How do Europeans view these horrible working conditions under which Americans work?
We fail to really understand why you collectively put up with it. But we also fail to understand what part of your culture has gone (in our perspective) so horribly awry.
Here's a real story (from Europe) for perspective. The company I work for recently had almost all upper management replaced. The old management encouraged overtime by paying a 50% bonus for overtime (mandatory and voluntary alike), and many of us have used it (myself included). The new managements take on this? We don't want overtime - we'll rather hire those 20 workers that your overtime pay equates to, and then make sure that, on average, you work 37 hr/week every year. If this means a couple of extra weeks of vacation in the summer, good for you. And if this means turning down an assignment now and then, that's regarded as being a responsible worker, who takes his obligations to not "burn out" seriously. Another poster relayed a study about the most effective workweek being 35 hr/week, so in the long run both management and I will benefit from this. There WILL be a few 60-70 hour weeks up to major deadlines, but we MUST find a way to take that time off to compensate. You are NOT regarded as a good worker if you fail to do so.
Oh, and my company is NOT the only one doing this.
Now call us naive if you want, and try convincing me that they'll just make me work long hours for no pay this way. That would be the standard US way - paranoia reigns supreme between employer and employee, and everyone is out to screw you over (os so people seem to think). It works differently here - most of the time, anyway. I think it is related to a cultural difference when it comes to teamwork. The "Lone Wolf" character is not as idolized in Europe as it seems to be in the US, and being a teamplayer is the norm, not the exception.
Finally, I think unions have been a factor in this too. I don't personally like the way most unions work politically (not a member of any for that very reason), but realistically they've helped remove a lot of the overworking explotation kind of crap still taking place in the US.
Just some input from someone who actually knows about windmills (I design and implement remote control and monitoring system for windmills for a living) - most windmills being set up by utilities are at least 2 MW and most new designs are for ~4 MW and upwards. Current technology (variable speed generator and big inverters for, among other things, phase compensation) is expected to scale with little adaptation to about 8 MW, and other technologies are being researched about breaking that barrier too.
So 500 kW and 1 MW windmills are small and mostly old and rather inefficient, which makes them both bad candidates for use in your calculations. Newer and bigger turbines also continually decreases the amortized cost per MWh for wind power, but it is still quite high. I agree with your post more than with the grandparent though - not replacement for gasoline-driven vehicles based on current technology seems practical.
Submerged tidal energy is really interesting too - don't really see us running out of "moon" anyday soon:-) Essentially this is a windmill below the water powered by the tidal current near coastal areas. This will affect the climate too - as will all electrical power generation - so don't put all eggs in one basket. Still, tidal energy is VERY predictable, which is something wind energy is most definately NOT.
Great - and I could get to carry one of those "silencers" in my pocket, and everywhere I go cellphones are silent. Oh joy, the silence. And so would a lot of other people, and before long the feature would get an override on new phones to allow it to actually ring again and we'd be back to status quo.
I'm afraid you'll need to make it IMPOSSIBLE to use it in certain areas if you want people to not do so. Blocking the ambient signal and setting up a pico-cell with emergency-only functionality would seem to accomplish this.
[Upstanding individuals who don't desex their cats...]
"Desex?" Is that a politically correct euphemism for "cut their balls off?"
Yes and no. Desex would be the quasi-scientific term that works for EITHER gender. "Cut their balls off" very accurately describes the action for ONE gender. Neutering (sp?) would be more accurate though, works for both genders and already exists. So it's kind of an invented term where another does exist, which makes it a strong contender in the "politically correct" department. OTOH, it IS more accurate than "cut their balls off", which works in the opposite direction - at least IMHO.
For the record, I've had several cats (all male) and none of them have been neutered. They've lived full lives - lots of hunting, lots of fighting, lots of attempts (sometimes successful) at breeding. Not very long lifes, though - even though we live in the countryside, we DO have cars and I've yet to see a cat that properly understands that they pose a real danger. As do combine harvesters, if one should be foolish enough to nap inside one...
Really good. Stuff like this always makes me think of the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. Scary how close it comes to ACTUAL mission statements sometimes.
Du-uh. You do realize that the DoD is the sub-department of the DoE that handles teaching geography, don't you? Until the USA invades some small nation, no one has a clue about its existance, let alone its location. So in fact this puts the budget for the DoE at $458 Billion, possibly adding the appropriations for the War in Iraq. Whether this is a cost-efficient way of teaching geography is still open for debate, though...
Maybe because the people he CAN contact are working for the ISP of the offending party, and they are usually not to blame? No reason to piss off some guy working for an ISP, especially if you'd like that guy to help you with similar requests in the future.
I think I'll pay for my phones thanks... Well - you do that either way, you know. Pay it all up-front, or pay it through somewhat more expensive service over a period of time. Either way, YOU pay the phone. Point in case - a few months ago I got a new Nokia 3100 with a 6 month contract. 15 EUR upfront, 15 EUR per month subscription and then subscription drops to nothing and the contract is, well, over. That would give 7 times 15 EUR, or about the price of the phone. Could I have bought it for that price with no contract, and gotten a zero subscription rate? Yes. Did I choose to? No. YMMV.
Back in the days of the 286, I had a nice 286-12 with an open case (I had messed with something). I didn't bother to put it back on for a few days, and then had to water a plant on a shelve above it, and naturally proceeded to spill all the water into the thing while it ran. It stopped working immediately, gave a strange buzzing sound and smelled weird. I turned it off, took it apart, waited a day or two and reassembled it. It ran fine for several years, and was not retired until it was replaced by something faster (386@40MHz).
Won't compete with IE6...
on
Browser Wars 2004
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The competition will be with XAML,.NET Zero Deployment and the likes om them. The initiative described in the article is probably good and all, and I seriously hope they do make it into something. But make no mistake - MS has been working long and hard on getting stuff that blurs the line between web and local pages (or apps, if you prefer that name), and some of it works just fine (.NET Zero Deployment is a good example here). Soon enough, there will be no browser war because the browser will not be as essential as it is today. It still is, though - and that's why I use Firefox whenever I can:-) Seriously, running richer and richer "weblets" (for lack of a better technology-neutral term) on your local machine, feeding them with remote data and making it all flexible and (hopefully) secure, is a trend that's been going on for YEARS now. A lot of us would like this to feature open standards, open source and other such goodness, but we need to take a long, hard look at the initiatives from MS - their market dominance means that THEIR standards will become a reality.
No IE fan (I use Firefox when I can - like right now), but I *NEED* IE for my frequent visits to windowsupdate.microsoft.com. At work we use MS stuff almost exclusively, and need to keep our W2K/WXP boxens updated. At home, I've got an WXP box for telecommuting and the odd game - it needs its fair share of windowsupdate too. If an update came out that made windowsupdate work just as well in Firefox, I guess there'd be little or no reason to use IE anymore for me.
Cool - I knew that one. It's fast, efficient and non-intuitive. Now try doing that with any non-integer type (like, say, a string), and the grandparent posters x,y = y,x really shines. Besides, the semantics of x,y = y,x is readily understandable.
The sound they refer to is a frequency-shifted and time-compressed recording of emissions from charged particles in the magnetic field around Saturn. There is no actual "sound" there, as sound requires an athmosphere(sp?) of some sort. There's athmosphere a-plenty on Saturn (most of it IS probably gas, after all), but none near or around the probe.
You need to read this a bit more carefully. It does not say "died before he proved it." It says "died before he could conclusively prove it," as in before he was able to do so.
Cool - that puts me in the same league as Riemann. I'm pretty sure that I'll die without having been able to prove the Riemann hypothesis too:-)
that one of the big improvements to come with digital was the ability to shoot countless images and just keep the good ones without the cost/delay/inconvenience of developing traditional film. Back then it mattered that each photo was good because you couldn't review the photo before several days had passed, and it was important that each shot was good. Now, I tend to just take maybe 20 or 30 shots in rapid succession and rely on one or more to be good - a quick review will tell me if it's ALL bad, and in 30 seconds the memory is erased, and I can start snapping pictures again, this time moving to avoid the backlight or whatever spoiled the first batch. Not really arguing against learning to take better pictures - selfimprovement through learning is always GOOD (and geekish, mind you). It just doesn't seem as necessary as it once was.
The same as ever - whenever Windows is mentioned, lots of wisecracks about crashing is posted. Did you imagine they'd port Win95 or Win3.11 to HPC? Duh. They'll port something like WinXP or W2K3, and guess what - those are quite stable OS'es. Of course you CAN make them unstable, but that goes for PenguinWare as well...
Ah well, I better put on my flamesafe suit - I forgot to criticize Microsoft...
Re:Inflation - but you are wrong
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
How would you react if gas went from $5.50 a gallon to $10.00 a gallon over the course of a year? That's the sort of increase that's happening here in the US.
You are so wrong. A comparable increase would be from $5.50 to $6.50 - just because your prices kind of doubled, doesn't mean it will double in the rest of the world. Most European countries (my own included) tax gasoline heavily to make us use less of it (and to get tax revenue) - this makes the increase much smaller as a percentage, since the tax is usually a set amount per gallon/liter, acting as an offset but not a multiplier.
Is this just an actual case of, you get what you pay for? Does a good ~100ft. wireless keyboard/mouse need components that costs over 50% of that price ($80) assuming 50% for mark-up, etc.,.? That's hard to believe.
I think it's more a case of production volume. Lots of wireless stuff have ~30 ft. ranges, but few have a 100 ft. range. Since 100 ft. components were probably more expensive to develop, they have more cost to amortize over the product. And since demand is lower for 100 ft. range items, this adds even more development cost to each unit. Even if the 100ft. component were just a beefed up version of the 30ft. component, the difference in number of items is very important to product cost, and you still need separate QA, packaging, marketing, handling etc. for the beefed up version.
We use WP8 extensively at work, and most of the word-processing functions in it are just fine. The implementation and interface sucks, though. It's been localized to my native language (danish), but the shortcuts are still using english abbrevations. The toolbar correctly shows a bold F for bold (called 'fed' in danish), but you still need to type Ctrl-B to activate it. I can not even begin to explain how totally counter-intuitive that is.
Most of the times when I save a document, the location of the friggin mouse becomes the new entry point. So when I type Ctrl-S to save the document and continue typing, the text will go to some random location in the document. The only certainty is that it's NOT where I was typing before, since I tend to move the mouse away from the area where I type.
In short, it's bad - except for the math/equation editor, which ROCKS! Luckily I can use that editor from inside Word XP.
Slashdot Mirror
How do Europeans view these horrible working conditions under which Americans work?
We fail to really understand why you collectively put up with it. But we also fail to understand what part of your culture has gone (in our perspective) so horribly awry.
Here's a real story (from Europe) for perspective. The company I work for recently had almost all upper management replaced. The old management encouraged overtime by paying a 50% bonus for overtime (mandatory and voluntary alike), and many of us have used it (myself included).
The new managements take on this? We don't want overtime - we'll rather hire those 20 workers that your overtime pay equates to, and then make sure that, on average, you work 37 hr/week every year. If this means a couple of extra weeks of vacation in the summer, good for you. And if this means turning down an assignment now and then, that's regarded as being a responsible worker, who takes his obligations to not "burn out" seriously. Another poster relayed a study about the most effective workweek being 35 hr/week, so in the long run both management and I will benefit from this. There WILL be a few 60-70 hour weeks up to major deadlines, but we MUST find a way to take that time off to compensate. You are NOT regarded as a good worker if you fail to do so.
Oh, and my company is NOT the only one doing this.
Now call us naive if you want, and try convincing me that they'll just make me work long hours for no pay this way. That would be the standard US way - paranoia reigns supreme between employer and employee, and everyone is out to screw you over (os so people seem to think). It works differently here - most of the time, anyway. I think it is related to a cultural difference when it comes to teamwork. The "Lone Wolf" character is not as idolized in Europe as it seems to be in the US, and being a teamplayer is the norm, not the exception.
Finally, I think unions have been a factor in this too. I don't personally like the way most unions work politically (not a member of any for that very reason), but realistically they've helped remove a lot of the overworking explotation kind of crap still taking place in the US.
Just some input from someone who actually knows about windmills (I design and implement remote control and monitoring system for windmills for a living) - most windmills being set up by utilities are at least 2 MW and most new designs are for ~4 MW and upwards. Current technology (variable speed generator and big inverters for, among other things, phase compensation) is expected to scale with little adaptation to about 8 MW, and other technologies are being researched about breaking that barrier too.
:-) Essentially this is a windmill below the water powered by the tidal current near coastal areas. This will affect the climate too - as will all electrical power generation - so don't put all eggs in one basket. Still, tidal energy is VERY predictable, which is something wind energy is most definately NOT.
So 500 kW and 1 MW windmills are small and mostly old and rather inefficient, which makes them both bad candidates for use in your calculations. Newer and bigger turbines also continually decreases the amortized cost per MWh for wind power, but it is still quite high. I agree with your post more than with the grandparent though - not replacement for gasoline-driven vehicles based on current technology seems practical.
Submerged tidal energy is really interesting too - don't really see us running out of "moon" anyday soon
Great - and I could get to carry one of those "silencers" in my pocket, and everywhere I go cellphones are silent. Oh joy, the silence. And so would a lot of other people, and before long the feature would get an override on new phones to allow it to actually ring again and we'd be back to status quo.
I'm afraid you'll need to make it IMPOSSIBLE to use it in certain areas if you want people to not do so. Blocking the ambient signal and setting up a pico-cell with emergency-only functionality would seem to accomplish this.
[Upstanding individuals who don't desex their cats...]
"Desex?" Is that a politically correct euphemism for "cut their balls off?"
Yes and no. Desex would be the quasi-scientific term that works for EITHER gender. "Cut their balls off" very accurately describes the action for ONE gender. Neutering (sp?) would be more accurate though, works for both genders and already exists. So it's kind of an invented term where another does exist, which makes it a strong contender in the "politically correct" department. OTOH, it IS more accurate than "cut their balls off", which works in the opposite direction - at least IMHO.
For the record, I've had several cats (all male) and none of them have been neutered. They've lived full lives - lots of hunting, lots of fighting, lots of attempts (sometimes successful) at breeding. Not very long lifes, though - even though we live in the countryside, we DO have cars and I've yet to see a cat that properly understands that they pose a real danger. As do combine harvesters, if one should be foolish enough to nap inside one...
This sounds cool and all - but one that can see through bullshit would be infinitely more useful...
What I'd like to know is: What is the capacity in a PROPER unit, like LOC?
Really good. Stuff like this always makes me think of the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. Scary how close it comes to ACTUAL mission statements sometimes.
Du-uh. You do realize that the DoD is the sub-department of the DoE that handles teaching geography, don't you? Until the USA invades some small nation, no one has a clue about its existance, let alone its location. So in fact this puts the budget for the DoE at $458 Billion, possibly adding the appropriations for the War in Iraq. Whether this is a cost-efficient way of teaching geography is still open for debate, though...
I like "Geographically challenged" a lot better...
Maybe because the people he CAN contact are working for the ISP of the offending party, and they are usually not to blame? No reason to piss off some guy working for an ISP, especially if you'd like that guy to help you with similar requests in the future.
I think I'll pay for my phones thanks...
Well - you do that either way, you know. Pay it all up-front, or pay it through somewhat more expensive service over a period of time. Either way, YOU pay the phone.
Point in case - a few months ago I got a new Nokia 3100 with a 6 month contract. 15 EUR upfront, 15 EUR per month subscription and then subscription drops to nothing and the contract is, well, over. That would give 7 times 15 EUR, or about the price of the phone. Could I have bought it for that price with no contract, and gotten a zero subscription rate? Yes. Did I choose to? No. YMMV.
Back in the days of the 286, I had a nice 286-12 with an open case (I had messed with something). I didn't bother to put it back on for a few days, and then had to water a plant on a shelve above it, and naturally proceeded to spill all the water into the thing while it ran. It stopped working immediately, gave a strange buzzing sound and smelled weird. I turned it off, took it apart, waited a day or two and reassembled it. It ran fine for several years, and was not retired until it was replaced by something faster (386@40MHz).
The competition will be with XAML, .NET Zero Deployment and the likes om them. The initiative described in the article is probably good and all, and I seriously hope they do make it into something. But make no mistake - MS has been working long and hard on getting stuff that blurs the line between web and local pages (or apps, if you prefer that name), and some of it works just fine (.NET Zero Deployment is a good example here). Soon enough, there will be no browser war because the browser will not be as essential as it is today. It still is, though - and that's why I use Firefox whenever I can :-)
Seriously, running richer and richer "weblets" (for lack of a better technology-neutral term) on your local machine, feeding them with remote data and making it all flexible and (hopefully) secure, is a trend that's been going on for YEARS now. A lot of us would like this to feature open standards, open source and other such goodness, but we need to take a long, hard look at the initiatives from MS - their market dominance means that THEIR standards will become a reality.
No IE fan (I use Firefox when I can - like right now), but I *NEED* IE for my frequent visits to windowsupdate.microsoft.com. At work we use MS stuff almost exclusively, and need to keep our W2K/WXP boxens updated. At home, I've got an WXP box for telecommuting and the odd game - it needs its fair share of windowsupdate too. If an update came out that made windowsupdate work just as well in Firefox, I guess there'd be little or no reason to use IE anymore for me.
Cool - I knew that one. It's fast, efficient and non-intuitive. Now try doing that with any non-integer type (like, say, a string), and the grandparent posters x,y = y,x really shines. Besides, the semantics of x,y = y,x is readily understandable.
The sound they refer to is a frequency-shifted and time-compressed recording of emissions from charged particles in the magnetic field around Saturn. There is no actual "sound" there, as sound requires an athmosphere(sp?) of some sort. There's athmosphere a-plenty on Saturn (most of it IS probably gas, after all), but none near or around the probe.
You need to read this a bit more carefully. It does not say "died before he proved it." It says "died before he could conclusively prove it," as in before he was able to do so.
Cool - that puts me in the same league as Riemann. I'm pretty sure that I'll die without having been able to prove the Riemann hypothesis too :-)
that one of the big improvements to come with digital was the ability to shoot countless images and just keep the good ones without the cost/delay/inconvenience of developing traditional film. Back then it mattered that each photo was good because you couldn't review the photo before several days had passed, and it was important that each shot was good. Now, I tend to just take maybe 20 or 30 shots in rapid succession and rely on one or more to be good - a quick review will tell me if it's ALL bad, and in 30 seconds the memory is erased, and I can start snapping pictures again, this time moving to avoid the backlight or whatever spoiled the first batch.
Not really arguing against learning to take better pictures - selfimprovement through learning is always GOOD (and geekish, mind you). It just doesn't seem as necessary as it once was.
The same as ever - whenever Windows is mentioned, lots of wisecracks about crashing is posted. Did you imagine they'd port Win95 or Win3.11 to HPC? Duh. They'll port something like WinXP or W2K3, and guess what - those are quite stable OS'es. Of course you CAN make them unstable, but that goes for PenguinWare as well...
Ah well, I better put on my flamesafe suit - I forgot to criticize Microsoft...
How would you react if gas went from $5.50 a gallon to $10.00 a gallon over the course of a year? That's the sort of increase that's happening here in the US.
You are so wrong. A comparable increase would be from $5.50 to $6.50 - just because your prices kind of doubled, doesn't mean it will double in the rest of the world. Most European countries (my own included) tax gasoline heavily to make us use less of it (and to get tax revenue) - this makes the increase much smaller as a percentage, since the tax is usually a set amount per gallon/liter, acting as an offset but not a multiplier.
What is needed is RANDOM width fonts.
My 6-year old can do that ANY day.
Or at least punish the people who mod them up.
Go right ahead - it's called metamoderation.
Is this just an actual case of, you get what you pay for? Does a good ~100ft. wireless keyboard/mouse need components that costs over 50% of that price ($80) assuming 50% for mark-up, etc.,.? That's hard to believe.
I think it's more a case of production volume. Lots of wireless stuff have ~30 ft. ranges, but few have a 100 ft. range. Since 100 ft. components were probably more expensive to develop, they have more cost to amortize over the product. And since demand is lower for 100 ft. range items, this adds even more development cost to each unit.
Even if the 100ft. component were just a beefed up version of the 30ft. component, the difference in number of items is very important to product cost, and you still need separate QA, packaging, marketing, handling etc. for the beefed up version.
We use WP8 extensively at work, and most of the word-processing functions in it are just fine. The implementation and interface sucks, though. It's been localized to my native language (danish), but the shortcuts are still using english abbrevations. The toolbar correctly shows a bold F for bold (called 'fed' in danish), but you still need to type Ctrl-B to activate it. I can not even begin to explain how totally counter-intuitive that is.
Most of the times when I save a document, the location of the friggin mouse becomes the new entry point. So when I type Ctrl-S to save the document and continue typing, the text will go to some random location in the document. The only certainty is that it's NOT where I was typing before, since I tend to move the mouse away from the area where I type.
In short, it's bad - except for the math/equation editor, which ROCKS! Luckily I can use that editor from inside Word XP.
Man, you really need to LAY off the spelling thing and GET LAID (layed?) (layered?) (lied?) - argh!