Re:Don't take medical advice from me...
on
Preventing RSI?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I use the same trick.
When i was a teenager i actually got into the early stages of RSI (i had loss of feeling in the palm of my hands) due to programing at home while supporting my wrists in the border of the table (ie the keyboard was next to the border of the table).
Nowadays, 15+ years later, after working as a professional softwared developer for several years, i have no RSI symptoms whatsoever. No special keyboards, plain-ol-style mouse, no wrist support or any other support watsoever other than a table.
The big secret: - Position your keyboard on the table far from you (typically next to the monitor). Your elbows should be supported by the table. When your arms are parallel, with your elbows supported by the table your fingers should reach the second top row of a common QWERTY keyboard (ie not the function keys row, the one below it).
Typing is a question of moving your hands from side to side (and your fingers up and down:) ) with your elbows fixed in place or just slightly moving. Only pressing function keys ( a comparativelly rare operation) will require your to lift your arms from the table. Most of the time the whole arm (almost up to the wrists) will be supported by the table. With the mouse next to the keyboard, picking the mouse and moving it is also a question of rotating your arm on your elbows and (posssibly) sliding it around a bit when moving the mouse.
A couple more usefull tip i've picked up: - You chair should be to such a height that with your legs bended at an 90 degrees angle, the whole sole of your shoes is on the floor. - Your screen should be in such a positions that your chest (and face) are facing the screen. If your position relative to the screen is such that your head is turned you're strining your neck - Your back should be fully in contact with the back of your chair and at a 90 degree angle to your legs (thus ||_ ). If your ass is forward (towards the front of the chair, like |\_ ) then your are straining your chest muscules (if you have chest pain it's probably this or a heart problem;) )
Having played a *cough* *cough* "demo" version i went out and bought it precisely because it was NOT copy protected.
And as an interesting sidenote their EULA is one of the simplest, shortest and less screw-the-customer ones i've ever seen.
Oh yeah, and the game is fun too (if a little short with only 10-20 hours of gameplay).
PS: I have no association with the makers of Legion Arena whatsoever, i just believe in rewarding game makers that make good products and are not out to screw the customer.
I suspect that an important force pushing against CD sales is born out of the crossing of three trends: - Portable MP3 players are getting more common and more widespread in use - Easy access to digital format music (either legal or pirated) is now widespread (aka Internet & broadband) - Copy protected CDs
Nowadays anybody that has a portable MP3 player and buys a CD runs the risk of not being able to get the music into the MP3 player - in other words "not being able to listen to it on the move". Avoiding the problem requires having the correct apps and/or technical skills to go around the copy protection mechanism AND finding out which copy protection each CD has - this is time consuming. The approach of returning the CD to the store if you cannot copy the tracks to your MP3 player is also time consuming.
Downloading the music from the Internet is easy, usually (if you download pirated music) compatible with MP3 players and provides almost instant gratification.
It's hardly a surprise if people stop buying CDs and go download the tracks from the Internet.
Before, piratig music was a question of money
Then the music industry came up with Copy Protected CDs
Now pirating music is a question of money AND more convenience than buying it
Spreading your logic across multiple layers and using multiple languages is really bad for maintenability: - The code in each layer tends to tightly coupled to the code on any other layer - The application is now vendor locked - New versions of the engines in any layer might break you application - Any new person that is going to maintain/extend the application will need to know multiple languages, possibly with some being very specific to the server engines used.
<RANT>Of course if all you do is small web applications which are far from actually having a technical architecture, then feel free to spread you business logic all the way from browser-side JavaScript to database stored procedures - just make sure YOU maintain it for the next couple of years</RANT>
PS: As a freelancer i have often been the guy that has to unwrap/fix applications where the original design decisions where taken on the base of the "this looks fun to try", "doing this sounds cool" or "it will look good on my CV" kind of considerations. I am thus kinda pissed-off at having to clean up after some damn amateur designer's moment of self-pleasure.
PPS: Having recently worked on an assignment on a web developlement consultancy and after seing how things are done and noticing that they are far from bankrupt, i can confidently say that this part of the industry is the most amateurish, incompentent and disorganized segment of the IT world. Then again, i've often done mission critical systems and backend integration so maybe i'm just too demanding.
Things like Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" are hardly dull by contemporary standaards. Some of the early animation movies remain funny. Charlot films are still comic.
If for the so-called classics you pick-up films that where successful at a time when that style of movie was were fashionable (for example picking up dance movies from the early 80s or love movies from the early 50s) you will probably find most of them boring for the current standaards - after all they were their age's film equivalent of boys/girls bands in the 90s: mass produced slob for the quick buck.
[As a side note it's interesting to note that some movies have weathered time in a less than elegant way. Have a look at Buck Rogers from 1939 - This one went from being a Sci-Fi movie to being a comic one:) ]
A couple of years ago (more like 15-20) there was at line of books where you could at certain points make choices of what the character would do. Depending on those choices you would carry one reading from a specific page and you would thus follow a different path in the story than if you had made a different choice. In other words, book based interactive adventures.
According to that quote from Ebert, this kind of books are "inferior to film and literature" since "by their nature [they] require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."
WTF?
Something that encodes a (finite or infinite) number of stories which enfold based on the decisions of the viewer (aka user) is no less art than something that has a single fixed story.
The best books tipically do not describe the scenarios in excruciating detail, but instead tell the reader enough to sugest the sphere and appearence of the scenario and let the reader's mind fill in the details.
Viewers/readers have co-creators in "serious art" for centuries now.
In a world where some will consider a totally black canvas with a single white stripe "serious art", that someone openlly considers something as Myth or Neverwinter Nights as NOT art because viewers are also participants and have a choice on how the story unfolds is simply insulting.
For pricing, Oracle considers dual Core CPUs as 2 processors - thus the typical Intel (compatible) server with one CPU that you can get nowadays will actually require TWO licenses for the Oracle database (just try getting a real server - thus not a white brand PC with an AthlonFX in it - with a single core CPU to see what i mean).
This has caused problems with many hardware upgrade paths where getting a new machine for an existing system means doubling the licensing costs for Oracle.
Plainly, your listed Oracle prices thus do not fully reflect reality.
You argument stands fully on the assumption that people are either "bad guys" (which use guns for criminal purposes) or "honest citizens" (which use guns to defend themselfs). Furthermore, there is the implicity reasoning that any person not only is one or another but also remains being one or another - i.e. an "honest citizen" will never turn into a "bad guy".
In reality people get angry/frightened/desperate and do stupid things (something a gun might turn into a tragedy) and armed thiefs don't go around killing unarmed people (but they often shoot armed ones).
As a non-dutch living in Holland for the last 5 years can most definitely say that the current dutch govrenment is NOT cutting taxes.
Actually they're doing the reverse - increasing taxes. Notice for example the new mandatory health insurance (as soon as health insurance became mandatory prices jumped 30%) - a tax in all but name.
They are however cutting on PUBLIC SERVICES, which is probably one of the reasons they just lost the municipal elections.
I wouldn't know if it is a "classic" or not - it does not seem refined enough to be a classic.
From your description, it seems your manager is doing it in a very obvious way. I see two possible motivations behind this: a) Your manager is trying to get you to quit by making your life miserable. Why would that be that, i have no idea. Are you in a country were it is hard to fire people? b) Your manager is trying to set you up as the fall guy - maybe some project where you work(ed) and he manages/ed is about-to-go/has-gone down the drain?
If it's a), consider finding another group withing the company or even move jobs. No point in fighting that war if the job market is good IMHO.
If it's b) then, judging by your description, your manager is doing it in a too obvious way. If indeed ALL issues in your review are reported as "very big problems" and NONE as "smaller problem" while for everybody else it is a very different picture, then that in itself would, to any outsider, be an indication that you are being singled-out and attacked in the review process.
I sugest you bring this up to the right ears outside your group. Go at it in a round-about way in which you come to some higher-up or side-ways person in a position of power (an HR manager for example) looking for advice on how to improve YOURSELF since your review lists lots of very big problems and you're very concerned since it never happened before and you don't know how things went so bad all of a sudden with your work.
Consider going to your manager first to "ask for advice on how to improve yourself". This:
Can be a very enlightening exercise - pay special attention to things for which he has no sugestions or only has "pre-packaged" (bullshit) sugestions, since these tend to indicate wild and unfounded criticisms he has done against you
Serves as an excuse to go ask some other senior person (read person in position of power) for sugestions on improving yourself, since "your manager's sugestions were not enough" or "you wanted another point of view"
When said other person asks you if you already went to your manager with, you can say "Yes!"
DON'T directly accuse your manager of discrimination - instead point out the exceptional negativity of your review with relation to past-reviews/reviews-for-other-group-members. Let the listener draw his/her own conclusions.
Keep in mind that: - Stakeholders in the Review process (HR, your manager's manager) want it to be realistic. Misuse of this process (for example by a manager trying to cover his back) will likelly be seen as abusive and at the very least frown uppon. - Some of the criticism might be true (if exagerated). If you use the "asking for advice to improve myself" act, DO NOT DO IT AS AN ACT - seriously consider that you have room for improvement and really think about (and maybe follow some of) the advices you are given.
You want to discredit your manager while at the same time fortifying your position (and if you can improve yourself in the process so much the beter).
Keep in mind that managers are not necessarily more inteligent than "techies", they're just more experience with "social" things. Consider the whole process as a challenge to your mental abilities - you are trying to outwit your manager.
I'd add the recomendation that you let it be known in circles outside your own group that:
Decisions are wholy taken by one person without participation of the other members of the group. This also means that responsability for screwups due to those decisions fully rests with that one person
Several members of the group (give no names) are (becoming) unsatisfied - ie moral is (becoming) low due to them not being in any way part of the decision process
The point of "spreading the word" is to prepare for the future:
If the system being imposed in your group does not negativelly impact your group's productivity and some of the people you talked to still remember your words, then you can admit that your fears where unfounded after all. No harm done, nobody will care.
If the system does NOT work and the productivity of your group is lower because of it (especially in comparisson with other groups), then your message will be remembered by others outside your group and quite possibly everybody in that group except the decisionmaker will be in the clear.
In this world a lot boils down to information control. Countless situations of bad leadership keep going on in perpetuity because the only source of information which those that have the power to stop those situations (higher level managers) have is the person responsible for the problem in the first place (for example, the group's manager/lead). When confronted with the problem by someone higher in the hierarchy, the causer of the problem will commonly blame something/somebody else for it if he/she believes they can get away with it.
Thus the point of this technique is to make sure that, when the shit hits the fan, higher level decision makers get to know exactly how and why the shit got there in the first place.
When this is done really well, if indeed the decisionmaker is unqualified and/or a serial offender, it often results in said person being at the very least striped of said responsibilities, sometimes shelved and in some cases (i'm talking really incompetent here) even fired.
I've used this twice in the past to get rid of really bad managers, so i know for sure it works.
Also:
If in the meanwhile you get really frustrated with the way things are going i sugest you start looking internaly (within the company) for another group. If that doesn't work start looking outside the company.
Cable is relativelly good (4Mb/s, unlimitied data traffic, 45 EUR/month) if you're in an area with good cable connections. However if you're in an area with old cable installations (eg Amsterdam) it's sheer hell.
Reliability isn't bad (about one serious connection drop per month).
Oh, and their support is pretty much clueless and seems to have recently been outsourced to Belgium.
In general in Holland there are a lot of choices on the lower end of the market (the 256Kb/s for 12,5 EUR kind of thing), but less so at the higher end. Due to the above mentioned issues with cities with old cable installations, some people don't have access to reliable cable internet, thus leaving only ADSL as an option.
PS: In Holland XS4ALL is available with ADSL. They have long been known as the techies (i'm avoid saying hackers here 'cause people confuse it with crackers) ISP in the sence that they're support is not clueless, they don't simply give away any user's information without a court order and they don't do any sneaky blocking of ports for P2P or home servers.
Also, users that are savvy enough to run their own server typically don't have all the bullshit Windows problems, so they are constantly calling with some malware/shitware related problem.
--
You were doing so well... until you threw in a random anti-windows statement.
I read it like - "Users savy enough to run they're own server don't constantly call [the ISP] with malware/shitware related problems."
At the moment this kind of problems (and users) are pretty much only to be found on/using a Windows environment. (which IMHO has a lot more to do with the popularity of Windows that with the security of the latest Windows versions)
I saw no reference about savy-users NOT/NEVER using Windows.
In my day we were fired before development started, were expected to go back in time and have the game ready before the Marketing department had come up with the idea for the game and if we were very, very lucky they would let us take one machine back in time with us for testing.
Today: Give absolute liberty to a "hacker type" to arbitrarily choose languages and libraries for any significant project without having a good reason for it.
The rest of the life of that software: Pay for it by having bugfixes and improvements take 10x more time because of the learning curve for some obscure language or library or because some of the used libraries aren't supported anymore and have bugs. [Did i mention that the "hacker type" that did the project (and had his fun) is now long gone from the company leaving behind a string of applications, all done in different ways and all needing to be maintained?]
In my book, as somebody that has been both in the making side (started as a "hacker type" myself) and in the taking side (as freelancer i often have to maintain/upgrade software done by said "hacker types"), no "hacker type" ever makes the grade past "junior software developer" before he/she has had to maintain his/her own software a year or more after the software's first version was in production.
Unfortunatly our industry has many self-masturbating "hacker types" that never have to clean the mess afterwards
I've played the game for almost a year, and from my experience the biggest single problem with EVE online is the enormous amount of time you waste doing boring things in between the fun things:
Travelling takes enormous amounts of time. Going through any single start system takes several minutes and common trips via the highway systems (a group of important solar systems which are relativelly far from each other but have direct connections - the fastest way to cross the EVE universe) take at least 15 minutes. Traveling from a far from the highway system in one area to another in a different area can take up to 1h. Going all the way to deep 0.0 space will take several hours. When i was doing trading, i would wake up in the morning, fire up EVE on my PC and send my ship to pick-up some goods in a far system. While in real life i would shower, dress and eat breakfast the ship would be traveling. With a bit of luck the ship would've arrived when i was ready to go to work. I would then pick-up the goods and start the ship on the journey back and then would leave the EVE client on and go to work.
The base of the EVE economy is mining asteroids. In order to have the means to buy the most basic ship (newbie ships are free but they suck bigtime) you have to mine ore from asteroids. Mining asteroids is an incredibly boring activity - hours and hours looking at your lasers hitting some asteroids and your cargohold filling with ore. Since cargo holds aren't that big, one has to periodicaly (about once a minute) MANUALLY move the ore to an external cargo container. This hour after hour after hour. After you filled enough external containers you go a pick a different ship (transport ship, big cargohold, few mountpoints for mining lasers) and spend the next 30m moving ore from containers in space to a local starbase. On top of this, if you're not mining near a main system (where typically ore buyers and sellers meet - note that asteroids at main systems only have the worse quality ore), you will have another (multi-hour) session of transporting ore from the out-of-way system to a main system.
If you don't believe me, just trail the EVE online forums. You will see many people casualy talking about how they read a book or watch television while their ship travels/mines-ore.
In the end, even though I was quite wealthy for EVE standards (i stumbled early upon a mixed trading/manufacturing market arbitrage possibility introduced when a new type of ship components was made available in the game), i eventually left when i came to the conclusion that after all the time i had invested in it, most of the time playing EVE was composed of boring tasks, NOT fun.
Most (non-management) people on white-colar jobs have no idea of where the borders are, of what they and other stakeholders (managers, clients) can get away with. The younger the worker, the less likelly he or she will know how the "social forces" that surround him/her work and can be shapped.
Learning that you can say NO, when to say NO, and what is the right way to say NO to the different persons and under different situations goes a long way to avoiding abuses from managers.*
Traditional unions with industry wide wage agreements are not the solution (except perhaps for those that want everybody to be reduced to the industry average).
However, the pooling of resources (as in knowing from other union members in the same company and/or situation what can be done) and education side of unions (as in advising people) would be most usefull.
* The first thing to learn is that it's NOT a company that does something like this to you - companies do not feel, care or decide anything. It's people that choose to act or not towards you in ways that are abusive
Second thing to know is that a lot of managers that abuse the employees time are quite likelly deep into the grey areas of the borders of the company policy on acceptable behaviour towards employees. If as much as you try you can't get a manager to explicitly make the request on an e-mail (which you could then forward to their bosses) then they themselfs KNOW they're abusing the system
They first put out a simple patch, then a patch that broke more stuff than it fixed, and then a patch to fix the previous one and a couple more things.
EA is the worse company in the industry in terms of the way how they treat their customers.
Just look at the whole mess around BF2 (Battlefield 2) - they had a game with the potential to be the BEST FPS of the decade an what did they do: - Rushed it out the door with many bugs, unoptimized code (you need 2GB memory to be able to play it properly) and unbalanced gameplay (unbeatable airpower anyone?). - Did not release a proper fix for several months. Even now it's still an unbalanced hog of a game. - Instead of fixing the game, they invested their resources into getting a (payed) game expansion released after just a couple of months. This actually made the game even more demanding in terms of system resources and less stable. A second expansion is scheduled to come out this month. - The game expansion added new weapons that could also be used in normal maps. Said weapons were more powerfull than the ones available to players with only the original version of the game, thus meaning that those with the expansion had a built-in gameplay advantage. This is pretty much the sleaziest way to push an expansion i've ever seen in this industry. - All the while, any support requests registered in their site were magically going to the status "solved" without them actually solving anything.
Basically these guys keep treating their whole client base as (fanboy) teenagers and kids (which a lot of them are), while the demographics of gamers has been steadily changing in the last decade and the 25-35 year old males now form one of (if not the) biggest group of gamers.
Notice that 25-35 year olds have a lot more disposable income than teenages and kids....
Meanwhile the rest of the industry has actually moved out of the 1990s mentality of "people are used to games that crash so we can rush them out the door"...
I am not surprised at all that EA's profits are significantly down.
Still, i hardly expect that EA's management will take the blame - i'm sure that, somehow, it was all due to software piracy...
Consider the possiblity that the being dead tired due to crazy overworking is as much the cause of your errors on work and delays on deliveries as it is the consequence of it.
About deadlines, keep in mind the following: - Software developers are optimists. They will ALWAYS give shorter estimations that the time it actually ends up taking. This is well known. If your managers ask you for estimates and accept it face value without adding at least 20% to it (more like 50-100%% if you're junior at what you do) then they're either incompetent or trying to take advantage of you (basically they will throw your original estimates back at you when you fail to achieve them to make YOU feel guilty and get the extra hours out of you) - Software design/development completion estimates coming from sales persons or managers without a technical background which have not been validated by a senior designer/developer/analyst are usually pretty much pulled out of their asses. Furthermore, they will be guaranteed short, since said sales-persons/managers are trying to impress the customer/their-bosses and will thus promisse unachievable deadlines.
More importantly though is your current situation. You don't need time to interview for other jobs, you just need more time, period. Once you take a few 'sick afternoons' to go interview or leave for a long lunch interview, you may realize just how easy it is to leave you job at a reasonable hour. I had a job that used to make us stay late and work long hours. I was very unproductive. One day, because i hated that job so much, i left early (granted early=6:30, 8:30-6:30). I started doing it every day. One day, as i was leaving my manager stopped me and said 'i noticed you've been leaving at 6:30' (he dare not say 'early'!). I told him, matter of factly, that tonight i was meeting a friend and had to get ready. I made no excuses for the other nights. After that he learned to have more respect for the time i was in the office. He knew that i would be the 1st to leave the office and he would make extra efforts to make sure that i would have everything i needed to finish my projects before 6:30. He knew i wouldn't stay one second later, unless it was an emergency.
My coworkers were jealous that I got to leave 'early' and they had to stay until 9-10pm every night. I told them it was their own doing and they could leave when they wanted. When bonus time came around, my billing was on target and my bonus reflected that. I got more done during 8:30-6:30 when i felt good about my job, than i ever got done working 8:30AM-10PM and hating it.
This is one of my great revelations. It was beginning of restructuring my social life, getting physically fit, starting bike racing, and generally getting my life in order.
Similar experience here. It only works if you either have a manager that's smart enough to value results above appearences or if you yourself are so good as a professional that they are willing to accept your "defiance" of the unwritten company/group policy.
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I use the same trick.
:) ) with your elbows fixed in place or just slightly moving. Only pressing function keys ( a comparativelly rare operation) will require your to lift your arms from the table. Most of the time the whole arm (almost up to the wrists) will be supported by the table. With the mouse next to the keyboard, picking the mouse and moving it is also a question of rotating your arm on your elbows and (posssibly) sliding it around a bit when moving the mouse.
;) )
When i was a teenager i actually got into the early stages of RSI (i had loss of feeling in the palm of my hands) due to programing at home while supporting my wrists in the border of the table (ie the keyboard was next to the border of the table).
Nowadays, 15+ years later, after working as a professional softwared developer for several years, i have no RSI symptoms whatsoever. No special keyboards, plain-ol-style mouse, no wrist support or any other support watsoever other than a table.
The big secret:
- Position your keyboard on the table far from you (typically next to the monitor). Your elbows should be supported by the table. When your arms are parallel, with your elbows supported by the table your fingers should reach the second top row of a common QWERTY keyboard (ie not the function keys row, the one below it).
Typing is a question of moving your hands from side to side (and your fingers up and down
A couple more usefull tip i've picked up:
- You chair should be to such a height that with your legs bended at an 90 degrees angle, the whole sole of your shoes is on the floor.
- Your screen should be in such a positions that your chest (and face) are facing the screen. If your position relative to the screen is such that your head is turned you're strining your neck
- Your back should be fully in contact with the back of your chair and at a 90 degree angle to your legs (thus ||_ ). If your ass is forward (towards the front of the chair, like |\_ ) then your are straining your chest muscules (if you have chest pain it's probably this or a heart problem
is Legion Arena (RTS with ancient roman units)
Having played a *cough* *cough* "demo" version i went out and bought it precisely because it was NOT copy protected.
And as an interesting sidenote their EULA is one of the simplest, shortest and less screw-the-customer ones i've ever seen.
Oh yeah, and the game is fun too (if a little short with only 10-20 hours of gameplay).
PS: I have no association with the makers of Legion Arena whatsoever, i just believe in rewarding game makers that make good products and are not out to screw the customer.
I suspect that an important force pushing against CD sales is born out of the crossing of three trends:
- Portable MP3 players are getting more common and more widespread in use
- Easy access to digital format music (either legal or pirated) is now widespread (aka Internet & broadband)
- Copy protected CDs
Nowadays anybody that has a portable MP3 player and buys a CD runs the risk of not being able to get the music into the MP3 player - in other words "not being able to listen to it on the move". Avoiding the problem requires having the correct apps and/or technical skills to go around the copy protection mechanism AND finding out which copy protection each CD has - this is time consuming. The approach of returning the CD to the store if you cannot copy the tracks to your MP3 player is also time consuming.
Downloading the music from the Internet is easy, usually (if you download pirated music) compatible with MP3 players and provides almost instant gratification.
It's hardly a surprise if people stop buying CDs and go download the tracks from the Internet.
Before, piratig music was a question of money
Then the music industry came up with Copy Protected CDs
Now pirating music is a question of money AND more convenience than buying it
Good going guys!
Spreading your logic across multiple layers and using multiple languages is really bad for maintenability:
- The code in each layer tends to tightly coupled to the code on any other layer
- The application is now vendor locked
- New versions of the engines in any layer might break you application
- Any new person that is going to maintain/extend the application will need to know multiple languages, possibly with some being very specific to the server engines used.
<RANT>Of course if all you do is small web applications which are far from actually having a technical architecture, then feel free to spread you business logic all the way from browser-side JavaScript to database stored procedures - just make sure YOU maintain it for the next couple of years</RANT>
PS: As a freelancer i have often been the guy that has to unwrap/fix applications where the original design decisions where taken on the base of the "this looks fun to try", "doing this sounds cool" or "it will look good on my CV" kind of considerations. I am thus kinda pissed-off at having to clean up after some damn amateur designer's moment of self-pleasure.
PPS: Having recently worked on an assignment on a web developlement consultancy and after seing how things are done and noticing that they are far from bankrupt, i can confidently say that this part of the industry is the most amateurish, incompentent and disorganized segment of the IT world. Then again, i've often done mission critical systems and backend integration so maybe i'm just too demanding.
Things like Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" are hardly dull by contemporary standaards.
:) ]
Some of the early animation movies remain funny.
Charlot films are still comic.
If for the so-called classics you pick-up films that where successful at a time when that style of movie was were fashionable (for example picking up dance movies from the early 80s or love movies from the early 50s) you will probably find most of them boring for the current standaards - after all they were their age's film equivalent of boys/girls bands in the 90s: mass produced slob for the quick buck.
[As a side note it's interesting to note that some movies have weathered time in a less than elegant way. Have a look at Buck Rogers from 1939 - This one went from being a Sci-Fi movie to being a comic one
A couple of years ago (more like 15-20) there was at line of books where you could at certain points make choices of what the character would do. Depending on those choices you would carry one reading from a specific page and you would thus follow a different path in the story than if you had made a different choice.
In other words, book based interactive adventures.
According to that quote from Ebert, this kind of books are "inferior to film and literature" since "by their nature [they] require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."
WTF?
Something that encodes a (finite or infinite) number of stories which enfold based on the decisions of the viewer (aka user) is no less art than something that has a single fixed story.
The best books tipically do not describe the scenarios in excruciating detail, but instead tell the reader enough to sugest the sphere and appearence of the scenario and let the reader's mind fill in the details.
Viewers/readers have co-creators in "serious art" for centuries now.
In a world where some will consider a totally black canvas with a single white stripe "serious art", that someone openlly considers something as Myth or Neverwinter Nights as NOT art because viewers are also participants and have a choice on how the story unfolds is simply insulting.
steal the content
Thus they actually remove the bits out of other people's machines!!?
For pricing, Oracle considers dual Core CPUs as 2 processors - thus the typical Intel (compatible) server with one CPU that you can get nowadays will actually require TWO licenses for the Oracle database (just try getting a real server - thus not a white brand PC with an AthlonFX in it - with a single core CPU to see what i mean).
This has caused problems with many hardware upgrade paths where getting a new machine for an existing system means doubling the licensing costs for Oracle.
Plainly, your listed Oracle prices thus do not fully reflect reality.
You argument stands fully on the assumption that people are either "bad guys" (which use guns for criminal purposes) or "honest citizens" (which use guns to defend themselfs). Furthermore, there is the implicity reasoning that any person not only is one or another but also remains being one or another - i.e. an "honest citizen" will never turn into a "bad guy".
In reality people get angry/frightened/desperate and do stupid things (something a gun might turn into a tragedy) and armed thiefs don't go around killing unarmed people (but they often shoot armed ones).
As a non-dutch living in Holland for the last 5 years can most definitely say that the current dutch govrenment is NOT cutting taxes.
Actually they're doing the reverse - increasing taxes. Notice for example the new mandatory health insurance (as soon as health insurance became mandatory prices jumped 30%) - a tax in all but name.
They are however cutting on PUBLIC SERVICES, which is probably one of the reasons they just lost the municipal elections.
From your description, it seems your manager is doing it in a very obvious way. I see two possible motivations behind this:
a) Your manager is trying to get you to quit by making your life miserable. Why would that be that, i have no idea. Are you in a country were it is hard to fire people?
b) Your manager is trying to set you up as the fall guy - maybe some project where you work(ed) and he manages/ed is about-to-go/has-gone down the drain?
If it's a), consider finding another group withing the company or even move jobs. No point in fighting that war if the job market is good IMHO.
If it's b) then, judging by your description, your manager is doing it in a too obvious way. If indeed ALL issues in your review are reported as "very big problems" and NONE as "smaller problem" while for everybody else it is a very different picture, then that in itself would, to any outsider, be an indication that you are being singled-out and attacked in the review process.
I sugest you bring this up to the right ears outside your group. Go at it in a round-about way in which you come to some higher-up or side-ways person in a position of power (an HR manager for example) looking for advice on how to improve YOURSELF since your review lists lots of very big problems and you're very concerned since it never happened before and you don't know how things went so bad all of a sudden with your work.
Consider going to your manager first to "ask for advice on how to improve yourself". This:
DON'T directly accuse your manager of discrimination - instead point out the exceptional negativity of your review with relation to past-reviews/reviews-for-other-group-members. Let the listener draw his/her own conclusions.
Keep in mind that:
- Stakeholders in the Review process (HR, your manager's manager) want it to be realistic. Misuse of this process (for example by a manager trying to cover his back) will likelly be seen as abusive and at the very least frown uppon.
- Some of the criticism might be true (if exagerated). If you use the "asking for advice to improve myself" act, DO NOT DO IT AS AN ACT - seriously consider that you have room for improvement and really think about (and maybe follow some of) the advices you are given.
You want to discredit your manager while at the same time fortifying your position (and if you can improve yourself in the process so much the beter).
Keep in mind that managers are not necessarily more inteligent than "techies", they're just more experience with "social" things. Consider the whole process as a challenge to your mental abilities - you are trying to outwit your manager.
The point of "spreading the word" is to prepare for the future:
In this world a lot boils down to information control. Countless situations of bad leadership keep going on in perpetuity because the only source of information which those that have the power to stop those situations (higher level managers) have is the person responsible for the problem in the first place (for example, the group's manager/lead).
When confronted with the problem by someone higher in the hierarchy, the causer of the problem will commonly blame something/somebody else for it if he/she believes they can get away with it.
Thus the point of this technique is to make sure that, when the shit hits the fan, higher level decision makers get to know exactly how and why the shit got there in the first place.
When this is done really well, if indeed the decisionmaker is unqualified and/or a serial offender, it often results in said person being at the very least striped of said responsibilities, sometimes shelved and in some cases (i'm talking really incompetent here) even fired.
I've used this twice in the past to get rid of really bad managers, so i know for sure it works.
Also:
If in the meanwhile you get really frustrated with the way things are going i sugest you start looking internaly (within the company) for another group. If that doesn't work start looking outside the company.
Cable is relativelly good (4Mb/s, unlimitied data traffic, 45 EUR/month) if you're in an area with good cable connections. However if you're in an area with old cable installations (eg Amsterdam) it's sheer hell.
Reliability isn't bad (about one serious connection drop per month).
Oh, and their support is pretty much clueless and seems to have recently been outsourced to Belgium.
In general in Holland there are a lot of choices on the lower end of the market (the 256Kb/s for 12,5 EUR kind of thing), but less so at the higher end. Due to the above mentioned issues with cities with old cable installations, some people don't have access to reliable cable internet, thus leaving only ADSL as an option.
PS: In Holland XS4ALL is available with ADSL. They have long been known as the techies (i'm avoid saying hackers here 'cause people confuse it with crackers) ISP in the sence that they're support is not clueless, they don't simply give away any user's information without a court order and they don't do any sneaky blocking of ports for P2P or home servers.
Also, users that are savvy enough to run their own server typically don't have all the bullshit Windows problems, so they are constantly calling with some malware/shitware related problem.
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You were doing so well... until you threw in a random anti-windows statement.
I read it like - "Users savy enough to run they're own server don't constantly call [the ISP] with malware/shitware related problems."
At the moment this kind of problems (and users) are pretty much only to be found on/using a Windows environment. (which IMHO has a lot more to do with the popularity of Windows that with the security of the latest Windows versions)
I saw no reference about savy-users NOT/NEVER using Windows.
Now i feel bad that i found the bug in his code ...
80 hours a minute - what a luxury
In my day we were fired before development started, were expected to go back in time and have the game ready before the Marketing department had come up with the idea for the game and if we were very, very lucky they would let us take one machine back in time with us for testing.
Today: Give absolute liberty to a "hacker type" to arbitrarily choose languages and libraries for any significant project without having a good reason for it.
The rest of the life of that software: Pay for it by having bugfixes and improvements take 10x more time because of the learning curve for some obscure language or library or because some of the used libraries aren't supported anymore and have bugs.
[Did i mention that the "hacker type" that did the project (and had his fun) is now long gone from the company leaving behind a string of applications, all done in different ways and all needing to be maintained?]
In my book, as somebody that has been both in the making side (started as a "hacker type" myself) and in the taking side (as freelancer i often have to maintain/upgrade software done by said "hacker types"), no "hacker type" ever makes the grade past "junior software developer" before he/she has had to maintain his/her own software a year or more after the software's first version was in production.
Unfortunatly our industry has many self-masturbating "hacker types" that never have to clean the mess afterwards
If you don't believe me, just trail the EVE online forums. You will see many people casualy talking about how they read a book or watch television while their ship travels/mines-ore.
In the end, even though I was quite wealthy for EVE standards (i stumbled early upon a mixed trading/manufacturing market arbitrage possibility introduced when a new type of ship components was made available in the game), i eventually left when i came to the conclusion that after all the time i had invested in it, most of the time playing EVE was composed of boring tasks, NOT fun.
All the tracking information should be freely available on the Internet ... ... including historical logs ... ... for all managers too
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I mean, fair is fair, we should be able to know that the CFO goes visit his mistress every thursday evening, or that the CEO is out golfing
Most (non-management) people on white-colar jobs have no idea of where the borders are, of what they and other stakeholders (managers, clients) can get away with. The younger the worker, the less likelly he or she will know how the "social forces" that surround him/her work and can be shapped.
Learning that you can say NO, when to say NO, and what is the right way to say NO to the different persons and under different situations goes a long way to avoiding abuses from managers.*
Traditional unions with industry wide wage agreements are not the solution (except perhaps for those that want everybody to be reduced to the industry average).
However, the pooling of resources (as in knowing from other union members in the same company and/or situation what can be done) and education side of unions (as in advising people) would be most usefull.
* The first thing to learn is that it's NOT a company that does something like this to you - companies do not feel, care or decide anything. It's people that choose to act or not towards you in ways that are abusive
Second thing to know is that a lot of managers that abuse the employees time are quite likelly deep into the grey areas of the borders of the company policy on acceptable behaviour towards employees. If as much as you try you can't get a manager to explicitly make the request on an e-mail (which you could then forward to their bosses) then they themselfs KNOW they're abusing the system
They first put out a simple patch, then a patch that broke more stuff than it fixed, and then a patch to fix the previous one and a couple more things.
EA is the worse company in the industry in terms of the way how they treat their customers.
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Just look at the whole mess around BF2 (Battlefield 2) - they had a game with the potential to be the BEST FPS of the decade an what did they do:
- Rushed it out the door with many bugs, unoptimized code (you need 2GB memory to be able to play it properly) and unbalanced gameplay (unbeatable airpower anyone?).
- Did not release a proper fix for several months. Even now it's still an unbalanced hog of a game.
- Instead of fixing the game, they invested their resources into getting a (payed) game expansion released after just a couple of months. This actually made the game even more demanding in terms of system resources and less stable. A second expansion is scheduled to come out this month.
- The game expansion added new weapons that could also be used in normal maps. Said weapons were more powerfull than the ones available to players with only the original version of the game, thus meaning that those with the expansion had a built-in gameplay advantage. This is pretty much the sleaziest way to push an expansion i've ever seen in this industry.
- All the while, any support requests registered in their site were magically going to the status "solved" without them actually solving anything.
Basically these guys keep treating their whole client base as (fanboy) teenagers and kids (which a lot of them are), while the demographics of gamers has been steadily changing in the last decade and the 25-35 year old males now form one of (if not the) biggest group of gamers.
Notice that 25-35 year olds have a lot more disposable income than teenages and kids
Meanwhile the rest of the industry has actually moved out of the 1990s mentality of "people are used to games that crash so we can rush them out the door"...
I am not surprised at all that EA's profits are significantly down.
Still, i hardly expect that EA's management will take the blame - i'm sure that, somehow, it was all due to software piracy
Sounds like a new technology to improve hard drive performance.
Sata2 - Memory Lane mode
Consider the possiblity that the being dead tired due to crazy overworking is as much the cause of your errors on work and delays on deliveries as it is the consequence of it.
About deadlines, keep in mind the following:
- Software developers are optimists. They will ALWAYS give shorter estimations that the time it actually ends up taking. This is well known. If your managers ask you for estimates and accept it face value without adding at least 20% to it (more like 50-100%% if you're junior at what you do) then they're either incompetent or trying to take advantage of you (basically they will throw your original estimates back at you when you fail to achieve them to make YOU feel guilty and get the extra hours out of you)
- Software design/development completion estimates coming from sales persons or managers without a technical background which have not been validated by a senior designer/developer/analyst are usually pretty much pulled out of their asses. Furthermore, they will be guaranteed short, since said sales-persons/managers are trying to impress the customer/their-bosses and will thus promisse unachievable deadlines.
More importantly though is your current situation. You don't need time to interview for other jobs, you just need more time, period. Once you take a few 'sick afternoons' to go interview or leave for a long lunch interview, you may realize just how easy it is to leave you job at a reasonable hour. I had a job that used to make us stay late and work long hours. I was very unproductive. One day, because i hated that job so much, i left early (granted early=6:30, 8:30-6:30). I started doing it every day. One day, as i was leaving my manager stopped me and said 'i noticed you've been leaving at 6:30' (he dare not say 'early'!). I told him, matter of factly, that tonight i was meeting a friend and had to get ready. I made no excuses for the other nights. After that he learned to have more respect for the time i was in the office. He knew that i would be the 1st to leave the office and he would make extra efforts to make sure that i would have everything i needed to finish my projects before 6:30. He knew i wouldn't stay one second later, unless it was an emergency.
My coworkers were jealous that I got to leave 'early' and they had to stay until 9-10pm every night. I told them it was their own doing and they could leave when they wanted. When bonus time came around, my billing was on target and my bonus reflected that. I got more done during 8:30-6:30 when i felt good about my job, than i ever got done working 8:30AM-10PM and hating it.
This is one of my great revelations. It was beginning of restructuring my social life, getting physically fit, starting bike racing, and generally getting my life in order.
Similar experience here. It only works if you either have a manager that's smart enough to value results above appearences or if you yourself are so good as a professional that they are willing to accept your "defiance" of the unwritten company/group policy.