If the wind conditions are "No Wind" then a lighter than air platform (blimp) would probably be the best choice - certainly it would solve the problem of finding something that has a 20km minimum range and can carry 2 hi-def cameras: it would be very slow but have great staying power if there is no wind.
Somehow I think "No Wind" might be a simplification too far.
Guess what, plenty of managers know that Software Developers tend to be overly optimistic.
Worse, it's even a well known management technique to get Developers to give estimates and go along with them (even knowing they're far too optimistic) as a form getting "commitment to the deadlines" from the Developers, which innevitably results in crazy overtime.
Look around whenever you're again in one of those jobs where "it's the workers" - you'll notice that the ones that do the most overwork are invariably male and young. It's not by chance, they're the easiest to manipulate in that way.
In my experience of 15 years in the industry, people that always worked long hours because "that's the way everybody does it" don't actually know that overall productivity is much higher with shorter working hours.
Also, when going from longer-hours to shorter-hours one doesn't immediately get to the maximum productivity sweet-spot: if you've been working 80h-week, going to 40h-week will cut your productivity in half to begin with and it will take a couple of weeks before your productivity passes that of the 80h-week. In an environment where everybody does long-hours, people cutting down in overtime often give up (or are pressured into giving up) during the first few weeks when their body has not yet recovered enough from chronical burnout to compensate for the reduced number of hours.
My personal discovery of this only came when I moved from my native land (Portugal) where I worked 60h-weeks to Holland were if you're in the office after 6 PM your manager tells you to go home. It was an eye openner for me to see just how much more overall productivity (and lower stress and far fewer bugs) a Software Developer has in Holland's 40h-week system than in Portugal's 60h-week one.
When I moved to the UK I brought the Dutch 40h-week habit with me, and even though more than one of my managers tried to pressure me into staying in the office longer hours, my productivity was always better than my colleagues, my decisions were sharper and they always renewed my contract (I was working as a freelancer).
And heck, if you can do 8 hours of work at home in 2 hours, why not get 8 hours of pay! The key is productivity.
No, no, no!
Modern management evaluation techniques require that people are seen to work long hours so that management can claim that they work hard and make their people work hard.
In services industries, because results are hard to measure consistently, the perception of doing a lot of work is used to measure productivity. In addition to that, since in services projects are mostly unique and usually done done in response to needs of external actors, faster than expected delivery tends be followed by an idle period (since the next project "isn't ready to start yet") while in manufacturing, if you finish making a widget faster, you can immediatly start working on doing another widget.
The result is that in services efficiency is in fact treated as a bad thing - if you work smart, you're not visibly working hard and (worse) you finish your projects early and have periods of idleness while you wait for sales/management to catch up with new projects.
(I find it both funny and sad that in some cultures "working hard" is actually seen as a good thing, since by definition if you need to work hard either you or somebody else is not doing their job in an efficient maner)
The problem may be that you give people numerical and verbal reasoning tests. You are employing a human for a set of complex tasks, not measuring a robot to see if its arms fit a slot. The tests confirm nothing more than an interest in primitive puzzles and/or having practiced stupid recruitment tests, whittling out the most creative or intelligent who are either unable or unwilling to jump a few meaningless hoops.
Since my 18th year I have given myself a rule to not consider any position which requires a generic cognitive ability and/or personality test. Meaningless metrics are the bane of modern English work culture, from "performance targets" which encourage little more than gaming the system to "aptitude tests" which test little more than the willingness of an employer to pay for another con-man's puzzle book.
Take it from me: do the stupid tests, get the job, prove yourself professionally for a couple of years and you will never be asked again to do such tests by any future potential employers.
I seem to remember something like this in some Science Fiction book. I do believe it might have been Fahrenheit 451.
Prior art!?
... and built a clean room into the basement
Not clean enough, according to your mom.
Apples and Oranges comparisson.
If you RTFA you'll see that in a company he was working in, they found out that the actual cost of doing development in India was 30% of doing it in the US and in India they did using a (much less flexible) hierarchical fashion rather than using processes like Scrum, so the return on investment of outsourcing to India was actually negative for them.
His point is that this is a problem with management in India, not with the capabilities of their dev people.
Furthermore, he points at the case of a Dutch company that manages to successfully work with distributed development in The Netherlands and India and that their secret is that they first create and train the teams together in Holland and them send half the team to India but have them continue to work together as a team. Essentially they export a Dutch style of management and teamwork to India and it works!
Yet another point was that a race to the bottom in costs will always be won by developing countries and that the advantage that developed countries have is in their proximity and intimate knowledge of the markets where their products are sold and thus their ability in developing products that are better suited to the needs of developed country consumers. This competitive advantage is not being exploited by most managers of developed world companies whose management practices are almost entirelly focused on cost-cutting rather than know-your-customer.
He points at Apple as an example of a company that is being successful by being customer focused.
This is quite orthogonal to automation since automathons are not exactly affected by management styles, are owned by the company (rather than being an external company you outsource to) and are hardly going to fund their own company using what they learned from their customers.
It's a bit of a contradiction:
- If humanity could grow to pose a danger to the galaxy it would likelly destroy itself before that.
We (seem to) have survived the discovery of the power of the atom, but there are still plenty of challenges facing us as our technology advances, the next ones being in genetics (a man-made plague that wipes out our civilization) and nano-technology (out of control self reproducing nanites, i.e. the grey goo).
Any aliens concerned with us becoming a danger to the galaxy and yet willing to give us a chance would simply stay away from us and/or made sure we did not get access a feasible interstellar travel technology before we either evolved enough as a social species or destroyed ourselves.
Any aliens certain that we would become a danger to the galaxy would just leak the appropriate technologies to us and stand off while we proceeded to destroy ourselves with them.
I would say that the dearth of grand-visions problem is twofold:
- One one side, is the widespread, modern concept of the "hero", the one people others look up to. The "heroes" of today are sportsman and celebrities, not thinkers or explorers which both feeds and reflects a society that values luck, inherent ability and monetary success above all.
- On the other side is the democratisation of culture, where everybody is supposed to have a voice and (unsurprisingly) those who think the least, react the fastest, use the shortest soundbites and shout the most drown out those who actually think about things.
Actually your walking carbon footprint is very much dependant on the type of food you eat:
- Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.
It also doesn't help that nobody from the police ended up suspended for the killing of the Brazilian Electrician.
More recently, a newspaper salesman died after being attacked without provocation by a member of the riot police during some (mostly peaceful demonstrations) some years ago (and the newspaper salesman was not demonstrating, just trying to leave the area) and nobody went to jail for it.
In the UK, police officers don't answer for this kind of crime.
Add to this:
- Distancing from the overall population (fewer cops that walk their beat and know the people of the neighbourhood, more ex-military types cruising about in police cars)
- The emphasis in the last couple of year on conviction-targets (that's right, cops have targets to get X people convicted) rather than public-safety targets.
- An almost complete reliance on using hard-power rather than soft-power (so the kid that throws a stone through a window and which in the past would be dealth with by a police officer taking him home and talking to his parents will now be arrested, taken to the station, fingerprinted and charged).
Things are even worse in London which suffers extra due to the big-city (lots of anonymous people) problem and has it's own police force which is more disfunctional than most other police forces in the UK (it's head is usually a politically adept type rather than an old-school professional, since the Mayor can and often does replace the head of the Met in reaction to the latest newspaper-pumped scare).
Just out of curiosity:
- If you play a game which has a significant component of chance (i.e. random drops) which can be directly turned into money, would that not be considered gambling?
If that is so, would it not be the case that by hosting Real Money Auctions Blizaard is in fact running an online gambling facility (a bit like a Poker site).
Should they not be taxed and regulated as such then?
The modus operandi of government in the UK is "we must be seen to act, so do something, anything".
This applies as much to the police as with politicians, since in the last 10 or 15 years the police has progressivelly been politicised (with any high-level manager that didn't dance to the tune being sidelined) and they're usually called upon to be the tool that does the some kind of action for the cameras.
The outcome is that they cannot be trusted: have they got the right man? Have they got the wrong man? Who knows.
They got somebody and the media reported they're doing something, so the real objective of the operation has already been achived. Probably in 2 or 3 months time when this guy finally faces a court (the only part of the system that actually cares about finding out the truth, rather than convicting somebody) it's quite possible that he's found innocent (or maybe all they manage to pin on him is something minor) and they will quietly release him, since by then the media would have moved on.
As the recent News of The World debacle has shown, in the UK the press has a huge amount of influence and both the politicians and high-level management inside the police have been trained to quickly find somebody to sacrifice whenever the press demands blood.
There is a lot of work in Theatre about what makes acting feel real to the audience.
For example, reading about Status and Status transactions (in the domain of Improv) is a huge eye openner about how we (humans) pick up a lot of cues subconsciously and what kind of cues are they.
I suspect anthropomorphic androids will have to give out the right cues to be confortable for us, rather like an actor has to give out the right cues for a scene to feel right to the audience.
As long as we're going to reinvent the wheel again, we might as well try making it round this time. - Mike Dennison
