It is funny, whenever you ask an American about their life style, they claim it is the highest in the world, that nobody got it as good as them.
So please explain, what is so good about living like this? The hope that one day you will make it big? Amazing really. I honestly had this conversation with an American who worked 80 or so hours a week, so did his wife but they had this GREAT house with a big luxury home cinema setup... it never really entered his mind why I found it odd he wanted this, as I talked to him in Arnhem (holland) where he was stationed in an decent hotel but still a hotel for over a year now with only a short holiday around Christmas...
Anyway, if you are contracting don't you just put all the expenses like medical benefits in your hourly rate? Or do you actually think it is smart to contract for the same hourly wage that regular workers make? That doesn't sound like a long term plan.
You want better working conditions? Then stop kowtowing to the man every chance you get.
US (and british) companies have become VERY good at making employees think they are doing them a favor by employing them. It works great for them and allows them to fire people and make the rest glad they got a job in a recession that is SO bad not a SINGLE big company executive has had his/her bonuses cut. Odd that. 10% unemployment yet the bonuses for the top happen the same as before. Gosh I wonder where they got the money from. And all the rest of the sheep think is "well thank god it isn't my flesh the farmer is getting fat on". Probably because no sheep can think ahead to next year.
You are willing to trade "perks" like free coffee (and really, if that is a perk you got amazingly low standards, is free toilet paper a perk as well? Free tap water?) for real free days. Great, that is smart thinking sheep. Just what they want, and next year, they change the traded for days back to forced days again.
Years ago, when the company in the 21st century thought it was okay to turn vacation days into forced vacations, people should have walked out. They didn't.
Oh and for a history lesson, find a SINGLE year in history in which companies have NOT had an excuse to make cutbacks on personal. The recession, 9/11, the bubble, Y2K expenses, crash of the yen, cost of the dollar... there is always a reason. Now find a SINGLE year in which any of these reasons have led to a salary reduction for the people deciding that their should be money saved.
I am currently in a new position with some juniors and... JUST WHAT DO THEY TEACH THEM IN SCHOOL THESE DAYS?
I feared that as I got older I would find it harder as web developer. It has gotten easier. All I basically got to say is how many years I worked in IT as a programmer and I am on to the last round.
Granted I live in europe and the recession is mostly limited to the US but still.
People that say they will just replace experience with a trainee have never actually watched the results of such a move.
Computers have in a way become so easy, often at school pre-installed with the tools that they got no clue what to do. Even simple things like installing an archive utility is beyond them. It is not so much that they are stupid, they just never had to think about it, and so never did.
Because of my job switch I spoke to various recruiters and employers and they just can't find enough people right now. Even medior functions are hard to fill.
Basically, in IT (at least the web development part of it), the recession just hasn't happened. If you are any good, there are plenty of jobs. Sadly, a lot of people just ain't any good. I see it all the time, web developers who still haven't caught the difference between frontend and backend. And who think Java is a browser language... and the same as javascript. Or that XML is HTTP.
Americans seem to have to wrong idea about what Unions are about. It has become a lethal fight in a system that basically says: The worker has no rights.
In Holland unions work together and it is not unusual for the unions AND the employers to unite and tell the government to go screw it self. Like on wage freezes recently. The government said all wages (except its own oddly enough, an oversight I am sure) should be frozen and in some sectors employees and unions said that they had already sorted things out and wouldn't do it.
ideally, government, employers and unions/workers should all work together to create a working society with give and take and the realization that just because you are on opposites ends of the negotiation table, that doesn't mean you have to be enemies with no common goals.
Regular filter coffee costs in a dutch chain (AH) about 2,50 for half a kilo. 400 euro would therefor buy you 80kg of coffee (ignoring for the moment bulk-discounts).
There are on average 260 workdays in a year (not excluding holidays) 80/260 gives you three ounces of coffee a day. (And that is during working hours, an addict like this would drink all day)
The problem ain't like a webserver where you can seperate users, this about a LOT of users needing to interact with each other as they are in the same battle in the same area. You then run into the problem that for every person added you need 1+N more data being handled.
Imagine a battle between a B17 bomber and a single fighter aircraft. The game needs to handle direction changes by both players AND their firing action BUT while the B17 can generate a LOT of fire data (10 or so guns) it won't actually be doing that since many of its guns will not be able to shoot at anything.
But now add 1 more enemy fighter. Suddenly the B17 can often have two of its guns being able to see an enemy and fire at it. 1 more player added means not just that players flight and fire data but also additional data being generated by the original B17 player.
And you now got extra as well with the fighters wanting to know each others status.
That is why multiplayer games scale so badly and you can't just say, "oh my connection is 10x faster, now I can host 10 times the number of players. If that was true, we should be seeing home hosted 256 players game servers. We aren't.
Personally I think that for the next move in massive player worlds (lots of people in the same area rather then just a massive world made up of different zones) you need to talk to IBM about mainframes and "super" computers. And that would involve more serious money then a small MMO company has available.
MASSIVEmo's can't just be created by adding more servers, they have the difficult problem of needing a lot of CPU power to be applied to the SAME data, exactly what current super computers do NOT want to do. Parallel programming won't save your ass here. Neither will splitting up the load.
Say you are a developer and don't get enough funds for a project. Do you then
A: do your job in your own time because quality is everything
B: code what you can and shove the bugs/problems off to the next person in line?
They are passing the buck because they don't have enough money to do the process properly, with so many patents being applied in a world that has ever more existing material, the job size increases each day. In the dawn of human history the job was easy, get patent application #2, check if it conflicts with patent #1 and isn't fire, then grant it. Bit harder these days.
So more money is needed, that ain't available, so the problem is shoved on to someone else.
Same with other things, not enough jails, release the criminals early and shove the problem onto someone else. Not enough mental wards, lock the mental patients in regular jails, overfilling them etc etc.
And all because you want a 300 dollar tax rebate you spend in a day.
People want top grade government for cut-rate taxes. Don't happen in the real world, only in election promises.
Basically, the 5 page story ends up concluding that Second Life is for porn. Gosh, who could have guessed?
The simple fact is that SL was a hype based on the ancient idea of virtual/3d environments being useful. They ain't.
The reason? It is to bloody hard to do anything. When I am in the real world, moving about, turning my head, manipulating objects and chewing gum is so easy I don't actually know how to do it, I just do it. In second life, even just walking about is a pain in the ass. FPS solve this by simplifying the world and giving you limited interaction. You can just jump up any wall rather then having to climb it or put a chair in place to use as a ladder etc etc. In Dragon Age Origins I just click on a cocoon a few meters above me, without having to climb the tree it is hanging from. But in a virtual world ala Second Life they remove this simplified game element because they want something more.
And in the end, they end up with something less. Maybe it is the uncanny valley, the more real a virtual meeting room becomes, the more obvious it becomes that it isn't real. This doesn't matter in a game, because a game isn't real. But a meeting with real people I work with in a virtual world will just feel off. Because nobody but the most dedicated attendee will bother to fully animate his avatar. Smiling, body posture, they will all be pre-scripted (and what kind of person who needs to attend a virtual meeting hasthe time to sculpt his own avatar?) and not like the real person. And for what? So you can talk more easily? You are still staring at a screen, why not use video conferincing? You can interact with a 3D object? Only if that 3D object is fully realized in SL. And I can also see that 3D object in any other display where I can spin the camera and not have to manipulate a camera around a character with collision detection. There are far better purpose build tools for showing a 3D object. And where you new 3D design is NOT on someone elses server.
Oh, there are some useful scenario's, but they are so limited that SL doesn't deserve the hype. It would be like creating a hype for the Excell sheet viewer that MS has for people without Excell.
And so, as the story shows, porn is the only activity that is worthwhile. Same as the net. Just how much information do you need in a day? But you can always use more porn.
I find it intresting to see that the author says the hype has shifted to facebook and twitter. Indeed. Any predictions for how these will fair in 3 years time? MySpace has dropped a lot of its hype. Countless commercial blogs show current post as being several years old...
Part of it all I think is the problem CNN has. They don't have enough news to fill 24 hours and I think the web as a whole might not actually have enough content to fill it all. Twitter is the most obvious example of this, so I will use facebook. Intresting to keep track of old friends... BUT how much can you track? Say that you follow all your friends holiday pictures. Unless you got hundreds of friends, that will hardly keep you that busy will it? There simply ain't enough things people can put online to keep social sites full. Except of course porn. How much of MySpace/Facebook is naughty pics?
The problem is nothing new, it takes pixar 2 years to create a movie that takes us 2 hours to watch. Bioware spends a month on each hour of gameplay. A free news rag like metro is a day job for a whole office of workers and a global news network, and I am done with it in 20 minutes.
I can spend ages setting up a beautifull display in Second Life, as some have done, and then a user goes, he sees it and that is it... done. That is why porn rules, because it is so very very cheap to make and people will pay for a very similar girl in a very similar pose over and over again. Porn is an amazing business. Only the food industry matches it in being able to get people to pay for exactly the same stuff again and again.
The covering stones of the Pyramids have been used to build other buildings. The Chinese wall has been dismantled for resources as well. Painting have been painted over for the want of a canvas. Tapes for tv-shows have been re-used because tapes were expensive and who cared about another sitcom.
It is nothing new. We learned most of the egyptians from their dump site where they dropped tons of daily, and in their eyes, worthless communication. One accidently saved backup of MySpace will tell future researchers more then museums of our age. It is the data we don't care about that tells the most about us.
Some floppies will survive, purely by accident, and it will be, enough. The holocaust is important for our generation and yet its most influential book, The Diary of Anne Frank, is an accident. You could have all the records of the holocaust in tact, and it still wouldn't speak as loudly. If all the diaries of all the victims still existed, then they would be meaningless, a huge pile of paper nobody would ever bother to read. Precisely because records of the past are rare, we value them. If we knew every move of the roman empire, had it all on paper, what would be there to explore? Proof? How many people study ancient history vs the present? You can get all the records of the current senate of the world most powerful nation... C-span. Nobody is watching.
3. practically all land between 60 degrees North and 56 degrees South was included, with a resolution of 30 meters (90 feet).
Mmm, within ONE paragraph the writer sure lowers his tune. ALL the earth vs a part of it and then that part of it that is land and not sea? Anyone remember why it is called the Blue Planet at times? Because the majority of the surface is water?
Interesting news of course, but come on, can we at least on a tech site skip the hyperbole.
there is nothing here to be alarmed about. it is just an account you buy and your purchase additional bits of data they will track for you. Same as you do in a gym when you buy a membership card and then add a training schedule to it.
It is sale of a piece of entertainment. There is nothing virtual about it.
And it neatly allows people to look a bit silly when they compare sale of a physical product with the selling of a few bytes of data.
There is NO virtual. Never has been, never will be. All that you got is products and services. Farmville is a service. Same as your phone line and all things associated with it are. Your landline is connected, all it takes is a bit to be flipped in the "virtual" world for it to work. No different from buying an asset in a game.
You mean like the LA riots? Or the ones in Paris? Or the ones in Holland. Or the ones in...
Riots are nothing new. And they are always invariably sparked by what someone said about something.
Free speech is easy when discussed in a class room, a lot harder when applied to the real world.
Take Slashdot itself, free speech is constantly censored here by being labeled as hate speech (flamebait/troll) which makes it disappear from normal view.
And Slashdot uses moderation to keep the site functioning. So censorship does work... or does it? Because it is also well known that the moderation system is abused to silence those moderators disagree with.
So unless you can come up with a solution to the moderation system on Slashdot, I wouldn't suggest how a government of 1 billion should do it.
I think India has a near impossible task. Part of the problem currently is that the "lesser" developed cultures (cue flamebait/troll mod) have become rich enough to have time to waste but not so rich they have become afraid to loose.
Please allow me to explain. If you watch the known terrorists, then you notice that a lot of them (especially the western attacks) are made by people who are NOT poor. The crotch-bomber's family is very rich, Osama is a member of one of the richest family on the planet, the 9/11 attackers were all middle class.
The idea behind it is very simple and has been used by politicians in the west. Houses for voters (british scandal), or re-arrangement of voting districts in the US. The idea is that home-owners tend to vote more conservative. If you own your home, then (the logic goes) you care what happens to it, its value. If your area declines, you will fight it because you could loose the value of your house. The theory works, up to a point. People care about their house... when it is worth caring about. If you are forced to buy a cheap house in a bad area because their are no rented houses available, all that happens is that people resent having to pay high mortage for living in a bad area. It is no magic bullet.
SO, what does this mean for India? You got 3 groups of people.
The poor: these will only riot if it becomes a choice between life and death, else they got better things to do like staying alive.
The rich: these will only riot if it become a choice between their way of life and death, else they got better things to do, like making sure they stay rich. For an example of their rioting, see every South American nation were a left-wing politician is elected.
The last group is NOT the middle class, the middle class tends not to riot. INSTEAD, the 3rd group is hard to define, but it is the no poor enough to starve but not rich enough to have anything to loose. It is the disconnected, the B-ark. Those who either get their money from the state, family or jobs they resent having and are not all that stable.
If you take note, the crotch-bomber comes from a wealthy family, but he has contributed nothing. The rioters in the suburbs of paris are unwanted immigrants who work the jobs no-one wants or exist on goverment handouts, and their parents working the jobs nobody wants. Same in LA. It was the blacks who rioted, not the other immigrant groups.
And this isn't about race but about position in society. If you got nothing (or feel you got nothing) then it easy to start rioting.
And India got to balance all of this in a society that is being torn in all directions. You got areas were people are near starving and areas where its wealth is exploding. Space age nation with hunger probems. It is exploring the moon in a country where people fear a solar eclipse. And everywhere there are people who are rich enough not to worry about starving but to poor to want to keep what they got and feeling disconnected from their society.
And then it becomes very easy for resentment to form. India has been one of the most tolerant societies throughout its history. It is one of the few (if not only) country that
What you are saying is dogma. A statement that explains nothing, has no examples, no reasoning, just a statement presented as fact and if you disagree, you are wrong or worse, stupid.
It doesn't matter if it is "jews are 2nd rate humans" or "god loves everyone" or "evolution is responsible for all development of life". Without reasoning, any statement becomes dogma.
As I said, someone has been asleep. It is the old idea that England had pre-WW2. They thought they could outsource all the boring stuff like farming to their colonies, because they controlled the seas. And then they didn't and they had to dig for victory.
If it was blacks doing it with say Peanuts (far better for them to produce peanut butter then raw peanuts) or chocolate (most of the worlds chocolate if turned from cheap cocoa beans into expensive chocolate in holland) then it would be considered a good thing. The higher value the product you export, the more money the local economy makes. It is a good way for third world economies to get their fair share of the world trade.
But oh no, now it is the yellows doing it, it is mean and cheating. The entire world consist of trade restrictments that profit the western countries but bad chinese for doing exactly the same thing.
And you got to wonder why the mines are all in China. I would find it highly unlikely that China just happens to have the only locations with those metals.
Seems to me somebody fell asleep at the wheel (we, the voter) and let our whole economy collapse and be controlled by a single country.
You mention WW2, but the US got MOST of its technology FROM its allies and the axis powers. Radar, computers, the jet engine, the list goes on and on.
And I think this is significant, for a long time the US has been "cheating", a lot of the tech they developed wasn't developed by them at all, or at best in cooperation with others. And the US has become less good at working together and the rest of the world has less reasons to work together.
The americans got a lousy reputation, I am sure most here are aware that being america's allie is a good way to get yourself attacked by them. Vietnam promised independence, then had millions killed by the US, Iraq was an ally, so was the Taliban. Even western allies are not safe with the US having an attack plan ready for The Netherlands if any of its citizens would come up for war crimes. America would rather invade a friendly nation then have one of its citizens face justice for war crimes.
Internally, the US ain't doing much better. "United" states? Don't make me laugh.
But the US doesn't have to worry to much, as bad as it is doing, the rest of the world ain't doing much better. And you never know what the next big thing will be and who will invent it and who gets to benefit from it.
Why not simply work on virtual machines? Then you know they are clean and you can have all the rights you want and still have comply with company rules.
In a lot of environments, setting up a good seperation is simply to costly in time, so you either end up with dev's with not enough rights to do their job or to many where they can endanger systems they shouldn't.
So it should not be needed to have local admin rights, but then the sysadmins got a hell of a job to setup everything so that it is not needed. Most sysadmins simply ain't capable of that, or if they are, are not given the time.
Don't know where you get your car serviced but it is the sales people with a base salary who work on commission. The mechanics simply get a regular decent pay based on experience and skill and it ain't low because skilled mechanics are hard to find, while sale clerks are a dime a dozen.
Surgeons also wear uniforms, are they low paid as well? So do airline pilots.
And the higher you are in a bank, the more you are required to wear the uniform of a 3 piece suit in the appropriate colors/style. While the IT flunky can come to work at the same bank in whatever he wants as long as it contains the blubber.
On a construction site, the ones in the company colors are the regulars, the ones who got a job the whole year, everyone in their own clothes will be temps, hired hands, with no job security.
Sorry mate, but you need some more experience with real life.
Bad jobs are bad jobs, the uniform or not has nothing to do with it.
I would insist that the uniforms are paid for by the company, completely and cleaned on their expense. Then just consider it a saving and deal with it.
The iPod shuffle must be a joke, else why is Apple laughing all the way to bank, every single day, with a ton of cash.
The shuffle is perfect as a nice small shiny, good looking mp3 player for taking to the gym. No, it is not enough for me, but then you can get very rich by ignoring nerds like me.
Why don't you blame the people who are REALLY responsible? The voters.
As long as people vote for the guy who tells them they can keep their 2 suvs and that he will lower their taxes (never actually happened anywhere) you will get these kind of guys.
Take Pearl Harbor, a seemingly classic example of a failed defense.
But what were the Americans supposed to do? The Japanese knew were the attack was going to take place, and for that matter that an attack would even happen.
The attack could have happened anywhere including targets now controlled by the US. And it could happen at any day. The US went on alert because of warning signs, but not on the right day.
A simple game can show you this, one of the Medal of Honor titles ask you to defend a position, with the attack coming from 3 directions. You are alone, so you stand a 1/3 chance of being in the wrong spot. That is as simple as it gets. Oh you can check intel, make educated guesses etc etc, but as a defender, you got to be right every time every second of the day while an attacker can spend ages picking his moment.
Take Mumbai, how the hell do you defend against that? You can't seal of an entire city forever, cities only work if you can get in and out. The only alternative is to keep a force ready every second of the day and that attack might never come.
Really, if people talk about the wasted money of "security theater" why do they never talk about the wasted money of "fire fighting show". Go and count, how many exthinguishers and such do you come across in a typical day, all of them unused. Why bother? Especially since in a real fire they are rarely used?
Go ahead, board an aircraft without oxygen masks or seatbelts or emergency doors. None of them saved anyone ever. (well not enough to be worth the costs) So why bother?
It has become popular to bash aircraft security and to be fair, they made some really stupid choices at times, but there isn't much of an alternative. Do nothing and it will happen again, do something and people will say "oh you wasted money, because it never happened again".
One of the signs that democracy is severely overrated.
I think he is going senile, since clearly he has forgotten the endless terrorists attacks on planes BEFORE security was raised. For the young ones, open your history books or even just watch Munich for an idea of how the world was before "security theater".
What is the point of all those armed guards walking about? Well because BEFORE they walked around, any attacked could just walk in and gun people down with the police on scene only having pistols and being far to thinly spread and airports typically being a long way away from the city centers where SWAT teams (which are themselves a new invention) operate.
Bruce Schneier seems to desire what most simple people desire, a magic solution that will fix everything. It is the Oprah Winfrey method of fixing problems and it only works in making her filthy rich. Check how many follow-ups she does. Check how badly her magic one-shot solutions work on her own life, like her weight.
He suggests several solutions, and shows how much of a racist he really is in the process:
Arabic translators. Eh, the latest attacker comes from Nigeria. There Berbers who speak Arabic but the individual is not one of them. Main language of Nigeria between all the various groups is English. Now I grant you, Americans would probably need translators to understand English but why does Bruce Schneier automatically link terrorism to the Arabic language? He complains after all about ordinary buildings becoming targets, like Oklahoma? Did that guy study Arabic?
He also suggests that better ties with the Islamic world (again with Islam) would prevent terrorism. Better ties like freedom to travel and study in the west? Exactly like what was given to the latest attacker? In fact, which of the 9/11 attackers was NOT allowed to freely travel and do anything they want in the west? Were they kept behind an iron curtain or welcomed with open arms?
So, we know that attack on aircraft were far more common BEFORE security increased. We also know that the most secured airline in the world (El Al) hasn't had any successful attacks.
So is there a link between security "theater" and the number of attacks? What you got to accept before you can answer this question is that not all attacks are the same. A soldier (and a terrorist would see him/herself as a soldier fighting for a cause) might accept the potential of death but few would want to throw it away. The men who landed at Omaha must have known the risks but if had asked the men that went into the boats to have half their number put in the boilers to fuel the passage across to an unopposed beach, they would have refused. Not all attacks that result in death are committed by suicide attackers.
The attacker will want a return on their investment (terror for a life) and just being shot after the first bullet being fired is not very terrorizing. It would just be another criminal.
Schneier is right that an attack could indeed come anywhere and that it is impossible to defend against them all. Your house could be hit by a tornado, so why do you have smoke alarms? A lock on your door is not going to stop a determined burglar, so why lock your door at all? Why even have a door?
England pre-WW2 was debating wether they needed all those farms that messed up the country side. It had a large empire and booming trade, surely it could import everything it needed. It could, until the war. The same argument is currently being held in Holland, get rid of all the farms and re-locate them to places with more space. Sensible, right up to the point that you can't ship things anymore. What exactly is an army for when you haven't used it in 60 years. Well because you don't get to say when you need one. Germany steam-rolled over europe because the other countries had not been ready.
And the thing about being ready is that you can't stop it. Because then you aren't ready. The US has vowed never to led its guard down again after Pearl Harbour but that comes at an enormous cost AND it might not be enough because the
Have you followed the latest terrorist attempt? The guy comes from a rich family and was given the chance to study in the west with every western luxury and with every western freedom.
And yet, he did become a terrorist.
So what more do you want to give him?
And Osama? Member of one of the richest families in the world.
Let go of your racists ideas that everyone not living in the west is piss poor.
No starving child has ever committed a terrorist attack, they are to busy dying.
Check the red army brigade (german terrorist group) plenty of them coming from well to do families.
Check the US terrorists who blow up abortion clinics, lynched blacks or the guy that did Oklahoma. Is there a single piss-poor individual among them?
Slashdot Mirror
But that would be mean.
It is funny, whenever you ask an American about their life style, they claim it is the highest in the world, that nobody got it as good as them.
So please explain, what is so good about living like this? The hope that one day you will make it big? Amazing really. I honestly had this conversation with an American who worked 80 or so hours a week, so did his wife but they had this GREAT house with a big luxury home cinema setup... it never really entered his mind why I found it odd he wanted this, as I talked to him in Arnhem (holland) where he was stationed in an decent hotel but still a hotel for over a year now with only a short holiday around Christmas...
Anyway, if you are contracting don't you just put all the expenses like medical benefits in your hourly rate? Or do you actually think it is smart to contract for the same hourly wage that regular workers make? That doesn't sound like a long term plan.
Sing along now:
All I am saying, is give socialism a chance.
Not including official holidays.
You want better working conditions? Then stop kowtowing to the man every chance you get.
US (and british) companies have become VERY good at making employees think they are doing them a favor by employing them. It works great for them and allows them to fire people and make the rest glad they got a job in a recession that is SO bad not a SINGLE big company executive has had his/her bonuses cut. Odd that. 10% unemployment yet the bonuses for the top happen the same as before. Gosh I wonder where they got the money from. And all the rest of the sheep think is "well thank god it isn't my flesh the farmer is getting fat on". Probably because no sheep can think ahead to next year.
You are willing to trade "perks" like free coffee (and really, if that is a perk you got amazingly low standards, is free toilet paper a perk as well? Free tap water?) for real free days. Great, that is smart thinking sheep. Just what they want, and next year, they change the traded for days back to forced days again.
Years ago, when the company in the 21st century thought it was okay to turn vacation days into forced vacations, people should have walked out. They didn't.
Oh and for a history lesson, find a SINGLE year in history in which companies have NOT had an excuse to make cutbacks on personal. The recession, 9/11, the bubble, Y2K expenses, crash of the yen, cost of the dollar... there is always a reason. Now find a SINGLE year in which any of these reasons have led to a salary reduction for the people deciding that their should be money saved.
I am currently in a new position with some juniors and... JUST WHAT DO THEY TEACH THEM IN SCHOOL THESE DAYS?
I feared that as I got older I would find it harder as web developer. It has gotten easier. All I basically got to say is how many years I worked in IT as a programmer and I am on to the last round.
Granted I live in europe and the recession is mostly limited to the US but still.
People that say they will just replace experience with a trainee have never actually watched the results of such a move.
Computers have in a way become so easy, often at school pre-installed with the tools that they got no clue what to do. Even simple things like installing an archive utility is beyond them. It is not so much that they are stupid, they just never had to think about it, and so never did.
Because of my job switch I spoke to various recruiters and employers and they just can't find enough people right now. Even medior functions are hard to fill.
Basically, in IT (at least the web development part of it), the recession just hasn't happened. If you are any good, there are plenty of jobs. Sadly, a lot of people just ain't any good. I see it all the time, web developers who still haven't caught the difference between frontend and backend. And who think Java is a browser language... and the same as javascript. Or that XML is HTTP.
Unions work great in the rest of the world.
Americans seem to have to wrong idea about what Unions are about. It has become a lethal fight in a system that basically says: The worker has no rights.
In Holland unions work together and it is not unusual for the unions AND the employers to unite and tell the government to go screw it self. Like on wage freezes recently. The government said all wages (except its own oddly enough, an oversight I am sure) should be frozen and in some sectors employees and unions said that they had already sorted things out and wouldn't do it.
ideally, government, employers and unions/workers should all work together to create a working society with give and take and the realization that just because you are on opposites ends of the negotiation table, that doesn't mean you have to be enemies with no common goals.
Regular filter coffee costs in a dutch chain (AH) about 2,50 for half a kilo. 400 euro would therefor buy you 80kg of coffee (ignoring for the moment bulk-discounts).
There are on average 260 workdays in a year (not excluding holidays) 80/260 gives you three ounces of coffee a day. (And that is during working hours, an addict like this would drink all day)
I think you would bounce.
The problem ain't like a webserver where you can seperate users, this about a LOT of users needing to interact with each other as they are in the same battle in the same area. You then run into the problem that for every person added you need 1+N more data being handled.
Imagine a battle between a B17 bomber and a single fighter aircraft. The game needs to handle direction changes by both players AND their firing action BUT while the B17 can generate a LOT of fire data (10 or so guns) it won't actually be doing that since many of its guns will not be able to shoot at anything.
But now add 1 more enemy fighter. Suddenly the B17 can often have two of its guns being able to see an enemy and fire at it. 1 more player added means not just that players flight and fire data but also additional data being generated by the original B17 player.
And you now got extra as well with the fighters wanting to know each others status.
That is why multiplayer games scale so badly and you can't just say, "oh my connection is 10x faster, now I can host 10 times the number of players. If that was true, we should be seeing home hosted 256 players game servers. We aren't.
Personally I think that for the next move in massive player worlds (lots of people in the same area rather then just a massive world made up of different zones) you need to talk to IBM about mainframes and "super" computers. And that would involve more serious money then a small MMO company has available.
MASSIVEmo's can't just be created by adding more servers, they have the difficult problem of needing a lot of CPU power to be applied to the SAME data, exactly what current super computers do NOT want to do. Parallel programming won't save your ass here. Neither will splitting up the load.
Say you are a developer and don't get enough funds for a project. Do you then
A: do your job in your own time because quality is everything
B: code what you can and shove the bugs/problems off to the next person in line?
They are passing the buck because they don't have enough money to do the process properly, with so many patents being applied in a world that has ever more existing material, the job size increases each day. In the dawn of human history the job was easy, get patent application #2, check if it conflicts with patent #1 and isn't fire, then grant it. Bit harder these days.
So more money is needed, that ain't available, so the problem is shoved on to someone else.
Same with other things, not enough jails, release the criminals early and shove the problem onto someone else. Not enough mental wards, lock the mental patients in regular jails, overfilling them etc etc.
And all because you want a 300 dollar tax rebate you spend in a day.
People want top grade government for cut-rate taxes. Don't happen in the real world, only in election promises.
Basically, the 5 page story ends up concluding that Second Life is for porn. Gosh, who could have guessed?
The simple fact is that SL was a hype based on the ancient idea of virtual/3d environments being useful. They ain't.
The reason? It is to bloody hard to do anything. When I am in the real world, moving about, turning my head, manipulating objects and chewing gum is so easy I don't actually know how to do it, I just do it. In second life, even just walking about is a pain in the ass. FPS solve this by simplifying the world and giving you limited interaction. You can just jump up any wall rather then having to climb it or put a chair in place to use as a ladder etc etc. In Dragon Age Origins I just click on a cocoon a few meters above me, without having to climb the tree it is hanging from. But in a virtual world ala Second Life they remove this simplified game element because they want something more.
And in the end, they end up with something less. Maybe it is the uncanny valley, the more real a virtual meeting room becomes, the more obvious it becomes that it isn't real. This doesn't matter in a game, because a game isn't real. But a meeting with real people I work with in a virtual world will just feel off. Because nobody but the most dedicated attendee will bother to fully animate his avatar. Smiling, body posture, they will all be pre-scripted (and what kind of person who needs to attend a virtual meeting hasthe time to sculpt his own avatar?) and not like the real person. And for what? So you can talk more easily? You are still staring at a screen, why not use video conferincing? You can interact with a 3D object? Only if that 3D object is fully realized in SL. And I can also see that 3D object in any other display where I can spin the camera and not have to manipulate a camera around a character with collision detection. There are far better purpose build tools for showing a 3D object. And where you new 3D design is NOT on someone elses server.
Oh, there are some useful scenario's, but they are so limited that SL doesn't deserve the hype. It would be like creating a hype for the Excell sheet viewer that MS has for people without Excell.
And so, as the story shows, porn is the only activity that is worthwhile. Same as the net. Just how much information do you need in a day? But you can always use more porn.
I find it intresting to see that the author says the hype has shifted to facebook and twitter. Indeed. Any predictions for how these will fair in 3 years time? MySpace has dropped a lot of its hype. Countless commercial blogs show current post as being several years old...
Part of it all I think is the problem CNN has. They don't have enough news to fill 24 hours and I think the web as a whole might not actually have enough content to fill it all. Twitter is the most obvious example of this, so I will use facebook. Intresting to keep track of old friends... BUT how much can you track? Say that you follow all your friends holiday pictures. Unless you got hundreds of friends, that will hardly keep you that busy will it? There simply ain't enough things people can put online to keep social sites full. Except of course porn. How much of MySpace/Facebook is naughty pics?
The problem is nothing new, it takes pixar 2 years to create a movie that takes us 2 hours to watch. Bioware spends a month on each hour of gameplay. A free news rag like metro is a day job for a whole office of workers and a global news network, and I am done with it in 20 minutes.
I can spend ages setting up a beautifull display in Second Life, as some have done, and then a user goes, he sees it and that is it... done. That is why porn rules, because it is so very very cheap to make and people will pay for a very similar girl in a very similar pose over and over again. Porn is an amazing business. Only the food industry matches it in being able to get people to pay for exactly the same stuff again and again.
The covering stones of the Pyramids have been used to build other buildings. The Chinese wall has been dismantled for resources as well. Painting have been painted over for the want of a canvas. Tapes for tv-shows have been re-used because tapes were expensive and who cared about another sitcom.
It is nothing new. We learned most of the egyptians from their dump site where they dropped tons of daily, and in their eyes, worthless communication. One accidently saved backup of MySpace will tell future researchers more then museums of our age. It is the data we don't care about that tells the most about us.
Some floppies will survive, purely by accident, and it will be, enough. The holocaust is important for our generation and yet its most influential book, The Diary of Anne Frank, is an accident. You could have all the records of the holocaust in tact, and it still wouldn't speak as loudly. If all the diaries of all the victims still existed, then they would be meaningless, a huge pile of paper nobody would ever bother to read. Precisely because records of the past are rare, we value them. If we knew every move of the roman empire, had it all on paper, what would be there to explore? Proof? How many people study ancient history vs the present? You can get all the records of the current senate of the world most powerful nation... C-span. Nobody is watching.
So before phones, we couldn't life?
A secret phone number is a "virtual" service no different from the tractor in farmville.
Labelling a service/product differently because is considered essential is silly.
1. mapped the entire world in eleven days.
2. vast majority of solid Earth
3. practically all land between 60 degrees North and 56 degrees South was included, with a resolution of 30 meters (90 feet).
Mmm, within ONE paragraph the writer sure lowers his tune. ALL the earth vs a part of it and then that part of it that is land and not sea? Anyone remember why it is called the Blue Planet at times? Because the majority of the surface is water?
Interesting news of course, but come on, can we at least on a tech site skip the hyperbole.
there is nothing here to be alarmed about. it is just an account you buy and your purchase additional bits of data they will track for you. Same as you do in a gym when you buy a membership card and then add a training schedule to it.
It is sale of a piece of entertainment. There is nothing virtual about it.
And it neatly allows people to look a bit silly when they compare sale of a physical product with the selling of a few bytes of data.
There is NO virtual. Never has been, never will be. All that you got is products and services. Farmville is a service. Same as your phone line and all things associated with it are. Your landline is connected, all it takes is a bit to be flipped in the "virtual" world for it to work. No different from buying an asset in a game.
You mean like the LA riots? Or the ones in Paris? Or the ones in Holland. Or the ones in...
Riots are nothing new. And they are always invariably sparked by what someone said about something.
Free speech is easy when discussed in a class room, a lot harder when applied to the real world.
Take Slashdot itself, free speech is constantly censored here by being labeled as hate speech (flamebait/troll) which makes it disappear from normal view.
And Slashdot uses moderation to keep the site functioning. So censorship does work... or does it? Because it is also well known that the moderation system is abused to silence those moderators disagree with.
So unless you can come up with a solution to the moderation system on Slashdot, I wouldn't suggest how a government of 1 billion should do it.
I think India has a near impossible task. Part of the problem currently is that the "lesser" developed cultures (cue flamebait/troll mod) have become rich enough to have time to waste but not so rich they have become afraid to loose.
Please allow me to explain. If you watch the known terrorists, then you notice that a lot of them (especially the western attacks) are made by people who are NOT poor. The crotch-bomber's family is very rich, Osama is a member of one of the richest family on the planet, the 9/11 attackers were all middle class.
The idea behind it is very simple and has been used by politicians in the west. Houses for voters (british scandal), or re-arrangement of voting districts in the US. The idea is that home-owners tend to vote more conservative. If you own your home, then (the logic goes) you care what happens to it, its value. If your area declines, you will fight it because you could loose the value of your house. The theory works, up to a point. People care about their house... when it is worth caring about. If you are forced to buy a cheap house in a bad area because their are no rented houses available, all that happens is that people resent having to pay high mortage for living in a bad area. It is no magic bullet.
SO, what does this mean for India? You got 3 groups of people.
If you take note, the crotch-bomber comes from a wealthy family, but he has contributed nothing. The rioters in the suburbs of paris are unwanted immigrants who work the jobs no-one wants or exist on goverment handouts, and their parents working the jobs nobody wants. Same in LA. It was the blacks who rioted, not the other immigrant groups.
And this isn't about race but about position in society. If you got nothing (or feel you got nothing) then it easy to start rioting.
And India got to balance all of this in a society that is being torn in all directions. You got areas were people are near starving and areas where its wealth is exploding. Space age nation with hunger probems. It is exploring the moon in a country where people fear a solar eclipse. And everywhere there are people who are rich enough not to worry about starving but to poor to want to keep what they got and feeling disconnected from their society.
And then it becomes very easy for resentment to form. India has been one of the most tolerant societies throughout its history. It is one of the few (if not only) country that
What you are saying is dogma. A statement that explains nothing, has no examples, no reasoning, just a statement presented as fact and if you disagree, you are wrong or worse, stupid.
It doesn't matter if it is "jews are 2nd rate humans" or "god loves everyone" or "evolution is responsible for all development of life". Without reasoning, any statement becomes dogma.
As I said, someone has been asleep. It is the old idea that England had pre-WW2. They thought they could outsource all the boring stuff like farming to their colonies, because they controlled the seas. And then they didn't and they had to dig for victory.
Outsource your economy at your own peril.
If it was blacks doing it with say Peanuts (far better for them to produce peanut butter then raw peanuts) or chocolate (most of the worlds chocolate if turned from cheap cocoa beans into expensive chocolate in holland) then it would be considered a good thing. The higher value the product you export, the more money the local economy makes. It is a good way for third world economies to get their fair share of the world trade.
But oh no, now it is the yellows doing it, it is mean and cheating. The entire world consist of trade restrictments that profit the western countries but bad chinese for doing exactly the same thing.
And you got to wonder why the mines are all in China. I would find it highly unlikely that China just happens to have the only locations with those metals.
Seems to me somebody fell asleep at the wheel (we, the voter) and let our whole economy collapse and be controlled by a single country.
You mention WW2, but the US got MOST of its technology FROM its allies and the axis powers. Radar, computers, the jet engine, the list goes on and on.
And I think this is significant, for a long time the US has been "cheating", a lot of the tech they developed wasn't developed by them at all, or at best in cooperation with others. And the US has become less good at working together and the rest of the world has less reasons to work together.
The americans got a lousy reputation, I am sure most here are aware that being america's allie is a good way to get yourself attacked by them. Vietnam promised independence, then had millions killed by the US, Iraq was an ally, so was the Taliban. Even western allies are not safe with the US having an attack plan ready for The Netherlands if any of its citizens would come up for war crimes. America would rather invade a friendly nation then have one of its citizens face justice for war crimes.
Internally, the US ain't doing much better. "United" states? Don't make me laugh.
But the US doesn't have to worry to much, as bad as it is doing, the rest of the world ain't doing much better. And you never know what the next big thing will be and who will invent it and who gets to benefit from it.
Why not simply work on virtual machines? Then you know they are clean and you can have all the rights you want and still have comply with company rules.
In a lot of environments, setting up a good seperation is simply to costly in time, so you either end up with dev's with not enough rights to do their job or to many where they can endanger systems they shouldn't.
So it should not be needed to have local admin rights, but then the sysadmins got a hell of a job to setup everything so that it is not needed. Most sysadmins simply ain't capable of that, or if they are, are not given the time.
Isn't that what soldiers do with the enemy?
Don't know where you get your car serviced but it is the sales people with a base salary who work on commission. The mechanics simply get a regular decent pay based on experience and skill and it ain't low because skilled mechanics are hard to find, while sale clerks are a dime a dozen.
Surgeons also wear uniforms, are they low paid as well? So do airline pilots.
And the higher you are in a bank, the more you are required to wear the uniform of a 3 piece suit in the appropriate colors/style. While the IT flunky can come to work at the same bank in whatever he wants as long as it contains the blubber.
On a construction site, the ones in the company colors are the regulars, the ones who got a job the whole year, everyone in their own clothes will be temps, hired hands, with no job security.
Sorry mate, but you need some more experience with real life.
Bad jobs are bad jobs, the uniform or not has nothing to do with it.
I would insist that the uniforms are paid for by the company, completely and cleaned on their expense. Then just consider it a saving and deal with it.
The iPod shuffle must be a joke, else why is Apple laughing all the way to bank, every single day, with a ton of cash.
The shuffle is perfect as a nice small shiny, good looking mp3 player for taking to the gym. No, it is not enough for me, but then you can get very rich by ignoring nerds like me.
Why don't you blame the people who are REALLY responsible? The voters.
As long as people vote for the guy who tells them they can keep their 2 suvs and that he will lower their taxes (never actually happened anywhere) you will get these kind of guys.
Take Pearl Harbor, a seemingly classic example of a failed defense.
But what were the Americans supposed to do? The Japanese knew were the attack was going to take place, and for that matter that an attack would even happen.
The attack could have happened anywhere including targets now controlled by the US. And it could happen at any day. The US went on alert because of warning signs, but not on the right day.
A simple game can show you this, one of the Medal of Honor titles ask you to defend a position, with the attack coming from 3 directions. You are alone, so you stand a 1/3 chance of being in the wrong spot. That is as simple as it gets. Oh you can check intel, make educated guesses etc etc, but as a defender, you got to be right every time every second of the day while an attacker can spend ages picking his moment.
Take Mumbai, how the hell do you defend against that? You can't seal of an entire city forever, cities only work if you can get in and out. The only alternative is to keep a force ready every second of the day and that attack might never come.
Really, if people talk about the wasted money of "security theater" why do they never talk about the wasted money of "fire fighting show". Go and count, how many exthinguishers and such do you come across in a typical day, all of them unused. Why bother? Especially since in a real fire they are rarely used?
Go ahead, board an aircraft without oxygen masks or seatbelts or emergency doors. None of them saved anyone ever. (well not enough to be worth the costs) So why bother?
It has become popular to bash aircraft security and to be fair, they made some really stupid choices at times, but there isn't much of an alternative. Do nothing and it will happen again, do something and people will say "oh you wasted money, because it never happened again".
One of the signs that democracy is severely overrated.
I think he is going senile, since clearly he has forgotten the endless terrorists attacks on planes BEFORE security was raised. For the young ones, open your history books or even just watch Munich for an idea of how the world was before "security theater".
What is the point of all those armed guards walking about? Well because BEFORE they walked around, any attacked could just walk in and gun people down with the police on scene only having pistols and being far to thinly spread and airports typically being a long way away from the city centers where SWAT teams (which are themselves a new invention) operate.
Bruce Schneier seems to desire what most simple people desire, a magic solution that will fix everything. It is the Oprah Winfrey method of fixing problems and it only works in making her filthy rich. Check how many follow-ups she does. Check how badly her magic one-shot solutions work on her own life, like her weight.
He suggests several solutions, and shows how much of a racist he really is in the process:
Arabic translators. Eh, the latest attacker comes from Nigeria. There Berbers who speak Arabic but the individual is not one of them. Main language of Nigeria between all the various groups is English. Now I grant you, Americans would probably need translators to understand English but why does Bruce Schneier automatically link terrorism to the Arabic language? He complains after all about ordinary buildings becoming targets, like Oklahoma? Did that guy study Arabic?
He also suggests that better ties with the Islamic world (again with Islam) would prevent terrorism. Better ties like freedom to travel and study in the west? Exactly like what was given to the latest attacker? In fact, which of the 9/11 attackers was NOT allowed to freely travel and do anything they want in the west? Were they kept behind an iron curtain or welcomed with open arms?
So, we know that attack on aircraft were far more common BEFORE security increased. We also know that the most secured airline in the world (El Al) hasn't had any successful attacks.
So is there a link between security "theater" and the number of attacks? What you got to accept before you can answer this question is that not all attacks are the same. A soldier (and a terrorist would see him/herself as a soldier fighting for a cause) might accept the potential of death but few would want to throw it away. The men who landed at Omaha must have known the risks but if had asked the men that went into the boats to have half their number put in the boilers to fuel the passage across to an unopposed beach, they would have refused. Not all attacks that result in death are committed by suicide attackers.
The attacker will want a return on their investment (terror for a life) and just being shot after the first bullet being fired is not very terrorizing. It would just be another criminal.
Schneier is right that an attack could indeed come anywhere and that it is impossible to defend against them all. Your house could be hit by a tornado, so why do you have smoke alarms? A lock on your door is not going to stop a determined burglar, so why lock your door at all? Why even have a door?
England pre-WW2 was debating wether they needed all those farms that messed up the country side. It had a large empire and booming trade, surely it could import everything it needed. It could, until the war. The same argument is currently being held in Holland, get rid of all the farms and re-locate them to places with more space. Sensible, right up to the point that you can't ship things anymore. What exactly is an army for when you haven't used it in 60 years. Well because you don't get to say when you need one. Germany steam-rolled over europe because the other countries had not been ready.
And the thing about being ready is that you can't stop it. Because then you aren't ready. The US has vowed never to led its guard down again after Pearl Harbour but that comes at an enormous cost AND it might not be enough because the
Have you followed the latest terrorist attempt? The guy comes from a rich family and was given the chance to study in the west with every western luxury and with every western freedom.
And yet, he did become a terrorist.
So what more do you want to give him?
And Osama? Member of one of the richest families in the world.
Let go of your racists ideas that everyone not living in the west is piss poor.
No starving child has ever committed a terrorist attack, they are to busy dying.
Check the red army brigade (german terrorist group) plenty of them coming from well to do families.
Check the US terrorists who blow up abortion clinics, lynched blacks or the guy that did Oklahoma. Is there a single piss-poor individual among them?