If all three major parties are essentially the same then it becomes that anyone who votes for any one of the major parties is voting for, well, any the major parties.
Similarly, in the US if you vote Democrat then you might as well be voting Republican, or vice versa.
The determining factor in whether democracy has been achieved (in the majoritarian sense) is whether 50% of the people have voted for one of the major parties.
Since 1997 there have been three parties with a more than negligible proportion of votes: the Tories (who are even less interested in freedom of trade than Thatcher was), the New Tories (who are distinguished by paying lip service to some of the larger, more corrupt unions), and the Tory Lapdogs (who are distinguished by having something to say about civil liberties, as long as what they say is inconsequential).
The public is thus getting, by and large, exactly what it has asked for.
And complaints about government are from a small minority.
Do you feel the need to brag about anything to a bunch of people who do care?
There are so many people who talk of the pure wonder of anonymity but they're quite happy to slap their name on projects when it means increasing their reputation/employability/respect. Some very well-known open source projects - even though staffed by technically highly competent people - seem primarily about the social factors.
ACs are less likely to reply imho - probably because it's harder to find out when you get a reply.
Your statement makes as much sense as, "Dogs like my apple tree bark loudly."
Do you mean that software written for Android/Meego/iOS platforms tends to have a highly responsive UI? How much software is running alongside? How complex is the software? What hardware platforms are you trying (particularly Android) on? 'cos I can start mspaint, wordpad and a khtml widget in a window each within a second, and switch between them instantly.
A TOUCH interface? On a COMPUTER? I knew I should have invested in BBC Micro light pens.
As for "tilt", err, hooray, a few timewasting games get another imprecise input method. Goodness knows there was no electronics to check how level a surface was before the iPad.
UIs like Android, Meego and iOS that are instantly responsive on their dual core ARM devices,
You're listing mobile operating systems, not UIs. What did you actually mean?
even new laptop/netbook form factors based on online data storage (ChromeOS).
This reminds me of the '70s. I miss IBM. They sure did sell storage at reasonable prices.
Oh, no, wait, they sold service guarantees. What's the Google service guarantee again?
It's all an indication that the computing world is finally routing around the damage that is Microsoft's desktop computing monopoly.
Curse Microsoft and the liberty of a PC you control in your own room!
10+ minute boot up times, corporate-mandated infestations of malware preventers and intermittent UI hangs
So you're blaming Microsoft for your firm's crap IT department?
If MS were feeling as conceited as Apple they'd have some "the only realistic choice for workstations since 1996" slogan. Because, you know, if you claim that you can sit all day using a 'phone as an interface then you either have no real work to do or you're a liar.
What really scares me is to hear that some critical services, e.g. medical, use iPads in the treatment room! The first time I saw that I was even more worried than the EEG machine connected to control software running on Windows 98.
I was once attacked by a dog. Since then I have carried around a solid gold tiger. It has made me the object of ridicule, my limbs are aching and I can barely afford to eat. But at least I haven't been attacked by any more dogs.
"You're just jealous 'cos I'm smarter," used to sound stupid in the playground. It's the battle cry of the populist appealing to the mediocre to join the "winning team".
But since the '80s it's become some sort of circular business philosophy: if you're rich you must be good; if you're good you deserve to be rich.
Take it from me: do the stupid tests, get the job, prove yourself professionally for a couple of years and you will never be asked again to do such tests by any future potential employers.
Or prove yourself professionally in the first couple of years somewhere which doesn't demonstrate that it's managed by idiots before you start your first day. Don't know about you, but I was only assigned one lifetime. I don't want to spend one twentieth of the (hopefully) healthy working proportion of that lifetime surrounded by people who have been accepted mostly on the basis of a meaningless test. Since this test is a "foot in the door" it is also determining the make-up of the workplace for decades to come, and I refuse to participate in something which will make things worse for me and everyone in the long run.
And, no, it is not more expensive to have better employees - it's well worth the time it would take to filter people based on (i) portfolio; (ii) meaningful tasks completed in own time; (iii) interview in which (i) and (ii) are discussed. In the current market, there's in fact no need whatever to hire inexperienced graduates - a recent graduate can be required to have done some interesting original work either within or without the university.
By refusing to do the tests, you just show that you don't care enough to make a small effort. In other words: you're lazy
That's an absurd conclusion and you know it. It's much harder to get a job if you carefully consider various implications and stick to what you consider is moral and rational rather than dance like a monkey for whoever is willing to throw you some coin. But I've heard your argument before, and in the past my response has been to sit through an unreasonable test, draw a line through my answers and walk out.
You make a fair point. Linux isn't a particularly theoretically interesting or elegant design. But at least studying it gives you a taste of practical, functional engineering. A lot of "why did you do it like that?" comes down to "because it works on all platforms and it's fast".
Studying one of the modern BSDs is a lesson in what happens when you devolve one code base into several competing platforms each of which wishes to maintain an air of exclusivity. Perhaps it's productive for an advanced coder to try to get to grips with one of them to see what happens when social engineering mets software engineering, but it's really not helpful for the beginner to do so.
No, it isn't. It's been maintained by a sequence of cliques via contributor-mentor relationships and is badly documented, with certain subsystems displaying a horrible lack of orthogonality.
Linux, on the other hand, is well worth studying - it's really been written for practical engineers by practical engineers, arranged and documented so that anyone sufficiently competent can contribute. Don't forget the O'Reilly books on understanding the kernel and writing device drivers.
You're asking me to check my facts yet pasting from Wikipedia.
Although in this case Wikipedia appears to be illustrating the point: "High School" is usually only found as part of the proper name of a school, having a generic meaning only in specific regions of England and Wales (not Berkshire, FWIW). When considering the abilities of English candidates in general, it would not be appropriate to talk of a "high-school level" anything.
Everyone can apply to Cambridge today - it seems very odd to base your offer on that, but I've heard weirder!
I get the impression that so many people use the London colleges at undergraduate level to simply get themselves a nice job without making too much effort, and the colleges know it. What they care about, and what the good academics(*) hope you care about, is the research work.
(*) There are bad ones. A close relation was the director of a well-known department for one of them. He spent a lot of time in China courting the nouveau riche for delicious foreign fee payments!
I have a fairly low opinion of myself. I was questioning the dissonance between everyone thinking Imperial is great and Imperial offering me a place:-).
If you want to call internship followed by employment 'networking' then that's up to you, I would disagree. At that point it's a merit based hire. You don't invite the interns back if they can't do the job.
The point in networking is not to prove you can do the job but to get your foot in the door. If you get a job through networking without the internship step but can't do the tasks given to you then you will be sacked. An internship provided through university contacts leading to a job is a process of networking - although you don't even have to regard it so for the 50% figure to hold in general in the job market.
I don't know whether networking is in fact more common in the US than the UK. My experience has been that there is a lot more meritocracy at certain levels, but I can't cough up comparative statistics.
Either you are deliberately choosing graduates from bad universities or you are contradicting yourself. Or maybe you don't understand the difference between an excellent research university and an excellent undergraduate degree.
Hm, at application I'd got a dozen or more A*s at GCSE and AO and was doing 5 A levels, all projected at grade A. In what way is saying "we don't want to see you for interview/entrance tests, just carry on doing what you're doing and we'll take you" a way of telling you they don't want you? TBH i can't remember whether their condition was 3 or 4 As, but who cares? English school exams have been pointlessly easy since Thatcher and her caretakers decided to implement the National Curriculum, convert O levels into GCSEs and push the sale of the exam boards to private publishers, achieving delicious profit-making quantity over quality.
Although your post has an air of personal bitterness coming out of nowhere, so perhaps something went badly for you.
Some people lie in interview regardless - giving prior work/filtering will only help catch out fraudsters, not make it harder to do so.
Are you sure there is relevant employment law which would regard taking open-source work into account as illegally discriminating against those with family responsibilities? If the only remotely interesting code people have produced is unable to be shown to any third party, doesn't that say something?
I consider it more efficient to set up and study the results of some challenges than to interview a series of people most of whom are going to be found inappropriate. Then there's the advantage of a process which increases the chance of giving you an excellent team member. As you've said, "We've seen a lot of great CVs and great talkers who turn out to be shite at the practice."
Do you understand the difference between quality of research output and quality of undergraduate degree?
In particular, what do you mean by Imperial being "academically brilliant at pretty much all"? I recall the entry offer they gave me for some computing degree requiring neither interview nor any sort of assessment beyond the usual 4 As at A level (which everyone who bothers opening the book can achieve). I turned down their offer but I assume either they have high attrition or lower standards than every dime-a-dozen London university graduate likes to claim.
I assume you accept that Jobcentre Plus isn't an "exclusive atmosphere" - use the big bad Internet to find out how many people on JSA end up finding jobs through existing contacts. As you go up the job ladder, this proportion goes up.
Next, find out specifically how graduates find work. In particular, add up the proportions who find work through friend, family or university contacts. You'll already be exceeding a third. It's not quite the 50% of the general job market, but universities offer one other thing: agreements with firms to offer internships. Once you include people who are offered a job following an internship, you are well over 50% of graduate employment. Many people don't get much knowledge/cognitive training out of university, but they do get that valuable contact to a first skilled job if they are sufficiently social to join in all the networking opportunities which are offered.
There are types of work where agencies/etc take a big role, but this is not the norm. Assuming you're a nurse, Nursie, you'll find your particular profession is not representative of the wider job market.
But your challenge did prompt me to wonder what it was like in the US. Everything I've found so far suggests that it's just like in the UK.
The question you should be asking yourself is: Where am I going wrong with my recruitment process that people who fail to solve what I regard as simple problems are being admitted for interview?
Slashdot Mirror
If all three major parties are essentially the same then it becomes that anyone who votes for any one of the major parties is voting for, well, any the major parties.
Similarly, in the US if you vote Democrat then you might as well be voting Republican, or vice versa.
The determining factor in whether democracy has been achieved (in the majoritarian sense) is whether 50% of the people have voted for one of the major parties.
They have.
People suck.
Since 1997 there have been three parties with a more than negligible proportion of votes: the Tories (who are even less interested in freedom of trade than Thatcher was), the New Tories (who are distinguished by paying lip service to some of the larger, more corrupt unions), and the Tory Lapdogs (who are distinguished by having something to say about civil liberties, as long as what they say is inconsequential).
The public is thus getting, by and large, exactly what it has asked for.
And complaints about government are from a small minority.
Right?
Do you feel the need to brag about anything to a bunch of people who do care?
There are so many people who talk of the pure wonder of anonymity but they're quite happy to slap their name on projects when it means increasing their reputation/employability/respect. Some very well-known open source projects - even though staffed by technically highly competent people - seem primarily about the social factors.
ACs are less likely to reply imho - probably because it's harder to find out when you get a reply.
Your statement makes as much sense as, "Dogs like my apple tree bark loudly."
Do you mean that software written for Android/Meego/iOS platforms tends to have a highly responsive UI? How much software is running alongside? How complex is the software? What hardware platforms are you trying (particularly Android) on? 'cos I can start mspaint, wordpad and a khtml widget in a window each within a second, and switch between them instantly.
Broken link starting "htthttp" to radio programme: check.
No link to original university publication: check.
Three jeers for the pro-government, fact-loose, post-Hutton BBC!
HTML5 is basically Apple's attempt to created a crippled form of "cloud app" delivery so people buy iApps instead. It's hardly competing on merit.
with fast new text input methods like Swype,
Fuck it, why not just go full Mactini.
tablets with tilt and touch interfaces,
A TOUCH interface? On a COMPUTER? I knew I should have invested in BBC Micro light pens.
As for "tilt", err, hooray, a few timewasting games get another imprecise input method. Goodness knows there was no electronics to check how level a surface was before the iPad.
UIs like Android, Meego and iOS that are instantly responsive on their dual core ARM devices,
You're listing mobile operating systems, not UIs. What did you actually mean?
even new laptop/netbook form factors based on online data storage (ChromeOS).
This reminds me of the '70s. I miss IBM. They sure did sell storage at reasonable prices.
Oh, no, wait, they sold service guarantees. What's the Google service guarantee again?
It's all an indication that the computing world is finally routing around the damage that is Microsoft's desktop computing monopoly.
Curse Microsoft and the liberty of a PC you control in your own room!
10+ minute boot up times, corporate-mandated infestations of malware preventers and intermittent UI hangs
So you're blaming Microsoft for your firm's crap IT department?
If MS were feeling as conceited as Apple they'd have some "the only realistic choice for workstations since 1996" slogan. Because, you know, if you claim that you can sit all day using a 'phone as an interface then you either have no real work to do or you're a liar.
What really scares me is to hear that some critical services, e.g. medical, use iPads in the treatment room! The first time I saw that I was even more worried than the EEG machine connected to control software running on Windows 98.
I was once attacked by a dog. Since then I have carried around a solid gold tiger. It has made me the object of ridicule, my limbs are aching and I can barely afford to eat. But at least I haven't been attacked by any more dogs.
God bless your betters!
"You're just jealous 'cos I'm smarter," used to sound stupid in the playground. It's the battle cry of the populist appealing to the mediocre to join the "winning team".
But since the '80s it's become some sort of circular business philosophy: if you're rich you must be good; if you're good you deserve to be rich.
Take it from me: do the stupid tests, get the job, prove yourself professionally for a couple of years and you will never be asked again to do such tests by any future potential employers.
Or prove yourself professionally in the first couple of years somewhere which doesn't demonstrate that it's managed by idiots before you start your first day. Don't know about you, but I was only assigned one lifetime. I don't want to spend one twentieth of the (hopefully) healthy working proportion of that lifetime surrounded by people who have been accepted mostly on the basis of a meaningless test. Since this test is a "foot in the door" it is also determining the make-up of the workplace for decades to come, and I refuse to participate in something which will make things worse for me and everyone in the long run.
And, no, it is not more expensive to have better employees - it's well worth the time it would take to filter people based on (i) portfolio; (ii) meaningful tasks completed in own time; (iii) interview in which (i) and (ii) are discussed. In the current market, there's in fact no need whatever to hire inexperienced graduates - a recent graduate can be required to have done some interesting original work either within or without the university.
By refusing to do the tests, you just show that you don't care enough to make a small effort. In other words: you're lazy
That's an absurd conclusion and you know it. It's much harder to get a job if you carefully consider various implications and stick to what you consider is moral and rational rather than dance like a monkey for whoever is willing to throw you some coin. But I've heard your argument before, and in the past my response has been to sit through an unreasonable test, draw a line through my answers and walk out.
You make a fair point. Linux isn't a particularly theoretically interesting or elegant design. But at least studying it gives you a taste of practical, functional engineering. A lot of "why did you do it like that?" comes down to "because it works on all platforms and it's fast".
Studying one of the modern BSDs is a lesson in what happens when you devolve one code base into several competing platforms each of which wishes to maintain an air of exclusivity. Perhaps it's productive for an advanced coder to try to get to grips with one of them to see what happens when social engineering mets software engineering, but it's really not helpful for the beginner to do so.
It would be cheaper to hire sweatshop labourers to follow you around and tie your shoes as necessary.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
The best learn from the best.
No, it isn't. It's been maintained by a sequence of cliques via contributor-mentor relationships and is badly documented, with certain subsystems displaying a horrible lack of orthogonality.
Linux, on the other hand, is well worth studying - it's really been written for practical engineers by practical engineers, arranged and documented so that anyone sufficiently competent can contribute. Don't forget the O'Reilly books on understanding the kernel and writing device drivers.
You're asking me to check my facts yet pasting from Wikipedia.
Although in this case Wikipedia appears to be illustrating the point: "High School" is usually only found as part of the proper name of a school, having a generic meaning only in specific regions of England and Wales (not Berkshire, FWIW). When considering the abilities of English candidates in general, it would not be appropriate to talk of a "high-school level" anything.
Everyone can apply to Cambridge today - it seems very odd to base your offer on that, but I've heard weirder!
I get the impression that so many people use the London colleges at undergraduate level to simply get themselves a nice job without making too much effort, and the colleges know it. What they care about, and what the good academics(*) hope you care about, is the research work.
(*) There are bad ones. A close relation was the director of a well-known department for one of them. He spent a lot of time in China courting the nouveau riche for delicious foreign fee payments!
I have a fairly low opinion of myself. I was questioning the dissonance between everyone thinking Imperial is great and Imperial offering me a place :-).
If you want to call internship followed by employment 'networking' then that's up to you, I would disagree. At that point it's a merit based hire. You don't invite the interns back if they can't do the job.
The point in networking is not to prove you can do the job but to get your foot in the door. If you get a job through networking without the internship step but can't do the tasks given to you then you will be sacked. An internship provided through university contacts leading to a job is a process of networking - although you don't even have to regard it so for the 50% figure to hold in general in the job market.
As for figures on how graduates find jobs, these again may require you to perform a 30 second search but I'm sure it's not beyond you :-). To get you started, here's one example of a smaller survey which approximately confirms the figures I gave.
I don't know whether networking is in fact more common in the US than the UK. My experience has been that there is a lot more meritocracy at certain levels, but I can't cough up comparative statistics.
Either you are deliberately choosing graduates from bad universities or you are contradicting yourself. Or maybe you don't understand the difference between an excellent research university and an excellent undergraduate degree.
Hm, at application I'd got a dozen or more A*s at GCSE and AO and was doing 5 A levels, all projected at grade A. In what way is saying "we don't want to see you for interview/entrance tests, just carry on doing what you're doing and we'll take you" a way of telling you they don't want you? TBH i can't remember whether their condition was 3 or 4 As, but who cares? English school exams have been pointlessly easy since Thatcher and her caretakers decided to implement the National Curriculum, convert O levels into GCSEs and push the sale of the exam boards to private publishers, achieving delicious profit-making quantity over quality.
Although your post has an air of personal bitterness coming out of nowhere, so perhaps something went badly for you.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
Some people lie in interview regardless - giving prior work/filtering will only help catch out fraudsters, not make it harder to do so.
Are you sure there is relevant employment law which would regard taking open-source work into account as illegally discriminating against those with family responsibilities? If the only remotely interesting code people have produced is unable to be shown to any third party, doesn't that say something?
I consider it more efficient to set up and study the results of some challenges than to interview a series of people most of whom are going to be found inappropriate. Then there's the advantage of a process which increases the chance of giving you an excellent team member. As you've said, "We've seen a lot of great CVs and great talkers who turn out to be shite at the practice."
Do you understand the difference between quality of research output and quality of undergraduate degree?
In particular, what do you mean by Imperial being "academically brilliant at pretty much all"? I recall the entry offer they gave me for some computing degree requiring neither interview nor any sort of assessment beyond the usual 4 As at A level (which everyone who bothers opening the book can achieve). I turned down their offer but I assume either they have high attrition or lower standards than every dime-a-dozen London university graduate likes to claim.
I assume you accept that Jobcentre Plus isn't an "exclusive atmosphere" - use the big bad Internet to find out how many people on JSA end up finding jobs through existing contacts. As you go up the job ladder, this proportion goes up.
Next, find out specifically how graduates find work. In particular, add up the proportions who find work through friend, family or university contacts. You'll already be exceeding a third. It's not quite the 50% of the general job market, but universities offer one other thing: agreements with firms to offer internships. Once you include people who are offered a job following an internship, you are well over 50% of graduate employment. Many people don't get much knowledge/cognitive training out of university, but they do get that valuable contact to a first skilled job if they are sufficiently social to join in all the networking opportunities which are offered.
There are types of work where agencies/etc take a big role, but this is not the norm. Assuming you're a nurse, Nursie, you'll find your particular profession is not representative of the wider job market.
But your challenge did prompt me to wonder what it was like in the US. Everything I've found so far suggests that it's just like in the UK.
The question you should be asking yourself is: Where am I going wrong with my recruitment process that people who fail to solve what I regard as simple problems are being admitted for interview?