It is funny what we never think of- every night while we sleep there are so many people keeping us safe- Call me a geek, but astronomers are unsung heroes.
Yeah, like the guy at the water treatment facility - who keeps us from plague, or the fed-ex guy- who transports vital medical supplies, or the building inspector- who ensures our structures don't collapse on us, or the guy who draws those warning pictures - so we don't accidently eat our Shuffles, or telephone sanitizers.
Astronomers do an important job, but calling them unsung heroes is a little much. If they volunteer to be stuffed in a cannon and shot at the asteroid to deflect its path, then i'd call them heroes.
Furthermore, the only calls for "high tech workers" I've seen is for computer programmers
High tech != computers only. There are many "high tech" positions that have shortages because they aren't popular. Aerospace, Mat Sci, Chem E, Optical E. etc. The tech bubble focused on EE, and CE, so other science & engineering areas experienced shortages.
Additionally, the pool of available workers IN the United States INCLUDES "foreign students." They've already got green cards, and don't count against the H1B quota cap.
Foreign students have student visas, not green cards. They can't legally work in the US after graduation without a work visa.
So, if industry really wants more PhD's then they should put their money where their mouth is and fund more of us.
I got a scholarship from Honeywell while an undergrad. Many companies provide scholarships for undergrads with no strings attached. They also provide grants for grad students, with only the limitation being the specific research (no need to join the company after graduation).
Companies should offer funding in exchange for a commitment to work for the company for X number of years after finishing the degree.
They do in other countries (eg Malaysia) but because of US labor laws they aren't able to in this country.
Besides, having that 5 or 10 (or more) years of real-world experience and then going on to grad school makes you much more valuable than someone who goes directly to grad school after the bachelor's degree.
It is extremely difficult to go to grad school once you've become accustomed to working in the real world. Once you've traded Ramen for steak, the lifestyle sacrifice is just difficult, especially with a family.
What burns me about the whole situation is that corporations want to do business in a first world country and pay third world rates
It's because corporations are competing with others that are getting third world rates. It's not like US companies are the only ones in the world. As long as the US consumer only cares about the bottom line (cheapest price possible), the corporations have no choice but to care about the bottom line.
The question is how is medium shifting so different from obtaining the music / song / data etc from a different source if the content is the same?
For you probably not different, for the distributor though the rules are different. Copyright laws address primarily distribution. That's why RIAA sues file sharers rather than downloaders. Technically somebody cannot distribute without autorization, even to somebody who owns the music already.
DIY content is why The Sims is so incredibly popular
I doubt it, most people who play the Sims don't know about mods, or even care. What made it so popular was how it appealed to a wide audience NWN and Total Annihilation were very mod friendly, but didn't have the same level of popularity.
Can't someone please come up with simple absolute rules for everything so we don't have to think?
1 - Microsoft, SCO, MPAA, RIAA, & all corporations unless noted in rule 2 = Bad
2 - Linux, Google, Apple, AMD = Good
3 - DRM, outsourcing = Bad
4 - Open source, P2P = Good
5 - Patents, Copyright = Bad, unless being used against a big corp
6 - Goverment = Bad unless they are installing WiFi in your town
7 - NASA = Good, unless they say they will not keep Hubble in space
8 - USA = Arrogant
9 - Religion = only post flames, any intelligent conversation for or against religion will be ignored
10 - In Soviet Russia, Does it run Linux, Beowulf Cluster, I for one welcome, etc = overused, but still must be modded +5 funny
When you purchase music, you are purchasing the legal right to listen to that music peice for personal use
No you have rights to a copy, those rights are extended by fair use to backing up, time shifting, medium shifting. It does not necessarily mean you can obtain that music from a different source. Though you wouldn't be the one the RIAA would go after, it would be the distributor (See the MP3.com case)
What?! We're nerds, we're so much smarter than those business people. They just care about sports, money, and getting laid. We don't think about any of those things, all we care about is tech. There is no way they could possibly know more about how much it costs to make a microchip.:)
whatever happened to doing research for the sake of research and gaining knowledge. scientists used to share info just so others could use that same info to base future studies on. does it really matter who discovered it first?
Ego has always played a part in science. Even long past the deaths of those involved, racism, nationalism, or just picking your side, has led to controversies on who discovered what.
Who discovered calculus? Who created the first airplane? Who discovered America? Who created the first thermometer?
First. I buy a cellphone. Not rent, lease, or recieve as part of service, but buy.
If you buy a cellphone from a carrier by signing onto a plan, it is subsidized, therefore your are receiving the cellphone as part of the service. Pay full price for a cellphone and they come unlocked. So pay $59 for a cellphone from a carrier and deal with the restrictions imposed, or $499 and do whatever you want with your purchased hardware.
Every single odd, nonstandard, wierd, whatever media format that you can't easily write yourself has failed miserably. You'd think sony would have learned with the minidisc fiasco. Yes, I know minidisc is used by pros. Thanks.
You can easily write to minidisc. It is primarily used for recording live music, or creating personal mix. And I wouldn't call it a fiasco, it was and is still very popular in Japan, and has a following around the world.
CDs and DVDs were popular long before you could write to them. The key is to have the format supported by content creators, and convince the public that it is value added (eg better portability, quality, etc)
I'm trying to find out where in our Constitution does the Federal Government find an enumerated power to pay for this
"To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
You need to keep official records of things like: court rulings, legislation, federal expenditures, etc.
If the game companies insist on charging for the additional content, then maybe they could release a single version of the game in stores, and then offer an add-on as a downloadable purchase. Black & White 2, for 50$, and buy the extra creatures for 10$ from the company's web site. The irony is that they would probably make as much profit from the add-on as they do from the retail game, as they are cutting out the middle-men.
They already do that with Neverwinter Nights. I'm sure you'll see more and more companies do this
You can't sell a game like you would a movie or new artist. You can't just flash T&A, throw in a dash of racism and gang violence and make it into a blockbuster hit. You can't follow the same marketing principles and practices and expect to make money.
But those are the games that are making money. The "innovative" games tend to be hit and miss. The industry has matured to the point where to justify the costs you have to use similar marketing principles to get sufficient sales volumes.
Let's make it simple: if games cost half what they cost today, I would buy more than double, in part because I would feel less monetary guilt for every purchase
How many people would buy more than double the games? The game companies are greedy, if they could make more profits by lowering the price of a game they would. Prices of games fall, so eventually they will be in your price range, only difference is that they've maximized their profits by selling for a higher price to early adopters.
Look at what goes into the retail price, trim off the fat and restrategize. Do I really need to walk into EBGames to see the pretty boxes ? Does the experience add to the game itself ? Not at all. Do the cinematic frame grabs on the back of the box give me any idea how much fun I will be having ? Often the contrary. Does the flashy embossed T&A on the cover make it a better product ? Sorry, I don't get off on triangle-boobed high-elf priestesses. Now stop laundering the publisher's money and give me what I want for a change.
What about the parents and grandparents who buy games for their kids, or the casual gamers. The ones who don't do research on the net, and who look at the box and screenshots for their decision. Which do you think they would buy, the one in the cheap cardboard box, or the one with amazingly brilliant screenshots.
Wrong. In America, the next quarter or two are all that is important. Wall Street investors aren't worried about your company's long term outlook.
What do you think funded the dotcom bubble, those companies weren't making money. Why is it companies can post strong profits but still have their stocks fall due to poor outlook, or perceived long term industry weakness? Why can a company take several hundred million dollar charges investing in new ventures without suffering investor wrath? The day traders care about short term. Most investors look for continuous growth outlook for several years. In fact they want to see that your company is doing something to protect their investment and grow in the future.
Perhaps, but this doesn't help the employees working in these roles when review time comes around and their contributions don't look that great compared to other employees who brought in a lot of money
If those employees suffer, it's because they do not know how to properly play the political game. A training person can justify a raise by creating new initiatives that improve worker efficiency by X%, or an improvement in new employee integration rate of Y months, resulting in a cost savings of $Z thousands of dollars.
You also run into management setting up a timeline without any regard to reality, and deciding that something should only take 2 months to do when a normal team would require 12. But that doesn't matter; when the project fails, it's the team members' fault because they didn't spend 16 hours/day working on it.
Things like that will happen from time to time. If they happen regularly though, it shows incompotent management, then it's time to find a new company, because it's going under soon.
But overall, R&D is mostly a waste of time and money because it doesn't generate a short-term return.
But it does provide long term competitive advantage. Improved output, efficiency, quality, customer perception, there are a large number of advantages that a strong R&D component provides.
If your company feels differently, you must not be living in the USA, or your company is privately held and not run like a normal American corporation
I live in the USA and work at a tech corporation. Not all companies have such short-term outlooks. If not from their own reasoning, they get the message by seeing the failures of others who were short-sided. Look at how Carly ran HP into the ground by cutting R&D and focusing only on short term gain.
they hunt down people who did NOT respond to questionnaires, going to them in person with a bunch of flowers, explaining why they need to research skew. On average, it takes 2 calls and 1 visit to get to the pesky non-respondents.
Hunt them down with flowers? With a baseball bat they can get responses from those pests with just 1 visit, no calls needed. And in the future you can be sure they will respond the first time:)
Unless you want people sitting about all week saying they're 'thinking'. Or unless they want paying by results, i.e. £1000 per discovery or something
I work in R&D. Essentially the company is paying me for working 24/7 for them. Anything I think up on my "free time" belongs to them, also I can be working on a project in the lab 50 or 60+ hours and they don't give me overtime like hourly workers. Not being paid by the hour doesn't mean there are no expectations. Typically what management does is give you assignments that fill up 50+ hours of your time. I have meetings in the day. So I essentially have to work normal 8 hours, sometimes I can go in at 9am, sometimes I can leave at 4pm. Between meetings I also have to do work in the lab, so once again I have to be at work just by the nature of the job. Then I'm also expected to be in phone meetings with asia for another 3-4 hours at the end of the day. I don't have 9-5 hours, but I have to work those and more (without overtime) just by the assignments I am given. So if one day I decide to take a 2 hour lunch, management doesn't really care much.
It's hard to pay by the idea, because it's hard to quantify. Some might take 20 minutes, some might take years. The ones that take years could have a bigger payoff for the company, but if you compensate by the idea the person would be encouraged to go after the easy, quick-turn ones.
It's simple: their contribution is very poor, and you compensate them accordingly. This is America: the only thing that's important is the next quarter or two. Anything beyond that isn't important.
Then you will lose alot of talented R&D type folks. In America the next quarter or two are not what is important. Layoffs? offshoring? Typically a company takes a short term charge for such actions. The reason you layoff workers is because long term you don't see growth. You offshore because you see margins eroding. If you think business is going to boom next year you have to start investing now, people don't get trained, factories don't get prepped overnight.
Simple; you don't. You outsource the training to other companies and count it as an expense.
While it is possible to have a company that has all workers contributing to the bottom line, sometimes it isn't economically feasable. Depending on the size of the company there may be cost advantages to having staff in house, and there may be skills that can only be trained internally.
Consideration is given if the failure wasn't their fault ("missed the market window" or some other external factor),
There is always blame to pass around, especially on big projects. Missing a market window doesn't reduce the impact of the failure. You also run into management covering their ass by changing the timeline. So it's your team's failure you didn't get the project completed on time.
Yep, but they're supposed to know when they're working on something that won't be successful, and not work on that. What good is marvelous work if it's shitcanned and doesn't earn the company any money?
That is rather short sided. Sometimes work can just be added to an IP portfolio, and earn money or be used somehow down the line. I work in R&D, where you can spend several months on a project that goes nowhere. In fact most ideas don't actually end up in a product, but they do end up patented, published, or recycled for the next generation of products. Many times you know it won't go anywhere, but occassionally you hit that "jackpot," and all the failed projects pay off with one big success.
The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any third-party review of whether the secrecy is justified.
There is a third party review. The DoD is the one that keeps the secrets. Congress and the president have the right to ask for and review those secrets. Of course the soldiers in the field know what is going on, and if our elected representatives don't address the issue, as what happened with the body armor, the information will get out from them.
We live in a meaningless society: broken families, wage slavery, cubicles, lack of community, dead gods, no religion. What else is there to believe in?
Humanity itself maybe?
Times now are so tough, no wonder we all turn to our glowing boxes for salvation/sarcasm I'd take 50 hours a week of wage slavery in a cubicle so I can watch my plasma TV, over real slavery, or even 15 hours a day out in the fields so i have enough food to survive.
Throughout history people have problems, and people like to be distracted from them. What do you think the gladiator games, olympics, chariot racing, or even religion were for?
But the minute someone figures out how to get at them, if they don't share that knowledge with everyone then they are committing Theft By Default.
"Theft by default" for an idea is a pretty scary idea. It also conflicts with your statement "If you want to have ideas and keep them to yourself, that's just fine and dandy." The forcing of sharing of ideas I find to be much more invasive than current IP law. To what end does the goverment investigate that people are sharing ideas? What incentive is given to people or businesses to come up with new ideas?
What if someone dies of malnutrition because they didn't have enough bananas? If you knew how to get enough bananas but you chose not to anyway, then you as good as killed that person.
That is a moral issue for the individual to make. Do you want to be held liable because of something you may or may not have known? "Thought police" breaking down your door, because Timmy down the road said you had said you had an idea on how to climb the tree. Maybe you were not sure whether or not it would work, and hadn't tried it yourself, but you are still arrested because you did not properly share that thought with everybody else. Do you think that is an environment that is helpful for learning?
For somebody to discover something new, typically it takes some sort of investment. For example getting the bananas from the top of the tree may take several weeks of spending your free time trying different things, perhaps injuring yourself from a fall, maybe even purchasing or creating your own tools. Most people are unwilling to make the sacrifice unless there is some kind of reward, or at the very least some way to recover the effort put in.
Although that may have been the original intention -- and I can't dispute that it sounds a noble one -- IP laws have long since been subverted beyond belief {basically, the "short term personal gain" bit has been severely over-emphasised at the expense of the "long term community gain" bit}.
I agree, the implementation of the laws is poor, but not the frame work. Copyrights and patents should be getting shorter, not longer due to the faster time-to-market, and pace of growth. That doesn't deny, however, the actual concept of IP is a good one for the promotion of investment in new ideas.
Now hold on a minute. I never said anything about taking the credit for other people's inventions. In fact, I believe that to have your name associated, for as long as living memory persists, with an invention of yours that you shared with the world is the only right you have over it.
So you agree that the creator of new ideas has special rights. So in fact you need IP law of some form anyway to cover the inventor's rights. The current IP concept just takes that a step further, so that the community can reward a person not just in reputation (which doesn't feed you, and doesn't motivate everybody), but also with the opportunity to make money (which can feed you, and motivates most people). This allows people to become idea specialists, so that a PhD inventor can spend 10 hours a day inventing, rather than 8 hours a day flipping burgers to survive and 2 hours a day inventing.
And anyway, it's not really about the returns you receive. It's about the benefits that all of Society receives. Returns are nice, but nobody owes you anything.
So I owe everything to society and they owe nothing to me? Risk is one of the key needs to invent and create. As Edison said its 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. If I get nothing back from all my hard effort, maybe I'd rather just watch TV, or spend time with the wife and kids. Does that mean that advancement would stop, no, there are plenty of people who feel the reward of knowledge is enough. But in general the pace of development would significantly slow down.
If you think that you are the only one who could ever have determined how to reach the higher-up bananas, you are in
1. Try running for 15 hours or playing football for 15 hours.
You don't necessarily have to quantify the "+1 effect" purely in terms of time. In physical activites you can push yourself to the point of heat exhaustion, dehydration, or injury. One more hand gambling can cost you your rent payment, one more store can make you late for appointments, etc.
Besides, most people, even the runners among them, are not likely to be impressed when I show them the abused soles of my running shoes. These are enjoyable processes but they don't yield results the way games do. No shiny armor, no sword of pwnage, no boots of asskicking.
I'm sure most people in the world wouldn't be impressed if you told them "I got +5 boots of gnome punting." Maybe you shave a few seconds off your marathon time, maybe you find an awesome sale at the store. There is a payoff of somekind, even if is just the sense of accomplishment in your mind or recognition by others in the activity.
One aspect to identity is being a social construct, which means you need peers and a frame of reference to find yourself. If no real life people are around, people might fall back onto online communities for that.
Same as any other activity. MMOs don't necessarily provide a special sense of community. If you go to rally races you'll find other racers there, same as if you go on an MMO you'll find other MMO players.
In real life not all people are willing to go along with your story and there is no shared suspension of disbelief. Chances are you'll get a swift reality check. And you can't suddenly be a handsome, 2m tall, muscled Barabrian in real life. Nor can you be a busty female hotbod with an elfin face.
When involving yourself in an activity, physical appearance is one of the least important features. Beyond the first few seconds do you think anybody cares if you are a half-elf female or a barbarian male? Similarly if you go to one of those motorcycle conventions, you see a wide array of people. It isn't just the Hell's Angels people, its the balding accountant and his wife riding their Harley's. Social awkwardness is minimized once there is an initial framework to begin talking. In MMOs it's the game, in real life it could be talking about mountain trails you've biked down. Ultimately your personality will come through, online or in real life.
Ultimately my point is, MMOs aren't something especially addictive. Just like any other activity, it addictive for those who have social issues and cannot function outside of a particular space. The 40 hour MMO player, is not too different from the guy who lives at the bar because he has no friends, or the girl who is always at the gym because she's uncomfortable with her body.
I think there is a general profile to MMORPG players. It's just that the numbers have been underestimated and I think it reveals how subjectively difficult life for many people is. And I suspect that it shows how fundamentally afraid people are.
I don't think there really is a profile for MMO players. Everybody has the picture of the "comic book guy" type person. While there may be a slightly higher % of technical folks, its generally because of familiarity. The people who try and actually stay playing includes professional athletes, singers, engineers, artists, all races, all religions, men, women, pretty much anybody.
Slashdot Mirror
It is funny what we never think of- every night while we sleep there are so many people keeping us safe- Call me a geek, but astronomers are unsung heroes.
Yeah, like the guy at the water treatment facility - who keeps us from plague, or the fed-ex guy- who transports vital medical supplies, or the building inspector- who ensures our structures don't collapse on us, or the guy who draws those warning pictures - so we don't accidently eat our Shuffles, or telephone sanitizers.
Astronomers do an important job, but calling them unsung heroes is a little much. If they volunteer to be stuffed in a cannon and shot at the asteroid to deflect its path, then i'd call them heroes.
Furthermore, the only calls for "high tech workers" I've seen is for computer programmers
High tech != computers only. There are many "high tech" positions that have shortages because they aren't popular. Aerospace, Mat Sci, Chem E, Optical E. etc. The tech bubble focused on EE, and CE, so other science & engineering areas experienced shortages.
Additionally, the pool of available workers IN the United States INCLUDES "foreign students." They've already got green cards, and don't count against the H1B quota cap.
Foreign students have student visas, not green cards. They can't legally work in the US after graduation without a work visa.
So, if industry really wants more PhD's then they should put their money where their mouth is and fund more of us.
I got a scholarship from Honeywell while an undergrad. Many companies provide scholarships for undergrads with no strings attached. They also provide grants for grad students, with only the limitation being the specific research (no need to join the company after graduation).
Companies should offer funding in exchange for a commitment to work for the company for X number of years after finishing the degree.
They do in other countries (eg Malaysia) but because of US labor laws they aren't able to in this country.
Besides, having that 5 or 10 (or more) years of real-world experience and then going on to grad school makes you much more valuable than someone who goes directly to grad school after the bachelor's degree.
It is extremely difficult to go to grad school once you've become accustomed to working in the real world. Once you've traded Ramen for steak, the lifestyle sacrifice is just difficult, especially with a family.
What burns me about the whole situation is that corporations want to do business in a first world country and pay third world rates
It's because corporations are competing with others that are getting third world rates. It's not like US companies are the only ones in the world. As long as the US consumer only cares about the bottom line (cheapest price possible), the corporations have no choice but to care about the bottom line.
The question is how is medium shifting so different from obtaining the music / song / data etc from a different source if the content is the same?
For you probably not different, for the distributor though the rules are different. Copyright laws address primarily distribution. That's why RIAA sues file sharers rather than downloaders. Technically somebody cannot distribute without autorization, even to somebody who owns the music already.
DIY content is why The Sims is so incredibly popular
I doubt it, most people who play the Sims don't know about mods, or even care. What made it so popular was how it appealed to a wide audience
NWN and Total Annihilation were very mod friendly, but didn't have the same level of popularity.
Can't someone please come up with simple absolute rules for everything so we don't have to think?
1 - Microsoft, SCO, MPAA, RIAA, & all corporations unless noted in rule 2 = Bad
2 - Linux, Google, Apple, AMD = Good
3 - DRM, outsourcing = Bad
4 - Open source, P2P = Good
5 - Patents, Copyright = Bad, unless being used against a big corp
6 - Goverment = Bad unless they are installing WiFi in your town
7 - NASA = Good, unless they say they will not keep Hubble in space
8 - USA = Arrogant
9 - Religion = only post flames, any intelligent conversation for or against religion will be ignored
10 - In Soviet Russia, Does it run Linux, Beowulf Cluster, I for one welcome, etc = overused, but still must be modded +5 funny
When you purchase music, you are purchasing the legal right to listen to that music peice for personal use
No you have rights to a copy, those rights are extended by fair use to backing up, time shifting, medium shifting. It does not necessarily mean you can obtain that music from a different source. Though you wouldn't be the one the RIAA would go after, it would be the distributor (See the MP3.com case)
On the next exciting episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation...
Down.
And don't miss the thrilling season finale that will keep you guessing....
Episode 14J: "Delay"
Why Slashdotters Suck at Economics
:)
What?! We're nerds, we're so much smarter than those business people. They just care about sports, money, and getting laid. We don't think about any of those things, all we care about is tech. There is no way they could possibly know more about how much it costs to make a microchip.
whatever happened to doing research for the sake of research and gaining knowledge. scientists used to share info just so others could use that same info to base future studies on. does it really matter who discovered it first?
Ego has always played a part in science. Even long past the deaths of those involved, racism, nationalism, or just picking your side, has led to controversies on who discovered what.
Who discovered calculus? Who created the first airplane? Who discovered America? Who created the first thermometer?
First. I buy a cellphone. Not rent, lease, or recieve as part of service, but buy.
If you buy a cellphone from a carrier by signing onto a plan, it is subsidized, therefore your are receiving the cellphone as part of the service. Pay full price for a cellphone and they come unlocked. So pay $59 for a cellphone from a carrier and deal with the restrictions imposed, or $499 and do whatever you want with your purchased hardware.
Every single odd, nonstandard, wierd, whatever media format that you can't easily write yourself has failed miserably. You'd think sony would have learned with the minidisc fiasco. Yes, I know minidisc is used by pros. Thanks.
You can easily write to minidisc. It is primarily used for recording live music, or creating personal mix. And I wouldn't call it a fiasco, it was and is still very popular in Japan, and has a following around the world.
CDs and DVDs were popular long before you could write to them. The key is to have the format supported by content creators, and convince the public that it is value added (eg better portability, quality, etc)
I'm trying to find out where in our Constitution does the Federal Government find an enumerated power to pay for this
"To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
You need to keep official records of things like: court rulings, legislation, federal expenditures, etc.
If the game companies insist on charging for the additional content, then maybe they could release a single version of the game in stores, and then offer an add-on as a downloadable purchase. Black & White 2, for 50$, and buy the extra creatures for 10$ from the company's web site. The irony is that they would probably make as much profit from the add-on as they do from the retail game, as they are cutting out the middle-men.
They already do that with Neverwinter Nights. I'm sure you'll see more and more companies do this
You can't sell a game like you would a movie or new artist. You can't just flash T&A, throw in a dash of racism and gang violence and make it into a blockbuster hit. You can't follow the same marketing principles and practices and expect to make money.
But those are the games that are making money. The "innovative" games tend to be hit and miss. The industry has matured to the point where to justify the costs you have to use similar marketing principles to get sufficient sales volumes.
Let's make it simple: if games cost half what they cost today, I would buy more than double, in part because I would feel less monetary guilt for every purchase
How many people would buy more than double the games? The game companies are greedy, if they could make more profits by lowering the price of a game they would. Prices of games fall, so eventually they will be in your price range, only difference is that they've maximized their profits by selling for a higher price to early adopters.
Look at what goes into the retail price, trim off the fat and restrategize. Do I really need to walk into EBGames to see the pretty boxes ? Does the experience add to the game itself ? Not at all. Do the cinematic frame grabs on the back of the box give me any idea how much fun I will be having ? Often the contrary. Does the flashy embossed T&A on the cover make it a better product ? Sorry, I don't get off on triangle-boobed high-elf priestesses. Now stop laundering the publisher's money and give me what I want for a change.
What about the parents and grandparents who buy games for their kids, or the casual gamers. The ones who don't do research on the net, and who look at the box and screenshots for their decision. Which do you think they would buy, the one in the cheap cardboard box, or the one with amazingly brilliant screenshots.
Wrong. In America, the next quarter or two are all that is important. Wall Street investors aren't worried about your company's long term outlook.
What do you think funded the dotcom bubble, those companies weren't making money. Why is it companies can post strong profits but still have their stocks fall due to poor outlook, or perceived long term industry weakness? Why can a company take several hundred million dollar charges investing in new ventures without suffering investor wrath?
The day traders care about short term. Most investors look for continuous growth outlook for several years. In fact they want to see that your company is doing something to protect their investment and grow in the future.
Perhaps, but this doesn't help the employees working in these roles when review time comes around and their contributions don't look that great compared to other employees who brought in a lot of money
If those employees suffer, it's because they do not know how to properly play the political game. A training person can justify a raise by creating new initiatives that improve worker efficiency by X%, or an improvement in new employee integration rate of Y months, resulting in a cost savings of $Z thousands of dollars.
You also run into management setting up a timeline without any regard to reality, and deciding that something should only take 2 months to do when a normal team would require 12. But that doesn't matter; when the project fails, it's the team members' fault because they didn't spend 16 hours/day working on it.
Things like that will happen from time to time. If they happen regularly though, it shows incompotent management, then it's time to find a new company, because it's going under soon.
But overall, R&D is mostly a waste of time and money because it doesn't generate a short-term return.
But it does provide long term competitive advantage. Improved output, efficiency, quality, customer perception, there are a large number of advantages that a strong R&D component provides.
If your company feels differently, you must not be living in the USA, or your company is privately held and not run like a normal American corporation
I live in the USA and work at a tech corporation. Not all companies have such short-term outlooks. If not from their own reasoning, they get the message by seeing the failures of others who were short-sided. Look at how Carly ran HP into the ground by cutting R&D and focusing only on short term gain.
they hunt down people who did NOT respond to questionnaires, going to them in person with a bunch of flowers, explaining why they need to research skew. On average, it takes 2 calls and 1 visit to get to the pesky non-respondents.
:)
Hunt them down with flowers? With a baseball bat they can get responses from those pests with just 1 visit, no calls needed. And in the future you can be sure they will respond the first time
Unless you want people sitting about all week saying they're 'thinking'. Or unless they want paying by results, i.e. £1000 per discovery or something
I work in R&D. Essentially the company is paying me for working 24/7 for them. Anything I think up on my "free time" belongs to them, also I can be working on a project in the lab 50 or 60+ hours and they don't give me overtime like hourly workers.
Not being paid by the hour doesn't mean there are no expectations. Typically what management does is give you assignments that fill up 50+ hours of your time. I have meetings in the day. So I essentially have to work normal 8 hours, sometimes I can go in at 9am, sometimes I can leave at 4pm. Between meetings I also have to do work in the lab, so once again I have to be at work just by the nature of the job. Then I'm also expected to be in phone meetings with asia for another 3-4 hours at the end of the day.
I don't have 9-5 hours, but I have to work those and more (without overtime) just by the assignments I am given. So if one day I decide to take a 2 hour lunch, management doesn't really care much.
It's hard to pay by the idea, because it's hard to quantify. Some might take 20 minutes, some might take years. The ones that take years could have a bigger payoff for the company, but if you compensate by the idea the person would be encouraged to go after the easy, quick-turn ones.
It's simple: their contribution is very poor, and you compensate them accordingly. This is America: the only thing that's important is the next quarter or two. Anything beyond that isn't important.
Then you will lose alot of talented R&D type folks. In America the next quarter or two are not what is important.
Layoffs? offshoring? Typically a company takes a short term charge for such actions. The reason you layoff workers is because long term you don't see growth. You offshore because you see margins eroding. If you think business is going to boom next year you have to start investing now, people don't get trained, factories don't get prepped overnight.
Simple; you don't. You outsource the training to other companies and count it as an expense.
While it is possible to have a company that has all workers contributing to the bottom line, sometimes it isn't economically feasable. Depending on the size of the company there may be cost advantages to having staff in house, and there may be skills that can only be trained internally.
Consideration is given if the failure wasn't their fault ("missed the market window" or some other external factor),
There is always blame to pass around, especially on big projects. Missing a market window doesn't reduce the impact of the failure. You also run into management covering their ass by changing the timeline. So it's your team's failure you didn't get the project completed on time.
Yep, but they're supposed to know when they're working on something that won't be successful, and not work on that. What good is marvelous work if it's shitcanned and doesn't earn the company any money?
That is rather short sided. Sometimes work can just be added to an IP portfolio, and earn money or be used somehow down the line. I work in R&D, where you can spend several months on a project that goes nowhere. In fact most ideas don't actually end up in a product, but they do end up patented, published, or recycled for the next generation of products. Many times you know it won't go anywhere, but occassionally you hit that "jackpot," and all the failed projects pay off with one big success.
come on first post isn't That important, is it?
The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any third-party review of whether the secrecy is justified.
There is a third party review. The DoD is the one that keeps the secrets. Congress and the president have the right to ask for and review those secrets.
Of course the soldiers in the field know what is going on, and if our elected representatives don't address the issue, as what happened with the body armor, the information will get out from them.
Humanity? Go visit ogrish.com. The brutality videos are my favorite. Then tell me what you think about the human race.
And belief in God results in something different? Plenty of brutality has been done in the name of religion.
But I hear the average hunter-gatherer only had to work about 3 hours a day to provide himself with the necessities of life.
I could work a part time job 20 hours a week and get a much better lifestyle.
We live in a meaningless society: broken families, wage slavery, cubicles, lack of community, dead gods, no religion. What else is there to believe in?
/sarcasm
Humanity itself maybe?
Times now are so tough, no wonder we all turn to our glowing boxes for salvation
I'd take 50 hours a week of wage slavery in a cubicle so I can watch my plasma TV, over real slavery, or even 15 hours a day out in the fields so i have enough food to survive.
Throughout history people have problems, and people like to be distracted from them. What do you think the gladiator games, olympics, chariot racing, or even religion were for?
But the minute someone figures out how to get at them, if they don't share that knowledge with everyone then they are committing Theft By Default.
"Theft by default" for an idea is a pretty scary idea. It also conflicts with your statement "If you want to have ideas and keep them to yourself, that's just fine and dandy."
The forcing of sharing of ideas I find to be much more invasive than current IP law. To what end does the goverment investigate that people are sharing ideas? What incentive is given to people or businesses to come up with new ideas?
What if someone dies of malnutrition because they didn't have enough bananas? If you knew how to get enough bananas but you chose not to anyway, then you as good as killed that person.
That is a moral issue for the individual to make. Do you want to be held liable because of something you may or may not have known? "Thought police" breaking down your door, because Timmy down the road said you had said you had an idea on how to climb the tree. Maybe you were not sure whether or not it would work, and hadn't tried it yourself, but you are still arrested because you did not properly share that thought with everybody else. Do you think that is an environment that is helpful for learning?
For somebody to discover something new, typically it takes some sort of investment. For example getting the bananas from the top of the tree may take several weeks of spending your free time trying different things, perhaps injuring yourself from a fall, maybe even purchasing or creating your own tools. Most people are unwilling to make the sacrifice unless there is some kind of reward, or at the very least some way to recover the effort put in.
Although that may have been the original intention -- and I can't dispute that it sounds a noble one -- IP laws have long since been subverted beyond belief {basically, the "short term personal gain" bit has been severely over-emphasised at the expense of the "long term community gain" bit}.
I agree, the implementation of the laws is poor, but not the frame work. Copyrights and patents should be getting shorter, not longer due to the faster time-to-market, and pace of growth. That doesn't deny, however, the actual concept of IP is a good one for the promotion of investment in new ideas.
Now hold on a minute. I never said anything about taking the credit for other people's inventions. In fact, I believe that to have your name associated, for as long as living memory persists, with an invention of yours that you shared with the world is the only right you have over it.
So you agree that the creator of new ideas has special rights. So in fact you need IP law of some form anyway to cover the inventor's rights.
The current IP concept just takes that a step further, so that the community can reward a person not just in reputation (which doesn't feed you, and doesn't motivate everybody), but also with the opportunity to make money (which can feed you, and motivates most people). This allows people to become idea specialists, so that a PhD inventor can spend 10 hours a day inventing, rather than 8 hours a day flipping burgers to survive and 2 hours a day inventing.
And anyway, it's not really about the returns you receive. It's about the benefits that all of Society receives. Returns are nice, but nobody owes you anything.
So I owe everything to society and they owe nothing to me? Risk is one of the key needs to invent and create. As Edison said its 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. If I get nothing back from all my hard effort, maybe I'd rather just watch TV, or spend time with the wife and kids. Does that mean that advancement would stop, no, there are plenty of people who feel the reward of knowledge is enough. But in general the pace of development would significantly slow down.
If you think that you are the only one who could ever have determined how to reach the higher-up bananas, you are in
1. Try running for 15 hours or playing football for 15 hours.
You don't necessarily have to quantify the "+1 effect" purely in terms of time. In physical activites you can push yourself to the point of heat exhaustion, dehydration, or injury. One more hand gambling can cost you your rent payment, one more store can make you late for appointments, etc.
Besides, most people, even the runners among them, are not likely to be impressed when I show them the abused soles of my running shoes. These are enjoyable processes but they don't yield results the way games do. No shiny armor, no sword of pwnage, no boots of asskicking.
I'm sure most people in the world wouldn't be impressed if you told them "I got +5 boots of gnome punting." Maybe you shave a few seconds off your marathon time, maybe you find an awesome sale at the store. There is a payoff of somekind, even if is just the sense of accomplishment in your mind or recognition by others in the activity.
One aspect to identity is being a social construct, which means you need peers and a frame of reference to find yourself. If no real life people are around, people might fall back onto online communities for that.
Same as any other activity. MMOs don't necessarily provide a special sense of community. If you go to rally races you'll find other racers there, same as if you go on an MMO you'll find other MMO players.
In real life not all people are willing to go along with your story and there is no shared suspension of disbelief. Chances are you'll get a swift reality check. And you can't suddenly be a handsome, 2m tall, muscled Barabrian in real life. Nor can you be a busty female hotbod with an elfin face.
When involving yourself in an activity, physical appearance is one of the least important features. Beyond the first few seconds do you think anybody cares if you are a half-elf female or a barbarian male? Similarly if you go to one of those motorcycle conventions, you see a wide array of people. It isn't just the Hell's Angels people, its the balding accountant and his wife riding their Harley's. Social awkwardness is minimized once there is an initial framework to begin talking. In MMOs it's the game, in real life it could be talking about mountain trails you've biked down. Ultimately your personality will come through, online or in real life.
Ultimately my point is, MMOs aren't something especially addictive. Just like any other activity, it addictive for those who have social issues and cannot function outside of a particular space. The 40 hour MMO player, is not too different from the guy who lives at the bar because he has no friends, or the girl who is always at the gym because she's uncomfortable with her body.
I think there is a general profile to MMORPG players. It's just that the numbers have been underestimated and I think it reveals how subjectively difficult life for many people is. And I suspect that it shows how fundamentally afraid people are.
I don't think there really is a profile for MMO players. Everybody has the picture of the "comic book guy" type person. While there may be a slightly higher % of technical folks, its generally because of familiarity. The people who try and actually stay playing includes professional athletes, singers, engineers, artists, all races, all religions, men, women, pretty much anybody.