Who listens to your rant? Engineering/development? Nope, we're already on the next product. Marketing? Not really, they are set up to do statistical analysis in the form of taking surveys and meeting with critical customers, not read 1M rants. They also focus on non-paying customers, particularly those who chose another product (doesn't apply to games as much). Product management? Nope, they've moved on, but they believe DRM is working based on trade rags and only pirates are complaining.
Support? Nope, they're just there to help you get it working, most of the time they're not even in the same company or country, much less have feedback to development.
Sending a lot of letters might actually work because someone has to clean out all the trash it makes. Otherwise at least in my giant corp, sending a letter to our CEO often has effects. Sometimes people get fired, but it has effects.
You can't legislate competance. Others have tried and failed. There is a "PE" certification for that, but very few engineers bother with it, it's so broad as to be meaningless. IT has the MCSE (and a bunch of others) iirc, but I don't know many people who bother with them, all citing the various idiots they know with MCSE degrees who can't find their ass with both hands. All take note of the fees...wondering what exactly it is they're paying for.
The point is not to abdicate interest and authority, to pay money to have a problem go away. The point is to unify around particular issues, and push those issues. Vote strongly with your organization, fund people to make sure you're buying the same expensive dinners that corporate interests are buying. I'm talking about a political party more than a union, one that does not seek the presidency, but to manipulate those that do.
But making a new bureacracy? Trying to find ways of setting a bar for competance over very, very broad fields of study? Systems are already in place to weed out the incompetant.
Well the point is as a EE I can learn real fast. I know how it works in principle, I know how to read well and understand the intent behind the rules. I could pick it up fast if it were profitable to do so. An organization that requires X years of apprenticeship in order to practice the trade would piss me off.
On the other hand, as an EE I have no job security. My job is offshorable, and goes that way often. The reason we don't unionize is the same: it won't help. Go ahead, build "BS EE" into the law, see how many companies stop being "R&D" companies and turn to "Manufacturing" or "IP" companies. The same logic applies to IT, all that will be left are on-site help desk techs, and networking contractors (unglorified electricians: you won't even have safety on your side). All the fun server room stuff will go far, far away. That's what the ABA and AMA have that IT, and EE/CS types will never have.
If IT wants to unionize, forget traditional labor unions. Lobby. Make the economy and tech labor issues move to the top of the campaigns. Spread your propaganda to all your union employees and astroturf the hell out of it. MADD and AARP are far more effective "unions" than the teamsters. Bend the laws to make it unprofitable to offshore. Spread beyond IT, many of us EE/CS/ME types feel the same pain you do. I'd pay dues for an organization that had real power in Washington for issues I care about.
Kind of like taking lunch money away. Without getting in trouble by explaining the funding model (which may have changed), let's just say it wasn't always working out for both parties involved. The hate went both ways too.
If you were a researcher and had a business funded project, you had to stop research and be a developer full time until the project was ready. This meant you were expected to be on a typically tight development schedule, leaving no time for papers, conferences, new research etc. You had to basically be an engineer for a year or two. I guess I didn't understand their pain, but they agreed with each other it is torture.
On the other hand, the business side (which weren't all or significantly MBAs, most were EEs/CSs) had the usual deadlines/deliverables/initiatives/targets/metrics model. We scoff at such trivialities! For them it's very real, I did not understand myself until I came to my present employer in a pure development role. People are fired over these things, but I remember us talking over the water cooler about the business "nonsense" and "small minds". It is how we might laugh at women in the middle east wearing head to toe clothing in the heat, but they get their heads chopped off if they don't...it's just an impedance mismatch.
Further, if you were in BL in a roughly business aligned area, all was not well. Any new product idea which even sounded like it might somehow compete with an existing product was squashed. You had to get external funding, work within your pathetically small internal budget, or basically submarine it and take it out of the company. This happened a lot, there were a few groups who were very disloyal to the company and just using it for a salary in between start-ups, the old-boy network ensured they'd land on their feet.
At least when I left the situation was dire. The research side didn't want to get picked up on a project, and the business side didn't really want to waste time on new development and would rather wait and see, and buy successful companies (either to get their product, or to squish their product). Unfortunately since telecom is so driven by monopolies, there isn't the push to innovate, in fact the contrary. Why make something new, when you can keep selling something old? I personally believe DSL only happened because of the telecom act of '96 forced access provision. Once that went away (or was otherwise nerfed), almost as the first act of the Dubya administration...new projects stopped overnight. Lights out.
So even if they suddenly got billions of dollars, I don't see them embracing research again. They'd just sit on it and use it strategically, waiting for products they want/need to emerge on their own.
I used to work there, pretty safe to say the business side hates the research side (sometimes with good reason, sometimes not). I would not anticipate their return even if economics changed.
Exactly, Apple could have used an Intel processor but tossed all the legacy crap, and made their own architecture. They have the money, connections and know-how...they just did not want to. The only thing that makes them "Apple" is the TPM chip (which most shipping PCs have, or will have) with Apple's secret sauce in it. Something that for all it's dread, is not all that difficult to work around.
It's really almost like Apple wanted this to happen, like they may not believe in the personal computing market anymore. They'll keep their hardware biz around for as long as it makes sense, and gradually PCize their fanboi's. Meanwhile their OS is clearly poised to kick MS's ass (and really hurt Linux adoption) and they can make more selling it (and using it to control chip, hardware and OEMs).
I suspect someone just couldn't figure out how to tell the shareholders "Hey uh, about what I have been saying for 20 years? Yeah funny thing..."
In the part of amerika I live in, you get 8 days. In engineering, I've been able to negotiate salaries by 10-20%, but have never gotten a single hour of extra vacation.
There's no minimum vacation days that I know of, 10-15 seem to be standard. Google is pretty generous if they give 25 after 6 years.
I don't think less of Google because of the MS boomerangers. So far not one of them showcased here has had any real interest in technology development, so they seem to belong in MS. All i see is bullshit career development. You went to school to learn engineering, do it or get out.
Now the daycare thing I have a bit more sympathy for, but on the other hand my present company offers none whatever, nor has my past employer, nor any employers I am looking at. However people may have taken their job based on that benefit, so it seems like the right thing to do is to put all new children on the new pay scale, but leave the existing children on the existing scale. Eventually the kids go to school and get out of daycare anyway.
Where I come from A = 90-100, B=80-89, C=70-79, D=65-69, and anything else is an F. The +/-'s break up pretty evenly in that range, so this is a B-. I went to school all over the US.
I'm sure across the world it varies...but I call it a B-.
And I'm not sure that voting for free trade with China is exactly the position most/.'ers would be for. They key words in there is "wanted by technology firms", i.e. the suits other dorks running the companies, not the people who actually produce technology.
It's almost as if cnet has an agenda....say it ain't so.
What is the right way to make profit on R&D (which may include art, music, literature etc.), that isn't distribution?
I'm hungry for a good answer. But as an engineer/developer I do need to make money. I don't charge for everything, but I have to put food on the table, and a roof over my families head. I don't care about shareholders and wall street...yet they are the only people with the money to invest the $1M + it takes to invent, design and test a new product.
I've thought of a few ways, because I do agree with you. But I don't see the way yet...that doesn't involve IP.
The electronic equivalent is the receipt system. Have the machine print your vote on receipt paper, visible behind glass in the machine. As the last step, you verify your selection, and the paper scrolls away. If you do not approve, if the slip is incorrect, if there is mechanical printing failure, etc. the ballot is destroyed, the electronic vote is not pushed, and you try again.
Later on, the ballots are collected, counted by hand the traditional way, and that is compared against the electronic result.
That way ballots are anonymous, there is a paper trail that is verifiable by the various interested parties, but the electronic system can be trusted and kept in check.
Well the only real threat of an armed rebellion is when enough people are unhappy about enough things that they're willing to risk dying. The 2nd amendment exists for that cause. One person is a criminal, 10 people are a conspiracy, thousands is a revolt.
I personally think it's fixable with less extreme measures, but it may entail a bit more suffering before enough people have visibility that there's a problem.
Most of the country hasn't seen electronic voting machines (yet). Wait till we stand in line and watch them crash, or behave strangely, or visibly ignore input. Wait till the popular candidate mysteriously loses. No one needs to die for this, it just needs to APPEAR to fail one time.
The day when McDonalds can get away with requiring MS CS, MS EE, AND get an abundance of qualified applicants for fry cook positions is rapidly approaching.
In most cases polygamists are persecuted not for having sex with multiple women, but because they're weird in some other dimension:
- Wear funny clothes - Live in a compound, play with military weapons - Have a sometimes deserved history of disobeying hot-button laws, such as pedophilia
Sometimes the hatred is truly unfair, sometimes not so much.
Otherwise, if you want to have multiple wives, at least in the US, have fun, just don't claim it on your tax return. I don't think you can be arrested for living with 4 women, married under (for example) Muslim tradition...as long as you don't try to get the extra deductions for it, and don't try to acquire multiple simultaneous marriage licenses. I'm sure there are local laws that might prevent this arrangement in some places, but I haven't heard of them being enforced.
Whether you and your spouses get legal protection is unclear, I think it'd be very messy. It's probably inadvisable for women to enter in to.
Even if you clean room design the technology, if Intel or AMD have a patent on some necessary, fundamental aspect of the technology and you duplicate it while recreating the technology, you are still required to license it.
Keep in mind that here, lame patents are legal and enforceable.
The fact is if you look at the altered photograph, you still remember reality. The reality you remember may be dark. Dad not in the photo of your birthday party like he promised, but someone added him? You remember, maybe it's worse for having been photoshopped.
Pimple on prom night? You remember.
The only thing that's altered are other people's perceptions of you and yours, and that's a game that is as old as time itself.
It was pretty hard to "pull" some of the early dungeons at the intended level with the available gear. And by hard I mean, a net loss to xp and gear for all but the elite. It was always best to hit the dungeons well above the intended level, with a full group. That's how the camping started - preparations for hitting a dungeon.
EQ was released with some big balance issues, but no one had ever tried an online group-based game before. I think the original designers (including McQuaid, who I don't think of as a saintly figure) had very different expectations of gamer dedication. The behavior that resulted was a direct result of game designers not knowing what to expect and wanting a more hardcore audience, but SOE wanting a wide audience paying monthy fees. WoW murdered EQ only because they learned from the mistakes and put thought into it, unlikely every other MMO between EQ and WoW.
In some ways it always irked me that SOE & Verant just gave up on EQ and left it as a stupid level treadmill followed by a stupid gear treadmill. It was definitely one of the more immersive environments and had much better classes. Re-imagined, it could be a really good game.
It's a mmog where you sit in groups of 6 for roughly 1 year (real life time) killing things, over and over, and over again. Then, upon attaining max level, you join groups of 30-70 people to kill really big things. Over and over again.
You never, ever quest. I think that's how it got its name.
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Who listens to your rant? Engineering/development? Nope, we're already on the next product. Marketing? Not really, they are set up to do statistical analysis in the form of taking surveys and meeting with critical customers, not read 1M rants. They also focus on non-paying customers, particularly those who chose another product (doesn't apply to games as much). Product management? Nope, they've moved on, but they believe DRM is working based on trade rags and only pirates are complaining.
Support? Nope, they're just there to help you get it working, most of the time they're not even in the same company or country, much less have feedback to development.
Sending a lot of letters might actually work because someone has to clean out all the trash it makes. Otherwise at least in my giant corp, sending a letter to our CEO often has effects. Sometimes people get fired, but it has effects.
If tax avoidance was illegal, there would be a lot more out there.
You can't legislate competance. Others have tried and failed. There is a "PE" certification for that, but very few engineers bother with it, it's so broad as to be meaningless. IT has the MCSE (and a bunch of others) iirc, but I don't know many people who bother with them, all citing the various idiots they know with MCSE degrees who can't find their ass with both hands. All take note of the fees...wondering what exactly it is they're paying for.
The point is not to abdicate interest and authority, to pay money to have a problem go away. The point is to unify around particular issues, and push those issues. Vote strongly with your organization, fund people to make sure you're buying the same expensive dinners that corporate interests are buying. I'm talking about a political party more than a union, one that does not seek the presidency, but to manipulate those that do.
But making a new bureacracy? Trying to find ways of setting a bar for competance over very, very broad fields of study? Systems are already in place to weed out the incompetant.
Well the point is as a EE I can learn real fast. I know how it works in principle, I know how to read well and understand the intent behind the rules. I could pick it up fast if it were profitable to do so. An organization that requires X years of apprenticeship in order to practice the trade would piss me off.
On the other hand, as an EE I have no job security. My job is offshorable, and goes that way often. The reason we don't unionize is the same: it won't help. Go ahead, build "BS EE" into the law, see how many companies stop being "R&D" companies and turn to "Manufacturing" or "IP" companies. The same logic applies to IT, all that will be left are on-site help desk techs, and networking contractors (unglorified electricians: you won't even have safety on your side). All the fun server room stuff will go far, far away. That's what the ABA and AMA have that IT, and EE/CS types will never have.
If IT wants to unionize, forget traditional labor unions. Lobby. Make the economy and tech labor issues move to the top of the campaigns. Spread your propaganda to all your union employees and astroturf the hell out of it. MADD and AARP are far more effective "unions" than the teamsters. Bend the laws to make it unprofitable to offshore. Spread beyond IT, many of us EE/CS/ME types feel the same pain you do. I'd pay dues for an organization that had real power in Washington for issues I care about.
I was gonna throw out gravitational forces, although the sunspot observation wouldn't necessarily support that.
It would be interesting if there were a correlation there.
Kind of like taking lunch money away. Without getting in trouble by explaining the funding model (which may have changed), let's just say it wasn't always working out for both parties involved. The hate went both ways too.
If you were a researcher and had a business funded project, you had to stop research and be a developer full time until the project was ready. This meant you were expected to be on a typically tight development schedule, leaving no time for papers, conferences, new research etc. You had to basically be an engineer for a year or two. I guess I didn't understand their pain, but they agreed with each other it is torture.
On the other hand, the business side (which weren't all or significantly MBAs, most were EEs/CSs) had the usual deadlines/deliverables/initiatives/targets/metrics model. We scoff at such trivialities! For them it's very real, I did not understand myself until I came to my present employer in a pure development role. People are fired over these things, but I remember us talking over the water cooler about the business "nonsense" and "small minds". It is how we might laugh at women in the middle east wearing head to toe clothing in the heat, but they get their heads chopped off if they don't...it's just an impedance mismatch.
Further, if you were in BL in a roughly business aligned area, all was not well. Any new product idea which even sounded like it might somehow compete with an existing product was squashed. You had to get external funding, work within your pathetically small internal budget, or basically submarine it and take it out of the company. This happened a lot, there were a few groups who were very disloyal to the company and just using it for a salary in between start-ups, the old-boy network ensured they'd land on their feet.
At least when I left the situation was dire. The research side didn't want to get picked up on a project, and the business side didn't really want to waste time on new development and would rather wait and see, and buy successful companies (either to get their product, or to squish their product). Unfortunately since telecom is so driven by monopolies, there isn't the push to innovate, in fact the contrary. Why make something new, when you can keep selling something old? I personally believe DSL only happened because of the telecom act of '96 forced access provision. Once that went away (or was otherwise nerfed), almost as the first act of the Dubya administration...new projects stopped overnight. Lights out.
So even if they suddenly got billions of dollars, I don't see them embracing research again. They'd just sit on it and use it strategically, waiting for products they want/need to emerge on their own.
I used to work there, pretty safe to say the business side hates the research side (sometimes with good reason, sometimes not). I would not anticipate their return even if economics changed.
And I thought they were just trying to appeal to the elitist instinct in many gamers.
Exactly, Apple could have used an Intel processor but tossed all the legacy crap, and made their own architecture. They have the money, connections and know-how...they just did not want to. The only thing that makes them "Apple" is the TPM chip (which most shipping PCs have, or will have) with Apple's secret sauce in it. Something that for all it's dread, is not all that difficult to work around.
It's really almost like Apple wanted this to happen, like they may not believe in the personal computing market anymore. They'll keep their hardware biz around for as long as it makes sense, and gradually PCize their fanboi's. Meanwhile their OS is clearly poised to kick MS's ass (and really hurt Linux adoption) and they can make more selling it (and using it to control chip, hardware and OEMs).
I suspect someone just couldn't figure out how to tell the shareholders "Hey uh, about what I have been saying for 20 years? Yeah funny thing..."
Based on the position of the international date line, I predict tomorrow will be a shitty day.
In the part of amerika I live in, you get 8 days. In engineering, I've been able to negotiate salaries by 10-20%, but have never gotten a single hour of extra vacation.
There's no minimum vacation days that I know of, 10-15 seem to be standard. Google is pretty generous if they give 25 after 6 years.
You'll always get a bigger raise outside.
I don't think less of Google because of the MS boomerangers. So far not one of them showcased here has had any real interest in technology development, so they seem to belong in MS. All i see is bullshit career development. You went to school to learn engineering, do it or get out.
Now the daycare thing I have a bit more sympathy for, but on the other hand my present company offers none whatever, nor has my past employer, nor any employers I am looking at. However people may have taken their job based on that benefit, so it seems like the right thing to do is to put all new children on the new pay scale, but leave the existing children on the existing scale. Eventually the kids go to school and get out of daycare anyway.
Where I come from A = 90-100, B=80-89, C=70-79, D=65-69, and anything else is an F. The +/-'s break up pretty evenly in that range, so this is a B-. I went to school all over the US.
I'm sure across the world it varies...but I call it a B-.
And I'm not sure that voting for free trade with China is exactly the position most /.'ers would be for. They key words in there is "wanted by technology firms", i.e. the suits other dorks running the companies, not the people who actually produce technology.
It's almost as if cnet has an agenda....say it ain't so.
What is the right way to make profit on R&D (which may include art, music, literature etc.), that isn't distribution?
I'm hungry for a good answer. But as an engineer/developer I do need to make money. I don't charge for everything, but I have to put food on the table, and a roof over my families head. I don't care about shareholders and wall street...yet they are the only people with the money to invest the $1M + it takes to invent, design and test a new product.
I've thought of a few ways, because I do agree with you. But I don't see the way yet...that doesn't involve IP.
The electronic equivalent is the receipt system. Have the machine print your vote on receipt paper, visible behind glass in the machine. As the last step, you verify your selection, and the paper scrolls away. If you do not approve, if the slip is incorrect, if there is mechanical printing failure, etc. the ballot is destroyed, the electronic vote is not pushed, and you try again.
Later on, the ballots are collected, counted by hand the traditional way, and that is compared against the electronic result.
That way ballots are anonymous, there is a paper trail that is verifiable by the various interested parties, but the electronic system can be trusted and kept in check.
Well the only real threat of an armed rebellion is when enough people are unhappy about enough things that they're willing to risk dying. The 2nd amendment exists for that cause. One person is a criminal, 10 people are a conspiracy, thousands is a revolt.
I personally think it's fixable with less extreme measures, but it may entail a bit more suffering before enough people have visibility that there's a problem.
Most of the country hasn't seen electronic voting machines (yet). Wait till we stand in line and watch them crash, or behave strangely, or visibly ignore input. Wait till the popular candidate mysteriously loses. No one needs to die for this, it just needs to APPEAR to fail one time.
The day when McDonalds can get away with requiring MS CS, MS EE, AND get an abundance of qualified applicants for fry cook positions is rapidly approaching.
Goodbye helloworld.c, hello wantfrieswiththat.cxx
In most cases polygamists are persecuted not for having sex with multiple women, but because they're weird in some other dimension:
- Wear funny clothes
- Live in a compound, play with military weapons
- Have a sometimes deserved history of disobeying hot-button laws, such as pedophilia
Sometimes the hatred is truly unfair, sometimes not so much.
Otherwise, if you want to have multiple wives, at least in the US, have fun, just don't claim it on your tax return. I don't think you can be arrested for living with 4 women, married under (for example) Muslim tradition...as long as you don't try to get the extra deductions for it, and don't try to acquire multiple simultaneous marriage licenses. I'm sure there are local laws that might prevent this arrangement in some places, but I haven't heard of them being enforced.
Whether you and your spouses get legal protection is unclear, I think it'd be very messy. It's probably inadvisable for women to enter in to.
Even if you clean room design the technology, if Intel or AMD have a patent on some necessary, fundamental aspect of the technology and you duplicate it while recreating the technology, you are still required to license it.
Keep in mind that here, lame patents are legal and enforceable.
The fact is if you look at the altered photograph, you still remember reality. The reality you remember may be dark. Dad not in the photo of your birthday party like he promised, but someone added him? You remember, maybe it's worse for having been photoshopped.
Pimple on prom night? You remember.
The only thing that's altered are other people's perceptions of you and yours, and that's a game that is as old as time itself.
It was pretty hard to "pull" some of the early dungeons at the intended level with the available gear. And by hard I mean, a net loss to xp and gear for all but the elite. It was always best to hit the dungeons well above the intended level, with a full group. That's how the camping started - preparations for hitting a dungeon.
EQ was released with some big balance issues, but no one had ever tried an online group-based game before. I think the original designers (including McQuaid, who I don't think of as a saintly figure) had very different expectations of gamer dedication. The behavior that resulted was a direct result of game designers not knowing what to expect and wanting a more hardcore audience, but SOE wanting a wide audience paying monthy fees. WoW murdered EQ only because they learned from the mistakes and put thought into it, unlikely every other MMO between EQ and WoW.
In some ways it always irked me that SOE & Verant just gave up on EQ and left it as a stupid level treadmill followed by a stupid gear treadmill. It was definitely one of the more immersive environments and had much better classes. Re-imagined, it could be a really good game.
If you turn yourself upside down, objects appear to fall the other way.
Are particles unpredictable because they have free will, or are they unpredictable because we don't have the ability to understand what drives them?
At one point objects fell from the sky because it was God's will.
It's a mmog where you sit in groups of 6 for roughly 1 year (real life time) killing things, over and over, and over again. Then, upon attaining max level, you join groups of 30-70 people to kill really big things. Over and over again.
You never, ever quest. I think that's how it got its name.