You don't have to tell he that to her face, but DON'T take the blame on yourself, even sarcastically. That would be playing into her game (and it IS a game).
It is a game, and you want to take all the blame you can humanly get - and not sarcastically at all, but quite sincerely. The fact is, with respect to helping this woman, you do suck, by the simple measure that you're not able to help. The base fault may lie with her and her inability to follow even simple precautions, but you have failed too, by your inability to impress her with the need to follow them. You are a bad match as a support person. I'm not saying anybody else would be good match for her, but it's plain that you are not.
And by making all agree that you're absolutely inept at anything support-related, you have a gold-plated excuse no matter how bad the situation may get, without imperiling your relation with your sibling. You suck, so for the love of your sister there is no way you'll interfere and making things worse. Her computer could be on fire and you can quite plausibly state that trying to put it out would only have resulted in worse consequences than the house burning to the ground.
Sit them down in front of you, look them in the eye and say:
"This is not working. I try to do my best helping you with your computer problems in any way I can; I even built your last computer to save you some money. I have been at your beck and call, day and night, for years. What I get from you is a constant stream of complaints."
"Clearly, what I can offer you in help is not good enough by far. I do not know the reason - it could be incompetence on my part, it could be you inadvertently doing things you should not, or it could be that Windows, and the programs you want to run on it, just aren't very good quality. Quite possibly it is a combination of these. It doesn't matter, though - you are miserable, and that makes me miserable too."
"So from now on I will not interfere. No longer will my bungled attempts at fixing things just make everythng worse. I suggest you buy your next computer from a real vendor, with a service contract, and contact their professionals if you ever experience a problem with your new machine. You will be a lot happier knowing you can rely on people who help users for a living, and I can be free of the guilt of trying to do things that are perhaps over my head."
"I am truly sorry I have inconvenienced you like this for years. I wanted to help but of course I whould have known better."
First of all, for reasearch, you need a good research environment and community. You cannot do research in a void. You need the competition and support and all that.
Which was my point about taking a job in a research lab or school, just not an actual research position. You have the same people, and many of the resources. You can participate in seminars and corridor talk just like any of the other people there. If you're a teacher, you're not only welcome, but expected to keep abreast with the research side of things, and as a technician or support personnel, most places are deligthed to have you participate since you not only become better in your job, knowing exactly wht is going on, but you're also very effective as a sounding board and discussion partner for ideas since you're not in competition for the research positions.
Secondly, I think good research is done when it makes or breaks you. I mean, if you are comfortable and research doesn't really matter if you do well or fail, then it will slowly fall away. Plus, you can't do research part time. Hell, there was even a story here on SD few years ago about how family lives kills research.
You can argue the same for any non-trivial job. And it's just as wrong. Yes, people can be surprisingly productive-seeming for a while when you have them cornered like a rat. But that "productivity" is largely a sham. It becomes a matter of busy-work - take whatever measure used (publications) and maximize that to the detriment of any other possible consideration, like actual quality of the work. What you end up with is a lot of rehashes of previous results, and an increase in shoddy work and outright fraud. If the system is set up to "make or break" me, in a field where luck and random insight counts for as much as spending working hours, there is no way I'd take a risk when it's safer to just republish another minor variation of an idea I first had ten years previous.
You end up penalizing original reasearch, long-shot approaches and long-term projects. You also disqualify otherwise qualified people for unrelated issues - women (who generally need to have their children before the age of 35), for example, account for over half of the pool of undergraduates today, and you'd just throw that talent away for some misplaced "law of the jungle" fantasy of effectiveness.
Ultimately, though, if research forces me to choose between it and having a life, I'm out of here. And I know the same goes for a lot of other people in the field. Research is fun, it is fascinating and it is challenging. But in the end, it is a job, a hobby, an interest. Few people see it as their whole life (and I would argue that those that do lack the perspective and ability to step back to be as good at the job as they could be).
Teaching is not the only way to keep a hand in. If you have technical or other specialist skills, finding a support job at university or institute may not be a bad idea either. You are perhaps a wizard on the lab lathe and milling machine, or you have demonic organizational skills, making you excellent department secretary material? You have access to a lot of research resources, you have a steady job with not need to spend much of your time just chasing money to live on - and chances are, your income is higher than that of the post-docs you're surrounded with.
Of course, you'd not be the only one realizing this; you're in for some heavy competition no matter what you try to do.
If you are looking for the kind of place that Xerox used to be, especially as a way to avoid the mindnumbing grind of chasing grants and spending your life in what amounts to temp job, forget it.
First, even at the "golden years" of blue-sky research, the only ones that had a permanent position were people that had already proven themselves by a long grind in the post-doc mill and found to be exceptional. Going from your thesis to a steady research job in a place like that didn't happen even then.
There are places like that today - around here we have NICT and ATR in southern Kyoto, for example. But there too, much of the research is implicitly or explicitly aimed at resulting in something useful, and you are no more free of the grant process than at a university. The people with a permanent position are again few and far between; the head researchers overseeing the groups of post-docs and visiting researchers having some temporary grant.
Really, the difference between university research and research institute or large-company research is in my experience mainly in the need to teach (and the opportunity for a semi-steady income) at a university on one hand; and the greater financial resources for equipment and travel at institutes on the other.
I know of only two ways to get to do free research without the teeth-grinding pain of grant-chasing and temporary job upon temporary job:
* Get a steady part-time job you can live on, and do research in your spare time. Teaching is not a bad option if you're reasonably good at it; you have access to the university, with seminars, labs and people, and teaching your subject forces you to pay attention to areas you perhaps would tend to ignore if left to your own devices.
* Make a fortune, retire and do research as a hobby, perhaps form and finance a small group with a couple of colleagues you like and work well with. Hey, we can all dream, right?
If you're that worried about safety, take the train!:)
I live in Japan, so I do. I've never even bothered to have my licence converted into a Japanese one; trains, subways and bicycles take me wherever I need to go.
Of course, a Japanese train is always at risk of being attacked by Godzilla; I guess the only safe choice is to build my own MechaZilla which should widthstand the ravages of even the most determined bad actor in a rubber suit. ^_^
Here in Shanghai and everywhere in China, you can buy for an electric bicycle or scooter for less than $200 US dollars after some bargaining.
They're everywhere in Japan as well, especially the "secondary motor" bicycle kind, where you still pedal and the motor gives you extra help for inclines or headwinds. They extend the range, you don't get sweaty, and they're very cheap to buy and run - the drive system doesn't actually need to be able to push the bike all by itself afer all, so the whole package is small and light.
Re:nobody's going to stop buying SUVs
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because when it comes right down to it, they're safer. Sadly, the reason they're safer is they destroy anyone or anything not in an equivalent vehicle.
A bus or an 18-wheeler is safer still, for the same reasons. So I guess if you really care about safety that's what you should buy and drive to work every morning.
I know. I have one. But people studying philosophy are far from the only ones getting a PhD; anybody in the sciences and many other subjects likewise get a PhD. The name is a throwback to a time where anything that wasn't religion, law or medicine by definition was "philosophy". So do differentiate the degree you add the subject you studied - did you write your thesis on a class of partial differential equations, the mating habits of the garden slug, on 14th century altar paintings in Westphalen or on the idea of self? So you say you have a "PhD in X" where X is the subject you actually pursued, whether mathematics, physics, art history or, indeed, theoretical philosophy.
So, 30 years for 12 tenets. That makes 2.5 years per tenet if I'm not mistaken. Not a particularily productive tenet-developing group if I may say so, seeing has how a single philosophical paper can contain dozens of them. If a simple tenet takes 2.5 years from concept to deployment, no wonder Vista is four years late already.
Perhaps if they had hired a few of those philosophy PhD:s currently being gainfully employed in the fast-food industry, they could have gotten them into production faster?
It is a free market. But the customers are the carriers, not the consumers that end up using the phones. If the US had a mobile phone market where you could use the same handset with any provider perhaps you would start seeing phones offered to please the end-user. As it is, what they're selling and you're buying is a provider phone plan; the phone is just the necessary piece of gear to use the plan.
Hm, I'm misremembering it then. Was it perhaps one of the late-model PDP:s? I know one machine of that era had it, and of course now I can't remember correctly which one:(
Sure, CPU:s look quite a bit different now than they did 20+ years ago. On the other hand, CPU designs do heavily take into account what features are being used by the application code expected to be run on them, and one constant you can still depend on is that most of that application code is going to be machine-generated by a C compiler.
For instance, 20 years ago there was nothing strange about having an actual quicksort machine instruction (VAXen had it). One expectation was still, at the time, that a lot of code would be generated directly by humans, so instructions and instruction designs catering to that use-case were developed. But by around then, most code was machine generated by a compiler, and since the compiler had little high-level semantics to work with, the high-level instructions - and most low-level one's too - went unused; this was one impetus for the development of RISC machines, by the way.
So, as long as a lot of coding is done in C and C++ (and especially in the embedded space, where you have most rapid CPU development, almost all coding is), designs will never stray far away from the requirements of that language. Better compilers have allowed designers to stray further, but stray too far and you get penalized in the market.
*shrug* - not that big a deal, and an internationalisation, not open content problem.
To elaborate a bit - there's large and thriving translator communities out there for many of the worlds languages. I'd go out on a limb and say that any open project can quite easily rustle up competent (and sometimes truly expert) help for any language or localization issue.
I don't maintain focus for more than an hour at a time. In fact, I can't. And being involved in cognitive science research, I can state that for sustained work, neither can anybody else. Yes, once in a while, if your current problem is intensely interesting, you can zone out and work on it for many hours straight. But most work - however interesting it is - isn't able to grab your focus in that manner. To see it from another perspective, a movie is designed to grab your attention, is created by people devoting their lives to grab your attention as effectively as possible and has about every technical means short of drugs available to grab and hold your attention. And yet, few movies are longer than two hours, because people will not be able to hold their focus for much longer than that.
If you try to force yourself by having only your work available and forcing yourself to sit on front of it, all that will happen is that after an hour or two your thoughts will start to drift, you'll get stuck in a rut reiterating old thought processes, and you may even nod off for short periods due to the imposed lack of stimulus variation. In short, "maintaining focus" is a good way to sink your productivity.
Instead, accept that you can't single-mindedly focus on any one thing for more than about 45 minutes to an hour (there's a good reason class time seems to have converged to about 45 minutes the world over). Do one of these things in combination:
* Get up, stretch and move about a bit. Go look out the window, find someone else on a break and shoot the breeze for a few minutes. Leaf through the morning paper, trade magazine, or that 2001 office supplies catalogue you never seem to get around to throw away. Go over to Accounting and ask about that missing trsvel reimbursement. In short, get yourself exposed to some new stimuli so you canh approach the next hour with a fresh mind.
* Have a secondary task you can switch to whenever you get bored with the main one. Maybe now is a good time to answer a few email, or write some documentation (there's always documentation to write). Really the same thing as above - get some new stimuli - but with more of a work focus.
* Set a goal for the day. And when it's done, quit. Sure there's more work to be done - but there's always more work to be done. You can stay 24/7 and there will still be more. Do what you set out to do, then go home. With a definite short-term goal, pacing yourself is easier, and it's much easier to focus on a comprehensible, digestible chunk of work.
Which brings up a point - why is this any worse than home schooling? It seems like exactly the same thing, except here the kid is taught by actual teachers and a syllabus with (assumedly) some idea about giving a balanced education, not whatever lunatic fairy tales the homeschooling parent happens to want to impart.
So if layoffs end up scaring off all the great employees, how should a company get rid of its worst employees? I only ask this as idle speculation.
By and large, I don't think it's possible to really purge an organization of the worst people (apart from the tautology that there always are "worst people" no matter how good everyone is). I strongly suspect that there's a deeper dynamic going on that makes them as neccesarily present as the inevitable few stars.
No matter what kind of performance review or ability measure you apply, most of the "worst people" (assuming actual substandard performers, not grading on a curve) will pass anyway. Remember, these people came through the hiring process intact; a review and examination rather more thourough than any summary performance report while at work. And after they've been at work for some time, they have contacts, friends, nowledge of the internal process and so on that makes it even more difficult to find and target them (to the exclusion of the people you want to keep).
And this of course leads into the essential deficiency of performance reviews: do they actually measure what you're after? The actual individual output of lines of code or whatever really isn't what the company is all about after all. If you focus too myopically you risk microoptimizing your employees to the detriment of the organization as a whole.
For example, some of the bad performers that pass anyway do so because they're likeable, have a wide net of contacts, keep up with the office gossip, maybe party animals always ready to suggest a department out on the town. Those people are in reality doing a hugely important job (without being aware of it). They are providing a lot of the social grease necessary to have the department work reasonably wel despite plenty of strong-willed, socially clumsy (but excellent) workers. Get rid of them, and you'll see a productivity decrease among the other staff instead; and probably one that more than offsets what you gained. Not until another amiable screwup is transferred to the office will productivity go up again.
Performance reviews really should probably be at a departmental, not an individual, level, and largely ignore individuals. And with a team performing at a substandard level (and after you've ascertained it's not because of the nature of the projects they're involved in), you should probably focus on finding the group dynamic reasons for it and look for ways to improve it, either by transfer in (or out) people, or in extreme cases to split the group and integrate the members in other groups instead. Note that the head of the group or depratment too is a member and does not have sole responsibility (though of course more individual responsibility than the other members).
And the real disastrous employees, well, don't worry about them; you don't need reviews to find them, and rarely an excuse to get rid of them. Just wait until the police, fire department or the CDC has identified the idiot who caused the whole mess and get rid of them.
It also affects their ability to do certain types of business. Refusing to pay a fine like this automatically adds them on various blacklists that at least a lot of governmental agencies and large corporations do follow and means they'd be ineliglible for contracts with those organizations.
What happens when anybody doesn't pay an outstanding court-ordered fine? Likely they'd just freeze their assets in Europe until it's paid. In extremis they'd sell off assets to cover the amount.
Don't forget, this is a court-ordered fine - a punishment - upheld after an appeal. Nonpayment really is not an option. It will not come to that of course; just imagine what such an action would do to their credit rating and reputation.
Absolutely amazing. I mean, what are the chances that he ever saw turbulent streams or windswept clouds living in rural Europe or that he took his inpiration from those pattern as much as from all the other organic/natural patterns he used everywhere in his art?
The review was shorthand for "Pantech didn't send us swag or phones on 'indefinite' loan so here's the payback". The inclusion in the worst list is "They not only didn't send any swag, they even accused us of wanting bribes when we called and complained about it".
Cnet used to be decent a few years ago; now it's frankly best ignored.
Oh, and I'd say the Nintendo name change is probably one of the better PR coups this year. Perhaps the reviewers didn't get a free DS Lite either.
Other posters gave a couple of reasons that in combination probably explains it.
First, we're still groping for a workable methodology in creating large-scale software using large teams. So Vista is heavily delayed and stripped of half it's intended functionality - that's pretty much par for the course on any project that size. Check the steady stream of horror stories at trade rags like InfoWorld or statistics on project performance at any large company. The large-scale project that is on time and on budget is rare enough to be seen almost as mythical. Nobody else knows how to do this kind of big-bang software development right, why would MS be the exception?
Second - and this, too is endemic - the feature set is determined by different people than those tasked with implementing it, and the time frame is set by yeat a third group. And this has to be so - coders are mildly speaking not the entirely right people to decide what the market will be interested in or what users will find useful (or even tolerable). It's a communications problem, and almost every large project - and every large organization - has it.
Third, when you're doing a brand-new system to replace an existing set of systems, you're going to step on toes and intrude on peoples' turf. There's sure to be a lot of people at MS who has a lot of professional and intelectual capital invested in various technologies that Vista would have replaced, and why should they help it along any more than they had to? And even if you and yor group is neutral towards it, you don't want to allocate any scarce resource towards helping that project when your own stuff needs those resources as well. From various sources there seems to have been quite a bit of bureocratic infighting going on over the years and that would not exactly help the project along. Again, though, this is a problem for any largish organization, not just MS.
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You don't have to tell he that to her face, but DON'T take the blame on yourself, even sarcastically. That would be playing into her game (and it IS a game).
It is a game, and you want to take all the blame you can humanly get - and not sarcastically at all, but quite sincerely. The fact is, with respect to helping this woman, you do suck, by the simple measure that you're not able to help. The base fault may lie with her and her inability to follow even simple precautions, but you have failed too, by your inability to impress her with the need to follow them. You are a bad match as a support person. I'm not saying anybody else would be good match for her, but it's plain that you are not.
And by making all agree that you're absolutely inept at anything support-related, you have a gold-plated excuse no matter how bad the situation may get, without imperiling your relation with your sibling. You suck, so for the love of your sister there is no way you'll interfere and making things worse. Her computer could be on fire and you can quite plausibly state that trying to put it out would only have resulted in worse consequences than the house burning to the ground.
Sit them down in front of you, look them in the eye and say:
"This is not working. I try to do my best helping you with your computer problems in any way I can; I even built your last computer to save you some money. I have been at your beck and call, day and night, for years. What I get from you is a constant stream of complaints."
"Clearly, what I can offer you in help is not good enough by far. I do not know the reason - it could be incompetence on my part, it could be you inadvertently doing things you should not, or it could be that Windows, and the programs you want to run on it, just aren't very good quality. Quite possibly it is a combination of these. It doesn't matter, though - you are miserable, and that makes me miserable too."
"So from now on I will not interfere. No longer will my bungled attempts at fixing things just make everythng worse. I suggest you buy your next computer from a real vendor, with a service contract, and contact their professionals if you ever experience a problem with your new machine. You will be a lot happier knowing you can rely on people who help users for a living, and I can be free of the guilt of trying to do things that are perhaps over my head."
"I am truly sorry I have inconvenienced you like this for years. I wanted to help but of course I whould have known better."
The baseball player is quite sad.
Why sad? Sounds like he's mentally a perfect fit for pro sports already.
First of all, for reasearch, you need a good research environment and community. You cannot do research in a void. You need the competition and support and all that.
Which was my point about taking a job in a research lab or school, just not an actual research position. You have the same people, and many of the resources. You can participate in seminars and corridor talk just like any of the other people there. If you're a teacher, you're not only welcome, but expected to keep abreast with the research side of things, and as a technician or support personnel, most places are deligthed to have you participate since you not only become better in your job, knowing exactly wht is going on, but you're also very effective as a sounding board and discussion partner for ideas since you're not in competition for the research positions.
Secondly, I think good research is done when it makes or breaks you. I mean, if you are comfortable and research doesn't really matter if you do well or fail, then it will slowly fall away. Plus, you can't do research part time. Hell, there was even a story here on SD few years ago about how family lives kills research.
You can argue the same for any non-trivial job. And it's just as wrong. Yes, people can be surprisingly productive-seeming for a while when you have them cornered like a rat. But that "productivity" is largely a sham. It becomes a matter of busy-work - take whatever measure used (publications) and maximize that to the detriment of any other possible consideration, like actual quality of the work. What you end up with is a lot of rehashes of previous results, and an increase in shoddy work and outright fraud. If the system is set up to "make or break" me, in a field where luck and random insight counts for as much as spending working hours, there is no way I'd take a risk when it's safer to just republish another minor variation of an idea I first had ten years previous.
You end up penalizing original reasearch, long-shot approaches and long-term projects. You also disqualify otherwise qualified people for unrelated issues - women (who generally need to have their children before the age of 35), for example, account for over half of the pool of undergraduates today, and you'd just throw that talent away for some misplaced "law of the jungle" fantasy of effectiveness.
Ultimately, though, if research forces me to choose between it and having a life, I'm out of here. And I know the same goes for a lot of other people in the field. Research is fun, it is fascinating and it is challenging. But in the end, it is a job, a hobby, an interest. Few people see it as their whole life (and I would argue that those that do lack the perspective and ability to step back to be as good at the job as they could be).
Of course I forgot something:
Teaching is not the only way to keep a hand in. If you have technical or other specialist skills, finding a support job at university or institute may not be a bad idea either. You are perhaps a wizard on the lab lathe and milling machine, or you have demonic organizational skills, making you excellent department secretary material? You have access to a lot of research resources, you have a steady job with not need to spend much of your time just chasing money to live on - and chances are, your income is higher than that of the post-docs you're surrounded with.
Of course, you'd not be the only one realizing this; you're in for some heavy competition no matter what you try to do.
If you are looking for the kind of place that Xerox used to be, especially as a way to avoid the mindnumbing grind of chasing grants and spending your life in what amounts to temp job, forget it.
First, even at the "golden years" of blue-sky research, the only ones that had a permanent position were people that had already proven themselves by a long grind in the post-doc mill and found to be exceptional. Going from your thesis to a steady research job in a place like that didn't happen even then.
There are places like that today - around here we have NICT and ATR in southern Kyoto, for example. But there too, much of the research is implicitly or explicitly aimed at resulting in something useful, and you are no more free of the grant process than at a university. The people with a permanent position are again few and far between; the head researchers overseeing the groups of post-docs and visiting researchers having some temporary grant.
Really, the difference between university research and research institute or large-company research is in my experience mainly in the need to teach (and the opportunity for a semi-steady income) at a university on one hand; and the greater financial resources for equipment and travel at institutes on the other.
I know of only two ways to get to do free research without the teeth-grinding pain of grant-chasing and temporary job upon temporary job:
* Get a steady part-time job you can live on, and do research in your spare time. Teaching is not a bad option if you're reasonably good at it; you have access to the university, with seminars, labs and people, and teaching your subject forces you to pay attention to areas you perhaps would tend to ignore if left to your own devices.
* Make a fortune, retire and do research as a hobby, perhaps form and finance a small group with a couple of colleagues you like and work well with. Hey, we can all dream, right?
If you're that worried about safety, take the train! :)
I live in Japan, so I do. I've never even bothered to have my licence converted into a Japanese one; trains, subways and bicycles take me wherever I need to go.
Of course, a Japanese train is always at risk of being attacked by Godzilla; I guess the only safe choice is to build my own MechaZilla which should widthstand the ravages of even the most determined bad actor in a rubber suit. ^_^
Here in Shanghai and everywhere in China, you can buy for an electric bicycle or scooter for less than $200 US dollars after some bargaining.
They're everywhere in Japan as well, especially the "secondary motor" bicycle kind, where you still pedal and the motor gives you extra help for inclines or headwinds. They extend the range, you don't get sweaty, and they're very cheap to buy and run - the drive system doesn't actually need to be able to push the bike all by itself afer all, so the whole package is small and light.
because when it comes right down to it, they're safer. Sadly, the reason they're safer is they destroy anyone or anything not in an equivalent vehicle.
A bus or an 18-wheeler is safer still, for the same reasons. So I guess if you really care about safety that's what you should buy and drive to work every morning.
What happens when a vehicle with a drunk driver collides with your vehicle?
What happens when a sleep-exhausted semi driver collides with your SUV?
If you're that worried about road safety, take the bus.
Just for the record, PhD -> Doctor of Philosophy
I know. I have one. But people studying philosophy are far from the only ones getting a PhD; anybody in the sciences and many other subjects likewise get a PhD. The name is a throwback to a time where anything that wasn't religion, law or medicine by definition was "philosophy". So do differentiate the degree you add the subject you studied - did you write your thesis on a class of partial differential equations, the mating habits of the garden slug, on 14th century altar paintings in Westphalen or on the idea of self? So you say you have a "PhD in X" where X is the subject you actually pursued, whether mathematics, physics, art history or, indeed, theoretical philosophy.
So, 30 years for 12 tenets. That makes 2.5 years per tenet if I'm not mistaken. Not a particularily productive tenet-developing group if I may say so, seeing has how a single philosophical paper can contain dozens of them. If a simple tenet takes 2.5 years from concept to deployment, no wonder Vista is four years late already.
Perhaps if they had hired a few of those philosophy PhD:s currently being gainfully employed in the fast-food industry, they could have gotten them into production faster?
You know, that whole "free market" thingy...
It is a free market. But the customers are the carriers, not the consumers that end up using the phones. If the US had a mobile phone market where you could use the same handset with any provider perhaps you would start seeing phones offered to please the end-user. As it is, what they're selling and you're buying is a provider phone plan; the phone is just the necessary piece of gear to use the plan.
Hm, I'm misremembering it then. Was it perhaps one of the late-model PDP:s? I know one machine of that era had it, and of course now I can't remember correctly which one :(
Sure, CPU:s look quite a bit different now than they did 20+ years ago. On the other hand, CPU designs do heavily take into account what features are being used by the application code expected to be run on them, and one constant you can still depend on is that most of that application code is going to be machine-generated by a C compiler.
For instance, 20 years ago there was nothing strange about having an actual quicksort machine instruction (VAXen had it). One expectation was still, at the time, that a lot of code would be generated directly by humans, so instructions and instruction designs catering to that use-case were developed. But by around then, most code was machine generated by a compiler, and since the compiler had little high-level semantics to work with, the high-level instructions - and most low-level one's too - went unused; this was one impetus for the development of RISC machines, by the way.
So, as long as a lot of coding is done in C and C++ (and especially in the embedded space, where you have most rapid CPU development, almost all coding is), designs will never stray far away from the requirements of that language. Better compilers have allowed designers to stray further, but stray too far and you get penalized in the market.
*shrug* - not that big a deal, and an internationalisation, not open content problem.
To elaborate a bit - there's large and thriving translator communities out there for many of the worlds languages. I'd go out on a limb and say that any open project can quite easily rustle up competent (and sometimes truly expert) help for any language or localization issue.
I don't maintain focus for more than an hour at a time. In fact, I can't. And being involved in cognitive science research, I can state that for sustained work, neither can anybody else. Yes, once in a while, if your current problem is intensely interesting, you can zone out and work on it for many hours straight. But most work - however interesting it is - isn't able to grab your focus in that manner. To see it from another perspective, a movie is designed to grab your attention, is created by people devoting their lives to grab your attention as effectively as possible and has about every technical means short of drugs available to grab and hold your attention. And yet, few movies are longer than two hours, because people will not be able to hold their focus for much longer than that.
If you try to force yourself by having only your work available and forcing yourself to sit on front of it, all that will happen is that after an hour or two your thoughts will start to drift, you'll get stuck in a rut reiterating old thought processes, and you may even nod off for short periods due to the imposed lack of stimulus variation. In short, "maintaining focus" is a good way to sink your productivity.
Instead, accept that you can't single-mindedly focus on any one thing for more than about 45 minutes to an hour (there's a good reason class time seems to have converged to about 45 minutes the world over). Do one of these things in combination:
* Get up, stretch and move about a bit. Go look out the window, find someone else on a break and shoot the breeze for a few minutes. Leaf through the morning paper, trade magazine, or that 2001 office supplies catalogue you never seem to get around to throw away. Go over to Accounting and ask about that missing trsvel reimbursement. In short, get yourself exposed to some new stimuli so you canh approach the next hour with a fresh mind.
* Have a secondary task you can switch to whenever you get bored with the main one. Maybe now is a good time to answer a few email, or write some documentation (there's always documentation to write). Really the same thing as above - get some new stimuli - but with more of a work focus.
* Set a goal for the day. And when it's done, quit. Sure there's more work to be done - but there's always more work to be done. You can stay 24/7 and there will still be more. Do what you set out to do, then go home. With a definite short-term goal, pacing yourself is easier, and it's much easier to focus on a comprehensible, digestible chunk of work.
Which brings up a point - why is this any worse than home schooling? It seems like exactly the same thing, except here the kid is taught by actual teachers and a syllabus with (assumedly) some idea about giving a balanced education, not whatever lunatic fairy tales the homeschooling parent happens to want to impart.
So if layoffs end up scaring off all the great employees, how should a company get rid of its worst employees? I only ask this as idle speculation.
By and large, I don't think it's possible to really purge an organization of the worst people (apart from the tautology that there always are "worst people" no matter how good everyone is). I strongly suspect that there's a deeper dynamic going on that makes them as neccesarily present as the inevitable few stars.
No matter what kind of performance review or ability measure you apply, most of the "worst people" (assuming actual substandard performers, not grading on a curve) will pass anyway. Remember, these people came through the hiring process intact; a review and examination rather more thourough than any summary performance report while at work. And after they've been at work for some time, they have contacts, friends, nowledge of the internal process and so on that makes it even more difficult to find and target them (to the exclusion of the people you want to keep).
And this of course leads into the essential deficiency of performance reviews: do they actually measure what you're after? The actual individual output of lines of code or whatever really isn't what the company is all about after all. If you focus too myopically you risk microoptimizing your employees to the detriment of the organization as a whole.
For example, some of the bad performers that pass anyway do so because they're likeable, have a wide net of contacts, keep up with the office gossip, maybe party animals always ready to suggest a department out on the town. Those people are in reality doing a hugely important job (without being aware of it). They are providing a lot of the social grease necessary to have the department work reasonably wel despite plenty of strong-willed, socially clumsy (but excellent) workers. Get rid of them, and you'll see a productivity decrease among the other staff instead; and probably one that more than offsets what you gained. Not until another amiable screwup is transferred to the office will productivity go up again.
Performance reviews really should probably be at a departmental, not an individual, level, and largely ignore individuals. And with a team performing at a substandard level (and after you've ascertained it's not because of the nature of the projects they're involved in), you should probably focus on finding the group dynamic reasons for it and look for ways to improve it, either by transfer in (or out) people, or in extreme cases to split the group and integrate the members in other groups instead. Note that the head of the group or depratment too is a member and does not have sole responsibility (though of course more individual responsibility than the other members).
And the real disastrous employees, well, don't worry about them; you don't need reviews to find them, and rarely an excuse to get rid of them. Just wait until the police, fire department or the CDC has identified the idiot who caused the whole mess and get rid of them.
It also affects their ability to do certain types of business. Refusing to pay a fine like this automatically adds them on various blacklists that at least a lot of governmental agencies and large corporations do follow and means they'd be ineliglible for contracts with those organizations.
What happens if they don't pay?
What happens when anybody doesn't pay an outstanding court-ordered fine? Likely they'd just freeze their assets in Europe until it's paid. In extremis they'd sell off assets to cover the amount.
Don't forget, this is a court-ordered fine - a punishment - upheld after an appeal. Nonpayment really is not an option. It will not come to that of course; just imagine what such an action would do to their credit rating and reputation.
As a quick tip, "rm -- filename" would have worked; it makes rm not parse the filename in any way whatsoever.
Absolutely amazing. I mean, what are the chances that he ever saw turbulent streams or windswept clouds living in rural Europe or that he took his inpiration from those pattern as much as from all the other organic/natural patterns he used everywhere in his art?
The review was shorthand for "Pantech didn't send us swag or phones on 'indefinite' loan so here's the payback". The inclusion in the worst list is "They not only didn't send any swag, they even accused us of wanting bribes when we called and complained about it".
Cnet used to be decent a few years ago; now it's frankly best ignored.
Oh, and I'd say the Nintendo name change is probably one of the better PR coups this year. Perhaps the reviewers didn't get a free DS Lite either.
Other posters gave a couple of reasons that in combination probably explains it.
First, we're still groping for a workable methodology in creating large-scale software using large teams. So Vista is heavily delayed and stripped of half it's intended functionality - that's pretty much par for the course on any project that size. Check the steady stream of horror stories at trade rags like InfoWorld or statistics on project performance at any large company. The large-scale project that is on time and on budget is rare enough to be seen almost as mythical. Nobody else knows how to do this kind of big-bang software development right, why would MS be the exception?
Second - and this, too is endemic - the feature set is determined by different people than those tasked with implementing it, and the time frame is set by yeat a third group. And this has to be so - coders are mildly speaking not the entirely right people to decide what the market will be interested in or what users will find useful (or even tolerable). It's a communications problem, and almost every large project - and every large organization - has it.
Third, when you're doing a brand-new system to replace an existing set of systems, you're going to step on toes and intrude on peoples' turf. There's sure to be a lot of people at MS who has a lot of professional and intelectual capital invested in various technologies that Vista would have replaced, and why should they help it along any more than they had to? And even if you and yor group is neutral towards it, you don't want to allocate any scarce resource towards helping that project when your own stuff needs those resources as well. From various sources there seems to have been quite a bit of bureocratic infighting going on over the years and that would not exactly help the project along. Again, though, this is a problem for any largish organization, not just MS.