It's because you have two types of people on Slashdot.
Those with actual experience in the real world who have encountered things like BES and seen first hand why there are still even with it's decreased marketshare, millions of people using Blackberries.
Then on the other hand, you have the students, the people who never really went anywhere in life, and the unemployed due to incompetence.
Guess which person makes which type of comment?
The problem is that over the years the number of students et. al. who think they know better because their prof. told them something, even though the real world works completely differently has drastically increased whilst the number of people with real world experience has decreased.
"People who are unemployed are the most suited for long waits for stuff."
No they're not, because if you're genuinely desperately looking for a job then you spend far more hours of a day looking than you do working if you're already in employment.
What you say is only true if you're to assume all unemployed people are lazy layabouts who have nothing better to do than wait around and aren't spending any time at all looking for work.
It's easier to take a sick day when you're sick even if you don't get paid for it knowing full well you can go back in tomorrow and get paid than it is to be unemployed and not have any guarantee of money any time soon unless you spend every waking moment seeking it.
"We do get more for our extra spend (and we fund a bunch of research that way), though we certainly don't get 2.5x more."
Really? So how do you excuse your higher infant mortality, lower life expectancy, higher levels of obesity and so forth?
Those two things don't tally. If you were getting more for your money, you'd be having more successful child births leading to living longer healthier lives, but you're not.
So therein lies the problem, you're actually paying more and getting less in the average case. The only time the US healthcare system is superior is if you're part of the 1% and have the millions required to pay for the highest tiers of healthcare (and even then skipping the waiting list didn't exactly help Steve Jobs so it's not exactly a magical guarantee of good health even if you do have the money) but for the average American, you're paying more and are far worse off too.
Saying you get more for your money just sounds like an attempt at justification as to why you allow yourselves to be ripped off so hard by healthcare insurers et. al. because it's certainly not actually true.
I'm sure you could find some cases where it is better (cancer survival rates maybe?) and I'm sure places like Fox News can provide fake stats, I'm sure I could find dodgy counter studies and so forth (because I've noticed since Obama started the great healthcare debates the internet has become full of partisan propaganda from both sides of the US debate), but at the end of the day there's really little you can do to escape the fact that you lose more infants, you suffer from poorer health by way of things such as obesity and you don't live as long - this is based on objective studies performed by international entities who really have no interest making the US look better or worse than the UK or than any of the others.
"Gove himself is a slightly odd character to me, because half of the time I feel like he's the first Education Secretary we've had in years who actually has the guts to stand up and tell it as it is, but the other half of the time I wonder where he dreamt up this or that crazy idea and what he was smoking when he thought alienating this or that major part of the education profession would help."
It's because he's part of the Tories farthest right elements, that's the issue. It's incredible because you can lump those elements of the Conservatives in together quite consistently - you have the run of the mill Tories, the normal ones, and then you have the farthest right element of the party which almost unanimously agree on issues such as being anti-Europe and gay being gay haters and so forth.
But the policies they agree on stretch beyond that, they're completely against any kind of socialism, and in this respect they align well with the US Republicans - they're pro-Atlanticist for this reason.
So the thing you've got to realise is that Gove isn't standing up to teachers because he has the guts to do so, because it's the right thing, he's standing up to them because ideologically he hates the idea of state run schools, because he hates unions, and because he hates other such leftist notions.
The fact that in this respect he just happens to be right on some of it is part of the inevitable truth that even the wing nuts will be at least somewhat right sometimes, but they're certainly not right all the time, and not even right most of the time.
Personally I'm a rather centrist person, it makes sense to me because you can take the good ideas from both sides and ignore the bad - you can have your will for a reduction of the counter-productive and unhelpful attitudes of the teaching unions without having to hate foreigners and hate gay people. You can have you reforms of local government over-indulgence of spending and creation of joke/non-jobs without also wanting to see the NHS gutted and turned private.
I think all the parties have at least some good ideas, for example, I'm against HS2, because spending £30bn on a scheme to get you to an out of town train station where you then have to spend 30minutes walking/waiting for a connecting transport into the city centre when you could've just used an existing train to get you there in the same time whilst also bulldozing some of our nicest landscapes and destroying or devaluing people's homes makes little sense to me - especially when for a fraction of that cost you could roll out nation wide fibre and spend the rest greatly speeding up local rail infrastructure for an order of magnitude greater net benefit to the national economy. For this reason I think UKIP are the only party who are right about HS2, but I otherwise think UKIP is an abomination that needs to die - the point being that I think even the far right can get it right just every once in a while but therein also lies the problem, because our country is so polarised politically, largely because of the failed undemocratic voting system we use known as first past the post, the parties also have an awful lot of wrong opinions.
In other words the UK has lost it's centrism, and so we end up with politicians like Gove where the best we can hope for is that just every once in a while, one out of their hundreds of policies just happens, out of simple statistical probability, to be a decent one- a broken clock and all that. Becareful not to interpret that which is essentially coincidence as competence however- it's not. If a wingnut like Gove has got something right, it really is just sheer random chance of the various variables involved in the political calculations in our world colliding in a way that even an extremist can get something right some of the time but will otherwise get most things wrong most of the time.
"Then, after the cold war, there are no longer "Marxist Terror Gangs". They all just gave up and went home, I guess. Now, there are "Muslim Terror Gangs". Amazing."
To be fair a lot of terror gangs gave up and went home and I think it'd be hard to suggest some of them were run by the security services. Some of the Palestinian organisations, some of the Japanese groups and so forth for example. There were far more terror groups in the 60s, 70s, and 80s than there were afterwards
I think it's a combination of the fact that policies not to negotiate with terrorists, combined with successful anti-terror operations that left the terrorists red faced (in more ways than one) combined with increase global stability (which let's face it, did happen after the cold war) coupled with greater global prosperity as a result decreased the impact of it.
In fact, you can see a pretty strong parallel between the decrease of poverty in places where these groups were from a decrease in prominence and existence of such groups so I'd frankly wager that it's more about that than anything.
I think the security services are given way too much credit. Given the sorts of absurd fuckups they're often responsible for I'm not really sure they have the competence to carry out the sort of conspiracies you suggest.
Something stinks about all of Yahoo's acquisitions so far.
I've pointed out previously what a sham the summly acquisition ones. Long story short, summly was largely a shell of a company that outsourced development to 3rd parties for everything but the iOS user interface - the AI, the Android version etc. were all outsourced. The company CEO were a few silicon valley vets bought in by the kids' Dad who was an investment banker and his mum who was a Yahoo lawyer. The investment banker father got people like Steven Fry, Ashton Kutcher, and the Murdoch's to invest in the company and publicise it prior to the take over by Yahoo. Yahoo doesn't plan to use the Summly product, they're actually ditching it.
So given that the question is if Yahoo just want the summarisation tech behind Summly (which doesn't work very well by the way) then why didn't they save themselves about $39million and go straight to the AI company Summly used?
The whole acquisition stunk of money games, of some kind of pump and dump scheme too. The famous names invested in it were pumping it, and then it was dumped on Yahoo for a valuation that was over 40x what the company was actually making in profit.
I'm not really sure what's going on at Yahoo but there's something very fishy about it all, people do seem to be getting rich off a constant stream of overpriced acquisitions. It's as if it is indeed actually just being stripped of cash.
"Anyways; it may be a challenge, if the code quality metric is good enough, it could be used to overcome bad code by flagging it for review and rewrite"
By whom? The same bad developers? They'll eventually get fed up of being told their code is bad even though it is and will just leave it bad and ignore any warnings.
The only way to solve it is to have good developers to rewrite the bad code, which just means you're going to have to hire some good developers to re-do what the bad developers did wrong in the first place, so why even bother having those bad developers at all?
America's economic growth has occurred because of massive public spending.
In the UK we've seen worse than average economic status because we've been cutting too much too fast and doing the opposite to America.
For the Western world, if you want to look at the true health of the general economy for Western nations then it's best to look at reasonably sized countries like France/Germany that have had a much healthier balance between austerity and public expenditure, or alternatively at the Eurozone as a whole where such austerity/spending programs tend to balance out a little.
If you look at that sort of picture you'll see that growth is roughly flat for developed western nations under natural circumstances (i.e. if government did nothing and had carried on as normal with no special expenditure/austerity).
So yes, America has returned to growth, but it's not natural growth, it's artificial growth fed by heavily increasing debt. Similarly in the UK we've been in recession more than similar economies like France/Germany/America in recent years because we've cut things a little too much because the current Conservative party saw it as an opportunity to make ideological changes rather than necessary changes to improve economic health.
I think just about every forecast now though believes that natural growth will return to Western economies this year or next but we're not quite there yet.
Note finally that I'm not making an argument about whether austerity or debt fed growth are a better option, both have their benefits, both have their disadvantages, that's a different discussion for a different day though. Personally however I think that it doesn't matter too much which option governments take, I think until you get a return of natural economic growth it doesn't really matter what governments do, things will still be shitty in some way or another.
Re:Why didn't it shut down in 2009?
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Groklaw Turns Ten
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I suspect given that she was new to blogging, that like all new people working with those sorts of web applications, 1, 2 and possibly 4, and 5 were possibly just test posts figuring out how to make certain things work and not intended for public consumption.
I think few new sites starting out on a new CMS manage to preserve exact sequential numbering of new articles right from 1 for precisely this reason.
I don't disagree that the decreased battery life occured for good reason - you were getting a larger colour screen and so forth, but even if the argument was that battery relative to efficiency of what the device does (rather than simple battery duration) is the argument I'm not terribly convinced the iPhone was in any way ahead here, things like the N95 had much better battery life still and were more powerful devices.
Apple had a lot of problems with batteries for quite some time, all the way upto and including the 3GS they couldn't get the technology quite so well pinned down as their competitors (though there wasn't much in it compared to other similarly priced smartphones with similar capacity batteries), so despite all the changes the iPhone brought to the market I can't see any convincing argument that improvements in battery life or efficiency was one of those things.
It would've always been difficult for Apple to be a leader in the battery usage in smartphones in part because things like Series 60 had been so better optimised for power over so many more years. Don't get me wrong, Series 60 was shit, but it did allow equally powerful devices to be more efficient than iOS (or Android) at the time. The same was always fairly true for Blackberry, they had battery efficiency nailed down far more tightly than any of the new entrants at the time (Google and Apple) did on their devices.
Again this isn't to belittle Apple, the gains in what the device could do and the way it worked more than made up for any battery deficiencies (especially as most people were happy to do what I do and charge every night regardless) but I don't think they can really be credited with any battery improvements by any metric!
It's the same with the Jamie Bulger killers, there's an injunction on identifying them, and in fact, claiming a picture of some random person of them is them is a breach of the injunction. Theoretically I believe even if you draw a stick man and name it as Jamie Bulger's killer then you're breaching the injunction it's that stupid.
Recently two people in the UK broke the injunction and the judge felt the need to remind us that there's a global injunction on identifying them.
I'm just waiting for someone overseas to make a complete and utter mockery of that arrogant suggestion that the judge has the power to enforce such an injunction worldwide.
"Jobs just designed the pain out of the iPhone. Long battery life."
What? I'm not disagreeing with everything else you said, but the iPhone brought in an era of phones that needed charging every night, when before they, including smartphones, lasted a week.
I never saw this as a problem as I always habitually put my phone on charge every night anyway, but I don't see how the iPhone brought in long battery life, it did the complete opposite, it took battery life from a norm of 5 - 10 days down to 1 - 2 days.
"Dude, all you've done is pulled a bunch of numbers out of your ass, and then constructed an argument on it."
Except I provided a source for all my numbers, which is more than can be said for your incoherent rants and conspiracy theories. At least the numbers I provided are verifiable, I'm sorry if the facts conflict with your world view.
"Now I appreciate that maybe Fox News has had a bad impact on your ability to construct a proper argument"
Except I don't watch Fox News because as I said, I'm not American, and we don't have that drivel here. We have proper news outlets like the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 news.
"but rather than address the specific points, I'll just throw out a couple key principles that are well-established and then hit the conclusion."
In other words, "I'll do what I accused you of and make shit up and drawn a conclusion on the shit I made up".
"First, if you increase labor, and demand remains constant, the price will drop. This is the law of supply and demand. All of your quoting of numbers and beating of chest tries to cover up the fact that more workers means lower wages, all other things being equal. It's an escapable economic truth."
Which is great for your argument if you ignore the fact that demand hasn't remained constant and the price hasn't dropped. Unfortunately, ignoring reality doesn't help your case.
"Here's some global data regarding wages. I'm not going to make it too easy for you by linking in the exact table you need to look at... but if you want to educate yourself instead of screaming profanities... I'd start there."
In other words "I'm going to link to an arbitrary site, and not point to anything particular and pretend this adds validity to my argument in some unknown way". I could see nothing specific about developer wages there which is what we're talking about, and given that developer wages haven't followed the average trend I can only guess this is a desperate attempt by you to muddy the waters and make the false inference that if average wages have dropped, so must have developer wages. If you can't even be bothered to point out what it is you believe is damning evidence for your case then I'm certainly not going to try and dig for and guess what you think that might be given that I've already proven your existing points wrong with verifiable facts and figures.
I offered you a pretty detailed and verifiable set of facts and figures as to why the US is still full of developer opportunities and you opted to ignore it, pretend it's not real, and claw desperately for misdirection. It's okay I get it, you really are beyond help, the fact you "educate yourself instead of screaming profanities" despite there being no profanities in my comment is evidence enough that there isn't something quite right in your head because if you can't read a reasoned post with verifiable facts without seeing profanities where there are none then you obviously need professional help.
Good luck wallowing in your pit of despair, you obviously want to keep blaming everyone but yourself, but don't be surprised when nothing changes for you. You'll never find a solution when you refuse to even acknowledge the problem - you.
Well hopefully they're just talking about the US market then!
Well that's a lie, for the sake of Americans hopefully not, but I mean, for their sake and ours, I hope they haven't just openly admitted to breaking the law in the UK.
That and their hand was probably forced somewhat, in the face of the recent European ruling that companies cannot artificially block or limit second hand software sales they'd have had to do this anyway.
I was wondering about this too, by Lands End I'm assuming she means the actual place Lands End in the UK? If so then again this seems to be yet another company breaking UK law on data collection and not a thing being done about it.
It's worth noting that it's not simply a breach of the point in law you say - the right to be able to access this data, but also that as a 3rd party company with whom you have no business then they have absolutely no legal right to be holding this data in the first place. It's true that you don't have to have a direct relation to a company for them to be able to hold data on you, a data controller can authorise a data processor to process data they hold on you, but from what she's saying - the fact they have their own distinct hive of data implies they're not acting merely as a data processor but are themselves a data controller and as I've never once had any direct business correspondence with this firm then that suggests they are breaking the law.
What's actually really really interesting in the case you site is their reason for not giving you access to data they hold - one of the responsibilities placed on data controllers is that they must hold data in a suitable filing system, a suitable filing system can be as simple as a pile of paper on your desk with the caveat that if that pile of paper on your desk contains personal information of someone and they ask to see it then you have to be able to find it else it's not a suitable filing system. The fact they're claiming they can't give you access to your data because their systems are too complex means they're not even fulfilling the minimum requirements needed legally to be a data controller.
It seems that effectively they're breaching the DPA in almost every possible conceivable way.
The reason I've tended to find experienced contractors can hit the ground running faster is simply because they've had so much practice at it - they've seen so many companies do so many things in so many different ways that it's just easier for them to jump in, even if you do things slightly different the person whose been at 30 different companies will find it easier to jump in than one that has only been at 2 or 3. Usually if they haven't seen the exact "thing" you do they've seen something they can at least relate to it.
I suppose in part though I have the benefit of having built decent relationships with close contractors such that I can usually find at least one that'll be able to come back as and when I need them. Because of that relationship they do know how we work, what we do and so forth so I guess in way once you've taken that first step of building up a decent pool of well known contractors then it gets easier too but again the value in doing this might depend on how dynamic you need your workforce to be.
This isn't to say that I haven't had bad contractors too of course, but that's one of those bumps along the road, and at least bad contractors are easy as hell to get rid of if nothing else.
I'm not sure what the US recruitment market is like (assuming that's where you are) but there are literally 100s of recruitment agencies in the UK and thanks to sheer number it does mean that at least one or two are actually quite good and again building relationships up with the good recruiters can help because they'll usually find you exactly what you need in no time and are also good at blacklisting the ones that got a bad reputation and hyping up the ones that have a good reputation because they know that means repeat business for them.
I think you've probably misunderstood what I said so I'll explain in more detail. The 2% is the proportion of H1-B visas relative to the amount of the jobs in the market each year.
For example, for 2012, if there are 1 million developer jobs in the US as the most realistic lower bounds figures suggest* and there are 20,000 new H1-B applicants each year then that means that in 2012, 2% of developer jobs were taken up by H1-B applicants. This means that in the 10 years since the H1-B program started, assuming there wasn't an equivalent number of H1-B workers leaving that the total figure will be higher, as the number of jobs and number of workers has scaled in fact you'd have just under 1%, but let's round it up to 1% of today's figures in 2002, 1.1% in 2003, 1.2% in 2004 and so on. That means assuming none left, none retired, none changed role (for example, promoted into management) 16.5% of today's developer market consisting of H1-B workers.
So your 20% figure isn't too far off that, but that estimate is very generous in weighting all assumptions towards the viewpoint that H1-B visas have a real impact on the job market. If there are in fact as high as 4 million developers it drops to only 4.125%, and of course if you guess that a non-negligible proportion have moved into management, left the US and gone back home, or changed careers then the number shrinks further. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but it's likely that in practice maybe 7 - 8% of developer jobs in the US are taken up by H1-B workers.
If you're seeing figures of 20% - 40% then you're working in places that are grossly weighted towards using the H1-B program and to offset that there would need to be many more companies that use few or no H1-B workers at all. In other words, your experience would not be typical in the slightest so is not reasonable to form an objective or neutral viewpoint off of.
*Some figures are even lower, but they search on a specific term like "programmer" and ignore developer so 1million is the lowest realistic estimate I could find but as I say, some estimates put it as high as 4 million.
"Moreover for about half of Europe dynamism would suck ass. Germany and Northern Europe are doing fine with their fossilized labor markets."
Which is of course why the EU is still by far the largest economy in the world. Because it's not dynamic enough.
Seriously, no one in the EU believes in a job for life anymore. Well that's a lie, but no greater a proportion than anywhere else in the world. It's primarily the baby boomers who hold that view.
"As for paid time off, you do realize that salaried Americans don't get that much less paid time off then Europeans? 20 days a year is exactly what the UK mandates."
20 days + 8 bank holidays, so 28 days. The same applies to the other countries you mentioned, you're just comparing against the leave that you can use when you want to as an employee, rather than the total which also includes static public holidays like Christmas day, Good friday and so on.
"On the topic of paid time off, in the UK there is a legal minimum of 28 days paid leave."
That's until the eurosceptic Tory/UKIP supporters take it away from us of course given that each time "renegotiation" with the EU is brought up the first thing they demand we renegotiate is the working time directive and minimum holiday limitations.
If they get their way then we'll be going the US way of no minimum leave long before the US comes in our direction and grants it's citizens a minimum statutory amount of time off.
One might wonder also how a) Their hiring process ended up managing to hire such a disproportionately high amount of incompetent staff because Italy is still a top 10 major world economy and it couldn't be if even the majority of it's citizens were like this, and b) why they don't just close down their Italian operation full stop and pull out of Italy rather than leave it as is.
Or to put it another way, the GP's post has the distinct smell of bullshit to it.
Switzerland isn't an EU member so that's really a Swiss problem and is symptomatic of the insular view of the Swiss people (which in turn is why they choose not to be in the EU).
EU countries still have control of their non-EU immigration policies so getting permission to work in the EU as a non-EU citizen will really vary from country to country in general for what it's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
It's because you have two types of people on Slashdot.
Those with actual experience in the real world who have encountered things like BES and seen first hand why there are still even with it's decreased marketshare, millions of people using Blackberries.
Then on the other hand, you have the students, the people who never really went anywhere in life, and the unemployed due to incompetence.
Guess which person makes which type of comment?
The problem is that over the years the number of students et. al. who think they know better because their prof. told them something, even though the real world works completely differently has drastically increased whilst the number of people with real world experience has decreased.
"People who are unemployed are the most suited for long waits for stuff."
No they're not, because if you're genuinely desperately looking for a job then you spend far more hours of a day looking than you do working if you're already in employment.
What you say is only true if you're to assume all unemployed people are lazy layabouts who have nothing better to do than wait around and aren't spending any time at all looking for work.
It's easier to take a sick day when you're sick even if you don't get paid for it knowing full well you can go back in tomorrow and get paid than it is to be unemployed and not have any guarantee of money any time soon unless you spend every waking moment seeking it.
"We do get more for our extra spend (and we fund a bunch of research that way), though we certainly don't get 2.5x more."
Really? So how do you excuse your higher infant mortality, lower life expectancy, higher levels of obesity and so forth?
Those two things don't tally. If you were getting more for your money, you'd be having more successful child births leading to living longer healthier lives, but you're not.
So therein lies the problem, you're actually paying more and getting less in the average case. The only time the US healthcare system is superior is if you're part of the 1% and have the millions required to pay for the highest tiers of healthcare (and even then skipping the waiting list didn't exactly help Steve Jobs so it's not exactly a magical guarantee of good health even if you do have the money) but for the average American, you're paying more and are far worse off too.
Saying you get more for your money just sounds like an attempt at justification as to why you allow yourselves to be ripped off so hard by healthcare insurers et. al. because it's certainly not actually true.
I'm sure you could find some cases where it is better (cancer survival rates maybe?) and I'm sure places like Fox News can provide fake stats, I'm sure I could find dodgy counter studies and so forth (because I've noticed since Obama started the great healthcare debates the internet has become full of partisan propaganda from both sides of the US debate), but at the end of the day there's really little you can do to escape the fact that you lose more infants, you suffer from poorer health by way of things such as obesity and you don't live as long - this is based on objective studies performed by international entities who really have no interest making the US look better or worse than the UK or than any of the others.
"Gove himself is a slightly odd character to me, because half of the time I feel like he's the first Education Secretary we've had in years who actually has the guts to stand up and tell it as it is, but the other half of the time I wonder where he dreamt up this or that crazy idea and what he was smoking when he thought alienating this or that major part of the education profession would help."
It's because he's part of the Tories farthest right elements, that's the issue. It's incredible because you can lump those elements of the Conservatives in together quite consistently - you have the run of the mill Tories, the normal ones, and then you have the farthest right element of the party which almost unanimously agree on issues such as being anti-Europe and gay being gay haters and so forth.
But the policies they agree on stretch beyond that, they're completely against any kind of socialism, and in this respect they align well with the US Republicans - they're pro-Atlanticist for this reason.
So the thing you've got to realise is that Gove isn't standing up to teachers because he has the guts to do so, because it's the right thing, he's standing up to them because ideologically he hates the idea of state run schools, because he hates unions, and because he hates other such leftist notions.
The fact that in this respect he just happens to be right on some of it is part of the inevitable truth that even the wing nuts will be at least somewhat right sometimes, but they're certainly not right all the time, and not even right most of the time.
Personally I'm a rather centrist person, it makes sense to me because you can take the good ideas from both sides and ignore the bad - you can have your will for a reduction of the counter-productive and unhelpful attitudes of the teaching unions without having to hate foreigners and hate gay people. You can have you reforms of local government over-indulgence of spending and creation of joke/non-jobs without also wanting to see the NHS gutted and turned private.
I think all the parties have at least some good ideas, for example, I'm against HS2, because spending £30bn on a scheme to get you to an out of town train station where you then have to spend 30minutes walking/waiting for a connecting transport into the city centre when you could've just used an existing train to get you there in the same time whilst also bulldozing some of our nicest landscapes and destroying or devaluing people's homes makes little sense to me - especially when for a fraction of that cost you could roll out nation wide fibre and spend the rest greatly speeding up local rail infrastructure for an order of magnitude greater net benefit to the national economy. For this reason I think UKIP are the only party who are right about HS2, but I otherwise think UKIP is an abomination that needs to die - the point being that I think even the far right can get it right just every once in a while but therein also lies the problem, because our country is so polarised politically, largely because of the failed undemocratic voting system we use known as first past the post, the parties also have an awful lot of wrong opinions.
In other words the UK has lost it's centrism, and so we end up with politicians like Gove where the best we can hope for is that just every once in a while, one out of their hundreds of policies just happens, out of simple statistical probability, to be a decent one- a broken clock and all that. Becareful not to interpret that which is essentially coincidence as competence however- it's not. If a wingnut like Gove has got something right, it really is just sheer random chance of the various variables involved in the political calculations in our world colliding in a way that even an extremist can get something right some of the time but will otherwise get most things wrong most of the time.
"Then, after the cold war, there are no longer "Marxist Terror Gangs". They all just gave up and went home, I guess. Now, there are "Muslim Terror Gangs". Amazing."
To be fair a lot of terror gangs gave up and went home and I think it'd be hard to suggest some of them were run by the security services. Some of the Palestinian organisations, some of the Japanese groups and so forth for example. There were far more terror groups in the 60s, 70s, and 80s than there were afterwards
I think it's a combination of the fact that policies not to negotiate with terrorists, combined with successful anti-terror operations that left the terrorists red faced (in more ways than one) combined with increase global stability (which let's face it, did happen after the cold war) coupled with greater global prosperity as a result decreased the impact of it.
In fact, you can see a pretty strong parallel between the decrease of poverty in places where these groups were from a decrease in prominence and existence of such groups so I'd frankly wager that it's more about that than anything.
I think the security services are given way too much credit. Given the sorts of absurd fuckups they're often responsible for I'm not really sure they have the competence to carry out the sort of conspiracies you suggest.
Why would they burn down your luxury mansion rather than just seize it and make it their own?
Does McAfee really care about a house he'll probably never be able to return to or recoup anything from being burned down?
Something stinks about all of Yahoo's acquisitions so far.
I've pointed out previously what a sham the summly acquisition ones. Long story short, summly was largely a shell of a company that outsourced development to 3rd parties for everything but the iOS user interface - the AI, the Android version etc. were all outsourced. The company CEO were a few silicon valley vets bought in by the kids' Dad who was an investment banker and his mum who was a Yahoo lawyer. The investment banker father got people like Steven Fry, Ashton Kutcher, and the Murdoch's to invest in the company and publicise it prior to the take over by Yahoo. Yahoo doesn't plan to use the Summly product, they're actually ditching it.
So given that the question is if Yahoo just want the summarisation tech behind Summly (which doesn't work very well by the way) then why didn't they save themselves about $39million and go straight to the AI company Summly used?
The whole acquisition stunk of money games, of some kind of pump and dump scheme too. The famous names invested in it were pumping it, and then it was dumped on Yahoo for a valuation that was over 40x what the company was actually making in profit.
I'm not really sure what's going on at Yahoo but there's something very fishy about it all, people do seem to be getting rich off a constant stream of overpriced acquisitions. It's as if it is indeed actually just being stripped of cash.
"Anyways; it may be a challenge, if the code quality metric is good enough, it could be used to overcome bad code by flagging it for review and rewrite"
By whom? The same bad developers? They'll eventually get fed up of being told their code is bad even though it is and will just leave it bad and ignore any warnings.
The only way to solve it is to have good developers to rewrite the bad code, which just means you're going to have to hire some good developers to re-do what the bad developers did wrong in the first place, so why even bother having those bad developers at all?
America's economic growth has occurred because of massive public spending.
In the UK we've seen worse than average economic status because we've been cutting too much too fast and doing the opposite to America.
For the Western world, if you want to look at the true health of the general economy for Western nations then it's best to look at reasonably sized countries like France/Germany that have had a much healthier balance between austerity and public expenditure, or alternatively at the Eurozone as a whole where such austerity/spending programs tend to balance out a little.
If you look at that sort of picture you'll see that growth is roughly flat for developed western nations under natural circumstances (i.e. if government did nothing and had carried on as normal with no special expenditure/austerity).
So yes, America has returned to growth, but it's not natural growth, it's artificial growth fed by heavily increasing debt. Similarly in the UK we've been in recession more than similar economies like France/Germany/America in recent years because we've cut things a little too much because the current Conservative party saw it as an opportunity to make ideological changes rather than necessary changes to improve economic health.
I think just about every forecast now though believes that natural growth will return to Western economies this year or next but we're not quite there yet.
Note finally that I'm not making an argument about whether austerity or debt fed growth are a better option, both have their benefits, both have their disadvantages, that's a different discussion for a different day though. Personally however I think that it doesn't matter too much which option governments take, I think until you get a return of natural economic growth it doesn't really matter what governments do, things will still be shitty in some way or another.
I suspect given that she was new to blogging, that like all new people working with those sorts of web applications, 1, 2 and possibly 4, and 5 were possibly just test posts figuring out how to make certain things work and not intended for public consumption.
I think few new sites starting out on a new CMS manage to preserve exact sequential numbering of new articles right from 1 for precisely this reason.
I don't disagree that the decreased battery life occured for good reason - you were getting a larger colour screen and so forth, but even if the argument was that battery relative to efficiency of what the device does (rather than simple battery duration) is the argument I'm not terribly convinced the iPhone was in any way ahead here, things like the N95 had much better battery life still and were more powerful devices.
Apple had a lot of problems with batteries for quite some time, all the way upto and including the 3GS they couldn't get the technology quite so well pinned down as their competitors (though there wasn't much in it compared to other similarly priced smartphones with similar capacity batteries), so despite all the changes the iPhone brought to the market I can't see any convincing argument that improvements in battery life or efficiency was one of those things.
It would've always been difficult for Apple to be a leader in the battery usage in smartphones in part because things like Series 60 had been so better optimised for power over so many more years. Don't get me wrong, Series 60 was shit, but it did allow equally powerful devices to be more efficient than iOS (or Android) at the time. The same was always fairly true for Blackberry, they had battery efficiency nailed down far more tightly than any of the new entrants at the time (Google and Apple) did on their devices.
Again this isn't to belittle Apple, the gains in what the device could do and the way it worked more than made up for any battery deficiencies (especially as most people were happy to do what I do and charge every night regardless) but I don't think they can really be credited with any battery improvements by any metric!
It's the same with the Jamie Bulger killers, there's an injunction on identifying them, and in fact, claiming a picture of some random person of them is them is a breach of the injunction. Theoretically I believe even if you draw a stick man and name it as Jamie Bulger's killer then you're breaching the injunction it's that stupid.
Recently two people in the UK broke the injunction and the judge felt the need to remind us that there's a global injunction on identifying them.
I'm just waiting for someone overseas to make a complete and utter mockery of that arrogant suggestion that the judge has the power to enforce such an injunction worldwide.
I know someone personally (not a friend, but went to school with them) who hit and killed someone with his car driving 60mph in a 30mph zone.
Not a single day spent in prison.
So to be fair, you can do things that are, in the grand scheme of things much more awful, and still get a much lighter sentence.
They could still be extradited to the US. That could still happen.
Hopefully not given that they've been charged, found guilty and sentenced here already.
I wont hold my breathe though, I bet this isn't the end for them knowing how badly broken our extradition agreement with the US is.
"Jobs just designed the pain out of the iPhone. Long battery life."
What? I'm not disagreeing with everything else you said, but the iPhone brought in an era of phones that needed charging every night, when before they, including smartphones, lasted a week.
I never saw this as a problem as I always habitually put my phone on charge every night anyway, but I don't see how the iPhone brought in long battery life, it did the complete opposite, it took battery life from a norm of 5 - 10 days down to 1 - 2 days.
"Dude, all you've done is pulled a bunch of numbers out of your ass, and then constructed an argument on it."
Except I provided a source for all my numbers, which is more than can be said for your incoherent rants and conspiracy theories. At least the numbers I provided are verifiable, I'm sorry if the facts conflict with your world view.
"Now I appreciate that maybe Fox News has had a bad impact on your ability to construct a proper argument"
Except I don't watch Fox News because as I said, I'm not American, and we don't have that drivel here. We have proper news outlets like the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 news.
"but rather than address the specific points, I'll just throw out a couple key principles that are well-established and then hit the conclusion."
In other words, "I'll do what I accused you of and make shit up and drawn a conclusion on the shit I made up".
"First, if you increase labor, and demand remains constant, the price will drop. This is the law of supply and demand. All of your quoting of numbers and beating of chest tries to cover up the fact that more workers means lower wages, all other things being equal. It's an escapable economic truth."
Which is great for your argument if you ignore the fact that demand hasn't remained constant and the price hasn't dropped. Unfortunately, ignoring reality doesn't help your case.
"Here's some global data regarding wages. I'm not going to make it too easy for you by linking in the exact table you need to look at... but if you want to educate yourself instead of screaming profanities... I'd start there."
In other words "I'm going to link to an arbitrary site, and not point to anything particular and pretend this adds validity to my argument in some unknown way". I could see nothing specific about developer wages there which is what we're talking about, and given that developer wages haven't followed the average trend I can only guess this is a desperate attempt by you to muddy the waters and make the false inference that if average wages have dropped, so must have developer wages. If you can't even be bothered to point out what it is you believe is damning evidence for your case then I'm certainly not going to try and dig for and guess what you think that might be given that I've already proven your existing points wrong with verifiable facts and figures.
I offered you a pretty detailed and verifiable set of facts and figures as to why the US is still full of developer opportunities and you opted to ignore it, pretend it's not real, and claw desperately for misdirection. It's okay I get it, you really are beyond help, the fact you "educate yourself instead of screaming profanities" despite there being no profanities in my comment is evidence enough that there isn't something quite right in your head because if you can't read a reasoned post with verifiable facts without seeing profanities where there are none then you obviously need professional help.
Good luck wallowing in your pit of despair, you obviously want to keep blaming everyone but yourself, but don't be surprised when nothing changes for you. You'll never find a solution when you refuse to even acknowledge the problem - you.
Well hopefully they're just talking about the US market then!
Well that's a lie, for the sake of Americans hopefully not, but I mean, for their sake and ours, I hope they haven't just openly admitted to breaking the law in the UK.
That and their hand was probably forced somewhat, in the face of the recent European ruling that companies cannot artificially block or limit second hand software sales they'd have had to do this anyway.
I was wondering about this too, by Lands End I'm assuming she means the actual place Lands End in the UK? If so then again this seems to be yet another company breaking UK law on data collection and not a thing being done about it.
It's worth noting that it's not simply a breach of the point in law you say - the right to be able to access this data, but also that as a 3rd party company with whom you have no business then they have absolutely no legal right to be holding this data in the first place. It's true that you don't have to have a direct relation to a company for them to be able to hold data on you, a data controller can authorise a data processor to process data they hold on you, but from what she's saying - the fact they have their own distinct hive of data implies they're not acting merely as a data processor but are themselves a data controller and as I've never once had any direct business correspondence with this firm then that suggests they are breaking the law.
What's actually really really interesting in the case you site is their reason for not giving you access to data they hold - one of the responsibilities placed on data controllers is that they must hold data in a suitable filing system, a suitable filing system can be as simple as a pile of paper on your desk with the caveat that if that pile of paper on your desk contains personal information of someone and they ask to see it then you have to be able to find it else it's not a suitable filing system. The fact they're claiming they can't give you access to your data because their systems are too complex means they're not even fulfilling the minimum requirements needed legally to be a data controller.
It seems that effectively they're breaching the DPA in almost every possible conceivable way.
The reason I've tended to find experienced contractors can hit the ground running faster is simply because they've had so much practice at it - they've seen so many companies do so many things in so many different ways that it's just easier for them to jump in, even if you do things slightly different the person whose been at 30 different companies will find it easier to jump in than one that has only been at 2 or 3. Usually if they haven't seen the exact "thing" you do they've seen something they can at least relate to it.
I suppose in part though I have the benefit of having built decent relationships with close contractors such that I can usually find at least one that'll be able to come back as and when I need them. Because of that relationship they do know how we work, what we do and so forth so I guess in way once you've taken that first step of building up a decent pool of well known contractors then it gets easier too but again the value in doing this might depend on how dynamic you need your workforce to be.
This isn't to say that I haven't had bad contractors too of course, but that's one of those bumps along the road, and at least bad contractors are easy as hell to get rid of if nothing else.
I'm not sure what the US recruitment market is like (assuming that's where you are) but there are literally 100s of recruitment agencies in the UK and thanks to sheer number it does mean that at least one or two are actually quite good and again building relationships up with the good recruiters can help because they'll usually find you exactly what you need in no time and are also good at blacklisting the ones that got a bad reputation and hyping up the ones that have a good reputation because they know that means repeat business for them.
I think you've probably misunderstood what I said so I'll explain in more detail. The 2% is the proportion of H1-B visas relative to the amount of the jobs in the market each year.
For example, for 2012, if there are 1 million developer jobs in the US as the most realistic lower bounds figures suggest* and there are 20,000 new H1-B applicants each year then that means that in 2012, 2% of developer jobs were taken up by H1-B applicants. This means that in the 10 years since the H1-B program started, assuming there wasn't an equivalent number of H1-B workers leaving that the total figure will be higher, as the number of jobs and number of workers has scaled in fact you'd have just under 1%, but let's round it up to 1% of today's figures in 2002, 1.1% in 2003, 1.2% in 2004 and so on. That means assuming none left, none retired, none changed role (for example, promoted into management) 16.5% of today's developer market consisting of H1-B workers.
So your 20% figure isn't too far off that, but that estimate is very generous in weighting all assumptions towards the viewpoint that H1-B visas have a real impact on the job market. If there are in fact as high as 4 million developers it drops to only 4.125%, and of course if you guess that a non-negligible proportion have moved into management, left the US and gone back home, or changed careers then the number shrinks further. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but it's likely that in practice maybe 7 - 8% of developer jobs in the US are taken up by H1-B workers.
If you're seeing figures of 20% - 40% then you're working in places that are grossly weighted towards using the H1-B program and to offset that there would need to be many more companies that use few or no H1-B workers at all. In other words, your experience would not be typical in the slightest so is not reasonable to form an objective or neutral viewpoint off of.
*Some figures are even lower, but they search on a specific term like "programmer" and ignore developer so 1million is the lowest realistic estimate I could find but as I say, some estimates put it as high as 4 million.
"Moreover for about half of Europe dynamism would suck ass. Germany and Northern Europe are doing fine with their fossilized labor markets."
Which is of course why the EU is still by far the largest economy in the world. Because it's not dynamic enough.
Seriously, no one in the EU believes in a job for life anymore. Well that's a lie, but no greater a proportion than anywhere else in the world. It's primarily the baby boomers who hold that view.
"As for paid time off, you do realize that salaried Americans don't get that much less paid time off then Europeans? 20 days a year is exactly what the UK mandates."
20 days + 8 bank holidays, so 28 days. The same applies to the other countries you mentioned, you're just comparing against the leave that you can use when you want to as an employee, rather than the total which also includes static public holidays like Christmas day, Good friday and so on.
"On the topic of paid time off, in the UK there is a legal minimum of 28 days paid leave."
That's until the eurosceptic Tory/UKIP supporters take it away from us of course given that each time "renegotiation" with the EU is brought up the first thing they demand we renegotiate is the working time directive and minimum holiday limitations.
If they get their way then we'll be going the US way of no minimum leave long before the US comes in our direction and grants it's citizens a minimum statutory amount of time off.
One might wonder also how a) Their hiring process ended up managing to hire such a disproportionately high amount of incompetent staff because Italy is still a top 10 major world economy and it couldn't be if even the majority of it's citizens were like this, and b) why they don't just close down their Italian operation full stop and pull out of Italy rather than leave it as is.
Or to put it another way, the GP's post has the distinct smell of bullshit to it.
Switzerland isn't an EU member so that's really a Swiss problem and is symptomatic of the insular view of the Swiss people (which in turn is why they choose not to be in the EU).
EU countries still have control of their non-EU immigration policies so getting permission to work in the EU as a non-EU citizen will really vary from country to country in general for what it's worth.