I think the main reason we have so many bugs in software is quite simply that no one really cares. Of course everyone complains about it, but when you look past the words towards the actions, you can see it more clearly.
Everyone still buys the cheap software with tons of features. A simple bridge with a few modifications to an almost cookie cutter design costs a lot more than a very complex piece of custom business software with far more potential points of failure. And that's about right. If the bridge fails there's a good chance someone will die. If business software fails, someone might lose some money. So when you're looking at the risk of bugs in business software, paying for a lot of people to do detailed design, design reviews, code, code reviews, QA testing etc. etc. Well it just doesn't add up. The cost of getting it right is higher than the cost of dealing with the bugs.
The reason this contract is fundamentally stupid is because a vendor following it will have to increase the contract cost by an order of magnitude. Probably some more as well to cover the risk of litigation. Then the customer will have to weigh up the costs and risks, and realise their older contract might actually be more sensible in the real world.
I've never seen that survey before. It's got some very interesting data. The methodology looks pretty sound for getting average data. I'd suspect Steam users on average are a bit more into the enthusiast camp than the entire market, and so the machines may be slightly more up to date, but it's been around for long enough that it shouldn't be a huge difference.
From this data it does really look as if by the end of this year, single core CPUs will not be that much of a market sector for gamers.
The other point that really surprised me in the Steam data was active gamers by game. Counterstrike is still right up there, so presumably a lot of the single core users are playing older games and therefore not really part of the new sales market.
Hopefully the engine developers are more up to date on hardware trends than me and already have got into gear building proper multi-core optimised engines!
I believe you're right - except about timescales. Because you're saying single core CPUs have now been almost phased out - and that's not quite right. They have been almost phased out of new PCs, but in terms of the overall install base of PCs, there are still a lot of single core machines out there. In fact I'd suspect the majority of actively used computers are still single core. I work at a software company and I'd guess about a quarter of the PCs here are still single core.
There are overheads involved in multi-threaded or multi-process programs so on a single core machine it will run slower. And realistically, it's those single core machines that you need it optimised the best for since they're the ones that will really struggle. Optimising games for multi-core processors could well rule out a big chunk of potential market. And so considering the engineering investment needed to do it right, I suspect no one wants to really take the plunge just yet. And even once the engine developers have, it will take a couple more years to filter through to the end game developers. I suspect we'll see a lot of people complaining how hard it is to code for this architecture, in a similar way as has happened for the PS3.
I suspect a majority of games won't be taking full advantage of multi-core processors until 2012 or 2013.
You're considering traction on the front wheels vs traction on the rears.
The point is traction works differently at different speeds (particularly stopped vs moving). There's a lot more traction on stationary wheels, so with the front wheels planted nicely into the tarmac, it's very easy to spin up your rear tyres in a rear wheel drive car.
On a front wheel drive car (which I believe the affected ones mostly are) you're looking at the power coming from the engine and the braking force on the same wheels. The tyre traction never plays a part in this.
LiPoly doesn't currently have the power-to-weight ratio of some battery technologies, which is a big factor for car batteries.
I was looking for a definite reference for this, but I can't see many LiPoly specific references. The Wikipedia page says 7.1kW/kg, which seems stupendously high and, I suspect, completely wrong. The Wikipedia entry for Li-Ion says 250-340 W/kg, which is more reasonable, while NiMH shows as 25-1000 W/kg. Both of these ranges are easily found elsewhere. LiPoly runs similar chemistry so the results should be similar.
Taking middle of the range figures for each battery type - say 300 W/kg and 600 W/kg - your NiMh car will have twice the bhp of the LiPoly car.
That is certainly true, but the custom is around for a reason. The reason is that as many people have found out, if you're dealing with someone who wants to be difficult, and is prepared to sue you to get their way, it's a very bad idea to have a plain-english contract.
As in my original post, words like optimal are used in situations where the system follows a simple algorithm to optimise a result. But a human looking at it can find a better result and rightly claim the system isn't optimal at all.
These customs have changed significantly from time to time my previous house was built in 1885 and came with a full set of documents covering the whole history of the house I found it extremely interesting that when it was sold circa 1930 the contracts for the sale had no punctuation line or paragraph breaks just like this the idea was that you couldnt change the meaning by inserting those after signing the document this custom made it very difficult to actually read the document at all and so has passed out of usage to my knowledge
Kinda like the episode of the Simpsons where Lionel Hutz adjusts an advert from:
It's not very workable just based on the difference between plain English language and contractual English. A bit like legalese gets very convoluted to simply state a simple fact, without allowing differences of interpretation.
Some of the worst difficulties I've recently had are on a project where the design specifications used inappropriate terms. The word 'optimal' was used, rather than specifying an algorithm. Also, one line promised statistics would be available crane, despatch chute, spur etc. The etc. cost a lot of money to implement.
The fact is, a salesperson just can't get bogged down in every detail while selling a system. There's no possible way for them to say the etc. means sorter levels, sorter chutes, pick stations, but it doesn't mean statistics are available by user. And also a typical sales pitch will show every interesting feature implemented at any similar client. It doesn't mean that's included in the cost and will be included in the system you're buying.
So you get the sales pitch, and then you draw up design specs of what is actually going to be delivered and agree on that. Ignore anything the salesman said that you haven't got written in the spec.
A week ago, I nearly picked up a copy of CitiesXL, being a big fan of Sim-City type games. I decided not to, and to read a few **USER** reviews first (don't get me started on professional games reviews). Definitely was a good move.
The game includes an subscription model if you want to play online, along with a free standalone mode. Unfortunately, certain vital elements such as public transport are not available to non-subscribers, meaning your £30 game is next to useless unless you want to subscribe. To me, that is just appalling.
I'm not against subscription gaming WOW-style where what you're buying is known from the off. But tricking people into buying a subscription game when they think they're buying a full-price standalone game is blantantly dishonest. Very few user reviews gave the game more than 1 out of 10 (or whatever the lowest possible score was).
If only the mods went to +6. I think we've already seen evidence with Spore, which picked up a reputation for annoying DRM, and subsequently became the most pirated game.
Surely it wouldn't be long before it would be cracked anyway - the crack would just have to modify the PCs hosts file to set pointlessdrm.ubisoft.com 127.0.0.1, and run a mini activation server that tells the game your copy's legit.
I find things the opposite way here in the UK. All we have to do at audits is show we follow a policy. It seems we can make the policy say anything we like - doesn't have to be sensible; 'Programming is only allowed while wearing a cowboy hat' or something. I've seen the action taken for a non-conformity raised by audits is just to change the policy to match what is done.
It's not really that daft, there seems to be a template of issues our policies must address. Our policy says printed copies of design documents must have a disclaimer they're probably not up to date (masters are electronic), and that's our own addition. We only get a minor non-conformity for failing to do that. But anything where we stray too far outside the template on for instance change controls, and having a backed up copy of source code currently in production use, that raises more serious issues.
It sounds to me like the situation isn't as you've just described though.
From the article, my impression was that the IT department came up with this backup policy as a cover your ass approach to avoid getting in trouble if there is another episode of data loss. In fact my thoughts were that it sounds like a good policy for the IT department, but extremely onerous for the staff trying to get real work done, and an expensive overhead to adminster. I'd suspect at a small company (I also work at one), bosses would have a think how much the data loss really cost them versus how much this policy costs and have maybe decided it doesn't add up.
What significant data are people really taking on the road with them anyway? For people handling contractual emails, you can leave a copy on the server, and backup from there. Contractual documents hopefully live on a central server because multiple people will need access. The laptops probably only contain a couple of weeks of in-progress documents and bits and pieces like that. Losing it would be a pain, but not the end of the world (or company).
Possibly in a similar way to the GP, searching that site for google doesn't always give you a result for the google search add on. I found I had to search google to find it.
I had this problem when selecting a default search engine on one particular install (on a Vista Home Basic machine). Google wasn't listed, and searching for Google didn't find the correct results. Eventually, I had to load google, then search that for a Google search provider for IE, which finally worked. But I'd guess that ploy would have stopped 90% of people choosing to use google.
Agreed. I'm not in consulting myself, but I do write custom software, and regularly visit customer sites for install and commissioning of the software. I have also never once seen a company encrypting stuff like this. Just one company wouldn't let us connect our own laptops onto their network, and instead provided laptops we could collect each morning. That's about the most security conscious place I've ever encountered, and most of these are very large companies typically tens of thousands of employees.
The stuff I do at work is for warehouses, and the people who are best at it are good at the tech side, but it's incredibly important to understand what a warehouse actually does, and the level of experience of typical users. I've made various clever improvements to standard query screens on our systems, but about 50% of users go to a stock list screen and page through all the records until they find the one they're after. That's definitely not the best way to find a record, but it's what half the users do since it requires less thought.
We had a really clever PhD guy here who vastly improved the core screen technology while working on one of my projects. Once he had done with that, I got him to work using his new core screens, writing one of the screens to guide a warehouse process. That was a bit of a disaster - he didn't really understand what the warehouse workers did and how to make things easier for them.
Hopefully he's now working for a bigger company that can keep him working on the stuff where all that technical knowledge is more useful. But I think for large sections of programming, it's just as important to understand the people and the domain.
That market cap isn't in US $ - it's presumable Taiwanese New Dollars. So that would be $8.8B in US dollars. Still big but HTC clearly isn't bigger than IBM and Microsoft.
Some programmers can be handed a problem, and will give back a well designed solution. Others, that just won't happen - you have to outline a solution and then they'll fill in the dots. Almost universally, the people in the first category seem to have a good understanding of maths.
I'm not sure why. I hope I'm one of the programmers you can give a raw problem to, and I don't feel like I use much maths over the course of a normal day. There is a correlation though.
You'd also need something to prop up the other end of the new extended screen to display the number - Venus should be in about the right place when it gets a bit closer!
You're right of course - there is another point I forgot here. The Papst fan is silent when held up in clean air next to your ear. Once mounted into a case directly onto a grill, it is not.
On my desktop, the solution was just cut out the grill and replace with a special grill that sticks out 2cm before interrupting the airflow. In the HTPC, the fan is mounted on the CPU cooler and is separated by ~1cm from the grill in the case anyway.
Passive cooling hopefully isn't necessary. Consider just getting a big HSF with a big fan, to run at minimum speeds. I've got a Core 2 E6400 HTPC in a Silverstone LC11-M case. I could unplug every single case fan, set the stock cooler to the lowest possible speed (about 920rpm) and play videos without it overheating, or even getting close to overheating. At that point the noisiest item was the hard disc, even though its got soundproofing panels around it.
I've recently bought a 30GB SSD to replace the noisiest bit, along with a Nexus LOW-7000 cooler. I've now got the single 120mm fan on the Nexus running about 750 rpm as the only moving part. I know it isn't technically going to be silent, but it is now silent to my ears at least. I think big fans are the way forward rather than passive cooling. I've also got an older 80mm Papst fan in my desktop PC, which at minimum speed I just can't hear, even with my ear 1 inch from the fan. Have a look for Papst 8412NGLE - over about 10 'silent' fans I've bought over the years, this seems to be the one that remarkably does do what it says.
As the article states, the main use is intended to be people suffering muscular atrophy. But also different normal range people have different amounts of muscle - and for some people this means various occasional tasks like moving a fridge/freezer, washing machine, CRT TV etc. just aren't possible without help.
One other thing I can think of is both my wife's parents have back problems which cause them a lot of difficulty. I've generally taken the view that what would really help them is much stronger back muscles - but of course to do this naturally requires back exercises, so it's a bit of a catch-22 since they aren't going to be doing deadlifts any time soon. If this stuff could be given in controlled and targeted doses, a couple of injections through the core muscles and lats could be a dramatic improvement.
I'd disagree with this to some extent. When I was purely an engineer, it was easier to work whatever hours I chose, often 7:30 am to 4pm. This became harder in team lead positions, because for instance one of the guys used to sleep in mornings, and began work at 1pm / 2pm sort of time, others would work a typical 9-5:30 shift. And being team lead, you need to actually communicate face to face with everyone on your team, which kind of means you'll often need to be there when other people are - and having a regular day off may just not be an option.
Sure I don't have to clock in, but my job performance will naturally go down if I work unusual hours, in a way that just isn't true as an engineer.
Wish I had some mod points today. You should do a job that you enjoy doing. The only thing I would say is to have patience with your choices. If you've invested a lot of time getting a degree you really shouldn't switch fields too quickly.
Personally, I was bored of programming and IT after 3 years at Uni doing computer science. I took a job when I left as a business consultant at a large consultancy firm. They went bust shortly before I was about to begin work with them, and left me in a bit of a pickle looking for a job when most of the graduate schemes had filled up. The easiest jobs to find were the ones directly related to my degree so I found another job as a software engineer at a small company.
Turns out when I got into commercial software development, I enjoyed it much more than the academic side. It turned out that a lot of the stuff I thought was stupid when doing my degree has just been thrown out the window, and a lot of things work very much the way I initially expected. It's a lot more challenging and a lot more rewarding working on real stuff that people use to do their jobs. The only thing that genuinely annoys me in my job is coding stupid stuff that won't work, because I know if I could explain the problems better, we could all get to a solution much quicker. But that's the nature of any job - you're going to be doing what someone is handing over money for.
Quite possibly, the business consultancy going bust was one of the luckiest things to have happened to me. I've met enough consultants with a basic academic understanding of computers, blagging their way through technical discussions, to know I would have hated the job. But it paid very well, and I may have stuck with it for that.
But of course if she had more than that number of children, she contributed to the balooning world population exacerbating environmental problems and overcrowding to be faced by future generations.
While an expanding population is good in the short term, we do need population to stabilise in the long term. And in fact the sooner we have a stable population the better things will be for the future.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the main reason we have so many bugs in software is quite simply that no one really cares. Of course everyone complains about it, but when you look past the words towards the actions, you can see it more clearly.
Everyone still buys the cheap software with tons of features. A simple bridge with a few modifications to an almost cookie cutter design costs a lot more than a very complex piece of custom business software with far more potential points of failure. And that's about right. If the bridge fails there's a good chance someone will die. If business software fails, someone might lose some money. So when you're looking at the risk of bugs in business software, paying for a lot of people to do detailed design, design reviews, code, code reviews, QA testing etc. etc. Well it just doesn't add up. The cost of getting it right is higher than the cost of dealing with the bugs.
The reason this contract is fundamentally stupid is because a vendor following it will have to increase the contract cost by an order of magnitude. Probably some more as well to cover the risk of litigation. Then the customer will have to weigh up the costs and risks, and realise their older contract might actually be more sensible in the real world.
I've never seen that survey before. It's got some very interesting data. The methodology looks pretty sound for getting average data. I'd suspect Steam users on average are a bit more into the enthusiast camp than the entire market, and so the machines may be slightly more up to date, but it's been around for long enough that it shouldn't be a huge difference.
From this data it does really look as if by the end of this year, single core CPUs will not be that much of a market sector for gamers.
The other point that really surprised me in the Steam data was active gamers by game. Counterstrike is still right up there, so presumably a lot of the single core users are playing older games and therefore not really part of the new sales market.
Hopefully the engine developers are more up to date on hardware trends than me and already have got into gear building proper multi-core optimised engines!
I believe you're right - except about timescales. Because you're saying single core CPUs have now been almost phased out - and that's not quite right. They have been almost phased out of new PCs, but in terms of the overall install base of PCs, there are still a lot of single core machines out there. In fact I'd suspect the majority of actively used computers are still single core. I work at a software company and I'd guess about a quarter of the PCs here are still single core.
There are overheads involved in multi-threaded or multi-process programs so on a single core machine it will run slower. And realistically, it's those single core machines that you need it optimised the best for since they're the ones that will really struggle. Optimising games for multi-core processors could well rule out a big chunk of potential market. And so considering the engineering investment needed to do it right, I suspect no one wants to really take the plunge just yet. And even once the engine developers have, it will take a couple more years to filter through to the end game developers. I suspect we'll see a lot of people complaining how hard it is to code for this architecture, in a similar way as has happened for the PS3.
I suspect a majority of games won't be taking full advantage of multi-core processors until 2012 or 2013.
You're considering traction on the front wheels vs traction on the rears.
The point is traction works differently at different speeds (particularly stopped vs moving). There's a lot more traction on stationary wheels, so with the front wheels planted nicely into the tarmac, it's very easy to spin up your rear tyres in a rear wheel drive car.
On a front wheel drive car (which I believe the affected ones mostly are) you're looking at the power coming from the engine and the braking force on the same wheels. The tyre traction never plays a part in this.
LiPoly doesn't currently have the power-to-weight ratio of some battery technologies, which is a big factor for car batteries.
I was looking for a definite reference for this, but I can't see many LiPoly specific references. The Wikipedia page says 7.1kW/kg, which seems stupendously high and, I suspect, completely wrong. The Wikipedia entry for Li-Ion says 250-340 W/kg, which is more reasonable, while NiMH shows as 25-1000 W/kg. Both of these ranges are easily found elsewhere. LiPoly runs similar chemistry so the results should be similar.
Taking middle of the range figures for each battery type - say 300 W/kg and 600 W/kg - your NiMh car will have twice the bhp of the LiPoly car.
That is certainly true, but the custom is around for a reason. The reason is that as many people have found out, if you're dealing with someone who wants to be difficult, and is prepared to sue you to get their way, it's a very bad idea to have a plain-english contract.
As in my original post, words like optimal are used in situations where the system follows a simple algorithm to optimise a result. But a human looking at it can find a better result and rightly claim the system isn't optimal at all.
These customs have changed significantly from time to time my previous house was built in 1885 and came with a full set of documents covering the whole history of the house I found it extremely interesting that when it was sold circa 1930 the contracts for the sale had no punctuation line or paragraph breaks just like this the idea was that you couldnt change the meaning by inserting those after signing the document this custom made it very difficult to actually read the document at all and so has passed out of usage to my knowledge
Kinda like the episode of the Simpsons where Lionel Hutz adjusts an advert from:
Works on commission
No money down
to:
Works on commission?
No, Money down!
It's not very workable just based on the difference between plain English language and contractual English. A bit like legalese gets very convoluted to simply state a simple fact, without allowing differences of interpretation.
Some of the worst difficulties I've recently had are on a project where the design specifications used inappropriate terms. The word 'optimal' was used, rather than specifying an algorithm. Also, one line promised statistics would be available crane, despatch chute, spur etc. The etc. cost a lot of money to implement.
The fact is, a salesperson just can't get bogged down in every detail while selling a system. There's no possible way for them to say the etc. means sorter levels, sorter chutes, pick stations, but it doesn't mean statistics are available by user. And also a typical sales pitch will show every interesting feature implemented at any similar client. It doesn't mean that's included in the cost and will be included in the system you're buying.
So you get the sales pitch, and then you draw up design specs of what is actually going to be delivered and agree on that. Ignore anything the salesman said that you haven't got written in the spec.
A week ago, I nearly picked up a copy of CitiesXL, being a big fan of Sim-City type games. I decided not to, and to read a few **USER** reviews first (don't get me started on professional games reviews). Definitely was a good move.
The game includes an subscription model if you want to play online, along with a free standalone mode. Unfortunately, certain vital elements such as public transport are not available to non-subscribers, meaning your £30 game is next to useless unless you want to subscribe. To me, that is just appalling.
I'm not against subscription gaming WOW-style where what you're buying is known from the off. But tricking people into buying a subscription game when they think they're buying a full-price standalone game is blantantly dishonest. Very few user reviews gave the game more than 1 out of 10 (or whatever the lowest possible score was).
If only the mods went to +6. I think we've already seen evidence with Spore, which picked up a reputation for annoying DRM, and subsequently became the most pirated game.
Surely it wouldn't be long before it would be cracked anyway - the crack would just have to modify the PCs hosts file to set pointlessdrm.ubisoft.com 127.0.0.1, and run a mini activation server that tells the game your copy's legit.
Dammit our 60% VAT rate strikes again.
I find things the opposite way here in the UK. All we have to do at audits is show we follow a policy. It seems we can make the policy say anything we like - doesn't have to be sensible; 'Programming is only allowed while wearing a cowboy hat' or something. I've seen the action taken for a non-conformity raised by audits is just to change the policy to match what is done.
It's not really that daft, there seems to be a template of issues our policies must address. Our policy says printed copies of design documents must have a disclaimer they're probably not up to date (masters are electronic), and that's our own addition. We only get a minor non-conformity for failing to do that. But anything where we stray too far outside the template on for instance change controls, and having a backed up copy of source code currently in production use, that raises more serious issues.
It sounds to me like the situation isn't as you've just described though.
From the article, my impression was that the IT department came up with this backup policy as a cover your ass approach to avoid getting in trouble if there is another episode of data loss. In fact my thoughts were that it sounds like a good policy for the IT department, but extremely onerous for the staff trying to get real work done, and an expensive overhead to adminster. I'd suspect at a small company (I also work at one), bosses would have a think how much the data loss really cost them versus how much this policy costs and have maybe decided it doesn't add up.
What significant data are people really taking on the road with them anyway? For people handling contractual emails, you can leave a copy on the server, and backup from there. Contractual documents hopefully live on a central server because multiple people will need access. The laptops probably only contain a couple of weeks of in-progress documents and bits and pieces like that. Losing it would be a pain, but not the end of the world (or company).
Possibly in a similar way to the GP, searching that site for google doesn't always give you a result for the google search add on. I found I had to search google to find it.
I had this problem when selecting a default search engine on one particular install (on a Vista Home Basic machine). Google wasn't listed, and searching for Google didn't find the correct results. Eventually, I had to load google, then search that for a Google search provider for IE, which finally worked. But I'd guess that ploy would have stopped 90% of people choosing to use google.
Agreed. I'm not in consulting myself, but I do write custom software, and regularly visit customer sites for install and commissioning of the software. I have also never once seen a company encrypting stuff like this. Just one company wouldn't let us connect our own laptops onto their network, and instead provided laptops we could collect each morning. That's about the most security conscious place I've ever encountered, and most of these are very large companies typically tens of thousands of employees.
The stuff I do at work is for warehouses, and the people who are best at it are good at the tech side, but it's incredibly important to understand what a warehouse actually does, and the level of experience of typical users. I've made various clever improvements to standard query screens on our systems, but about 50% of users go to a stock list screen and page through all the records until they find the one they're after. That's definitely not the best way to find a record, but it's what half the users do since it requires less thought.
We had a really clever PhD guy here who vastly improved the core screen technology while working on one of my projects. Once he had done with that, I got him to work using his new core screens, writing one of the screens to guide a warehouse process. That was a bit of a disaster - he didn't really understand what the warehouse workers did and how to make things easier for them.
Hopefully he's now working for a bigger company that can keep him working on the stuff where all that technical knowledge is more useful. But I think for large sections of programming, it's just as important to understand the people and the domain.
That market cap isn't in US $ - it's presumable Taiwanese New Dollars. So that would be $8.8B in US dollars. Still big but HTC clearly isn't bigger than IBM and Microsoft.
Some programmers can be handed a problem, and will give back a well designed solution. Others, that just won't happen - you have to outline a solution and then they'll fill in the dots. Almost universally, the people in the first category seem to have a good understanding of maths.
I'm not sure why. I hope I'm one of the programmers you can give a raw problem to, and I don't feel like I use much maths over the course of a normal day. There is a correlation though.
You'd also need something to prop up the other end of the new extended screen to display the number - Venus should be in about the right place when it gets a bit closer!
You're right of course - there is another point I forgot here. The Papst fan is silent when held up in clean air next to your ear. Once mounted into a case directly onto a grill, it is not.
On my desktop, the solution was just cut out the grill and replace with a special grill that sticks out 2cm before interrupting the airflow. In the HTPC, the fan is mounted on the CPU cooler and is separated by ~1cm from the grill in the case anyway.
Passive cooling hopefully isn't necessary. Consider just getting a big HSF with a big fan, to run at minimum speeds. I've got a Core 2 E6400 HTPC in a Silverstone LC11-M case. I could unplug every single case fan, set the stock cooler to the lowest possible speed (about 920rpm) and play videos without it overheating, or even getting close to overheating. At that point the noisiest item was the hard disc, even though its got soundproofing panels around it.
I've recently bought a 30GB SSD to replace the noisiest bit, along with a Nexus LOW-7000 cooler. I've now got the single 120mm fan on the Nexus running about 750 rpm as the only moving part. I know it isn't technically going to be silent, but it is now silent to my ears at least. I think big fans are the way forward rather than passive cooling. I've also got an older 80mm Papst fan in my desktop PC, which at minimum speed I just can't hear, even with my ear 1 inch from the fan. Have a look for Papst 8412NGLE - over about 10 'silent' fans I've bought over the years, this seems to be the one that remarkably does do what it says.
As the article states, the main use is intended to be people suffering muscular atrophy. But also different normal range people have different amounts of muscle - and for some people this means various occasional tasks like moving a fridge/freezer, washing machine, CRT TV etc. just aren't possible without help.
One other thing I can think of is both my wife's parents have back problems which cause them a lot of difficulty. I've generally taken the view that what would really help them is much stronger back muscles - but of course to do this naturally requires back exercises, so it's a bit of a catch-22 since they aren't going to be doing deadlifts any time soon. If this stuff could be given in controlled and targeted doses, a couple of injections through the core muscles and lats could be a dramatic improvement.
I'd disagree with this to some extent. When I was purely an engineer, it was easier to work whatever hours I chose, often 7:30 am to 4pm. This became harder in team lead positions, because for instance one of the guys used to sleep in mornings, and began work at 1pm / 2pm sort of time, others would work a typical 9-5:30 shift. And being team lead, you need to actually communicate face to face with everyone on your team, which kind of means you'll often need to be there when other people are - and having a regular day off may just not be an option.
Sure I don't have to clock in, but my job performance will naturally go down if I work unusual hours, in a way that just isn't true as an engineer.
Wish I had some mod points today. You should do a job that you enjoy doing. The only thing I would say is to have patience with your choices. If you've invested a lot of time getting a degree you really shouldn't switch fields too quickly.
Personally, I was bored of programming and IT after 3 years at Uni doing computer science. I took a job when I left as a business consultant at a large consultancy firm. They went bust shortly before I was about to begin work with them, and left me in a bit of a pickle looking for a job when most of the graduate schemes had filled up. The easiest jobs to find were the ones directly related to my degree so I found another job as a software engineer at a small company.
Turns out when I got into commercial software development, I enjoyed it much more than the academic side. It turned out that a lot of the stuff I thought was stupid when doing my degree has just been thrown out the window, and a lot of things work very much the way I initially expected. It's a lot more challenging and a lot more rewarding working on real stuff that people use to do their jobs. The only thing that genuinely annoys me in my job is coding stupid stuff that won't work, because I know if I could explain the problems better, we could all get to a solution much quicker. But that's the nature of any job - you're going to be doing what someone is handing over money for.
Quite possibly, the business consultancy going bust was one of the luckiest things to have happened to me. I've met enough consultants with a basic academic understanding of computers, blagging their way through technical discussions, to know I would have hated the job. But it paid very well, and I may have stuck with it for that.
But of course if she had more than that number of children, she contributed to the balooning world population exacerbating environmental problems and overcrowding to be faced by future generations.
While an expanding population is good in the short term, we do need population to stabilise in the long term. And in fact the sooner we have a stable population the better things will be for the future.