Here's the difference between Canadian and US Health care (as a summary) before O-Care:
US had a slightly higher top end standard (in places like the Mayo Clinic) and you could get better health care if you were covered by a great program from a good HMO (but it often cost). Canada had better overall coverage as we didn't have so many uncovered men, women and children. The problem in the US was that, if you got sick then had to change jobs, your new HMO likely would want to write up your health issue as pre-existing and you wouldn't have coverage. A friend of mine's wife worked for the State of Louisiana and had this issue arise. I can change jobs here or have no job and I still have decent coverage (better with the add ons from work, but nobody asks about prior conditions because it might be illegal).
The issue with government health care O-Care style is this:
If you had a single payer with some privatized service delivery (we do this), that's pretty effective. It's not terribly inefficient necessarily either as my friend's wife mentioned above worked in resolving health care claims in Louisiana and the state government spent a very large % of its health care budget (shockingly so) chasing HMOs and arguing over who would pay for what. That system was hugely inefficient and wasteful plus it slowed down resolution. That whole monstrous expense disappears with single payer.
The issue the US is suffering from is you are trying to socialize and extend coverage but doing it by building on top of the existing corporate, flawed, corrupt HMO system and with things like kickbacks to doctors and clinics for pushing drugs and procedures and other things that wouldn't fly here. It's like trying to build a nice new luxury home on rotted pilings. The massive roll-out all at once was also a huge fustercluck. That's the worst way to deploy new solutions.
Instead, it would have made sense to say: 1) Identify a range of probable best-practices. 2) Cook up a ground-up rebuild of socialized single-payer medicine with privatized service delivery in places where it makes sense. 3) Deploy in a region (county/state) and run at least 1-2 years of pilot. 4) Take lessons learned, revise, repilot for 0.5 - 1 year. 5) Then begin national roll outs one state at a time.
Much less chaos, better chance to test what you deploy and see how it works. Probably cheaper. And a ground up design rather than a built-on-troubled-systems approach.
We don't know much up here in the eyes of some in the US, but we mostly get decent to good health care. Both of my parents are disabled. One had heart surgery, had a leg with open ulceration for about 8 years, then lost it when infection control was not possible. My other parent's car got hit by a 10 wheel dump truck making an illegal turn out of a local landfill. About 30 broken bones, 6 plates, 75 screws, other artifical parts just to get back to a fraction of her function and with a grim prognosis (although she's made 11 years now, things get worse day by day).
Those two sets of surgeries, both life threatening, plus follow on work and surgeries, plus rehab, plus dressings (surprising how much full leg sized silver impregnated dressings can cost... $100+ per dressing change, changes from 2 times per day to three times a week depending on which phase we were in). I'd guess that was over $500K, likely closer to $700K or more. And our socialized system handled a lot of it.
My parents were died in the wool conservatives (small c). Even they have been forced to admit the system has done a lot for them even though they used to be totally opposed to it.
We watched my cousin (who married a girl from Missouri) go through a rough time as his wife lost her son at 28 with a dual heart and lung transplant needed. He lived for about 6 weeks of his son's life. He was just married. The surgery was going to cost $1M. They didn't have it, he didn't have coverage, and even though the town pulled together and did fundraisers, my cousin and his wife are still dealing with the crushing debt that left them.
No, I'll take our system thanks. I just wish the folks in the US had one that ran as well (or even better, since ours is not perfect).
My service is $42 a month Cdn for 25 Mbps down and 2 or 3 Mbps up (enough to serve skype conferences) with a 300 Gb cap but it also doesn't count 'wee hours' usage (12 - 6 am?) and I've only once come close to the cap and that was a mix of massive software installs and updates combined with heavy netflix high-res usage that month.
And its with Teksavvy. I was soooo glad to say goodbye to Rogers and previously Primus and Bell at different times.
Teksavvy may use Rogers' cable (or as I think of it, taxpayer-funded cable) but they have better tools and nicer tech support. I've know people who worked at Rogers tech support and hated the company they worked for because of how it did business.
How do you imagine you build competition into the marketplace? It sounds a lot like new regulations to me.
The problem is there is no interest from the big incumbents to do anything other than attempt whatever stranglehold they can and they have piles of people figuring out how to do just that in one form or another.
Without regulation, you'll never get out of this mess. That requires law and lawyers and enforcement.
Frankly, if internet service were mandated as a common utility, that might be a useful change. The issues that come from combining content providers and access providers in the same entity are profound.
The investment climate won't change so entirely that this investment will be a poor one. I'm quite sure they can always find a way to monetize their product.
This seems more about politics and political pressure than about any solid business reason.
It is interesting how much of this sort of response you see on tech sites. We digital sorts should be (in the popular mind) champions of this stuff.
I think the truth is most of us recognize the flaws and dangers of the complex electronic systems and the simplicity and functional nature of old fashioned pencil-and-ballot voting.
E-voting is indeed a solution looking.... but not for a problem..... for lots of $$$$.
Not counting the fact that the post offices are fading as papermail becomes a thing of the past and any business model they had just isn't sustainable over the long run?
Yes, in theory this approach is good. On the other hand, you probably have no idea if your vote made it to be counted and the post offices may well not be around in another few years (for anything but parcels).
I've never had to boot a pencil and paper, nor did receiving the wrong pencil ever preclude voting, nor did the pencil erroneously mark the wrong candidate as long as I was competent to use it.
I have worked as a Poll Clerk and Deputy Returning Officer in a number of Provincial and Federal elections in Canada.
There is no imperative served by knowing, some hours earlier, who won. There is no value I can see to electronic voting except perhaps to (eventually) allow vote-from-home, but we are SO far from having that technology work effectively and without abuse that we can really delete that from consideration.
Vote counting has always been an issue. It appears the technology doesn't remove that issue, it just hides the flaws.
We always had trained DROs and scrutineers from the major parties to keep things honest at most polls.
There is a physical record of the ballots (included, excluded, etc) and a chain of custody that is likely at least as robust as most electronic ones from what I've read. Massive diversion and vote fraud would take some serious abuse of Elections Ontario or Elections Canada and would likely be caught by party scrutineers.
Electronic voting sounds very sexy and techy, but so far, it seems to have greater glitches and risks than paper voting.
Guys can be made some fun of for being geeks or nerds or dorks by the jocks and sundry other forms of the male of the species. Women get peer pressure and crappy treatment (worse than what the guys get - women know how to wound in ways guys will never learn because they would have went to fist bludgeoning many steps before) from other women for deviating from social norms. Women are worse to women than guys.
A guy can be a geek and a few women might make fun of him, most won't. Some guys will, but its less than it used to be.
A girl who is a geek/nerd/etc gets a lot of flack from a lot of her ostensible peers in high school and a lot from guys who are intimidated or just disrespectful.
The pressure levels aren't the same in my observation.
I wish the world were as you suggest - with both boys and girls experiencing only a SLIGHT discouragement to their choices which strength of character would deal with nicely. It isn't. The discouragement is often far worse than slight. And it comes from teachers, other students of both genders, everywhere in TV and advertising, etc.
Teachers tend to see girl's first instinct upon hitting a problem (which is a social response of seeking help) to be somehow indicative of a weaker student whereas boys inclination to just bash their head against the wall until the wall collapses or their skull does to be somehow indicative of a stronger student. The truth is, the best response is usually 'try the most obvious things and then ask for help'. Extremes of either approach can be bad for any real world project. But that isn't the point - the point is teachers frequently see the student differently based on common gender-associated problem-solving approaches and often aren't even aware they do that. This is most common with male teachers who tend to be more common in STEM courses.
This is just an example of how the girls have the deck stacked against them in STEM areas. CS among them.
There are many double standards in our society. If a guy beds many girls, he's a stud. If she does, she's a slut. That's just one classic example.
Those gender norms are really societal constructions. When women get bombarded by subtle messages every day growing up about what will make them happy and what are presumed to be appropriate values, concerns, toys, goals, etc. then we can hardly expect anything else.
Gender stereotyping is a massive aspect of where women end up going. Same with boys.
Those who aren't comfortable with non-stereotypical gender roles like to argue this is nature, but it isn't (at least 95%), it is nurture (education and advertising).
This is why women raised outside of the cultural norms (Dad wanted a boy, raised her like a boy) will make these sorts of choices. This isn't a genetic limitation but a cultural one.
I am a male and I claim a fairly different nature than thou.
I also claim your notion of predestination is absolute BS.
My observations: - Women protect their own time more than men in this industry (don't want to do as much overtime, don't want their weekends to vanish, etc) and this leads to a negative management style that penalizes healthy behaviour and thus limits women's progress - Women take maternity leave and have kids and that hurts prospects in the high-grind world of CS - There are a lot of poorly emotionally developed males in management roles (not all, by any means, but enough that an 'I like my coders young male and single' comment isn't a surprise out of a manager) - Women will try to ask for an answer when stumped, guys will try to battle through (taking a long time sometimes) - the best course is usually somewhere in the middle. - Women don't particularly love to be abused and they are less willing to put up with it from management than men (who are willing to get called some nasty things by their boss most times)
The industry is hard on developers and artists and QA people. It burns them out, treating them like disposable resources. Women are smart enough to recognize this and fewer of them want to enter this. Guys are still 'hey, neat tech!' and 'I get to code a video game/drive the space shuttle/build smartbombs/code networked scrabble/etc'. So they still throw themselves into the grinder more willingly.
Guys also respond more to challenge and to hostile bosses (that's likely deep in our genes) by trying to outperform. That same climate I believe makes a lot of women just want to leave.
So in summary, it can be a hard field on people and it is managed in ways that drive women from the field.
My cred: 18 years in software development in a lot of companies (custom software contractor much of the time in and out of companies of all sizes).
The main tragedy, if I ever have to come off Gmail, is exactly how much grouping (in the form of hundreds of labels, many nested). It's how I classify and find my way around gigs and gigs of email.
I can recover my email itself from Gmail via POP. WTF can I recover or port the whole classification and grouping - the labels!
If there was a way to get that out in a way that would import to something else, I'd darn well consider it.
This is the scale of what I want (although I'd take the screen and mount it into a hardwood table). The price tag is.... insanity. That's about $9-11K Canadian. I can get a 60" LED smart TV with a 4K screen for under $2K.
So, yes, this is what I want, along with some of the neat software for it and some of the hardware that interfaces with the screen. And I'd like it in the $2500 or less range which should be achievable with economies of large production scale.
Because occasionally I forget to stop it after I play a game at the end of the day. My work laptop happens to also be my current steam platform since my gaming box is now out of support (XP). (By work, I mean 'the laptop I do useful work on' vs. 'the laptop provided by work').
The Ottawa Public Library is having a significant budgetary shortfall due to a reduction in late fees.
The sad thing is that these entities have integrated punitive fines into their standard funding expectations and financial plans.
I think that sort of thinking needs to be scorned. It is a poor way to manage an institution. You don't want your model to be 'well, we will depend on and be incentivized to encourage people to break the rules we claim we want them to follow'. It's a rather ethically laughable situation.
Yes, orbital habs over Earth (or maybe around the moon) are our best bets. We can likely control sunlight and gravity and have enough air and water in them to support a good population (if we can get the construction tech).
We might be able to terraform Mars, might be able to adapt bodies to the low partial pressures in the atmo. What we can't do is fix the low gravity and its effects on our immune system, reproductive system, etc. Low G is one of the 'hard' things to live with and one of the things we have no ability to change.
If we build a sufficiently good station, we can get 0.8+ gees by rotation. That ought to be enough. There are issues to the orbital colonies (materials, construction science, where to get air, water, etc, orbital safety, and so on) but they are the best low-environmental impact living spaces if we can make them truly not requiring Earth to ship resources on a continuing basis to support them.
We can even build multiple stations. Probably a good idea if our first few Babylon projects go poorly. (And the fourth one might just disappear)
I'd say I prefer my windows to just *be gone* when I minimize them. I know they end up in the system tray. I don't need an animation to tell me that my UI/Desktop Manager is doing its job.
You can provide status information visually WITHOUT animation.
Just to say: Some years back, I had a boss who, using a dual monitor station for software development, frequently hit the Windows 2000 Window Limit (64 I think).
I currently have 22 windows open. Of them, about 8 are tabbed browser windows so you can figure I likely have about 60-80 tabs open concurrently. My editors and PDF viewers also run multiple documents concurrently. I'm not even on heavy workload right now or there would likely be another 10-15 windows open. I sometimes do notice slowdowns but I suspect I may be pushing the available memory from time to time, but animations may also play a role.
In the background or actively running on my machine, I have 2 Tomcat instances, and HFS instance, iTunes, SQL Server instance, a My SQL Instance, Apache Instance, Netbeans, Eclipse, KeePass 2, Adobe Chrome, IE, SVN client and server, Steam, Calibre, and the list goes on. There are likely a number of background servers I'm actually forgetting.
I begrudge my cycles to animations I don't need and that actually I find visually distracting and which don't aide me in figuring things out but I find distract me and confuse the issue.
Not everyone just has a handful of apps open. Not everyone benefits from animations. A lot of $ are used getting them to work and making them pretty when that money could be spent on truly functional software features.
The highlight of the top bar that caused the windows to expand to fill the screen was actually nausea inducing.
FFS people.....
Eye candy might help some of you a bit, it'll hurt some of us others a bit.
Simple utility and well thought out design for usability makes a quite usable UI. Windows 2000 had a workable UI. So did XP if you put it in classic mode. So does 7. 8+... assssssssss.....
Xubuntu I quite like. Ubuntu before Unity isn't bad. I've seen Zorin lately and it looks okay.
A decent operator can learn a consistent UI in a bit of time and work around its ideosyncratic behaviours to accomplish a lot.
The main offense in UI/desktop design is inconsistency and too much contextual stuff that can choose to hide key things when IT thinks you don't want to do them. Inconsistency ruins any amount of training.
I find Apple's UI unintuitive. I can navigate Droids and Crackberries fine, but iPhones give me pain. I can navigate Slackware, RH, RHEL, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and likely even BSD or Yggdrasil (that goes back!) no problem. Even NonStop UNIX or Sun UNIX. But OS X.... makes my teeth gnash. Windows 8 Metro a bit too (others I could manage fine).
I can't quite put my finger on it, but every assumption I make in those problematic environments that would be the logic of all the other named systems in one way or another, doesn't seem to work as expected.
I do appreciate that the people who find OS X and iPhones straightforward may struggle with Droids and other OSes for the reciprocal reason.
Generally, if I have to fight the UI or Desktop to get things done, it isn't doing its job.
I meant Eps VI to IV instead of 1-3. I think of them as first to third because I saw them all as they came out in theaters. The actual eps I to III were an example of how to start with a horrible failure and move to less horrible somewhat failures.
My most recent Blu-Ray player has gone to the annoying habit of making its buttons hard to distinguish. You either have to run your finger along it to find the braille or else you have to jab around until you finally find one (thus lighting them up) and hope the one you hit was the one you wanted.
What in the heck ever happened to having clearly identifiable buttons in favour of these mostly concealed soft-button things?
Warning: I am about to use some bad language. Stop now if that offends you.....
Ah yes, I know what it was. Pardon my french: ****ing INTERFACE DESIGNERS.
I actually had a Skype proponent (who seemed to be speaking for the design team) argued for aesthetics over function when I pointed out that on my laptop, the contact list font (not changeable on the version I have and accessibility settings don't change font size) was on the order of 2 mm. When one of the other users pointed out he headed an Academic department that was finding recent releases unusable on many modern monitors with 40+ aged staff, he got the same scornful 'it's all about design and aesthetics'.
Well here's a notion for the UI designers: F*** AESTHETICS WITH A CHAINSAW.
Aesthetics are okay if usability is high and complete. If not, and they are the reason why not, they are not just failure but brain-addled failure.
If your user base is saying 'hey, we'd like your software to have readable font sizes for modern monitors' and those who seem to be fanbois or speaking for the product say 'our aesthetic is more important', then they will find their customers say 'have fun in the bankruptcy court, Fail Co.'
I stopped paying Skype monthly fees because of this crap. It used to be something I recommended and bought add on apps for. Now its on my 'hope to find a replacement' list.
I heard later someone indicating some of Skype may have come from a prior code base (an AIM product?) and that the original code which may have included UI code was an arcane mess and that the new engineers probably had no idea (or no budget) to fix the screwed up and unusable UI. I could understand that. It was the defense of the poor usability as intentional design that burnt my britches. I'd fire anyone that thought that on my development team.
Ultimately, MS has made a habit of retraining users every time they switch OS by shuffling around where you can find common administrative operations (at least common for power users). This has been a PITA for IT people and others since Win 3.1. Yes, once in a while part of the re-org made some logical sense of regrouping functions or or hierarchically arranging them. Mostly, none that I could observe.
Don't bother to retrain me unless there's a darn good reason. It's about one of the most off-putting part of software updates (including those on Android). The Ribbon Bar on latter day MS windows is an example. More efficient for the 10% hardcore users yes, a retraining time wasting PITA for the other 90%, HELL YES.
Try to get it right the first time. Try hard. If you make a mistake, make changes careful, limited, an gradual for UI items. Explain the logic of the new UI functional bits. And don't make any unnecessary changes or force senseless and time wasting retraining on your users.
Then again, I suppose UI designers are artists not engineers and always want to explore new things or see a way it can be done better. George Lucas had that when he made the newer versions of Eps 1-3 without the models, with awkward scenes formerly cut, and with Greedo shooting first. He thought we wanted to see the movies HE wanted to make. We actually wanted to see the movies WE HAD SEEN when we were younger which he ****ed up. (Not as bad as what came after with Ep 1 and product placement insanity....)
There are *few* valid uses of silencers in police work I will concede.
Say your ERT is engaged in a dynamic entry to deal with a hostage situation. It might be critical to take out a lookout quietly.
Or say you are trying to get into a drug manufacturing compound that has armed guards with a night raid before they can blow the warehouse (or any similar sort of entry where you need surprise). Silencers can add to your odds of being able to execute. Note that you wouldn't necessarily have to be deploying lethal munitions.
Third smallest percentage of GDP in NATO (only Slovenia and Slovak Republic less) so no, I'd not even say they get a lot of money unless you mean large in the sense 'if I had it sitting in my pickup, I'd be very happy' large. By that definition, one M1A1 would make you very happy.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the difference between Canadian and US Health care (as a summary) before O-Care:
US had a slightly higher top end standard (in places like the Mayo Clinic) and you could get better health care if you were covered by a great program from a good HMO (but it often cost). Canada had better overall coverage as we didn't have so many uncovered men, women and children. The problem in the US was that, if you got sick then had to change jobs, your new HMO likely would want to write up your health issue as pre-existing and you wouldn't have coverage. A friend of mine's wife worked for the State of Louisiana and had this issue arise. I can change jobs here or have no job and I still have decent coverage (better with the add ons from work, but nobody asks about prior conditions because it might be illegal).
The issue with government health care O-Care style is this:
If you had a single payer with some privatized service delivery (we do this), that's pretty effective. It's not terribly inefficient necessarily either as my friend's wife mentioned above worked in resolving health care claims in Louisiana and the state government spent a very large % of its health care budget (shockingly so) chasing HMOs and arguing over who would pay for what. That system was hugely inefficient and wasteful plus it slowed down resolution. That whole monstrous expense disappears with single payer.
The issue the US is suffering from is you are trying to socialize and extend coverage but doing it by building on top of the existing corporate, flawed, corrupt HMO system and with things like kickbacks to doctors and clinics for pushing drugs and procedures and other things that wouldn't fly here. It's like trying to build a nice new luxury home on rotted pilings. The massive roll-out all at once was also a huge fustercluck. That's the worst way to deploy new solutions.
Instead, it would have made sense to say:
1) Identify a range of probable best-practices.
2) Cook up a ground-up rebuild of socialized single-payer medicine with privatized service delivery in places where it makes sense.
3) Deploy in a region (county/state) and run at least 1-2 years of pilot.
4) Take lessons learned, revise, repilot for 0.5 - 1 year.
5) Then begin national roll outs one state at a time.
Much less chaos, better chance to test what you deploy and see how it works. Probably cheaper. And a ground up design rather than a built-on-troubled-systems approach.
We don't know much up here in the eyes of some in the US, but we mostly get decent to good health care. Both of my parents are disabled. One had heart surgery, had a leg with open ulceration for about 8 years, then lost it when infection control was not possible. My other parent's car got hit by a 10 wheel dump truck making an illegal turn out of a local landfill. About 30 broken bones, 6 plates, 75 screws, other artifical parts just to get back to a fraction of her function and with a grim prognosis (although she's made 11 years now, things get worse day by day).
Those two sets of surgeries, both life threatening, plus follow on work and surgeries, plus rehab, plus dressings (surprising how much full leg sized silver impregnated dressings can cost... $100+ per dressing change, changes from 2 times per day to three times a week depending on which phase we were in). I'd guess that was over $500K, likely closer to $700K or more. And our socialized system handled a lot of it.
My parents were died in the wool conservatives (small c). Even they have been forced to admit the system has done a lot for them even though they used to be totally opposed to it.
We watched my cousin (who married a girl from Missouri) go through a rough time as his wife lost her son at 28 with a dual heart and lung transplant needed. He lived for about 6 weeks of his son's life. He was just married. The surgery was going to cost $1M. They didn't have it, he didn't have coverage, and even though the town pulled together and did fundraisers, my cousin and his wife are still dealing with the crushing debt that left them.
No, I'll take our system thanks. I just wish the folks in the US had one that ran as well (or even better, since ours is not perfect).
My service is $42 a month Cdn for 25 Mbps down and 2 or 3 Mbps up (enough to serve skype conferences) with a 300 Gb cap but it also doesn't count 'wee hours' usage (12 - 6 am?) and I've only once come close to the cap and that was a mix of massive software installs and updates combined with heavy netflix high-res usage that month.
And its with Teksavvy. I was soooo glad to say goodbye to Rogers and previously Primus and Bell at different times.
Teksavvy may use Rogers' cable (or as I think of it, taxpayer-funded cable) but they have better tools and nicer tech support. I've know people who worked at Rogers tech support and hated the company they worked for because of how it did business.
How do you imagine you build competition into the marketplace? It sounds a lot like new regulations to me.
The problem is there is no interest from the big incumbents to do anything other than attempt whatever stranglehold they can and they have piles of people figuring out how to do just that in one form or another.
Without regulation, you'll never get out of this mess. That requires law and lawyers and enforcement.
Frankly, if internet service were mandated as a common utility, that might be a useful change. The issues that come from combining content providers and access providers in the same entity are profound.
The investment climate won't change so entirely that this investment will be a poor one. I'm quite sure they can always find a way to monetize their product.
This seems more about politics and political pressure than about any solid business reason.
It is interesting how much of this sort of response you see on tech sites. We digital sorts should be (in the popular mind) champions of this stuff.
I think the truth is most of us recognize the flaws and dangers of the complex electronic systems and the simplicity and functional nature of old fashioned pencil-and-ballot voting.
E-voting is indeed a solution looking .... but not for a problem..... for lots of $$$$.
Not counting the fact that the post offices are fading as papermail becomes a thing of the past and any business model they had just isn't sustainable over the long run?
Yes, in theory this approach is good. On the other hand, you probably have no idea if your vote made it to be counted and the post offices may well not be around in another few years (for anything but parcels).
I've never had to boot a pencil and paper, nor did receiving the wrong pencil ever preclude voting, nor did the pencil erroneously mark the wrong candidate as long as I was competent to use it.
I have worked as a Poll Clerk and Deputy Returning Officer in a number of Provincial and Federal elections in Canada.
There is no imperative served by knowing, some hours earlier, who won. There is no value I can see to electronic voting except perhaps to (eventually) allow vote-from-home, but we are SO far from having that technology work effectively and without abuse that we can really delete that from consideration.
Vote counting has always been an issue. It appears the technology doesn't remove that issue, it just hides the flaws.
We always had trained DROs and scrutineers from the major parties to keep things honest at most polls.
There is a physical record of the ballots (included, excluded, etc) and a chain of custody that is likely at least as robust as most electronic ones from what I've read. Massive diversion and vote fraud would take some serious abuse of Elections Ontario or Elections Canada and would likely be caught by party scrutineers.
Electronic voting sounds very sexy and techy, but so far, it seems to have greater glitches and risks than paper voting.
That's true. It was Jedi where they made Boba Fett die the most meaningless death since his dad Jango....
Guys can be made some fun of for being geeks or nerds or dorks by the jocks and sundry other forms of the male of the species. Women get peer pressure and crappy treatment (worse than what the guys get - women know how to wound in ways guys will never learn because they would have went to fist bludgeoning many steps before) from other women for deviating from social norms. Women are worse to women than guys.
A guy can be a geek and a few women might make fun of him, most won't. Some guys will, but its less than it used to be.
A girl who is a geek/nerd/etc gets a lot of flack from a lot of her ostensible peers in high school and a lot from guys who are intimidated or just disrespectful.
The pressure levels aren't the same in my observation.
I wish the world were as you suggest - with both boys and girls experiencing only a SLIGHT discouragement to their choices which strength of character would deal with nicely. It isn't. The discouragement is often far worse than slight. And it comes from teachers, other students of both genders, everywhere in TV and advertising, etc.
Teachers tend to see girl's first instinct upon hitting a problem (which is a social response of seeking help) to be somehow indicative of a weaker student whereas boys inclination to just bash their head against the wall until the wall collapses or their skull does to be somehow indicative of a stronger student. The truth is, the best response is usually 'try the most obvious things and then ask for help'. Extremes of either approach can be bad for any real world project. But that isn't the point - the point is teachers frequently see the student differently based on common gender-associated problem-solving approaches and often aren't even aware they do that. This is most common with male teachers who tend to be more common in STEM courses.
This is just an example of how the girls have the deck stacked against them in STEM areas. CS among them.
There are many double standards in our society. If a guy beds many girls, he's a stud. If she does, she's a slut. That's just one classic example.
Those gender norms are really societal constructions. When women get bombarded by subtle messages every day growing up about what will make them happy and what are presumed to be appropriate values, concerns, toys, goals, etc. then we can hardly expect anything else.
Gender stereotyping is a massive aspect of where women end up going. Same with boys.
Those who aren't comfortable with non-stereotypical gender roles like to argue this is nature, but it isn't (at least 95%), it is nurture (education and advertising).
This is why women raised outside of the cultural norms (Dad wanted a boy, raised her like a boy) will make these sorts of choices. This isn't a genetic limitation but a cultural one.
+1, Factual
I am a male and I claim a fairly different nature than thou.
I also claim your notion of predestination is absolute BS.
My observations:
- Women protect their own time more than men in this industry (don't want to do as much overtime, don't want their weekends to vanish, etc) and this leads to a negative management style that penalizes healthy behaviour and thus limits women's progress
- Women take maternity leave and have kids and that hurts prospects in the high-grind world of CS
- There are a lot of poorly emotionally developed males in management roles (not all, by any means, but enough that an 'I like my coders young male and single' comment isn't a surprise out of a manager)
- Women will try to ask for an answer when stumped, guys will try to battle through (taking a long time sometimes) - the best course is usually somewhere in the middle.
- Women don't particularly love to be abused and they are less willing to put up with it from management than men (who are willing to get called some nasty things by their boss most times)
The industry is hard on developers and artists and QA people. It burns them out, treating them like disposable resources. Women are smart enough to recognize this and fewer of them want to enter this. Guys are still 'hey, neat tech!' and 'I get to code a video game/drive the space shuttle/build smartbombs/code networked scrabble/etc'. So they still throw themselves into the grinder more willingly.
Guys also respond more to challenge and to hostile bosses (that's likely deep in our genes) by trying to outperform. That same climate I believe makes a lot of women just want to leave.
So in summary, it can be a hard field on people and it is managed in ways that drive women from the field.
My cred: 18 years in software development in a lot of companies (custom software contractor much of the time in and out of companies of all sizes).
The main tragedy, if I ever have to come off Gmail, is exactly how much grouping (in the form of hundreds of labels, many nested). It's how I classify and find my way around gigs and gigs of email.
I can recover my email itself from Gmail via POP. WTF can I recover or port the whole classification and grouping - the labels!
If there was a way to get that out in a way that would import to something else, I'd darn well consider it.
This is the scale of what I want (although I'd take the screen and mount it into a hardwood table). The price tag is.... insanity. That's about $9-11K Canadian. I can get a 60" LED smart TV with a 4K screen for under $2K.
So, yes, this is what I want, along with some of the neat software for it and some of the hardware that interfaces with the screen. And I'd like it in the $2500 or less range which should be achievable with economies of large production scale.
Because occasionally I forget to stop it after I play a game at the end of the day. My work laptop happens to also be my current steam platform since my gaming box is now out of support (XP). (By work, I mean 'the laptop I do useful work on' vs. 'the laptop provided by work').
The Ottawa Public Library is having a significant budgetary shortfall due to a reduction in late fees.
The sad thing is that these entities have integrated punitive fines into their standard funding expectations and financial plans.
I think that sort of thinking needs to be scorned. It is a poor way to manage an institution. You don't want your model to be 'well, we will depend on and be incentivized to encourage people to break the rules we claim we want them to follow'. It's a rather ethically laughable situation.
Yes, orbital habs over Earth (or maybe around the moon) are our best bets. We can likely control sunlight and gravity and have enough air and water in them to support a good population (if we can get the construction tech).
We might be able to terraform Mars, might be able to adapt bodies to the low partial pressures in the atmo. What we can't do is fix the low gravity and its effects on our immune system, reproductive system, etc. Low G is one of the 'hard' things to live with and one of the things we have no ability to change.
If we build a sufficiently good station, we can get 0.8+ gees by rotation. That ought to be enough. There are issues to the orbital colonies (materials, construction science, where to get air, water, etc, orbital safety, and so on) but they are the best low-environmental impact living spaces if we can make them truly not requiring Earth to ship resources on a continuing basis to support them.
We can even build multiple stations. Probably a good idea if our first few Babylon projects go poorly. (And the fourth one might just disappear)
Hmmm.
I'd say I prefer my windows to just *be gone* when I minimize them. I know they end up in the system tray. I don't need an animation to tell me that my UI/Desktop Manager is doing its job.
You can provide status information visually WITHOUT animation.
Just to say: Some years back, I had a boss who, using a dual monitor station for software development, frequently hit the Windows 2000 Window Limit (64 I think).
I currently have 22 windows open. Of them, about 8 are tabbed browser windows so you can figure I likely have about 60-80 tabs open concurrently. My editors and PDF viewers also run multiple documents concurrently. I'm not even on heavy workload right now or there would likely be another 10-15 windows open. I sometimes do notice slowdowns but I suspect I may be pushing the available memory from time to time, but animations may also play a role.
In the background or actively running on my machine, I have 2 Tomcat instances, and HFS instance, iTunes, SQL Server instance, a My SQL Instance, Apache Instance, Netbeans, Eclipse, KeePass 2, Adobe Chrome, IE, SVN client and server, Steam, Calibre, and the list goes on. There are likely a number of background servers I'm actually forgetting.
I begrudge my cycles to animations I don't need and that actually I find visually distracting and which don't aide me in figuring things out but I find distract me and confuse the issue.
Not everyone just has a handful of apps open. Not everyone benefits from animations. A lot of $ are used getting them to work and making them pretty when that money could be spent on truly functional software features.
Or perhaps the excess packaging....
The highlight of the top bar that caused the windows to expand to fill the screen was actually nausea inducing.
FFS people.....
Eye candy might help some of you a bit, it'll hurt some of us others a bit.
Simple utility and well thought out design for usability makes a quite usable UI. Windows 2000 had a workable UI. So did XP if you put it in classic mode. So does 7. 8+... assssssssss.....
Xubuntu I quite like. Ubuntu before Unity isn't bad. I've seen Zorin lately and it looks okay.
A decent operator can learn a consistent UI in a bit of time and work around its ideosyncratic behaviours to accomplish a lot.
The main offense in UI/desktop design is inconsistency and too much contextual stuff that can choose to hide key things when IT thinks you don't want to do them. Inconsistency ruins any amount of training.
I find Apple's UI unintuitive. I can navigate Droids and Crackberries fine, but iPhones give me pain. I can navigate Slackware, RH, RHEL, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and likely even BSD or Yggdrasil (that goes back!) no problem. Even NonStop UNIX or Sun UNIX. But OS X.... makes my teeth gnash. Windows 8 Metro a bit too (others I could manage fine).
I can't quite put my finger on it, but every assumption I make in those problematic environments that would be the logic of all the other named systems in one way or another, doesn't seem to work as expected.
I do appreciate that the people who find OS X and iPhones straightforward may struggle with Droids and other OSes for the reciprocal reason.
Generally, if I have to fight the UI or Desktop to get things done, it isn't doing its job.
I meant Eps VI to IV instead of 1-3. I think of them as first to third because I saw them all as they came out in theaters. The actual eps I to III were an example of how to start with a horrible failure and move to less horrible somewhat failures.
My most recent Blu-Ray player has gone to the annoying habit of making its buttons hard to distinguish. You either have to run your finger along it to find the braille or else you have to jab around until you finally find one (thus lighting them up) and hope the one you hit was the one you wanted.
....
What in the heck ever happened to having clearly identifiable buttons in favour of these mostly concealed soft-button things?
Warning: I am about to use some bad language. Stop now if that offends you.
Ah yes, I know what it was. Pardon my french: ****ing INTERFACE DESIGNERS.
I actually had a Skype proponent (who seemed to be speaking for the design team) argued for aesthetics over function when I pointed out that on my laptop, the contact list font (not changeable on the version I have and accessibility settings don't change font size) was on the order of 2 mm. When one of the other users pointed out he headed an Academic department that was finding recent releases unusable on many modern monitors with 40+ aged staff, he got the same scornful 'it's all about design and aesthetics'.
Well here's a notion for the UI designers: F*** AESTHETICS WITH A CHAINSAW.
Aesthetics are okay if usability is high and complete. If not, and they are the reason why not, they are not just failure but brain-addled failure.
If your user base is saying 'hey, we'd like your software to have readable font sizes for modern monitors' and those who seem to be fanbois or speaking for the product say 'our aesthetic is more important', then they will find their customers say 'have fun in the bankruptcy court, Fail Co.'
I stopped paying Skype monthly fees because of this crap. It used to be something I recommended and bought add on apps for. Now its on my 'hope to find a replacement' list.
I heard later someone indicating some of Skype may have come from a prior code base (an AIM product?) and that the original code which may have included UI code was an arcane mess and that the new engineers probably had no idea (or no budget) to fix the screwed up and unusable UI. I could understand that. It was the defense of the poor usability as intentional design that burnt my britches. I'd fire anyone that thought that on my development team.
Ultimately, MS has made a habit of retraining users every time they switch OS by shuffling around where you can find common administrative operations (at least common for power users). This has been a PITA for IT people and others since Win 3.1. Yes, once in a while part of the re-org made some logical sense of regrouping functions or or hierarchically arranging them. Mostly, none that I could observe.
Don't bother to retrain me unless there's a darn good reason. It's about one of the most off-putting part of software updates (including those on Android). The Ribbon Bar on latter day MS windows is an example. More efficient for the 10% hardcore users yes, a retraining time wasting PITA for the other 90%, HELL YES.
Try to get it right the first time. Try hard. If you make a mistake, make changes careful, limited, an gradual for UI items. Explain the logic of the new UI functional bits. And don't make any unnecessary changes or force senseless and time wasting retraining on your users.
Then again, I suppose UI designers are artists not engineers and always want to explore new things or see a way it can be done better. George Lucas had that when he made the newer versions of Eps 1-3 without the models, with awkward scenes formerly cut, and with Greedo shooting first. He thought we wanted to see the movies HE wanted to make. We actually wanted to see the movies WE HAD SEEN when we were younger which he ****ed up. (Not as bad as what came after with Ep 1 and product placement insanity....)
<p>Bears and whatnot haven't evolved much since 1914, and they haven't been issued bear shaped body armor or fully automatic laser claws.</p></quote>
Now that you mention it, we should be looking into trained bears with just this sort of gear in the event that we get Russian company up North.
I mean, Bears with Laser Claws! That's better than Sharks with Frikkin Laser Beams!
(Your post was spot on BTW)
I totally disagree.
There are *few* valid uses of silencers in police work I will concede.
Say your ERT is engaged in a dynamic entry to deal with a hostage situation. It might be critical to take out a lookout quietly.
Or say you are trying to get into a drug manufacturing compound that has armed guards with a night raid before they can blow the warehouse (or any similar sort of entry where you need surprise). Silencers can add to your odds of being able to execute. Note that you wouldn't necessarily have to be deploying lethal munitions.
Third smallest percentage of GDP in NATO (only Slovenia and Slovak Republic less) so no, I'd not even say they get a lot of money unless you mean large in the sense 'if I had it sitting in my pickup, I'd be very happy' large. By that definition, one M1A1 would make you very happy.
Ref: http://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_topics/20140224_140224-PR2014-028-Defence-exp.pdf
Page 6.
2013 data.
Dollars matter. Especially with a government intent on a balanced budget by 2015 - 2017 and surpluses.