So many people here are saying. The thing is, I've never really understood this. What does it matter that tabloid newspapers and celebrity wannabes are having a collective pissing match over things? If, for example, a serving MP were arguing strongly against gay rights while being a closet homosexual, there would be a legitimate public interest in the story. However, most of the time when people like professional sportsmen have taken out these injunctions, frankly I'm not sure there was any legitimate public interest argument in splashing their private lives all over the papers, unless they have made a point of playing on their celebrity in the media beyond their sporting role, which most actually don't.
I'm not sure what you think I'm blaming you personally for and why your reply was so defensive. I am not attacking you personally, merely challenging your position. I, personally, believe that privacy rights are seriously undervalued in modern society, and the tendency to make everything public by default is going to bite us firmly in the ass with increasing frequency until we get it. Balancing privacy and free speech is a difficult challenge, but a vital one given that both subjects are so important. Unfortunately, a whole generation of digital natives has now grown up with Facebook and Twitter and mobile phones, in countries where the potential for widespread abuse has not been fully realised within their short lifetimes, and the awareness of why privacy matters has been eroded in recent years.
Britain's libel laws, because those laws are so outrageous and unfair
You think it's outrageous and unfair that the details of a family making a private decision in the best interests of a suffering patient under tragic circumstances should not be revealed on a widely-read public forum for the benefit of religious nutjobs who might express their disagreement through violence?
Free speech is not an absolute right anywhere that I know of, and this sort of case is one reason why. The fact that the Internet makes it more difficult to enforce this law does not make the ruling any less appropriate.
Actually, I think the reaction here on Slashdot is rather sad. It's like there's a knee-jerk "we deserve to know, you can't silence the Internet, free speech is more important" response whenever a story like this comes up. And it's like the people saying don't realise how wrong they are, on all three counts.
(After recent events, I find it staggering that anyone still believes the Internet in its current, unregulated form as a haven for breaking local laws using international proxies is going to survive. It's a big network, but you're still paying real companies with legally accountable executives for access to it, and the major infrastructure they depend on is still provided by other real companies with legally accountable executives. If you don't think that makes the common guy vulnerable to serious legal retribution if the Powers That Be decide they don't like something, I invite you to look up the draconian powers that can almost certainly be used against you today if you are even accused of copyright infringement by a major media player and you live in pretty much any first world country. I would also remind you that entire countries have been disconnected from the Internet accidentally, simply by severing the wrong cable, and other countries have had their entire communications networks suspended by abusive governments in recent months. And of course, there are the plans that are no doubt already well under way post-Wikileaks to ensure that anyone who makes a serious attempt to set up an alternative infrastructure that can circumvent such harsh future rules can be "dealt with" before they escape to a neutral country.)
I've basically stopped buying new AAA titles as well. I don't know what kind of crapware was being installed on my old PCs, but I know that I'm never allowing any of it on my new ones.
In other news, our household is contributing to the success of companies like PopCap, who seem to have a strong view that any DRM they use should be mild and never interfere with genuine customers' enjoyment of their products, and probably of GoG themselves in the near future.
I'm still trying to work out how (a) any of these invasive DRM systems can get by security in an OS (even if MS is playing ball with the games companies for some reason, it surely doesn't want to support others using the same mechanisms for even nastier purposes), and (b) these invasive DRM schemes are even legal under (in the UK) the Computer Misuse Act, Data Protection Act, and probably various more recent and/or related legislation.
The bloat is irritating to those of us who first switched to Firefox for a lean, fast browser.
What has irritated me more recently though is all the half-baked functionality and poor quality control. Right now, using Firefox 4 on my development PC, I have everything from obvious keming errors in the typography engine that make some words literally illegible up to intermittently and unpredictably completely breaking Java applets, via a really irritating UI for add-ons and extensions that has more basic usability problems than I care to list in a short post here and performance that is now pathetically slow compared to every other browser I use (and for the record, that is with just a handful of extensions installed, all of them mainstream and with positive reputations).
If they insist on releasing much more rapidly -- and as a web developer, I'll just note here that I no longer make any contractual guarantees at all about compatibility of my products with Chrome precisely because of their rapid release and push development process -- then it would be nice if they at least didn't break what used to be working while they're playing with the new toys.
IMHO, yes, we do, because a large proportion of the growth in world population over the next few years will come not from increases in birth rates but from longer lifespans for those already in the world. You need enough younger, stronger people to look after your older, wiser people effectively. In short, the practical alternative to rising population over the next few years isn't birth control, it's euthanasia on a global scale. I suspect I'm not the only one who has a problem with that.
Fortunately, we can predict trends in global population quite far in advance, and just because the curve is on an upswing for various reasons today, that doesn't mean it will continue to be so indefinitely.
I guess all of us running Firefox 3.6 on XP have malware, then. Possible, I suppose, but seems unlikely...
In any case, the new interface seems to be so poor that it's basically a waste of time visiting Slashdot today. I've put up with it enough to see if anything dramatic is happening in this thread, and it looks like the sidebar issue has been fixed, but the whole thing is so unusably slow and so many basic things like seeing replies to earlier messages aren't even slightly working that I think I'll just leave it for a few days.
As for turning off "the ajax crap", well, we'll all just get off your lawn now... but I doubt the rest of the internet is going to oblige.
The rest of the Internet doesn't lock up Firefox for 10 seconds just to load a single page. I will now enjoy sitting back and watching Slashdot community debate whether this obvious suckage is due to Slashdot itself or their favourite OSS browser.;-)
Seriously, though, there is a nasty layout bug where the menu top-left of every page expands if your user name is wider than the default area, hiding all of the content in the main column that is unfortunate enough to fall underneath. Since the menu goes most of the way down the page, that makes Slashdot almost unusable today for me. (I can see the full width of this edit box at the bottom of my screen to write this post, but only just.) I hope they either fix that quickly or give us an option to revert to one of the old layouts until they can.
Perhaps this is an excellent example of the difference between the veterans and the kids with the new toys.
The kids with the new toys focus on potential. C is yesterday's technology to them, underpowered and inefficient. The benefits C# offers are compelling. Their default is optimism, choosing C#.
The veterans focus on reality. They have seen it all before, and want to see real evidence before switching from tried and tested technology to something new. C is the safe bet to them. C# has potential but the risks need to be properly understood. The veterans' default is caution, choosing C.
Both groups think those in the other are ignorant and haven't learned enough about C# to make a properly informed decision, but the meaning of "enough" differs, and the veterans carry on getting real work done in the meantime.
Interesting sig. I reckon the history is a bit like this:
Web 1.0: Organisations provide most content, enthusiasts the rest
Web 1.1: Better ways to find that content evolve (search engines)
Web 1.5: Individuals provide content (MySpace, personal home pages, blogging)
Web 2.0: Sites gets interactive (blog comments, user-submitted content drives news sites like Slashdot)
Web 2.5: Interaction generalises to social networks
Web 3.0 (today): Social networks become platforms, ecosystems build around them (Twitter tools, social games, "share this" links on blog posts, portable ID)
I suspect that it will actually be people tiring of trivial comments and false relationships that brings down the current generation of social networks, but if the bad guys start exploiting all the privacy holes then that might see a move to more open, encrypted platforms first. In the long run, I suspect the social aspect will become much more distributed and personal, and centralised web sites will go back to being driven more by expert, or at least editorially controlled, content, rather than just repeating every little contribution from every user, spammer and troll under the sun.
Swearing at me isn't going to make your position any more convincing.
In any case, the ability to quit only matters if the deal is clear up-front and abuse is not widespread. Right now, abuse of employees by employers is widespread in many industries. In practice, employers usually have significantly more bargaining power than employees when it comes to negotiating contracts and significantly greater legal resources at their disposal in the event of a disagreement later. In the absence of either statutory regulation or employees grouping together to adopt collective bargaining positions (as unions do, for example) there is little incentive for employers not to abuse the arrangement unless they actually have a sense of ethics (or take the unusually enlightened view that keeping your staff happy is actually good for business).
Hint: If your contract says one thing about how many hours you will work per week and how much leave you will take, but you are routinely expected to work longer hours or take less holiday for no extra benefit in return, then you are an abusee. In what other part of the legal system is it considered routine or acceptable to outright lie in a binding agreement like that? It's about as ethical as "fair usage agreements", where "fair usage" means "we can advertise using words like 'unlimited' but do not in fact have to provide unlimited service". Sooner or later, industries that make a habit of doing this tend to get slapped down by the advertising regulators, but employers as a group are rarely subject to the same kind of ongoing scrutiny.
Oh, and by the way, some of us do quit. We become contractors and make a lot more money, or even start our own businesses and then steal the best people from the abusive employers by offering fair employment contracts. And then the abusive employers whinge to the media about how there are never any good people available to hire, and blame it on the global economy or the weather or some other lame excuse in the official statements to shareholders. Unfortunately, as long as most people don't know enough about alternative arrangements like contracting to realise they are being abused in the first place, that abuse will continue, and as usual the people least able to cope with it will be the ones who suffer the most.
So what do you call a contractor that has their tools provided by the client?
A walking tax liability!
In the UK, for example, the infamous IR35 rules for contractors mean that even experts aren't always completely sure when someone might be considered a disguised employee and thus made subject to employment-style tax rules. However, a few acid tests evolved from the early case law, and once you're past things like whether you work fixed hours for a fixed pay cheque, you do get to issues like whether the client provided the resources for the job. (This has been a long-standing problem for people who are genuinely operating as contractors, but start to fall into a grey area with some of the commonly applied rules of thumb; the whole area is currently under review, but only after years of lobbying and a change of government.)
Your personal equipment should not affect your chances of landing a job.
For employees, which is the topic at hand, I agree. However, I don't think it's unreasonable for a business that wants to outsource some work to favour someone who has more ability to do that work, whether that comes from having better tools or otherwise. It just means the business should expect to pay more for someone with more ability, which brings us back to the earlier comment about contractors.
I think the GP has it spot on. The point of an employment relationship is that the employer provides a certain degree of security for the employee — usually starting with a known compensation package and providing the necessary resources to do the job — thus bearing the overheads and risk themselves. In return, the employer keeps any remaining profits once their commitments to their staff are honoured, even if those staff generate many times their wages in profits.
If the employees aren't getting the security side of the deal but the employer still wants to keep all the open-ended benefits for themselves, then it's not so much employment as abuse.
As the GP suggested, if an employer wants to work with independently capable people without the obligation to provide a safety net, that's fine, but the employer should expect to pay those staff accordingly. This is why contractors typically command 2-3x the hourly rate that similarly capable employees do.
Personally, I think it's unfortunate that for many people, employment is considered the default or even the only possible business relationship. There is really no reason it should be in most industries, but a lot of relatively inexperienced workers and a lot of small businesses have never really considered the alternatives, even if a contractor-client relationship might suit both parties better. I suspect that quite a few social and economic problems in first world countries today might be improved if we focussed less on forcing the idea of employer-employee relationships down every teenager's throat and more on encouraging independent workers who can provide professional services more flexibly (and not just in computer-related fields).
At which point you're done with the game unless...
I don't see why that's a problem. I don't buy a movie or a book for replay value. I would rather have a game that was detailed and entertaining for a few days than one which lasted forever but became monotonous and lacked any real depth. Unfortunately, the people who make games only seem interested in serving the people who do want endless whatever these days, which I guess is why I don't buy a whole lot of games any more (aside from the buggy-as-hell, DRM'd-to-death nature of most of them, that is).
BTW, my nomination for thought-I-screwed-up-permanently-and-needed-to-go-back moment is getting kidnapped and waking up with no stuff in Deus Ex.
The widespread problem is that most software costs far too much for consumers, given that it is usually a huge hassle to obtain and install it, and then it often doesn't work properly anyway.
Exactly. Apps are, for the most part, just relatively small and simple programs. We used to get this sort of thing for free one way or another, because this sort of code is within the scope of a one-person, for-fun project that they would give away just for the satisfaction. People would get their demo/PIM/whatever included on a magazine cover disk, or share it on a BBS, or e-mail it to friends, or put it on their web site, or host it on $code_sharing_site, depending on which generation you're from.
This has always been a sharp contrast with "serious" programs, the kind of thing that require a lot of time from a lot of people to write, which would be sold in shops or, more recently, downloadable.
Apps for mobile devices are an odd hybrid, trying to take the simple stuff people used to get for free and make money off it by controlling the only distribution channel. As a businessman, I have to respect Apple et al's ability to, apparently successfully, establish new business models based around taking "minipayments" (not quite micropayments yet) for small pieces of downloadable content. However, I also have to think that if the platforms were open and people could download whatever they wanted onto their phone the same way we have with PCs for decades, you wouldn't see most insta-app developers making any serious money.
Unfortunately, while closed platforms are obviously in your interests if you control the only available channel, the same problems arise that you find with any other middleman-based monopoly. Ultimately, the consumer gets screwed because there is no real competitive market, and the people building the product get screwed because the middleman takes a big cut of the money and can cut the developer out of the system on a whim.
Fortunately, this model is unlikely to be sustainable once the novelty wears off. I don't believe consumers are going to pay for iFart apps forever, so apps wanting payment will have to start offering real value, something beyond what your mate could write in a weekend as a favour/fun experiment. However, the ability to cut out developers on a whim (as Apple have reportedly done on numerous occasions) makes investing in developing that kind of app a dangerous proposition for businesses, so I suspect the platform/channel services will need to become significantly more developer-friendly. Otherwise, since there are monopoly channels for each mobile platform but several platforms with none in a dominant market position right now, developers will gravitate towards the more favourable channels, and the more developer-hostile ones may see their platform's reputation sink. Hopefully this will lead to a more sensible balance between the interests of users, developers and platform/channel providers. And then I woke up...:-)
The trouble is, if it drives away some customers who won't buy an artificially crippled product, but it also prevents more potential customers from casually copying in the playground so they buy instead, then the DRM is probably a good investment for the company. It still means the honest part of the market is getting screwed while the dishonest part is benefitting, but the bottom line of the company is benefitting as well. Even DRM that only works for the first few weeks before a crack comes out can still be worth it in pure business terms.
Sadly, we have brought this upon ourselves: it is what we get in return for years of accepting lame arguments from the dishonest people about how information wants to be free, copyright infringement isn't theft, the big media companies deserve it, etc. Instead of enforcing the laws that are there to encourage businesses to develop good products with a reasonable expectation of profiting in return, we have taught the businesses that a confrontational attitude is the most profitable one to take, and that those of us who dislike DRM enough that we really won't buy broken products are insignificant relative to the number of freeloaders who would otherwise get away with it.
I don't see this changing unless and until either (a) more honest customers refuse to buy encumbered products (e.g., if DRM gets too irritating or popular sentiment changes), (b) more dishonest customers are compelled to buy if they want to play rather than freeloading (e.g., if we make a serious effort to enforce reasonable penalties in law), or possibly (c) the law starts enforcing advertising requirements and/or penalties for products that don't work properly or cause other damage because of poor DRM implementations.
I too read the list and thought, "So there will be mobile devices and multimedia applications in 2011? I could never have guessed!"
I'm hoping for a few more game-changing developments, though I have no idea how many might arrive in a useful form within the next 12 months. For example:
One or more open, secure, distributed social networks could take off.
Someone might release an "open" smartphone platform, providing good hardware and standard APIs but letting developers build the rest of the UI and consumers install whatever they want to.
We might see multimedia, storage and household devices start pushing interoperability standards as a major selling point, so I can finally connect all the bits of kit in my home wirelessly and watch/listen to/play stuff on whatever device I want, wherever the various relevant kit is physically located. (Much of this is already possible to some extent, but usually only found with very high-end devices and/or with expensive household automation systems.)
What I would really like, from both a personal and a professional point of view, is for some people with clue to start taking technology-related law seriously as well and deal with issues like net neutrality, IP (from both the fair use and the effective enforcement angles), DRM and EULA abuse, on-line privacy, vendor lock-in and de facto monopolies, defective-by-design hardware, and so on. Alas, given the current make-up of the government in most countries that affect me, I don't see that sort of thing happening within a year, so I suspect we are stuck with broken-by-design products and dubiously controlled content for a while yet.
I'm surprised the BlackBerry Torch didn't make it onto a list like this. It should have been their latest and greatest, but their first large touchscreen device offered a resolution at least a generation behind the competition from Apple, HTC, and friends and poor touch responsiveness as well.
Also, when I asked the Orange store about it and they told me the price, my immediate reaction was that I would be getting it with a 24-month plan, not just off the shelf. They told me the price they were quoting was with the 24-month lock-in. I actually laughed out loud.
Maybe the question should be, with 12 years of open source branding, and with well-marketed products like Ubuntu, why have we not advanced further?
Because unlike RMS, most people who are using FOSS really do care more about free-as-in-beer. Also, most people can understand that while FOSS has its success stories, there is little evidence that it inherently produces better quality products. FOSS has been at its most successful, in terms of size of user base, when providing "good enough" and free-of-charge products. It has also found success in server rooms and software houses, where the technically knowledgeable people using it value the typical strengths of FOSS projects and can tolerate their typical weaknesses.
Most expensive commercial software gets activation right most of the time these days. If it didn't, it wouldn't sell. The trouble is, if you are the guy in the unlucky X% who are doing something perfectly legitimate that the DRM/activation code happens not to like, you can still have a really bad day even though most people don't even notice.
As for less expensive consumer software like games, if you've never had a problem with activation or DRM then either you've been amazingly lucky or you just don't play a lot of recent high-end titles. I've got so bored of the bugs and invasive software and games that want me to turn off various security programs I run as standard (because that's going to happen) that I hardly buy AAA titles at all myself these days, and looking at the Assassin's Creed II fiasco I can't say I'm sad about it.
JS isn't the problem. The problem is dumb stuff like not running tabs in separate processes, so loading a single slow tab from, say, a bookmark group locks up the whole browser.
Slashdot is by far the #1 culprit on my system, BTW: since the redesign, it can take an eternity to load a page with lots of comments on it, which is painful if you're looking up a few articles and the corresponding comments off the front page. Ditto for most other social news sites to some extent, though none I use is anything like as bad as here for page load times.
However, you do actually have to send it back in that case, which almost certainly means a trip to the Post Office for most of us. Given that it is a similar amount of hassle for me to get to a "local" Post Office these days as it is to get into the city centre and browse in a book store, the Distance Selling regs aren't really worth that much to me in practice.
On a related note, any time I get a delivery from Amazon, I'm stuck making sure either that there is someone around at home full time to accept the delivery if it's too big for the letter box or that I can afford the time and hassle of going out to the mail depot to pick up the parcel if they tried to deliver it when I was out. We don't all work in offices that are staffed full-time by someone who can sign for someone else's package on delivery.
Slashdot Mirror
The UK has a shitty vile unfair system
So many people here are saying. The thing is, I've never really understood this. What does it matter that tabloid newspapers and celebrity wannabes are having a collective pissing match over things? If, for example, a serving MP were arguing strongly against gay rights while being a closet homosexual, there would be a legitimate public interest in the story. However, most of the time when people like professional sportsmen have taken out these injunctions, frankly I'm not sure there was any legitimate public interest argument in splashing their private lives all over the papers, unless they have made a point of playing on their celebrity in the media beyond their sporting role, which most actually don't.
I'm not sure what you think I'm blaming you personally for and why your reply was so defensive. I am not attacking you personally, merely challenging your position. I, personally, believe that privacy rights are seriously undervalued in modern society, and the tendency to make everything public by default is going to bite us firmly in the ass with increasing frequency until we get it. Balancing privacy and free speech is a difficult challenge, but a vital one given that both subjects are so important. Unfortunately, a whole generation of digital natives has now grown up with Facebook and Twitter and mobile phones, in countries where the potential for widespread abuse has not been fully realised within their short lifetimes, and the awareness of why privacy matters has been eroded in recent years.
Britain's libel laws, because those laws are so outrageous and unfair
You think it's outrageous and unfair that the details of a family making a private decision in the best interests of a suffering patient under tragic circumstances should not be revealed on a widely-read public forum for the benefit of religious nutjobs who might express their disagreement through violence?
Free speech is not an absolute right anywhere that I know of, and this sort of case is one reason why. The fact that the Internet makes it more difficult to enforce this law does not make the ruling any less appropriate.
Actually, I think the reaction here on Slashdot is rather sad. It's like there's a knee-jerk "we deserve to know, you can't silence the Internet, free speech is more important" response whenever a story like this comes up. And it's like the people saying don't realise how wrong they are, on all three counts.
(After recent events, I find it staggering that anyone still believes the Internet in its current, unregulated form as a haven for breaking local laws using international proxies is going to survive. It's a big network, but you're still paying real companies with legally accountable executives for access to it, and the major infrastructure they depend on is still provided by other real companies with legally accountable executives. If you don't think that makes the common guy vulnerable to serious legal retribution if the Powers That Be decide they don't like something, I invite you to look up the draconian powers that can almost certainly be used against you today if you are even accused of copyright infringement by a major media player and you live in pretty much any first world country. I would also remind you that entire countries have been disconnected from the Internet accidentally, simply by severing the wrong cable, and other countries have had their entire communications networks suspended by abusive governments in recent months. And of course, there are the plans that are no doubt already well under way post-Wikileaks to ensure that anyone who makes a serious attempt to set up an alternative infrastructure that can circumvent such harsh future rules can be "dealt with" before they escape to a neutral country.)
I just stopped buying games.
I've basically stopped buying new AAA titles as well. I don't know what kind of crapware was being installed on my old PCs, but I know that I'm never allowing any of it on my new ones.
In other news, our household is contributing to the success of companies like PopCap, who seem to have a strong view that any DRM they use should be mild and never interfere with genuine customers' enjoyment of their products, and probably of GoG themselves in the near future.
I'm still trying to work out how (a) any of these invasive DRM systems can get by security in an OS (even if MS is playing ball with the games companies for some reason, it surely doesn't want to support others using the same mechanisms for even nastier purposes), and (b) these invasive DRM schemes are even legal under (in the UK) the Computer Misuse Act, Data Protection Act, and probably various more recent and/or related legislation.
The bloat is irritating to those of us who first switched to Firefox for a lean, fast browser.
What has irritated me more recently though is all the half-baked functionality and poor quality control. Right now, using Firefox 4 on my development PC, I have everything from obvious keming errors in the typography engine that make some words literally illegible up to intermittently and unpredictably completely breaking Java applets, via a really irritating UI for add-ons and extensions that has more basic usability problems than I care to list in a short post here and performance that is now pathetically slow compared to every other browser I use (and for the record, that is with just a handful of extensions installed, all of them mainstream and with positive reputations).
If they insist on releasing much more rapidly -- and as a web developer, I'll just note here that I no longer make any contractual guarantees at all about compatibility of my products with Chrome precisely because of their rapid release and push development process -- then it would be nice if they at least didn't break what used to be working while they're playing with the new toys.
IMHO, yes, we do, because a large proportion of the growth in world population over the next few years will come not from increases in birth rates but from longer lifespans for those already in the world. You need enough younger, stronger people to look after your older, wiser people effectively. In short, the practical alternative to rising population over the next few years isn't birth control, it's euthanasia on a global scale. I suspect I'm not the only one who has a problem with that.
Fortunately, we can predict trends in global population quite far in advance, and just because the curve is on an upswing for various reasons today, that doesn't mean it will continue to be so indefinitely.
I guess all of us running Firefox 3.6 on XP have malware, then. Possible, I suppose, but seems unlikely...
In any case, the new interface seems to be so poor that it's basically a waste of time visiting Slashdot today. I've put up with it enough to see if anything dramatic is happening in this thread, and it looks like the sidebar issue has been fixed, but the whole thing is so unusably slow and so many basic things like seeing replies to earlier messages aren't even slightly working that I think I'll just leave it for a few days.
As for turning off "the ajax crap", well, we'll all just get off your lawn now... but I doubt the rest of the internet is going to oblige.
The rest of the Internet doesn't lock up Firefox for 10 seconds just to load a single page. I will now enjoy sitting back and watching Slashdot community debate whether this obvious suckage is due to Slashdot itself or their favourite OSS browser. ;-)
Seriously, though, there is a nasty layout bug where the menu top-left of every page expands if your user name is wider than the default area, hiding all of the content in the main column that is unfortunate enough to fall underneath. Since the menu goes most of the way down the page, that makes Slashdot almost unusable today for me. (I can see the full width of this edit box at the bottom of my screen to write this post, but only just.) I hope they either fix that quickly or give us an option to revert to one of the old layouts until they can.
Perhaps this is an excellent example of the difference between the veterans and the kids with the new toys.
The kids with the new toys focus on potential. C is yesterday's technology to them, underpowered and inefficient. The benefits C# offers are compelling. Their default is optimism, choosing C#.
The veterans focus on reality. They have seen it all before, and want to see real evidence before switching from tried and tested technology to something new. C is the safe bet to them. C# has potential but the risks need to be properly understood. The veterans' default is caution, choosing C.
Both groups think those in the other are ignorant and haven't learned enough about C# to make a properly informed decision, but the meaning of "enough" differs, and the veterans carry on getting real work done in the meantime.
Interesting sig. I reckon the history is a bit like this:
I suspect that it will actually be people tiring of trivial comments and false relationships that brings down the current generation of social networks, but if the bad guys start exploiting all the privacy holes then that might see a move to more open, encrypted platforms first. In the long run, I suspect the social aspect will become much more distributed and personal, and centralised web sites will go back to being driven more by expert, or at least editorially controlled, content, rather than just repeating every little contribution from every user, spammer and troll under the sun.
Swearing at me isn't going to make your position any more convincing.
In any case, the ability to quit only matters if the deal is clear up-front and abuse is not widespread. Right now, abuse of employees by employers is widespread in many industries. In practice, employers usually have significantly more bargaining power than employees when it comes to negotiating contracts and significantly greater legal resources at their disposal in the event of a disagreement later. In the absence of either statutory regulation or employees grouping together to adopt collective bargaining positions (as unions do, for example) there is little incentive for employers not to abuse the arrangement unless they actually have a sense of ethics (or take the unusually enlightened view that keeping your staff happy is actually good for business).
Hint: If your contract says one thing about how many hours you will work per week and how much leave you will take, but you are routinely expected to work longer hours or take less holiday for no extra benefit in return, then you are an abusee. In what other part of the legal system is it considered routine or acceptable to outright lie in a binding agreement like that? It's about as ethical as "fair usage agreements", where "fair usage" means "we can advertise using words like 'unlimited' but do not in fact have to provide unlimited service". Sooner or later, industries that make a habit of doing this tend to get slapped down by the advertising regulators, but employers as a group are rarely subject to the same kind of ongoing scrutiny.
Oh, and by the way, some of us do quit. We become contractors and make a lot more money, or even start our own businesses and then steal the best people from the abusive employers by offering fair employment contracts. And then the abusive employers whinge to the media about how there are never any good people available to hire, and blame it on the global economy or the weather or some other lame excuse in the official statements to shareholders. Unfortunately, as long as most people don't know enough about alternative arrangements like contracting to realise they are being abused in the first place, that abuse will continue, and as usual the people least able to cope with it will be the ones who suffer the most.
So what do you call a contractor that has their tools provided by the client?
A walking tax liability!
In the UK, for example, the infamous IR35 rules for contractors mean that even experts aren't always completely sure when someone might be considered a disguised employee and thus made subject to employment-style tax rules. However, a few acid tests evolved from the early case law, and once you're past things like whether you work fixed hours for a fixed pay cheque, you do get to issues like whether the client provided the resources for the job. (This has been a long-standing problem for people who are genuinely operating as contractors, but start to fall into a grey area with some of the commonly applied rules of thumb; the whole area is currently under review, but only after years of lobbying and a change of government.)
Your personal equipment should not affect your chances of landing a job.
For employees, which is the topic at hand, I agree. However, I don't think it's unreasonable for a business that wants to outsource some work to favour someone who has more ability to do that work, whether that comes from having better tools or otherwise. It just means the business should expect to pay more for someone with more ability, which brings us back to the earlier comment about contractors.
We're not talking about mechanics in a garage.
I think the GP has it spot on. The point of an employment relationship is that the employer provides a certain degree of security for the employee — usually starting with a known compensation package and providing the necessary resources to do the job — thus bearing the overheads and risk themselves. In return, the employer keeps any remaining profits once their commitments to their staff are honoured, even if those staff generate many times their wages in profits.
If the employees aren't getting the security side of the deal but the employer still wants to keep all the open-ended benefits for themselves, then it's not so much employment as abuse.
As the GP suggested, if an employer wants to work with independently capable people without the obligation to provide a safety net, that's fine, but the employer should expect to pay those staff accordingly. This is why contractors typically command 2-3x the hourly rate that similarly capable employees do.
Personally, I think it's unfortunate that for many people, employment is considered the default or even the only possible business relationship. There is really no reason it should be in most industries, but a lot of relatively inexperienced workers and a lot of small businesses have never really considered the alternatives, even if a contractor-client relationship might suit both parties better. I suspect that quite a few social and economic problems in first world countries today might be improved if we focussed less on forcing the idea of employer-employee relationships down every teenager's throat and more on encouraging independent workers who can provide professional services more flexibly (and not just in computer-related fields).
That's not much use if the company already went bust, though, and if this one isn't even profitable yet then that is a real possibility.
At which point you're done with the game unless...
I don't see why that's a problem. I don't buy a movie or a book for replay value. I would rather have a game that was detailed and entertaining for a few days than one which lasted forever but became monotonous and lacked any real depth. Unfortunately, the people who make games only seem interested in serving the people who do want endless whatever these days, which I guess is why I don't buy a whole lot of games any more (aside from the buggy-as-hell, DRM'd-to-death nature of most of them, that is).
BTW, my nomination for thought-I-screwed-up-permanently-and-needed-to-go-back moment is getting kidnapped and waking up with no stuff in Deus Ex.
The widespread problem is that most software costs far too much for consumers, given that it is usually a huge hassle to obtain and install it, and then it often doesn't work properly anyway.
Exactly. Apps are, for the most part, just relatively small and simple programs. We used to get this sort of thing for free one way or another, because this sort of code is within the scope of a one-person, for-fun project that they would give away just for the satisfaction. People would get their demo/PIM/whatever included on a magazine cover disk, or share it on a BBS, or e-mail it to friends, or put it on their web site, or host it on $code_sharing_site, depending on which generation you're from.
This has always been a sharp contrast with "serious" programs, the kind of thing that require a lot of time from a lot of people to write, which would be sold in shops or, more recently, downloadable.
Apps for mobile devices are an odd hybrid, trying to take the simple stuff people used to get for free and make money off it by controlling the only distribution channel. As a businessman, I have to respect Apple et al's ability to, apparently successfully, establish new business models based around taking "minipayments" (not quite micropayments yet) for small pieces of downloadable content. However, I also have to think that if the platforms were open and people could download whatever they wanted onto their phone the same way we have with PCs for decades, you wouldn't see most insta-app developers making any serious money.
Unfortunately, while closed platforms are obviously in your interests if you control the only available channel, the same problems arise that you find with any other middleman-based monopoly. Ultimately, the consumer gets screwed because there is no real competitive market, and the people building the product get screwed because the middleman takes a big cut of the money and can cut the developer out of the system on a whim.
Fortunately, this model is unlikely to be sustainable once the novelty wears off. I don't believe consumers are going to pay for iFart apps forever, so apps wanting payment will have to start offering real value, something beyond what your mate could write in a weekend as a favour/fun experiment. However, the ability to cut out developers on a whim (as Apple have reportedly done on numerous occasions) makes investing in developing that kind of app a dangerous proposition for businesses, so I suspect the platform/channel services will need to become significantly more developer-friendly. Otherwise, since there are monopoly channels for each mobile platform but several platforms with none in a dominant market position right now, developers will gravitate towards the more favourable channels, and the more developer-hostile ones may see their platform's reputation sink. Hopefully this will lead to a more sensible balance between the interests of users, developers and platform/channel providers. And then I woke up... :-)
Now, since DRM clearly drives away customers
The trouble is, if it drives away some customers who won't buy an artificially crippled product, but it also prevents more potential customers from casually copying in the playground so they buy instead, then the DRM is probably a good investment for the company. It still means the honest part of the market is getting screwed while the dishonest part is benefitting, but the bottom line of the company is benefitting as well. Even DRM that only works for the first few weeks before a crack comes out can still be worth it in pure business terms.
Sadly, we have brought this upon ourselves: it is what we get in return for years of accepting lame arguments from the dishonest people about how information wants to be free, copyright infringement isn't theft, the big media companies deserve it, etc. Instead of enforcing the laws that are there to encourage businesses to develop good products with a reasonable expectation of profiting in return, we have taught the businesses that a confrontational attitude is the most profitable one to take, and that those of us who dislike DRM enough that we really won't buy broken products are insignificant relative to the number of freeloaders who would otherwise get away with it.
I don't see this changing unless and until either (a) more honest customers refuse to buy encumbered products (e.g., if DRM gets too irritating or popular sentiment changes), (b) more dishonest customers are compelled to buy if they want to play rather than freeloading (e.g., if we make a serious effort to enforce reasonable penalties in law), or possibly (c) the law starts enforcing advertising requirements and/or penalties for products that don't work properly or cause other damage because of poor DRM implementations.
I too read the list and thought, "So there will be mobile devices and multimedia applications in 2011? I could never have guessed!"
I'm hoping for a few more game-changing developments, though I have no idea how many might arrive in a useful form within the next 12 months. For example:
What I would really like, from both a personal and a professional point of view, is for some people with clue to start taking technology-related law seriously as well and deal with issues like net neutrality, IP (from both the fair use and the effective enforcement angles), DRM and EULA abuse, on-line privacy, vendor lock-in and de facto monopolies, defective-by-design hardware, and so on. Alas, given the current make-up of the government in most countries that affect me, I don't see that sort of thing happening within a year, so I suspect we are stuck with broken-by-design products and dubiously controlled content for a while yet.
I'm surprised the BlackBerry Torch didn't make it onto a list like this. It should have been their latest and greatest, but their first large touchscreen device offered a resolution at least a generation behind the competition from Apple, HTC, and friends and poor touch responsiveness as well.
Also, when I asked the Orange store about it and they told me the price, my immediate reaction was that I would be getting it with a 24-month plan, not just off the shelf. They told me the price they were quoting was with the 24-month lock-in. I actually laughed out loud.
Maybe the question should be, with 12 years of open source branding, and with well-marketed products like Ubuntu, why have we not advanced further?
Because unlike RMS, most people who are using FOSS really do care more about free-as-in-beer. Also, most people can understand that while FOSS has its success stories, there is little evidence that it inherently produces better quality products. FOSS has been at its most successful, in terms of size of user base, when providing "good enough" and free-of-charge products. It has also found success in server rooms and software houses, where the technically knowledgeable people using it value the typical strengths of FOSS projects and can tolerate their typical weaknesses.
Most expensive commercial software gets activation right most of the time these days. If it didn't, it wouldn't sell. The trouble is, if you are the guy in the unlucky X% who are doing something perfectly legitimate that the DRM/activation code happens not to like, you can still have a really bad day even though most people don't even notice.
As for less expensive consumer software like games, if you've never had a problem with activation or DRM then either you've been amazingly lucky or you just don't play a lot of recent high-end titles. I've got so bored of the bugs and invasive software and games that want me to turn off various security programs I run as standard (because that's going to happen) that I hardly buy AAA titles at all myself these days, and looking at the Assassin's Creed II fiasco I can't say I'm sad about it.
JS isn't the problem. The problem is dumb stuff like not running tabs in separate processes, so loading a single slow tab from, say, a bookmark group locks up the whole browser.
Slashdot is by far the #1 culprit on my system, BTW: since the redesign, it can take an eternity to load a page with lots of comments on it, which is painful if you're looking up a few articles and the corresponding comments off the front page. Ditto for most other social news sites to some extent, though none I use is anything like as bad as here for page load times.
Wikileaks themselves didn't seem to mind, when they leaked the membership list of the BNP.
However, you do actually have to send it back in that case, which almost certainly means a trip to the Post Office for most of us. Given that it is a similar amount of hassle for me to get to a "local" Post Office these days as it is to get into the city centre and browse in a book store, the Distance Selling regs aren't really worth that much to me in practice.
On a related note, any time I get a delivery from Amazon, I'm stuck making sure either that there is someone around at home full time to accept the delivery if it's too big for the letter box or that I can afford the time and hassle of going out to the mail depot to pick up the parcel if they tried to deliver it when I was out. We don't all work in offices that are staffed full-time by someone who can sign for someone else's package on delivery.