In a data center, do you trust your ISP has full redundancy and will never, ever fail, decide to disconnect you or go bankrupt? Or you you use several ISPs, have an UPS and a standby generator just in case some day something does go wrong?
FPS has been continually improving. We take individually movable objects for granted now... what about maleable materials? What if every wall crumbles when you hit it with a rocket?
The two things that are still missing from FPS:
- Multisession persistence - the only character stats that improve over the course of a game are guns, and somewhat health and armor. There's especially a lack of persistence in multi-player FPS. What if I were to play an FPS today, and improve my character, log out, and log in tomorrow with those improvements? FPS Diablo for example.
- Worldspace - FPS are still limited in "level" size. It takes tens of seconds to minutes on comuputers to load a map, and once it's loaded, you're stuck within the confines of that map. What if, instead, you logged into a world and the world area around you was loaded, and the world continued to be dynamically loaded as you moved around? In current games, you can't play a map much bigger than a few buildings; what if instead you could drive from New York to LA (Or at least New York to New Haven?)
It's easy to not realize when game play is improved - movable objects, breakable glass, things you can see through and not shoot through, things you can shoot through and not see through, the ability to be above another character, those do make a difference on game play.
You can't just take a computer, swap out your old graphics card, and put in the $500 one. Well, you can, but it isn't the most effective use of your money. Your old processor/MB/memory likely isn't going to be able to feed that $500 card optimally, or drive the non-graphics computations going on. If you want a $500 graphics improvement, you might need a $500 processor improvement, maybe more.
One of the things that makes a steering wheel a good control input for a car is that in order to make large changes in what your car is doing, you have to make large changes in the control input. Want to floor the car? You have to STOMP the gas peddle. What to stop SUDDENLY? You have to STOMP the brake. Want to make a SHARP turn? You have to turn the wheel at least a half ref, often up to 2 revs for really sharp, and almost a quarter for a turn that will induce a skid at highway speed before you have a chance to correct it.
There's also a reason your acceleration and braking are controlled by your feet - because your leg muscles are stronger than your thumb muscles. You can't have your acceleration/braking controlled by a non-resistive joystick, because it'd just be too easy to sneeze/drop your coffee/knock it with your elbow and have sudden acceleration or braking. You need pretty stiff resistence to prevent accidental input. Now can you imagine driving for an extend period of time using your thumb muscles instead of your leg muscles?
Even on vehicles that have throttle controls (like planes and boats), the throttle is a separate input device, has a large range of motion, and the vehicle being controlled usually experiences INFREQUENT velocity changes.
We're just being told one sentence of a conversation as recollected by the guy who got fired. I'm not blindly defending google, but I am pointing out that there are plenty of reasons the OP may feel this way that have nothing to do with there being actual age discrimination.
I LOVE newegg. I buy lots of personal stuff there. I buy lots of business stuff there. And cheap, mission critical things, I buy two of. But things that I would need someone to come in and replace immediately, well, that's just not newegg's business. Which is why they are so good at being inexpensive - the burden of support is pushed onto the customer.
In my business, I have some mission critical components and a hostile environment and a SEVERE time crunch - we print ID cards for sporting events, sometimes pushing 500 people through in an afternoon. Now, technically, I could do this with one ID card printer. But we work outside, and that means lots of dust in the air, which ID card printers don't like, so...
I own FIVE duplicate ID card printers. One goes down, we unplug it and plug in the next one. Does it suck that we've paid $7500 for ID card printers instead of $1500? Sure. But it sucks more when you've got 200 people waiting in line wanting to pay you $40 but can't because your mission-critical component isn't working.
Of course, that's nothing compared to when you have 1,000 people trying to pay you $30 online and your mission-critical system is down. We used to pay $10/month for web server space. But the reliability sucked. Now we pay 50 times that much. We have the same bandwidth and the same space, all of that extra money went to reliability because we simply couldn't risk an event shutting down at a critical moment because a critical component (our server) was out.
In most cases, it is better for you to have your own qualified staff and redundant equipment for mission-critical applications. If you're a smaller operation and a 24/7 staff isn't practical, you at least want the redundant equipment.
It's an extreme example, but we used to have laws that made it illegal for black people to learn to read. Why? God forbid a black person should achieve the same ability to do a job as a white person.
We can't (ethically) prevent other people on this planet from educating themselves. We shouldn't (economically) prevent them from doing so either - a world with 50 million educated engineers is better than a world with 50 million people who can't read.
Australians (and Americans) don't lose jobs to immigrants because of migration. They lose jobs to them because the other person is better at doing the job, despite the inherent advantages they have in language and culture.
I work with immigrant engineering workers on a regular basis. These guys wern't born in the US, their families didn't speak english natively, they didn't grow up in this country - if these guys can do a job in a foriegn (to them) language, in a foreign culture, and to it better than a native.... whose fault is that? Getting (and keeping) a job is a competitive effort. I'd much rather see someone lose because the other person is better at the job than see someone lose because they were born in the wrong spot or have the wrong skin color.
And, at least in America, immigration is GOOD. Immigration lets us get young people to help fix our demographics problem. The best way to pay for all these damned baby boomers is to let a whole bunch of 20-something, educated immigrants into the country to pay taxes to support them (instead of letting them work in India where we don't get the money for our social system.)
I can make phone calls using my lap top (I have Verizon broadband cellular+Vonage+ethernet switch) but I don't.
I can listen to XM radio on my laptop (with said broadband cellular) but I don't.
I can take pictures with my laptop (with my webcam) but I don't.
There are always advantages for using a device designed for a specific task over a device designed for many tasks. It's a tradeoff between lots of devices that do each task really well and one device that does many tasks not-so-well.
People who read a LOT often do it in situations that are not convenient for laptops. Ever tried to use a laptop in coach? After 4 hours? Without power? In a chair? Without cooking your testicles?
Do you want to wait 2 minutes for your eBook to boot? To shutdown? Do you want your book to take up as much space as a laptop?
If you're carrying a laptop around anyway, then yes, you probably don't need an eBook. But if you are not, and you just want to read books, this is probably a good product for you.
I doubt the girl fully considered the legal ramifcations of her phrasing before she said it, being, after all, an engineer/CS person and not a lawyer.
Companies have a culture. Part of any interviewing process (including interning and being a temp) is determining a fit between the employee and a company culture. What you attribute to "age discrimination" is far more likely to be a mere cultural difference. People who work at Google are young, independent, single people whose lives revolve around working at google. If you were a 32-year-old who lived your life as an independent 25-year-old, then you probably would have been hired. But if you go home to be with the family and don't see your coworkers outside of limited hours at work while your team members are around each other 16 hours a day, and at the end of the project the management says "OF the 8 temps, hire 6", the people who are going to be hired are going to be the people who best fit with the culture.
When I was interviewing for positions out of school, I paid attention to the corporate culture of the companies I interviewed with. I wouldn't work for a company that had the wrong culture for me; why would I expect a company to hire an employee who didn't fit the culture? Like it or not, and especially with a company like Google where there is a lot of demand for positions, SOCIAL interaction is very often the differentiator between who gets the job and who doesn't. EVERYONE can do the job. But can everyone do the job while getting along with the rest of the team?
And lastly, you comment that you were told your work was "good".
This is GOOGLE we're talking about here. Your work should be ABSOLUTELY EXCEPTIONAL if you expect to be permanently employed there.
These young guys are buddies and like to hang out, so they all get to be millionaires together.
Age discrimination is when you systematically hire/fire workers based on age. Systematically hiring/firing workers because they don't hang out with other workers is not age discrimination, even if the reason the worker doesn't hang out with other workers is because he doesn't want to, on account of his coworkers being younger.
Did this guy have a family? Did he work 8 hour days and then leave to be with his kids while his younger, single coworkers spend 16 hours per day at the office? Did the younger workers get together on weekends, and this guy missed out because soccer practice was more important? There's nothing wrong with having different priorities, but maybe Google as a company wants young, single people who live, eat, and breathe Google 24/7.
Any group of people, including corporations, is going to have culture. Walmart doesn't allow alcohol consumption. Other companies have managers who bring in beer for employees on Friday afternoons. If you like alcohol and avoid the Walmart functions, or don't like alcohol and don't socialize with your coworkers on Fridays, you're more likely to get canned than the other guys. It's natural - people favor other people they know in a social setting over those they don't. People WORK BETTER with other people they know in a social setting than those they don't.
If this guy had been a 32 year old with the commitments of the average 25-year old, he probably would have been hired. But he wasn't, so he wasn't.
Why on earth would a company discontinue the employment of a TEMP? I just can't believe TEMPORARY employees wouldn't be PERMANENTLY employed!
Maybe when the girl said "The rest of the group was pretty young", she was politely saying "The rest of the group are up-to-speed on new tech and brilliant and you're a temp whose skills have languished in your old age."
Or maybe it was discrimination. But "being sued" by someone doesn't mean much - anybody can be sued for anything. Did the people bringing the suit prevail? Did they get a settlement worth more than what Google saved by not having to defend it?
Back to the subject at hand - there is nothing inherently evil about DRM. If you don't like DRM restrictions on a product, don't buy it. It's that simple. If enough people vote with their wallets, DRM will fail.
What will likely happen is that the interests of the consumer (as indicated by their willingness to spend money on a restricted product) and the interests of the content producers will find a middleground where there's an acceptable level of control over content that is purchased by both parties. And who knows, maybe someone will find a way to create DRM that lets consumers copy amongst their own devices as much as they want while not letting them give away/sell copies to others. Nothing evil about that.
If content just gets copied and distributed everywhere for free once the first copy is released, a lot of content will no longer be produced. In the old days, you could stop that because the cost of copying something was generally higher and/or easier to stop than with new technology. Ultimately, software that makes sure there is a financial return on producing content assures the consumer has the greatest variety of content available. That may mean the consumer won't have the ability to copy as easily as they did 5 years ago, but they'll still have more ability to copy as they did 50 years ago, when your LP was pretty much uncopyable.
Because, as we all know, all politicians are fully versed in technology and its myriad uses.
When confronted by the press about his website leaving cookies on people's computers, McCain apologized profusely, and promised that milk would be provided in the future.
The RIAA would go to customers' houses, brutally murder them, and grind up the body as organ meat for third world countries if they could get away with it.
Well, wouldn't anyone? There's lots of starving people in the 3rd world you know.
I read THE TERMS OF THE SETTLEMENT. I wasn't really concerned with whether or not Netflix actually committed the infraction anyway, the point was that, even if they were, Netflix didn't get any sort of penalty out of it, what they did get was a discounted marketing campaign - so Netflix won, the lawyer won, and the customer was screwed.
- Sue a company for something they didn't really do wrong in the first place - Negotiate a "Settlement" that's really a marketing campaign for that company - Pocket massive legal fees!
Did anyone read this settlement? If you sign up for it, you get a free month of a one-level upgrade of Netflix service. Then, and here's the cool part for netflix...
After that month, THEY CONTINUE TO BILL YOU AT THE HIGHER PACKAGE PRICE!
What kind of "penalty" is that? Trade a couple rentals to get your customers to upgrade packages? That's cheap advertising is what that is!
The problem is, if you don't send people to jail, how do you prevent people who have nothing to lose from committing crimes?
If I'm an intelligent person, and I can potentially make tens of thousands of dollars by committing a crime, and the penalty for committing the crime is potentially losing the 10's of thousands of dollars and doing some community service....
Time to begin my criminal career!
But if the crime is going to prison, committing the crime is probably no longer attractive.
Penalties for crime can't just be restitution - if there's no chance you'll be worse off if you commit the crime and a chance you'll be better off, everyone (not indoctrinated with social constraints like morals or fear of god) becomes a criminal.
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In a data center, do you trust your ISP has full redundancy and will never, ever fail, decide to disconnect you or go bankrupt? Or you you use several ISPs, have an UPS and a standby generator just in case some day something does go wrong?
Well, uh, I've got a surge suppressor....
FPS has been continually improving. We take individually movable objects for granted now... what about maleable materials? What if every wall crumbles when you hit it with a rocket?
The two things that are still missing from FPS:
- Multisession persistence - the only character stats that improve over the course of a game are guns, and somewhat health and armor. There's especially a lack of persistence in multi-player FPS. What if I were to play an FPS today, and improve my character, log out, and log in tomorrow with those improvements? FPS Diablo for example.
- Worldspace - FPS are still limited in "level" size. It takes tens of seconds to minutes on comuputers to load a map, and once it's loaded, you're stuck within the confines of that map. What if, instead, you logged into a world and the world area around you was loaded, and the world continued to be dynamically loaded as you moved around? In current games, you can't play a map much bigger than a few buildings; what if instead you could drive from New York to LA (Or at least New York to New Haven?)
It's easy to not realize when game play is improved - movable objects, breakable glass, things you can see through and not shoot through, things you can shoot through and not see through, the ability to be above another character, those do make a difference on game play.
To me the media features in the silicon is what's getting cooler and cooler.
It's actually the 5 lb copper heat sink that makes it cooler and cooler.
You can't just take a computer, swap out your old graphics card, and put in the $500 one. Well, you can, but it isn't the most effective use of your money. Your old processor/MB/memory likely isn't going to be able to feed that $500 card optimally, or drive the non-graphics computations going on. If you want a $500 graphics improvement, you might need a $500 processor improvement, maybe more.
You could still play Space Quest 1 VGA easily if you had kept your computer from 1988 as well as your NES.
I thought humans were flightless. Is there a DO NOT BREATHE UNDERWATER list too?
One of the things that makes a steering wheel a good control input for a car is that in order to make large changes in what your car is doing, you have to make large changes in the control input. Want to floor the car? You have to STOMP the gas peddle. What to stop SUDDENLY? You have to STOMP the brake. Want to make a SHARP turn? You have to turn the wheel at least a half ref, often up to 2 revs for really sharp, and almost a quarter for a turn that will induce a skid at highway speed before you have a chance to correct it.
There's also a reason your acceleration and braking are controlled by your feet - because your leg muscles are stronger than your thumb muscles. You can't have your acceleration/braking controlled by a non-resistive joystick, because it'd just be too easy to sneeze/drop your coffee/knock it with your elbow and have sudden acceleration or braking. You need pretty stiff resistence to prevent accidental input. Now can you imagine driving for an extend period of time using your thumb muscles instead of your leg muscles?
Even on vehicles that have throttle controls (like planes and boats), the throttle is a separate input device, has a large range of motion, and the vehicle being controlled usually experiences INFREQUENT velocity changes.
We're just being told one sentence of a conversation as recollected by the guy who got fired. I'm not blindly defending google, but I am pointing out that there are plenty of reasons the OP may feel this way that have nothing to do with there being actual age discrimination.
"Dell Might Use AMD"
Can you put that in a blue font inside a blue "handwritten" circle?
They can just charge you $0.25 more. Most consumers arn't going to notice the quarter and are going to notice the formatting.
Unless your solution is to buy two of everything.
I LOVE newegg. I buy lots of personal stuff there. I buy lots of business stuff there. And cheap, mission critical things, I buy two of. But things that I would need someone to come in and replace immediately, well, that's just not newegg's business. Which is why they are so good at being inexpensive - the burden of support is pushed onto the customer.
In my business, I have some mission critical components and a hostile environment and a SEVERE time crunch - we print ID cards for sporting events, sometimes pushing 500 people through in an afternoon. Now, technically, I could do this with one ID card printer. But we work outside, and that means lots of dust in the air, which ID card printers don't like, so...
I own FIVE duplicate ID card printers. One goes down, we unplug it and plug in the next one. Does it suck that we've paid $7500 for ID card printers instead of $1500? Sure. But it sucks more when you've got 200 people waiting in line wanting to pay you $40 but can't because your mission-critical component isn't working.
Of course, that's nothing compared to when you have 1,000 people trying to pay you $30 online and your mission-critical system is down. We used to pay $10/month for web server space. But the reliability sucked. Now we pay 50 times that much. We have the same bandwidth and the same space, all of that extra money went to reliability because we simply couldn't risk an event shutting down at a critical moment because a critical component (our server) was out.
In most cases, it is better for you to have your own qualified staff and redundant equipment for mission-critical applications. If you're a smaller operation and a 24/7 staff isn't practical, you at least want the redundant equipment.
It's an extreme example, but we used to have laws that made it illegal for black people to learn to read. Why? God forbid a black person should achieve the same ability to do a job as a white person.
We can't (ethically) prevent other people on this planet from educating themselves. We shouldn't (economically) prevent them from doing so either - a world with 50 million educated engineers is better than a world with 50 million people who can't read.
Australians (and Americans) don't lose jobs to immigrants because of migration. They lose jobs to them because the other person is better at doing the job, despite the inherent advantages they have in language and culture.
I work with immigrant engineering workers on a regular basis. These guys wern't born in the US, their families didn't speak english natively, they didn't grow up in this country - if these guys can do a job in a foriegn (to them) language, in a foreign culture, and to it better than a native.... whose fault is that? Getting (and keeping) a job is a competitive effort. I'd much rather see someone lose because the other person is better at the job than see someone lose because they were born in the wrong spot or have the wrong skin color.
And, at least in America, immigration is GOOD. Immigration lets us get young people to help fix our demographics problem. The best way to pay for all these damned baby boomers is to let a whole bunch of 20-something, educated immigrants into the country to pay taxes to support them (instead of letting them work in India where we don't get the money for our social system.)
I can make phone calls using my lap top (I have Verizon broadband cellular+Vonage+ethernet switch) but I don't.
I can listen to XM radio on my laptop (with said broadband cellular) but I don't.
I can take pictures with my laptop (with my webcam) but I don't.
There are always advantages for using a device designed for a specific task over a device designed for many tasks. It's a tradeoff between lots of devices that do each task really well and one device that does many tasks not-so-well.
People who read a LOT often do it in situations that are not convenient for laptops. Ever tried to use a laptop in coach? After 4 hours? Without power? In a chair? Without cooking your testicles?
Do you want to wait 2 minutes for your eBook to boot? To shutdown? Do you want your book to take up as much space as a laptop?
If you're carrying a laptop around anyway, then yes, you probably don't need an eBook. But if you are not, and you just want to read books, this is probably a good product for you.
I doubt the girl fully considered the legal ramifcations of her phrasing before she said it, being, after all, an engineer/CS person and not a lawyer.
Companies have a culture. Part of any interviewing process (including interning and being a temp) is determining a fit between the employee and a company culture. What you attribute to "age discrimination" is far more likely to be a mere cultural difference. People who work at Google are young, independent, single people whose lives revolve around working at google. If you were a 32-year-old who lived your life as an independent 25-year-old, then you probably would have been hired. But if you go home to be with the family and don't see your coworkers outside of limited hours at work while your team members are around each other 16 hours a day, and at the end of the project the management says "OF the 8 temps, hire 6", the people who are going to be hired are going to be the people who best fit with the culture.
When I was interviewing for positions out of school, I paid attention to the corporate culture of the companies I interviewed with. I wouldn't work for a company that had the wrong culture for me; why would I expect a company to hire an employee who didn't fit the culture? Like it or not, and especially with a company like Google where there is a lot of demand for positions, SOCIAL interaction is very often the differentiator between who gets the job and who doesn't. EVERYONE can do the job. But can everyone do the job while getting along with the rest of the team?
And lastly, you comment that you were told your work was "good".
This is GOOGLE we're talking about here. Your work should be ABSOLUTELY EXCEPTIONAL if you expect to be permanently employed there.
These young guys are buddies and like to hang out, so they all get to be millionaires together.
Age discrimination is when you systematically hire/fire workers based on age. Systematically hiring/firing workers because they don't hang out with other workers is not age discrimination, even if the reason the worker doesn't hang out with other workers is because he doesn't want to, on account of his coworkers being younger.
Did this guy have a family? Did he work 8 hour days and then leave to be with his kids while his younger, single coworkers spend 16 hours per day at the office? Did the younger workers get together on weekends, and this guy missed out because soccer practice was more important? There's nothing wrong with having different priorities, but maybe Google as a company wants young, single people who live, eat, and breathe Google 24/7.
Any group of people, including corporations, is going to have culture. Walmart doesn't allow alcohol consumption. Other companies have managers who bring in beer for employees on Friday afternoons. If you like alcohol and avoid the Walmart functions, or don't like alcohol and don't socialize with your coworkers on Fridays, you're more likely to get canned than the other guys. It's natural - people favor other people they know in a social setting over those they don't. People WORK BETTER with other people they know in a social setting than those they don't.
If this guy had been a 32 year old with the commitments of the average 25-year old, he probably would have been hired. But he wasn't, so he wasn't.
Would you believe my cassette tapes won't fit in my CD player? My VHS won't work in my DVD player either!
BASTARDS!
You've never had media portability. You can expect it all you want, but you're not going to get it. Get over it.
Why on earth would a company discontinue the employment of a TEMP? I just can't believe TEMPORARY employees wouldn't be PERMANENTLY employed!
Maybe when the girl said "The rest of the group was pretty young", she was politely saying "The rest of the group are up-to-speed on new tech and brilliant and you're a temp whose skills have languished in your old age."
Or maybe it was discrimination. But "being sued" by someone doesn't mean much - anybody can be sued for anything. Did the people bringing the suit prevail? Did they get a settlement worth more than what Google saved by not having to defend it?
Back to the subject at hand - there is nothing inherently evil about DRM. If you don't like DRM restrictions on a product, don't buy it. It's that simple. If enough people vote with their wallets, DRM will fail.
What will likely happen is that the interests of the consumer (as indicated by their willingness to spend money on a restricted product) and the interests of the content producers will find a middleground where there's an acceptable level of control over content that is purchased by both parties. And who knows, maybe someone will find a way to create DRM that lets consumers copy amongst their own devices as much as they want while not letting them give away/sell copies to others. Nothing evil about that.
If content just gets copied and distributed everywhere for free once the first copy is released, a lot of content will no longer be produced. In the old days, you could stop that because the cost of copying something was generally higher and/or easier to stop than with new technology. Ultimately, software that makes sure there is a financial return on producing content assures the consumer has the greatest variety of content available. That may mean the consumer won't have the ability to copy as easily as they did 5 years ago, but they'll still have more ability to copy as they did 50 years ago, when your LP was pretty much uncopyable.
Americans like lawyers?
We *HATE* lawyers! That's why we elect them, because we *HATE* our government too, and we might as well kill two birds with one stone.
Because, as we all know, all politicians are fully versed in technology and its myriad uses.
When confronted by the press about his website leaving cookies on people's computers, McCain apologized profusely, and promised that milk would be provided in the future.
The Warp Drive comes with a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
The RIAA would go to customers' houses, brutally murder them, and grind up the body as organ meat for third world countries if they could get away with it.
Well, wouldn't anyone? There's lots of starving people in the 3rd world you know.
Marraige could cost him half a zillion dollars. That's expensive!
I read THE TERMS OF THE SETTLEMENT. I wasn't really concerned with whether or not Netflix actually committed the infraction anyway, the point was that, even if they were, Netflix didn't get any sort of penalty out of it, what they did get was a discounted marketing campaign - so Netflix won, the lawyer won, and the customer was screwed.
I need to become a lawyer. This lawsuit rocks!
- Sue a company for something they didn't really do wrong in the first place
- Negotiate a "Settlement" that's really a marketing campaign for that company
- Pocket massive legal fees!
Did anyone read this settlement? If you sign up for it, you get a free month of a one-level upgrade of Netflix service. Then, and here's the cool part for netflix...
After that month, THEY CONTINUE TO BILL YOU AT THE HIGHER PACKAGE PRICE!
What kind of "penalty" is that? Trade a couple rentals to get your customers to upgrade packages? That's cheap advertising is what that is!
The problem is, if you don't send people to jail, how do you prevent people who have nothing to lose from committing crimes?
If I'm an intelligent person, and I can potentially make tens of thousands of dollars by committing a crime, and the penalty for committing the crime is potentially losing the 10's of thousands of dollars and doing some community service....
Time to begin my criminal career!
But if the crime is going to prison, committing the crime is probably no longer attractive.
Penalties for crime can't just be restitution - if there's no chance you'll be worse off if you commit the crime and a chance you'll be better off, everyone (not indoctrinated with social constraints like morals or fear of god) becomes a criminal.