you exclude everything else around you and you don't even notice the passing of time.
To get into "flow" you need to: - Be doing something that's just at the border of your abilities (ie doing something challenging but not excessively so) - Only be doing one task, even if the task is composed of multiple steps. - Have an interrupted period of time doing that task while you progressivelly go into that state (one cannot just switch into being in "flow")
Everytime you get interrupted when in flow you stop being in flow and it will take you some time to get back there.
If you continually get interrupted or you're constantly changing tasks you will either not get into the flow state or be most of the time outside that state with only short periods in "flow"
If you're constantly being interrupted or do not concentrate in any one task for long you either have time management problem or you work in some sort of people (partial-)support area (such as system administrator).
Being constantly interrupted or multi-tasking does not fit the geek stereotype - at most it fits the busy manager stereotype.
If a functionality is remotelly available via a public network then anybody can try to hack into your system via it.
Without AJAX: A web application serves pages via single HTTP calls, possibly with one or more parameters, per page. - Hackers can try getting into your system via this web application by tweaking the parameters, URL, HTTP headers, etc of the requests used to retrive pages
With AJAX: A web application serves pages via a single HTTP call, possible with one or more parameters, per page. Additionaly, JavaScript embedded in the page will, typically in response to user input, send extra HTTP requests to get more information (mostly in XML or plain text format). - Hackers can try getting into your system via this web application by tweaking the parameters, URL, HTTP headers, etc of the requests used to retrive pages or extra information.
Same principle for both, it's just that with AJAX there is a bigger number of entry points (more "handlers" for HTTP requests) since asynchronous HTTP requests from the Javascript code also require server-side code to process those requests (and generate responses).
Can you trust that nobody will try to get into your system by hand-executing an HTTP Request to a request handler that's supposed to only be called by Javascript code? Of course not!
It's the same reason why when an HTTP form is submited to the server you still check (on the server side) the validity of the information submited for that form even though your Javascript validator also does a full validation of the form before allowing the user to submit it.
Programmers that don't implement checks on information submited to the server and/or feed it directly to interpreted language engines (such as SQL query executers) without escaping or protecting it (in some other way) will ALWAYS leave gaping security holes open, AJAX or no AJAX.
An incompetent programmer is always an incompetent programmer.
I suggest you search for it (or EQ) in the Net and read about it.
Basically EQ measures things like interpersonal, social, self-motivation and self-guidance abilities.
For example, having an optimistic outlook on things (related to self-motivation), being persistent/hard-working, being confortable with large groups of people or being able to set for yourself clear objectives and a path to get there are all things that relate to your EQ.
Think of IQ as a measurement of one's mental raw power and EQ as the measure of one's ability to, in the wider framework that is the world (which is full of other people and all that;) ) use that brainpower to "achieve one's objectives in life".
The strong influence of EQ in one's success explains things like why some people that are geniuses in a specific area can still be unsuccessful in it (e.g. the really bright, awkward quiet guy that has been working by himself for the last 10 year in the dark corner of the office and has never gotten a raise).
PS: The good news is that someone's EQ can change and it's possible to improve one's own EQ.
1) You were not taught how to play a musical instrunment at an early enough age. Music is an expressive form, which can essentially communicate ideas or at least emotions, likely very similar to language. It is vastly easier for people to learn new languages at a certain age (I think younger than about 6 years old? Someone more versed in developmental psychology may feel free to correct me here.) After that age, it becomes more and more difficult to learn a foreign language. Although learning any foreign language in this critical time appears to make it much easier to learn a different foreign language later in life than if the person only learned their native tongue. My guess is that translating between languages is a skill that must be learned early to be fully effective.
Actually to fluently speak a language one cannot mentally translate between languages in your mind - in practice one goes directly from the word in whichever language (house/huis/maison/casa) to the mental concept (in this case the concept of a house).
In practice one can actually think in that language.
At least that's how it works for me.
I suspect that learning the link between a word and the meaning of that word (what it represents) is pretty much the same in your mother tongue or any other language. This would explain why at the age that you learn to speak, learning any (other) language is so easy.
From what i remember from doing an US IQ test i downloaded from the Internet (i'm neither from the US nor live there) they also have some cultural-dependant factors - if i remember it correctly it was mostly the language skills part, the memory part and some of the logical part (things like stories composed of multiple steps from which you have to figure out a logical step and/or result) that had those (things like linguistic expressions - which vary from country to country - or references to things "everybody" is expected to know).
Oh yeah, and IQ tests do try and measure overall inteligence - in a real deal IQ test (which tend to be long) one can definitely spot the parts that measure visual pattern recognition, numerical pattern recognition, language, memorization skills, logical skills and others.
Given the current public opinion in Europe about the current US Administration, i kinda doubt that what amounts to a request from the Bush administration to "Cut some slack with Big American Company" would actually produce any positive results.
Most likelly it will make no difference.
Possible it might actually make things worse for MS.
Additionally that they even asked just reinforces the widespread opinion here in Europe that the US administration (and by association the Americal people) believe that the whole world should play by made-in-US rules except themselfs.
Patent landgrabs are done pretty much according to the following method:
a) Make a list of existent business processes b) Make a cross list of all entries from a) with all latest technology trend words/expressions (eg "over a network", "wireless", "with nanobots ). Thus for example "A method to deliver text messages" can become "A method to deliver text messages over a network" (e-mail/im) or "A method to wirelessly deliver text messages" (eg sms). c) Patent as many as you can d) Wait a couple of years e) Sue the pants out of anybody that actually came up with a way of MAKING HAPPEN any of your algorithmic generated "ideas".
A couple of years ago one would generate patents using expressions such as "wireless" or "over a network" nowadays it's "nanobots" or "genetic".
The only in any way innovative thing any such an "inventor" does is figure out the most likelly trends to blossom in the coming 10 years - all the rest is algorithmic.
Another way is to pick up a couple of industry specialists, put them on a room together for a couple of days and pay them to "come up with ideas". Then just try to patent any of those ideas.
The current patent process will actually grants monopoly rights based on this.
How exactly does granting protection to an algoritmically-generated or pulled-out-somebodies-ass abstract idea (without actually stating a working way to actually do it) that at some point we might have "A method to build macro-structures using nanobots" helps advance technology?
"Science aside, how the hell could a deliberate demolition be pulled off without anyone finding out before or finding actual evidence after? Such things take rather a lot of setup to pull off."
Obviously you've never heard of the Bush administration's elite team of invisible ninja implosion specialists which during the Bush senior's administration were stollen from abortion clinics during attacks by anti-abortion groups as fetuses, then secretly bred in artificial wombs, raised in the Rockies all the while being trained in imploding the Twin Towers using virtual reality software which is so way beyond what's commercially available that they managed to be sexually satisfied all the way through their teens.
"The RQ-1A/B Predator is a system, not just an aircraft. The fully operational system consists of four air vehicles (with sensors), a ground control station (GCS), a Predator primary satellite link communication suite and 55 people."
If they deliver a version where the 55 people are scantilly claded playmates put me down for half a dozen.
Come to think of it, forget the air vehicles, the ground control station and the Predator primary satellite link communication suite and just deliver me the 55 scantilly claded playmates, preferable NOT in the puff-up version.
The day when downloading a movie from the Net is easier and gives you a beter quality product than buying it from the content producer is the day consumers will start jumping ship in droves.
Look at "protected" music CDs (hi Sony!) vs mp3s downloads from the latest and greatest P2P network.
If you have any kind of portable MP3 player, pirating the music IS the best option. (sad really)
(This is not completely so, thanks to Apple an iTunes)
Thus for movies, the scenario of turning the heat on too fast is still viable even when studios are slowly heating up the DRM fire. This is because consumers don't feel the heat in a linear way (the absolute number of hurdles do i have to jump over to seem the movie), but instead in a non-linear one (how many hurdles do i have to jump over by comparisson with the other ways of getting the same content)
DRM will not protected against pirating of the movies simply because for each movie DRM only has to be broken or bypassed once for the movie to become available in the Net.
It seems to me that your problem is of a social nature.
I recommend "training" those that get mad when you don't answer the phone by consistently putting whatever problem they want you to solve at the bottom of the pile of things you have to do.
I would also recommend that you NEVER accept a mobile phone from work, but i suspect it is far too late for that
Actually as far as i know, in the whole of Europe only the caller pays, not the receiver.
The only situation in which the receiver pays something is when he's "roaming" (i.e. in a different country from the one were he has his mobile phone contract), altough some trans-national mobile phone companies (Vodafone) now offer no extra costs for "roaming" as long as the country where the reciever is in also has a network from that company.
The physical equivalent of playing a movie with DRM is:
Having an official (human) controler from the movie studio controling what you can or not do when playing the movie.
Thus, in this scenario: - Any device where you can play the movie has a second master remote controler that the movie studio controler uses. - If there's no controler at the master controls on a device the movie won't play there. - Everytime that you press a button on your remote controls the controler gets to see it and can choose if the device will go ahead and do what you ask or not. - At any time the controler might decide to override your control and give his own commands. - The controler can, from a certain date onwards, not allow you play the movie. - The controler might only allow you to play the movie up to a certain maximum number of times. - The controler is the one that decides how much playing time on playing the movie is enough to considered that the movies has been played "one time" for the purpuses of limiting the maximum number of times the movie can be played. - The controler might decide not to allow you to use functions like fast forward, slow motion or rewind when he chooses to do so. - The controler makes his decisions based in a rule-book which you will never see. - The controler can phone the movie company and ask for updates the rules on his rule-book. - The movie company can phone the controler and give him updates for the rules in his rule-book. - If the controler cannot contact the movie company he might decide to stop letting you play the movie until he contacts the movie company. - The controler can report to the movie company everything you do with you remote when he has the master remote.
The difference between DRM on a movie and the scenario above is that with DRM the controler is not a human.
oddly enough NOT lowering the average IT wage is precisely why these jobs are being offshored.
I think you got your causal relation all messed-up:
Outsourcing happens because companies want to lower costs.
There are several ways to lower costs, which mostly fall into two groups: - Lower the costs of your inputs - Increase the efficiency of your productive process
In the software development process input costs are mostly employee salaries
Efficiency on the other way can be increased in two ways: - Capital investment - beter hardware, beter tools - Process optimization - improve the structure and flow of your process so that resources are busy with productive tasks most of their available time (note: in my definition a productive task is one in which a feature of the software is being created/extended - thus bugfixing is NOT a productive task) and maximizing the match between resource-provided skills and task-required skills.
Most companies have already done the reasonable capital investments (note: giving developers workstations with the latest most powerfull CPUs or whatever instead of the second tier ones is rarelly a reasonable capital investment since the cost is 2+ times as much while the increase in productivity is a low percentage value)
The process optimization part requires very competent managers which either understand the software development process well enough to do the process optimization or can find the right person to do it for them.
Finding a competent IT manager and/or someone that can optimize a software development process is neither easy nor cheap.
Also most companies don't have IT as their core business so investing in process optimization is not a high priority for them.
So companies go for reducing input costs: employee salaries.
Guess what happens if a company goes puts adverts out for senior software developers offering 1/5th or 1/10th of the average salary in that geographical area? Nobody comes.
Why?
The average salary level for a position in an area is derived from a number of factors: - Cost of living. - Average salary level in the same area for other ocupations requiring lower levels of expertise. - Ratio of open vacanties to job seekers which could take those vacanties.
Which is why people do not take a salary cut of 80-90% (and get indian level salaries): - They can't afford living in that area with that salary - Lower qualified jobs pay beter - There are open vacancies for similiar or lower qualified jobs paying beter
To put things in perspective: - If somehow all open vacancies for sofware development positions were paying 20% of the average salary, job seekers would just start filling in all open lower expertise positions that pay beter than that, all the way down to flipping burgers.
The only way to go around it to user workers in geographical areas where: - Cost of living is lower - All other jobs for lower qualified people pay proportionaly less - The ratio of open vacanties to job seekers is not so high that salaries for that type of position are very high.
In other words: Outsourcing
To wrap up my argument: - Companies outsource because the want to reduce costs while not being willing/able to invest in process improvement. Their input costs are mostly employee salaries and they cannot reduce those salaries locally because in the local market salaries are subjected the market pressures that other companies are offering beter salaries for equally or lower qualified positions and that if the offered salaries do not suffice to cover the cost of living in that area people will move out in search of lower cost of living/beter salaries.
People won't take lower salaries because they either can't (cost of living) or do not need to (they can find another jobs for more money).
Your post reads very much as an horror story to me.
You see, there are two sides in the Global Warming arena: - One that says: Global Warming is happening and will turn into a catastrofe. We have to DO SOMETHING before it's too late. - The other says: Global Warming is not really happing, and even if the temperatures are going up it's all part of the normal long-term cycle of temperature variance. We NEED NOT DO ANYTHING about it.
Both sides support their positions by putting out "scientific" opinions.
The side that defends DOING SOMETHING has to convince people that there is a real problem and we can do something about it.
The side that defends the option of NOT DOING ANYTHING just has to make people not fully believe either side. If they make people cynical about both side's arguments (ie, using FUD techniques) they will have achieved their aim of carrying on as usual and not having to do act on the global warming problem.
By just spreading confusion the Bush team can avoid that enough voters are so convinced of the critical nature of the global warming problem that they press the current US administration to do something about it. If not pressed by enough voters, they can keep on sidding with the lobbyists that fund their campaigns.
Brought to you by the "i've been thinking about it and it really seems logic" department:
Return on investment for a VC company is dependant on a probability curve.
The cumulative profits of the companies in any given sector follow a probability distribution where small number of companies are stars, a small number are total wash-outs and a big number sits somewhere in the middle.
Depending on the sector (and the status of the overall economy) the curve might me higher or lower with relation with the break-even line (ie the average profit of all companies sits at a higher/lower profit point - or if below the break-even line lower/higher loss point).
Also, the steepness of the curve might be higher or lower (i.e. more or less companies are at the extremes of the curve than at the center). Investment restricted to younger/non-listed companies probable matches a steeper curve (i.e. more likelly to be a wash-out or the next big thing).
Since nobody knows beforehand where each companies profit will be in this curve (remember this is a cumulative profit curve - u only know it when u get there), to decrease the investment risk VCs (and any wise investor) always invest in multiple companies (each investment representing a point in the curve). Thus they decrease the risk of doing a single investment which is a total wash-out and loosing it all.
VCs try to beat the market by:
Finding sectors where they expect the curve to be higher (i.e. better average profits) to invest in.
Trying to predict which companies will be in the positive part of the curve and invest in them - this consists a lot of experience and guess work.
And the major difference between a "real" VCs and an "investment fund", they try to influence the position in the curve on which the companies they invest in will end up in by providing guidance and expertise.
Still, the returns on investment of a VC are still constrained by that curve - they might get a star, they might get a total wash-out and most of their investment will be in companies that fall in the middle. I dare even say: the less a VC can provide guidance and expertise the more likelly it is that their return on investment will match the average on that sector. A VC company whose ROI matches the market average on a sector is little more than an extra expensive fund or index tracker on that sector.
There are two types of motivations for playing MMORPGS: a) Playing the game for the fun. Enjoying walking around, iteracting with other players, discovering new places, facing new challenges and beating them and maybe getting a cool outfit for your avatar in the process - playing because it feels good. b) Being the best, having the fattest loot and letting everybody else know about it. Being able to publicly proclaiming one's 1337ness, rubbing it in everybody else's face and going around calling all else noobs - in other words, an ego trip.
The big conflict between this two factions is born out of the following factors:
Casual players - those that cannot (for example because of work) or will not (because gaming is not the most important thing on their lifes) dedicate a significant part of their time to gaming - will NEVER be able to outcompete type b) players. They simply don't have the time for it
Type b) players - those that do it for the ego-trip - tend to be less mature (typically younger) than the type a) ones. This is because most people reach a point of their lifes after which they don't need to prove themselfs to others (in a game, of all things) in order to feel good about themselfs. For such persons, being successful and aknowledged as such by others still feels good but is not NEEDED - they don't have the drive to waste countless hours doing something repetitive to go from 7th to 6th in some ladder or other inside a game (in real life they might have that drive because it will give tangible rewards, not so in a game)
Most MMORPGs reward players persistence in doing something (for example, going again and again to farm an instance) with items or increased avatar ablities (levels) that allow them to be more effective than other players. This increase effectiveness is not only applicable in PvE (player versus environment) encounters but in many MMORPGs (certainly for WoW) in PvP (player versus player) encounters. Type b) players will, independently of their SKILL and purelly because they play more hours, pretty much always have the best equipment/highest level and thus be more likelly to defeat type a) players of equal or superior skill in PvP encounters. In most MMORPGs (WoW is a good example here), a slight difference of avatar levels translates into an enormous game-mechanics-generated benefict to the player with the highest level avatar
In some MMORPGs players play for different factions and are allowed to attack each other in most places in the world (again WoW in PvP servers is like this). It is a very common event that some player with higher levels and/or beter equipment will enter an area filled with lower-level players of the other faction and activelly go after and kill any players they found from the other faction, even though, game wise they get no rewards for it. Another common sight is higher level players killing any lower level player from the other faction that simply crosses their path. See my coment above on maturity for possible explanations.
To summon it, less mature players with the drive to spend enormous ammounts of time doing repetitive tasks in order to increase their 1337ness and (due to few or no responsabilities ) plenty of free time on their hands (type b) are, purelly due to game mechanics that reward repetitive behaviour, placed in a position in which they can easilly spoil the enjoyment of those players that play purelly for the fun of playing (type a). Some of these type b players take advantage of such built-in game mechanicas and will actually go out of their way to pester all other players.
Hence the conflict.
Personally i would love to see some type of player segregation (into different servers) on the basis of maturity. I doubt that this will ever happen within a single game - most likelly the segregation will naturally occur as game publishers put out more games aimed at the casual player crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting way to look at one's salary is to, instead of look at it per-month or per-year, measure it per-hour.
It can be a real eye opener when two persons compare their salary and they figure out that the one that has a salary which is 10% higher per-month than the other one, still makes 13% less per-hour since the first one works 10h/day and the other one only works 8.
This even before you take in account that not all hours have the same value for someone - that next hour working after having worked 10 hours is way much harder that if it would be if it was after only 3 hours work.
For those that are keen on maximizing their income, consider that the person working 8h/day has, by comparisson with the one working 10h/day, 2 available hours per-day to use in other income generating activities (such as setting up your own company).
For everybody else, you can look at your salary per-hour as a reverse scale of how much you are being done by the Man.
As someone which has worked as a software developer under both a "8 hours a day, 5 days a week" system and a "10+ hours a day 5-7 days a week depending on how lucky you are" one i can categorically state that the first is at least twice (maybe more) times more productive than the last.
Overworking makes for tired people, tired people make many more bugs than rested people. Bug solving can cost up to 10000x more man-hours that doing it properly in the first place.
(No kidding, bugs that go all the way to production can be REALLY THAT COSTLY to fix)
In other words, a couple of bugs done by a tired developer can easilly wipe out any (theoretical) gains to be had by having him work an extra 4 hours a day for many months.
Additionaly, software made by stressed people, because it has way more hacks and inconsistencies that software done by people with clear ideas and rested minds, ages way much faster than software done by rested people. This means that in the long run it will faster reach the stage were maintaining it is more costly than just writting it up again from scratch.
Still, giving the quality of many of the managers in this industry, i'm hardly surprised that any productivity affecting relations which either require more than one mental step to figure out (as in long ours = tired people = more bugs = more time lost) or are not directly measurable (workers level of tireness, workers motivation) almost ALWAYS are ignored with by comparisson to in-your-face productivity affecting relations (more hours worked = more work done) and or easeally measureble factors (how long are people at work).
The good news (for many of us) is that this is mostly a cultural problem - in the country were i am working at now (Holland) overworking is actually the exception, NOT the rule.
It doesn't have to be effective. If they did it five times and killed one person each time the population would be effectively terrorized. The purpose of terrorism isn't to kill people per-se. It's to scare them into some sort of action. Most people are perfectly happy to let any situation ride as long as it doesn't effect their daily lives. The terrorists seeks to effect the daily life of a fat dumb and happy or at least create the perception of the effect.
In that case, why go to the trouble of developing bioweapons at all?
They can just as easilly achieve the same results with conventional explosives. Or guns. Or knifes. Or hand-to-hand combat specialists.
Blowing up trains and buses, crashing planes into buildings, murdering famous persons - all much more effective ways of terrorising people (and of getting governments to pass draconian security laws and invading other countries).
As long as creating and using bio-weapons is a high-cost and low-result way of terrorising people, there are gazillions of cheaper ways for terrorists to spread terror.
Do not confuse a misguided, brain-washed, mentally disturbed person with no respected for human life and bent on killing "those that are not like us" with a stupid person.
If you read the article you will notice that this is aimed at saving costs for the mobile companies themselfs, NOT the users.
Notice that the "seamless transition" from of having your mobile communicating over the mobile network to having it use the WiFi network requires a server on the mobile network to support it.
The point here is that many mobile companies also own WiFi hotspot networks. With this kind of phone available they will be able to re-use those networks for mobile coverage, thus freeing more slots on the mobile network (and/or requiring less towers). Commercial WiFi hotspots are typically installed in areas with many potential users around (airports, train-stations, city centers) which are also the areas more congested in terms of mobile calls traffic, thus the potential for savings are very big. If they can get people to also use their own private WiFi hotspots at some, even beter for them.
Maybe some savings will be passed on to the consumers or maybe not. As always, companies try to make as much money as possible, thus they will only pass the savings on to consumers (via reduced prices) if:
a) They still make more money out of it. So for example, expect cheaper (but not free) "home" minutes if you use your own personal WiFi hotspot.
b) They are being squezed by other technologies and need to reduce prices in order to stay competitive.
Hopefully the technology will be implemented in such a way that it might be possible to use it WITHOUT support from the side of the mobile network operator. Quite possibly this first generation won't support it out-of-the-box. Don't expect quite a seamless transition of calls between networks though.
- Evolution states that the structure of natural systems results from a continuous process whereby random structure changes occur within a species, and at the same time those structure variations which provide more beneficts to individuals of the species are replicated more often (i.e. reproduction) than those which provide less beneficts or even are nefarious (i.e. natural selection)
I can state any one of:
A) an "inteligent" non-natural entity, having beforehand full and prefect knowledge the workings of the evolutionary process and the mental ability to predict the outcome at any point in time has of any starting conditions, in the far past and with full intention of achieving a specific outcome, setup the initial conditions in such a way that the evolutionary process has made life on earth be like it is today.
B) an "inteligent" non-natural entity created the world 5 seconds ago, so perfectly that all the memories in our brains and all physical characteristics make us believe the world is older than 5 seconds.
C) the universe moves back and forth through time and we are actually moving back in time at the moment (i.e. we are experiencing time backwards). In the "real" direction, life on earth is not evolving from simple to complex but instead disassembling from a complex state to a simple (thus exactly the inverse of what we percieve).
All 3 of these statements are all consistent with the evolution theory (even if C implicitly states that evolution is just the "real" devolution being percieved backwards).
For none of these 3 statement an experiment can be build which would either directly or indirectly prove or disprove it.
Thus none of the three statements are scientific.
Both A) and B) are explanations in which ID does not conflict with evolution. Given that neither A) or B) can be proven or disproven, trully believing in any of them is a question of faith.
In other words, it's prefectly possible to find an explanation to how life on earth is which includes both ID and evolution. It however still a religious (or at the very least philosophycal) explanation.
The emergence of of ink and papyrous has coincided with a startling decline in the basic stone carving skills of temple apprentices
The most productive mental state for doing something is called "flow".
Being in "flow" is when you are so absorved at doing something that you exclude everything else around you and you don't even notice the passing of time.
To get into "flow" you need to:
- Be doing something that's just at the border of your abilities (ie doing something challenging but not excessively so)
- Only be doing one task, even if the task is composed of multiple steps.
- Have an interrupted period of time doing that task while you progressivelly go into that state (one cannot just switch into being in "flow")
Everytime you get interrupted when in flow you stop being in flow and it will take you some time to get back there.
If you continually get interrupted or you're constantly changing tasks you will either not get into the flow state or be most of the time outside that state with only short periods in "flow"
If you're constantly being interrupted or do not concentrate in any one task for long you either have time management problem or you work in some sort of people (partial-)support area (such as system administrator).
Being constantly interrupted or multi-tasking does not fit the geek stereotype - at most it fits the busy manager stereotype.
If a functionality is remotelly available via a public network then anybody can try to hack into your system via it.
Without AJAX: A web application serves pages via single HTTP calls, possibly with one or more parameters, per page.
- Hackers can try getting into your system via this web application by tweaking the parameters, URL, HTTP headers, etc of the requests used to retrive pages
With AJAX: A web application serves pages via a single HTTP call, possible with one or more parameters, per page. Additionaly, JavaScript embedded in the page will, typically in response to user input, send extra HTTP requests to get more information (mostly in XML or plain text format).
- Hackers can try getting into your system via this web application by tweaking the parameters, URL, HTTP headers, etc of the requests used to retrive pages or extra information.
Same principle for both, it's just that with AJAX there is a bigger number of entry points (more "handlers" for HTTP requests) since asynchronous HTTP requests from the Javascript code also require server-side code to process those requests (and generate responses).
Can you trust that nobody will try to get into your system by hand-executing an HTTP Request to a request handler that's supposed to only be called by Javascript code? Of course not!
It's the same reason why when an HTTP form is submited to the server you still check (on the server side) the validity of the information submited for that form even though your Javascript validator also does a full validation of the form before allowing the user to submit it.
Programmers that don't implement checks on information submited to the server and/or feed it directly to interpreted language engines (such as SQL query executers) without escaping or protecting it (in some other way) will ALWAYS leave gaping security holes open, AJAX or no AJAX.
An incompetent programmer is always an incompetent programmer.
I suggest you search for it (or EQ) in the Net and read about it.
;) ) use that brainpower to "achieve one's objectives in life".
Basically EQ measures things like interpersonal, social, self-motivation and self-guidance abilities.
For example, having an optimistic outlook on things (related to self-motivation), being persistent/hard-working, being confortable with large groups of people or being able to set for yourself clear objectives and a path to get there are all things that relate to your EQ.
Think of IQ as a measurement of one's mental raw power and EQ as the measure of one's ability to, in the wider framework that is the world (which is full of other people and all that
The strong influence of EQ in one's success explains things like why some people that are geniuses in a specific area can still be unsuccessful in it (e.g. the really bright, awkward quiet guy that has been working by himself for the last 10 year in the dark corner of the office and has never gotten a raise).
PS: The good news is that someone's EQ can change and it's possible to improve one's own EQ.
1) You were not taught how to play a musical instrunment at an early enough age. Music is an expressive form, which can essentially communicate ideas or at least emotions, likely very similar to language. It is vastly easier for people to learn new languages at a certain age (I think younger than about 6 years old? Someone more versed in developmental psychology may feel free to correct me here.) After that age, it becomes more and more difficult to learn a foreign language. Although learning any foreign language in this critical time appears to make it much easier to learn a different foreign language later in life than if the person only learned their native tongue. My guess is that translating between languages is a skill that must be learned early to be fully effective.
Actually to fluently speak a language one cannot mentally translate between languages in your mind - in practice one goes directly from the word in whichever language (house/huis/maison/casa) to the mental concept (in this case the concept of a house).
In practice one can actually think in that language.
At least that's how it works for me.
I suspect that learning the link between a word and the meaning of that word (what it represents) is pretty much the same in your mother tongue or any other language. This would explain why at the age that you learn to speak, learning any (other) language is so easy.
From what i remember from doing an US IQ test i downloaded from the Internet (i'm neither from the US nor live there) they also have some cultural-dependant factors - if i remember it correctly it was mostly the language skills part, the memory part and some of the logical part (things like stories composed of multiple steps from which you have to figure out a logical step and/or result) that had those (things like linguistic expressions - which vary from country to country - or references to things "everybody" is expected to know).
Oh yeah, and IQ tests do try and measure overall inteligence - in a real deal IQ test (which tend to be long) one can definitely spot the parts that measure visual pattern recognition, numerical pattern recognition, language, memorization skills, logical skills and others.
Given the current public opinion in Europe about the current US Administration, i kinda doubt that what amounts to a request from the Bush administration to "Cut some slack with Big American Company" would actually produce any positive results.
Most likelly it will make no difference.
Possible it might actually make things worse for MS.
Additionally that they even asked just reinforces the widespread opinion here in Europe that the US administration (and by association the Americal people) believe that the whole world should play by made-in-US rules except themselfs.
Patent landgrabs are done pretty much according to the following method:
a) Make a list of existent business processes
b) Make a cross list of all entries from a) with all latest technology trend words/expressions (eg "over a network", "wireless", "with nanobots ). Thus for example "A method to deliver text messages" can become "A method to deliver text messages over a network" (e-mail/im) or "A method to wirelessly deliver text messages" (eg sms).
c) Patent as many as you can
d) Wait a couple of years
e) Sue the pants out of anybody that actually came up with a way of MAKING HAPPEN any of your algorithmic generated "ideas".
A couple of years ago one would generate patents using expressions such as "wireless" or "over a network" nowadays it's "nanobots" or "genetic".
The only in any way innovative thing any such an "inventor" does is figure out the most likelly trends to blossom in the coming 10 years - all the rest is algorithmic.
Another way is to pick up a couple of industry specialists, put them on a room together for a couple of days and pay them to "come up with ideas". Then just try to patent any of those ideas.
The current patent process will actually grants monopoly rights based on this.
How exactly does granting protection to an algoritmically-generated or pulled-out-somebodies-ass abstract idea (without actually stating a working way to actually do it) that at some point we might have "A method to build macro-structures using nanobots" helps advance technology?
"Science aside, how the hell could a deliberate demolition be pulled off without anyone finding out before or finding actual evidence after? Such things take rather a lot of setup to pull off."
Obviously you've never heard of the Bush administration's elite team of invisible ninja implosion specialists which during the Bush senior's administration were stollen from abortion clinics during attacks by anti-abortion groups as fetuses, then secretly bred in artificial wombs, raised in the Rockies all the while being trained in imploding the Twin Towers using virtual reality software which is so way beyond what's commercially available that they managed to be sexually satisfied all the way through their teens.
"The RQ-1A/B Predator is a system, not just an aircraft. The fully operational system consists of four air vehicles (with sensors), a ground control station (GCS), a Predator primary satellite link communication suite and 55 people."
If they deliver a version where the 55 people are scantilly claded playmates put me down for half a dozen.
Come to think of it, forget the air vehicles, the ground control station and the Predator primary satellite link communication suite and just deliver me the 55 scantilly claded playmates, preferable NOT in the puff-up version.
The day when downloading a movie from the Net is easier and gives you a beter quality product than buying it from the content producer is the day consumers will start jumping ship in droves.
Look at "protected" music CDs (hi Sony!) vs mp3s downloads from the latest and greatest P2P network.
If you have any kind of portable MP3 player, pirating the music IS the best option. (sad really)
(This is not completely so, thanks to Apple an iTunes)
Thus for movies, the scenario of turning the heat on too fast is still viable even when studios are slowly heating up the DRM fire. This is because consumers don't feel the heat in a linear way (the absolute number of hurdles do i have to jump over to seem the movie), but instead in a non-linear one (how many hurdles do i have to jump over by comparisson with the other ways of getting the same content)
DRM will not protected against pirating of the movies simply because for each movie DRM only has to be broken or bypassed once for the movie to become available in the Net.
Wouldn't this speed up the development of virus strains resistant to those medicines?
It seems to me that your problem is of a social nature.
I recommend "training" those that get mad when you don't answer the phone by consistently putting whatever problem they want you to solve at the bottom of the pile of things you have to do.
I would also recommend that you NEVER accept a mobile phone from work, but i suspect it is far too late for that
Actually as far as i know, in the whole of Europe only the caller pays, not the receiver.
The only situation in which the receiver pays something is when he's "roaming" (i.e. in a different country from the one were he has his mobile phone contract), altough some trans-national mobile phone companies (Vodafone) now offer no extra costs for "roaming" as long as the country where the reciever is in also has a network from that company.
Nah - it just looks at user's own website ratings and gives them back to the user
Your colleagues colleague is YOU.
The physical equivalent of playing a movie with DRM is:
Having an official (human) controler from the movie studio controling what you can or not do when playing the movie.
Thus, in this scenario:
- Any device where you can play the movie has a second master remote controler that the movie studio controler uses.
- If there's no controler at the master controls on a device the movie won't play there.
- Everytime that you press a button on your remote controls the controler gets to see it and can choose if the device will go ahead and do what you ask or not.
- At any time the controler might decide to override your control and give his own commands.
- The controler can, from a certain date onwards, not allow you play the movie.
- The controler might only allow you to play the movie up to a certain maximum number of times.
- The controler is the one that decides how much playing time on playing the movie is enough to considered that the movies has been played "one time" for the purpuses of limiting the maximum number of times the movie can be played.
- The controler might decide not to allow you to use functions like fast forward, slow motion or rewind when he chooses to do so.
- The controler makes his decisions based in a rule-book which you will never see.
- The controler can phone the movie company and ask for updates the rules on his rule-book.
- The movie company can phone the controler and give him updates for the rules in his rule-book.
- If the controler cannot contact the movie company he might decide to stop letting you play the movie until he contacts the movie company.
- The controler can report to the movie company everything you do with you remote when he has the master remote.
The difference between DRM on a movie and the scenario above is that with DRM the controler is not a human.
oddly enough NOT lowering the average IT wage is precisely why these jobs are being offshored.
I think you got your causal relation all messed-up:
Outsourcing happens because companies want to lower costs.
There are several ways to lower costs, which mostly fall into two groups:
- Lower the costs of your inputs
- Increase the efficiency of your productive process
In the software development process input costs are mostly employee salaries
Efficiency on the other way can be increased in two ways:
- Capital investment - beter hardware, beter tools
- Process optimization - improve the structure and flow of your process so that resources are busy with productive tasks most of their available time (note: in my definition a productive task is one in which a feature of the software is being created/extended - thus bugfixing is NOT a productive task) and maximizing the match between resource-provided skills and task-required skills.
Most companies have already done the reasonable capital investments (note: giving developers workstations with the latest most powerfull CPUs or whatever instead of the second tier ones is rarelly a reasonable capital investment since the cost is 2+ times as much while the increase in productivity is a low percentage value)
The process optimization part requires very competent managers which either understand the software development process well enough to do the process optimization or can find the right person to do it for them.
Finding a competent IT manager and/or someone that can optimize a software development process is neither easy nor cheap.
Also most companies don't have IT as their core business so investing in process optimization is not a high priority for them.
So companies go for reducing input costs: employee salaries.
Guess what happens if a company goes puts adverts out for senior software developers offering 1/5th or 1/10th of the average salary in that geographical area?
Nobody comes.
Why?
The average salary level for a position in an area is derived from a number of factors:
- Cost of living.
- Average salary level in the same area for other ocupations requiring lower levels of expertise.
- Ratio of open vacanties to job seekers which could take those vacanties.
Which is why people do not take a salary cut of 80-90% (and get indian level salaries):
- They can't afford living in that area with that salary
- Lower qualified jobs pay beter
- There are open vacancies for similiar or lower qualified jobs paying beter
To put things in perspective:
- If somehow all open vacancies for sofware development positions were paying 20% of the average salary, job seekers would just start filling in all open lower expertise positions that pay beter than that, all the way down to flipping burgers.
The only way to go around it to user workers in geographical areas where:
- Cost of living is lower
- All other jobs for lower qualified people pay proportionaly less
- The ratio of open vacanties to job seekers is not so high that salaries for that type of position are very high.
In other words: Outsourcing
To wrap up my argument:
- Companies outsource because the want to reduce costs while not being willing/able to invest in process improvement. Their input costs are mostly employee salaries and they cannot reduce those salaries locally because in the local market salaries are subjected the market pressures that other companies are offering beter salaries for equally or lower qualified positions and that if the offered salaries do not suffice to cover the cost of living in that area people will move out in search of lower cost of living/beter salaries.
People won't take lower salaries because they either can't (cost of living) or do not need to (they can find another jobs for more money).
Your post reads very much as an horror story to me.
You see, there are two sides in the Global Warming arena:
- One that says: Global Warming is happening and will turn into a catastrofe. We have to DO SOMETHING before it's too late.
- The other says: Global Warming is not really happing, and even if the temperatures are going up it's all part of the normal long-term cycle of temperature variance. We NEED NOT DO ANYTHING about it.
Both sides support their positions by putting out "scientific" opinions.
The side that defends DOING SOMETHING has to convince people that there is a real problem and we can do something about it.
The side that defends the option of NOT DOING ANYTHING just has to make people not fully believe either side. If they make people cynical about both side's arguments (ie, using FUD techniques) they will have achieved their aim of carrying on as usual and not having to do act on the global warming problem.
By just spreading confusion the Bush team can avoid that enough voters are so convinced of the critical nature of the global warming problem that they press the current US administration to do something about it. If not pressed by enough voters, they can keep on sidding with the lobbyists that fund their campaigns.
Return on investment for a VC company is dependant on a probability curve.
The cumulative profits of the companies in any given sector follow a probability distribution where small number of companies are stars, a small number are total wash-outs and a big number sits somewhere in the middle.
Depending on the sector (and the status of the overall economy) the curve might me higher or lower with relation with the break-even line (ie the average profit of all companies sits at a higher/lower profit point - or if below the break-even line lower/higher loss point).
Also, the steepness of the curve might be higher or lower (i.e. more or less companies are at the extremes of the curve than at the center). Investment restricted to younger/non-listed companies probable matches a steeper curve (i.e. more likelly to be a wash-out or the next big thing).
Since nobody knows beforehand where each companies profit will be in this curve (remember this is a cumulative profit curve - u only know it when u get there), to decrease the investment risk VCs (and any wise investor) always invest in multiple companies (each investment representing a point in the curve). Thus they decrease the risk of doing a single investment which is a total wash-out and loosing it all.
VCs try to beat the market by:
Still, the returns on investment of a VC are still constrained by that curve - they might get a star, they might get a total wash-out and most of their investment will be in companies that fall in the middle. I dare even say: the less a VC can provide guidance and expertise the more likelly it is that their return on investment will match the average on that sector.
A VC company whose ROI matches the market average on a sector is little more than an extra expensive fund or index tracker on that sector.
a) Playing the game for the fun. Enjoying walking around, iteracting with other players, discovering new places, facing new challenges and beating them and maybe getting a cool outfit for your avatar in the process - playing because it feels good.
b) Being the best, having the fattest loot and letting everybody else know about it. Being able to publicly proclaiming one's 1337ness, rubbing it in everybody else's face and going around calling all else noobs - in other words, an ego trip.
The big conflict between this two factions is born out of the following factors:
To summon it, less mature players with the drive to spend enormous ammounts of time doing repetitive tasks in order to increase their 1337ness and (due to few or no responsabilities ) plenty of free time on their hands (type b) are, purelly due to game mechanics that reward repetitive behaviour, placed in a position in which they can easilly spoil the enjoyment of those players that play purelly for the fun of playing (type a). Some of these type b players take advantage of such built-in game mechanicas and will actually go out of their way to pester all other players.
Hence the conflict.
Personally i would love to see some type of player segregation (into different servers) on the basis of maturity. I doubt that this will ever happen within a single game - most likelly the segregation will naturally occur as game publishers put out more games aimed at the casual player crowd.