Too bad the PD won't have their officers wear cameras while on duty. That would resolve the issue without the distraction of somebody following the office around all day.
Not really, because then the police have the control over the cameras. This officer in Albuquerque [1] was wearing a lapel cam in 3 separate serious incidents, after two of which he was accused of using excessive force and during the third incident he shot and killed a 19-year-old girl. During all three incidents his camera "died" before anything serious started happening.
They just learn where the wires are that keeps it running and they pull them out, then reconnect them when they're doing normal stuff. The same thing keeps coming up with dashcams, too. The dashcam footage gets "lost", etc. Maybe one day we'll have technologies and policies that don't allow officers to mess with them, but for the foreseeable future we're the ones who have to be vigilant.
Watchguard Video, which provides dashcam tech for police departments, is working on a streaming video solution that sends the live video feed back to HQ. I've seen a demo of the system and it's really neat. Cell, WiFi, satellite and a few other receivers are built into one board and firmware dynamically switches the active connection to the device with the strongest signal, ensuring the highest throughput as well as redundancy. It's all locked away in the trunk where it can't be accessed. It won't stop a determined rogue officer but it's a step in the right direction.
Easily addressable — make officers personally liable (as private citizens) for any actions that are not recorded, and cameras will suddenly become a whole lot more reliable.
I would love that so much, but public choice theory makes it clear that that is anything but the easy solution. I'm fully and 100% in favor of that idea though.
I would be satisfied with a ( future )society where everyone wears a recording system, officials have to or they lose their status, and the data is automatically encrypted and uploaded to state servers. Then if proof is needed, the legal system unlocks the appropriate data.
I had the same thought. Not so much that he'd be treated worse in the US, but that the Chinese police seemed perfectly reasonable given the newness/strangeness of the "offense".
I was also pleasantly surprised he got the copter and camera back at the end.
If that's what the author is trying to say, my response is still, "So what?"
Is that a problem? If not, why bother reporting it?
I would expect a first time buyer to be in the market for a "starter" home - old, not-updated, small, slightly less desirable neighborhood, etc. Or, a condo instead of a single-family unit.
They are very high profile. And the fact that they get moved around, used,and loaned out probably makes them a much more tempting target compared to a painting or sculpture that, for the most part, stays in one museum.
In addition to the responses already entered, the NFL (in combination with the NFLPA, the union that represents players) also requires athletes entering the draft to be three years out of high-school (typically 21 years old in the US).
So, even if you happen to have the physical aptitude to play professionally at age 18, you are barred from doing so.
Why does it have to be either/or? Is it really that hard for an employer to offer both?
If each team (of 7-10 people) has a scrum room/war room, plus some number of cubes (4-5) available on an as-needed basis, wouldn't that meet the needs of employee happiness, collaboration, etc?
Need to make a call? Go to a cube.
Deadline to meet? Go to a cube.
Mid-project, lots of design/analysis occurring? Stay in the open room.
Cubes still suck. They have most of the same noise issues as open floor plans. Assholes on speakerphone conference calls...
Also your plan requires that everyone work primarily on laptops (unless you expect to lug your desktop and monitors to a cube when you need to concentrate). And you've basically allocated double the space (cubes for half the team plus a room big enough for the whole team). Why not just cut the space up more efficiently and give everyone a private space?
This seems like a bad deal for everyone. Workers still feel like they have no privacy and are constantly distracted, and the company is paying for a lot of extra space.
> Why not just cut the space up more efficiently and give everyone a private space? ... Workers still feel like they have no privacy and are constantly distracted
Maybe it's just me, but for me it's not just about the privacy, it's about having a place for my things.
Having a desk and some drawers, some desktop space that is mine to leave papers on, etc. makes me feel a lot more at home and productive. Having to keep everything in a bag I can tote around leaves me feeling kind of uneasy and like the situation is impermanent, much like staying somewhere and living out of a duffel bag.
I'm a lot more inclined to do good work if it's for a company I feel like I'm at home at, that I'm going to stay at, than one that feels like I'll be gone from any moment now.
Only if you have a laptop that's beefy enough to replace a desktop and you also have monitors to connect it to when you're at work. A single 13" screen is decidedly nonoptimal.
Does anybody work for a software company that doesn't issue laptops as the primary PC? I haven't had a desktop in 10 years and just assumed that was the norm.
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo all provide a desktop and two monitors (or one 30" one), or did the last time I worked for or interviewed at these companies. They might also provide laptops, but they aren't the primary device for dev work. I seem to recall the same for Amazon, but am not certain.
I actually don't understand this belief that a laptop should be the primary device given the body of research that shows the usefulness of multiple large monitors (unless you're just docking the laptop).
Of course you're "docking" it. Nobody sane hunches over a laptop all day every day.
The advantage to the laptop is you can have your core machine with you everywhere -- home, office, or traveling. But when you're in the two places you spend the most time -- the office or at home -- you plug it into an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Where I work (a software company), only people who travel a lot have laptops as their primary PCs. People can easily connect to their desktop machines from home using the VPN.
I couldn't see myself working on a laptop all day unless it had an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. It would just be too physically painful.
> People can easily connect to their desktop machines from home using the VPN.
And use what to interact with it? VNC? I'd lose my mind. That's not an efficient user experience, it's slow and finicky and fucks up keyboard shortcuts.
> I couldn't see myself working on a laptop all day unless it had an external monitor, keyboard and mouse.
Which is exactly what we do. What lunatics do you work with that use laptops as primary work machines without doing this?
I've never worked for a company which didn't issue desktops as primary development machines, and I haven't used a single-display desktop machine since 2007.
Lack of psychological territoriality. Still unhappy, but better. Oh if only I had a job where my boss thought I was important enough that I could have a picture of my kids in my cube, you know, a Real job.
Also I've seen this tried and inevitably rules have to be put in place because no one wants to sit in the big room and everyone wants to sit in the cubes to do work. So you get people arguing about who's work is important enough to require the cubes. Which is not terribly motivating to people demoted to working sullenly, silently, in the big room.
>Also I've seen this tried and inevitably rules have to be put in place because no one wants to sit in the big room and everyone wants to sit in the cubes to do work. So you get people arguing about who's work is important enough to require the cubes. Which is not terribly motivating to people demoted to working sullenly, silently, in the big room.
Bingo.
The next time you see an open floor plan office, look at the 'quiet area' or the 'heads down space' or whatever they call it. Dollars to doughnuts the most senior person that doesn't have an office has claimed it as their personal domain.
You end up needing someone to go around and evict people, or a big shared calendar where everyone has to schedule their important work time, or...
The best solution is for the company to provide a private office for everyone and enough space for teams to work in one room as needed. Unfortunately it's also the most expensive solution.
It's the universal truth of open floor plans. I still remember trying to decide if I wanted to annoy the owner, tech lead, or lead designer when it came time to kick one of them out of the conference rooms so some developers could get on a conference call.
That's what is so funny about this whole discussion on open floor plans: it comes up over and over again even though scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows they are bad, employee satisfaction is shockingly low with them... but we can't seem to kick the habit!
Work at home / coffee shop / park is a pretty cheap option. Give the boss an enormous office big enough to hold the whole team at some discomfort, but its only used for team meetings or the occasional (rare) large team effort. Head down grinding is done at home or somewhere else.
Also sub-team meetings often happen at a coffee shop. Three dudes at starbucks not the whole dept or whatever.
I've also seen people working at the public library, although its difficult because so many parent use it as a day care center drop off site. Aside from the homeless shelter antics.
Those are all very decent options as well. The better companies I've worked at understand that programming is neither 100% solo work or 100% collaboration, and trust me to chose accordingly. This means some days I'd come in to work and spend time planning/brainstorming with the team, and other times I wouldn't come in at all because I was grinding away.
Thinking back, those were also the companies that didn't force me into a giant open floor plan with a ton of other people... the ones that did tended to be much more focused around "cars in the parking lot by 8:30, butts in the chairs until 5".
>HDD light blinking? That means it's working correctly. Am I right?
In a lot of ways that is correct. Generally, when something is thrashing the hard drive it is making actual progress on its task, and its task is relativly short lived. This means that if your computer is going slowly, and the HDD LED is active, you can likely wait for the HDD LED to quiet down. In contrast, when your computer is going slowly (or not responding at all) and your HDD LED is off, it is much more likely that something is wrong and won't resolve itself.
The problem is that getting top to start can take a long time if it's actually thrashing heavily enough.
I'd agree that the LED is nonessential with HDDs -- you can just listen; and then you can even make out whether it's doing a lot of seeking or long continuous accesses, but you can't do that with SSDs.
I had a VP once who decreed that the "Productivity" rating on our annual review was to based on the average hours/week spent at work. To be deemed "Productive", a developer had to average 45+ hours/week. This had the effect of screwing over two subsets of developers:
1 - Those that were very efficient and got their work done in a reasonable amount of time.
2 - Those that didn't spend hours/week on timetracking, and just stuck on 40/week by default
And rewarded those who were inefficient and took 50 hours to do 40 hours worth of work.
Sounds like you do all (or most so that you always have something light to finish off the day) of your work when your mind is rested, you are energized and focused, then read and participate in online communities like HN for the rest of the time. It should always be about the work that is done, but I think the big challenge most of the time is how do you measure the work that is done in certain businesses/industries.
