What awaits for us in the midst of the future? How current choices are going to impact on our future existance? Public pensions has been for a long time now a solid foundation for Italian families. Pensions allowed parents to keep their sons and daughter with them, helping them to have a roof and warm meals while occasionally earning 1000€ per month. Basically elderly pensions balanced precarious and occasional work, unemployment and dramatically high house prices.
There’s no way for a young couple to start a life together in any of the Northern Italy cities with such poor wages, with the ghost of sudden unemployment and such high apartment rents, not to talk about buying one.
(Well not that a young couple could start a life together if they live with their parents, neither… that could be part of the reasons for Italy has such a low natality rate).
Unfortunately the Italian pension system is lame.
Rather than implementing a system where everyone put aside a bit of money that are wisely invested and then given back as a life annuity after worker retirement, politicians and unions decided a long ago an inter-generation agreement. Under this agreement the current generation of workers pays the pensions of the current generation of retired. Brilliant? Maybe until the money set aside for pensions of the current work class is enough to pay for the current pension expense.
What is going wrong is that Italians make less and less babies and tend to survive (despite of the public health care) longer. So the agreement between generations is broken, the promise that we workers are going to receive the same treatment we are providing to our elders is void.
According to current law, when the time will come to retire I’ll have an annuity of about 40% of the average salary of the past 5 years. Not enough to survive unless I’m starting a extra bright career right now.
Although this trend is clear from about 15 years ago, only now drastic decisions have been taken. Workers money (the so called TFR a form a delayed salary awarded when leaving the job) have been confiscated leaving little or no choice to the former owners. Well, it isn’t completely true, you can leave everything as is, but you are on the verge of a cliff. The idea is to force most of the workers to move that money into complementary contributive pension funds. And when in a fund this money is no longer completely yours. You cannot move in another kind of investment or get them back to the former delayed salary form. Moreover you get no real warranty. If you chose for a conservative fund line you are granted that you will have back your money, no interest. Given the current inflation levels, that means that you could lose 2.5% of purchasing value of your money per year. The delayed salary is bound by law to produce an interest of 1,5% + 0,75 * inflation.
All this funds are privately held and what you get is an eased fiscal drag on the earnings, a bit more convenient than the TFR (19% against 23%).
The worst nightmare is not only having a ludicrous public pension, but losing every bit of the TFR money thanks to financial market volatility and irresponsible fund choices.
We have time up to the end of the month to decide what to do with our money, what is sure is that there will be lot of problems (the social kind) when the time will come for us to retire – precarious workers won’t have any pension at all, excessively conservative people won’t do any complementary form and will have just the TFR to add to the 40% of the last salaries, a number of funds will have problems (Cirio, Parmalat, Enron and 09/11 don’t ring any bell?) returning little or no money.
But there is a loop, the only way to provide a better future is to increase current wages so that everyone could save for retirement to achieve at least a decent life. Traditional manufacturing is in a difficult position with emerging country economies that allow for extremely low work costs. We have to do like the rest of Europe and follow the advanced services and technologies direction, we have to focus on industries where the cost of work is negligible respect to the cost of delivered good or service. And to do this we need both public investments in Research, in Universities, we need easier way to start business activities and to attract foreign investments in the advanced industries.
Are we hopeless?
Don’t try this
Ok, I warned you. If you try it out chances are high that your productivity could seize up. On the other hand, with a sensible usage, you’ll waste less time while gaining in knowledge (and since knowledge is power, all sort of savings are within reach). Reader is the name, Google Reader. It is a news feed reader that access Atom feeds and present them in a gmail like fashion on your favorite browser.
You can even mark interesting news for sharing and have them published in your website within an applet:
or you can look them up on a web page, or they can be fed as an RSS feed, or you can mail them via gmail. Pretty impressive!
This or That?
Now in one of my last rants I talked about how difficult is to chose a camcorders nowadays. Now I would talk a bit more specifically of the camcorder models that made it into the finals. Let’s start from the Canon HV20. This camcorder is really new, it is just coming through the usual distribution channels so chances are high that you can order it via Internet but it is still not available at your local dealer. The camera is high definition with miniDV storage and color viewfinder. Canon brochure is lengthy and equally parted between video and still shot functions. Depicting it as a very hybrid device.
Reviews are very good, but I am not enough geeky to jump on the HD train. First I have not the right TV set, nor has any of my friends or relatives, then the computational cost of HD rendering far exceeds the computational resource of Pagani’s Manor, finally I have not the proper storage media for playing it back… worse it is still undecided which the storage media for high definition will be. Blue Ray? HD-DVD? I think that some 10 years are still needed for the wide spread of these technologies and it makes no sense for me to pay money for something that I could use at the end of the camcorder life cycle.
Also, if talking about quality, I have some doubts that a consumer device, even if at the top of its range, could match the quality of a professional device of the previous generation. I mean that the Canon XM2 probably will outperform the HV20 in terms of quality even if it cannot achieve the same pixel resolution.
So, since I have introduced it, let’s talk about the Canon XM2. This is a professional entry level costing around twice the other models I considered. I found a good deal on used device, provided with 1-year shop warranty, in the right price range.
The XM2 is miniDV based and has a standard definition broadcast quality whatever this means. It has plenty of features and although you can use it in fully automatic mode you can set individually shot parameters. Reading the specifications I found lot of stuff that I don’t exactly know what is, but, I suppose, is there to improve the quality in difficult situations.
I think that the most appealing feature is the optics, large fluorite lenses that promise to deal greatly with even the darkest scenes, zooms and wide-angle far superior than the consumer models and a sun shield.
Against this camera count the size (it is 30 cm long) and the look which is very professional and that could attract too much unwanted (and possibly evil-intentioned) attentions. Given the dimension I reckon it is quite uncomfortable to carry during trekking and walks.
Last I got a suggestion about the Panasonic NV-GS500. This is a standard definition, miniDV based, and consumer top-range camera. It has large lenses, 3CCDs of more 1M pixels each, that’s near the double of other standard resolution devices. Weights about half a kilo. It is for sure easier to handle than the Canon XM2 and much less expensive-looking.
I read a couple of reviews (1 and 2) of the NV-GS500. It is praised for its video and audio quality, while its weakness are: the lack of a headphone jack, and that some commands are not directly accessible via buttons, but you have to navigate the camera menu to operate them.
Since I have never used the headphone jack with my current camera in the past 8 years, I don’t think I’ll miss it too much. As for the other problem, I guess it is more a shortcoming for those used to professional or semi-professional cameras. For example I even don’t know that something called zebra-pattern was a camcorder command. (No, I don’t think it is for filming pedestrian crossings).
Well, all that said, yesterday my wife and I went to the shop where the XM2 was on sale. We wanted to have another look at the camera and more specifically to transportability. Once in the shop I asked the clerk: “we’re here to have another look at the Canon XM2”, the clerk answered: “It’s been sold”, me: “… , … ? … ! … “, he: “yes, sold”.
And that was the end of the decision process, yesterday evening I ordered the NV-GS500.
Ten minutes of your time
(English below) Strano scrivere qui in italiano, ma visto che devo segnalare un’iniziativa in questa lingua mi sembra la maniera più semplice.
Fino al 19 Aprile c’è un questionario in linea sulle donazioni. Ci vogliono circa 10 minuti per compilarlo e alla fine è possibile scegliere la destinazione di un euro (donato da SWG, la società che esegue il sondaggio) ad una ONLUS a scelta da un elenco. La segnalazione mi giunge da un’associazione che ha la mia piena fiducia.
(English)
Odd writing here in Italian, but this seems to me the simplest way to let you know about an initiative in this language.
Until April, 19th there is an on-line poll about donations. It takes about 10 minutes to fill in and at the end you can choose the destination of one euro (offered by SWG, the company that set up the poll) to one non-profit company from a proposed list. I learned about this from a trusted association.
Which one?
Not a life treatening problem by large, nonetheless something eating up brain cycles. Our camcorder is about to retire after some 7 years of honored service. It is a Sony analog device from (then) budget range. It served quite well to the purpouse, until it gave rather bad results in our [/images/photoalbum/Norvegia/200508/index.html|travel to Norway]. Colors were dull and shots seemed nearly black and white. Maybe that Norway summer wasn’t bright enough for the camera, but we had basically no problem with cameras. Next year we [/images/photoalbum/Greece/200608/index.html|traveled to Greece] and again we weren’t quite satisfied with the shots. This summer we’re going to west USA and we don’t want to risk poor shots, so we’re looking for a new camcorder.
From my understanding this is a sort of critical time in several camcorder technologies – media, definition and sensor.
Most of the camcorders uses tape as storage, either in the DV or miniDV formats. Sony, Panasonic and JVC have started selling Hard Disks based cameras. The hard disk mechanic is simpler than tape (have a look inside a video tape slot if you don’t believe it) and more protected. A MEMS accelerometer senses if the camera is falling and parks the Hard Disk heads in order to avoid major damages. Most of camcorder producers have optical mini-disc (DVD/DVC) cameras in their listings. Although the mechanic is simpler than tape, it has to be much more precise and has lenses to be kept clean (and scratch free).
The real winner in the storage area is, at least based on my thoughts, is the digital flash memory, like SD/HC. This technology is quite mature, but capacity is still limited (4G bytes) for video application. Currently only Panasonic has a top range camcorder with SD/HC but it is missing the viewfinder.
Talking about viewfinders, I find a great shortcoming the lack of this interface in a camcorder. From my experience it is impossible to have a decent view of what you are shooting at under the direct sunlight with the camera monitor. Aside of that all the professional camcorders do have comfortable viewfinders. So I find it nonsensical for producer to remove the viewfinders from top range models. Despite of this Sony, JVC and Panasonic do have such items.
New top range consumer models are now high definition (1080p). From one side this is not so clear to me where the “high” comes from since the number of pixels in the sensor are about the same number of the “low definition” cameras. On the other hand my TV belongs to an era when “High Definition” was something related to analog devices only. My TV is still no flat-screen! So high definition is not a plus to me, but it is just a sign of changing times.
Next, sensors. Traditionally CCD sensors were associated with high performances and better quality. From my understanding CCD are not able to scale up to high definition and thus are being replaced by CMOS, traditionally associated with low quality and every sort of trouble. When I asked to a shop clerk about CCD vs CMOS, he answered that as of today’s technology there is no real difference. It maybe, but professional camcorders are all CCD based.
At this point in time it is quite risky to buy a camcorder. You can get too much on the bleeding edge and got burned (e.g. by choosing a new technology that will have no commercial success and will be shortly dismissed), or being too conservative and buy something that isn’t worth the price. But we have to renew the family camcorder department, so I have to take a decision.
Given that viewfinder is a must and the budget is not unlimited, the choice is quite restricted, Sony is too expensive, JVC has no viewfinders. Panasonic has an interesting previous-generation model the NV-GS500 and Canon has the new generation HV-20. Moreover I found an used semi-pro camcorder in excellent state and at a good price, the Canon XM2.
But this is meat for another post…
Easter Aftermath
Happy Easter… usually it starts with something like this, then you find 4 days later at the workplace wondering exactly what happened… Well it happened that supermarket shopping on Friday evening is always nefarious. Everyone, his friends and his brothers are there to shop for the weekend. People with no other goal than staring absent mindedly to shelves while keeping their cart across the corridors. Crowds of long unseen old friends clustering together (and usually complaining about people stopping in the market or about new generations without good manners). This time it had been a bit worse, because someone took our cart at about one third of the process and we had to restart from the beginning.
Then on Saturday it was the Shoes-Day, I spent the whole day with my wife in and out from shoe-shops and outlets in Parabiago. We also succeed in smashing another car door, fortunately no injuries for anyone and not much damage for our car (anyway our insurance fee will raise). We started about at 9:00 and we got back home after 20:00.
On Easter and Monday we paid the belonging to our families.
During this holidays evenings we tried to figure out the best accommodation in Las Vegas for this Summer U.S. travel. When traveling to Norway, two years ago, we found very helpful the website to make hotel reservations in Germany. Unfortunately there isn’t anything so complete for U.S. and we are browsing through endless lists of hotels, motels logdes, bed and breakfasts, inns and so on. At last (after three evenings of hard search and comparison) we found a Travelodge on the strip, close to Bellaggio, at a convenient price.
Copying
No, I haven’t forget my last post. I had a look at Engineering without Frontiers, a no-profit NGO, which should be the engineer answer to medical initiatives like Medecins Sans Frontieres. Although their magazine is interesting, and their statute is agreeable, I find the overall association a bit loose, somewhat too tied in the academic world and too abstract. Apparently the prompt answer to the question “How can I help?” is just “Send money here”. Maybe I have to dig further.The topic of the day is copying. When talking about this issue, I usually agree with content owners that deplore the act of copying for money and for personal use. My favourite example is that if you like a Ferrari, you don’t steal it only because you cannot afford it. The same goes for music, movies, software and so on. There are people who worked to create that content and it is their right to be paid for their work.
I could agree on some special cases such as when you are looking for something that’s not available or even out of print. But this should represent the exception, not the rule.
Sometimes ago I skimmed through Carlo Gubitosa’s Praise of Piracy, without being convinced at all about the point of the right to copy.
Although, during these days, I’ve been hit by a sort of revelation. There’s actually a practice of legally accessing content, without paying for it. More, you could actually access content any time you want with no restrictions. And this practice has been available for centuries to human kind… public libraries the name.
Some public library lends VHS/DVD movies, maybe this practice is discourages by video rental business. But from my point of view, what’s the difference in borrowing a book from the public library or downloading it via eMule?
From one side I think it is worth noticing that the book industry is not suffering from the free availability of books in public library. It may suffer from the fact that people read less and less, but not from the fact that I could chose to borrow a book rather than buying it.
From the other side I wonder how could it be legal? 🙂 After all if everyone would go to the library, then no one would buy the book and the writer would be starving. Would it be enough for the authors to receive the payment just from public libraries? In that case authors could be payed directly from our taxes cutting the public library service costs, the media costs, by letting everyone access everything online.
African Roses
I would like to write about the Hungarian notation, the good (not much) and the bad (quite a lot) of this source coding convention, but I really can’t. This matter sounds quite silly and irrelevant. My mind is still full of the images and the implications of the documentary I watched Saturday evening on La7. The title is “Rose d’Africa” (African Roses) and the author is Daniela Grandi. Unfortunately I cannot find the video on youtube nor google video, neither a summary on La7 website.
Well, what impressed me so much? The documentary brings hard evidence about the deep injustice affecting the African continent. An injustice that European and American corporations are feeding actively.
In Africa people actually die of starvation, sadly no news, but they are prevented from exploiting their fertile lands (such as near Tana River) because these lands are planted with roses (and other flowers) greenhouses. Flowers are grown and then sent to Netherlands for world distribution. Inhabitants, mostly women, are exploited in the greenhouses under terrible working conditions. The wages are incredibly low (basically we could pay for a pizza and a beer what they earn in a month), while they have basically no right. If they got pregnant, they work until the last day and then are fired. They are requested to enter the greenhouses just a while after the chemicals have been sprayed on the cultivations.
Moreover the remaining chemicals are dumped in the river, poisoning and polluting the environment.
Just outside of Nairobi (the Kenya capital) there is a huge slum where 2 millions of people live from what they can find in a nearby giant dump. That’s two millions! The slum has no sewers, no electricity and no water. The air is polluted by the dioxin coming from the dump.
All this is heartbreaking for me, deeply saddening, I can’t stand the idea of such suffering and waste. And I’m asking myself what can I do for helping…
So Long and Many Thanks Folks
I don’t like the way it is being put. By now everyone understands there’s something really wrong with the climate. You don’t need to be a genius – just have a look at the calendar and the thermometer.Rather than being some degrees below zero, this winter we have blossom, buds and shoots. That’s not the way that’s expected to be in mid-January.
So media are starting covering the issue. And I don’t like the way they are handling this. They are telling us that unavoidably things will go worse and worse – desertification, sea raising and submerging lands and cities, drought, and so on. Now, even more alarmingly, they speak about huge number of casualties and economic crashing in the Mediterranean areas.
The reason I don’t like in this message is the implicit statement that all this is ineluctable and unavoidable and it has always been. In other words – you are going to die, start considering it… but, hey, you wanted comfort, car and TV-set? Don’t complain… die quietly please.
Since I was young (that’s now more years than I’m keen to mention), environmentalists and scientists are telling us, our government our industry leaders that we were polluting too much, that we had to choose a more sustainable way of exploiting our planet resources. We also had a number of summits and round tables (Kyoto anyone?) about the matter where light or no actions were agreed.
If now it is too late, the only fault we could be blamed about is not having given our vote for different political leaders more attentive to these problems.
But is it true that nothing can still be done?
It is true that things change quickly, often with an exponential rate rather then linear. The meaning is that it could well be that we get aware of a certain effect when it is too late to act on its cause removal.
To explain exponential growth I really like the chessboard example. Everyone knows the legend. It is about the payment a wise man asked to his King for having taught him to play chess. The exact amount of the payment had to be computed with the chessboard. Starting with one grain of wheat in the first square and doubling the amount at each square. That is 1, 2, 4, 8, … and so on.
Here comes the most interesting point – the King gave him a couple of sacks thinking that it was enough, but the wise man objected that the exact quantity was more than the entire collection of the whole kingdom.
What’s so amusing? It is that exponential growth fights and defeats our intuition. You can consider it a slow pace linear process until it really explodes.
Back to the weather it is well possible that now it is to late to cancel the nefarious effect of the mankind on the environment, but I am strongly convinced that it is never too late to do the right thing.
I have the impression that media are just relaying propaganda. What is the most convenient move? Just do nothing, let the poor people die while those who hold the power survive. It won’t be hard to survive if you can live everywhere you like, if you can afford water, food and energy at any price, if you can have your personal army.
“Dear passengers this is the captain speaking, the smoke on the right side of the aircraft is the engine that’s burning, the little spot below it’s me with the only parachute that was on-board… I hope you enjoyed the flight”.
Back from Sciliar
I had great days on the Alpe di Siusi (Alp of Siusi) or SeiserAlm as those who live there call their home. It is a lovely and smooth plateau at around 1800m, braced by imposing Dolomite pikes. Sasso Piatto (“Flat Stone” a sort of understatement) bounds the East side, while Denti di Terra Rossa (“Red Soil Teeth”) bound the South Side and ends with the tooth shaped Sciliar pike.We had sun for nearly seven days and, despite of the warm winter, snow was enough to ski.
Alas, in order to appreciate great things, we have to compare them with the grey, dull industrial landscape of Castellanza, that’s why (I guess) I’m back home and at work.
The first interesting surprise hitting me at work has been the anticipation of the milestone I was working for. Our customer product has been selected for a design prize, so we are expected to deliver the working product earlier. Anyway we’re working hard, against time and hardware shortage to hit the milestone nonetheless.
At home, Santa (in the person of my wife) gave me a Xbox 360 and I started playing a not-so-Xmas-spirit game: Gears of War. I’m about the first boss and I should say that it’s great. From the technical viewpoint I think this is one of the first real next gen game. It runs on the Unreal 3 engine and the look is as detailed as awesome. The gameplay is based on taking cover, i.e. as soon as enemies are encountered you should take cover or you get badly shot. This is somewhat different from the classical shooter where the player drives a Rambo-like bullet-proof character (well, in Serious Sam, this was intended). The first boss is a chasing game play – run away from the monster, let him smash the doors for you and eventually take him off. Great.
While I was so fresh from the holidays and relaxed from Gears of War, I decided to update my notebook to the latest linux available. I gave a brief look to Sabayon Linux, only to discover that it behaves badly with the Toshiba touch pad and apparently has no support for my wireless adapter (I can’t believe that today distros still do not support the Centrino wireless adapter that is so widespread and at least two years old). So I turned to what I know quite well – Fedora Core 6.
I opted for the upgrade option instead of the install. Years ago I was used to upgrade, only to find that the system resulted in something that wasn’t completely new nor old and often was prone to glitches. A friend of mine suggested me to never upgrade, rather to backup the /home directory, install and restore it. This time I was so light from the holidays that I decided that an upgrade could do.
Well, I was wrong.
Yes I got a sort of FC6 tailored on my previous FC4 installation, and, yes, the wireless adapter sorta worked. But I could only browse the google website. No matter how I set the firewall/SELinux properties, there was no way to browse the rest of Internet. But this is another story.