Unions generally don't mature from their inception, its kind of a self-selective process. The goal of union leadership is more bodies, more pay, and more dues. As a result, they are inherently anti-progress, anti-tech, and anti-change. If they tried to align more with the companies they work with in setting production goals instead of man-hour quotas, I think the relationships would be much more amicable. Another poster got it right that the problem is with 'monopoly unions' or unions that control the labor force of an entire industry with no competition and sometimes no competition/advancement allowed (forced via contracts). In those situations, the most high-profile being the Teamsters, UAW, and the two coastwide Longshore unions, its about the union and the union only, industry be damned. Then people wonder why GM and Chrysler had to be bailed out, hostess crashes and burns, and several shipping terminals go bankrupt.
On another note, I feel the adversarial process is the bane of the 20th/21st centuries. It has turned prosecution/defense into a farce, it creates uncooperative industry issues like the unions/companies mentioned above, and it has turned congress into a wasted existence. Too many lawyers are bringing the adversarial process into places where it doesn't belong and ruining any chance of cooperation and advancement.
I think part of the flat icon craze is directly related to touch interfaces. Our mind, like it or not, sees 'bubbly' icons or buttons like the old XP start menu as an item where pressing on the edges is no good, like accidentally pressing the edge of a real-world rounded button and it not fully depressing. In a touch interface, this gives the illusion that the contact area is much smaller than it actually is, and makes for a hesitant approach. 'Flat' icons or targets give the impression that you can register a press on any part of the item. This is important on touch interfaces where tactile feedback is limited and your big fingers block what you're actually pressing.
This becomes quite obvious when looking at some of the old touchscreen keyboard UIs on the early touchscreen-era phones. The start of 'flat' UIs didn't come from windows 8, it came from the touchscreen phone. As someone else mentioned, DPI scaling might also be a factor, but this also came from the DPI race on touchscreen phones.
SteamBoxen are contingent on them figuring out the controller, which as I recall they've poured a lot of resources into. The draw of the SteamBox is that you can play PC games designed for PCs in the living room as well as the typical console games. Ever try to play an RTS on a TV with a controller? It is flat-out torture. That's why they are trying to work the touchpad into one of the d-pads on their controller, so you could play games like Dota 2 or Civ5 or any RTS in the living room. If they don't get that aspect of the SteamBox working, then its simply another console and has no defining draw that separates it from the others.
"Attribute not to malice what can be easily explained by incompetence."
I know it seems like something that people should easily understand and know, but our society (and in this case beaurocracy) is naturally populated by specialists/savants because of the way we approach and reward work. All some of these people see and do every day involves chasing bad guys, and some of them really can't think outside of their benefits of the change to see the damaging implications. Its kinda like multinationals naming a product that sounds like offensive slang in a foreign language without knowing. Or, a more obvious and closer-to-home example for this crowd, the manager / corporate officer that cripples IT security in response to non-IT complaints that their computers are inflexible and hindering their work.
It could very well be malice, but don't rule out incompetence.
About a decade ago, a one-shot FX series called Dirt came out. It was about the celebrity tabloid journalism industry, I thought it was pretty interesting even though I'm not into that kind of stuff. One of the more interesting parts of it was that there was a schizophrenic photographer, and they did a couple segments from his perspective during periods when he was on and off his meds. I have no idea if their portrayal is how it acutally is, but I thought it matched what we've been described to as the symptoms. When the show was through his perspective, it was hard to tell what was real and what wasn't real sometimes.
The volume isn't anything to scoff at either. I just did some numbers to get a visual perspective of the plastic mass we're talking about, in terms of container ships. 8 million metric tons at standard container size and weight (1 TEU = one twenty-foot equivalent unit, average loaded weight of 20 metric tons) and with high-capacity containerships averaging 15,000 TEU, thats 27 fully loaded ships. Thats approximately 350 meters long, 50 meters wide, and 15 meters deep of containers stacked 14-high per ship. That's a lot of material.
'Rods from God' becomes much more feasible when you imagine space mining enterprise. In the distant future with captured asteroids in earth orbit, obtaining mass already in space and re-purposing it for orbital weaponry is mostly just a math exercise.
When most people refer to LEGOs, they aren't referencing the company directly but the blocks used to build. Like Q-Tip, LEGO has become the go-to example of building blocks to the point where people call other brands LEGOs. In that sense, the additional S is fine and it explains why so many people reference to them as such.
All road costs are not created equal, and all road values are not created equal. Roads on the coast are more expensive because of required hurricane evacuation routes, and roads in the mountains are insanely expensive for little population, but serve to benefit the people passing through the mountains as much if not more than the people living there. I live in North Carolina, and we have both mountains and ocean, and spending the taxes based on population would make Charlotte and Raleigh great but make the mountains unpassable. The GP's suggestion would cripple a single-geography state like mountainous West Virginia, and in turn cripple Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky.
This is where parents end up having an opposite effect. If you take your experiences and position them as the only possible outcome for your child, you're simply parenting the way you wanted to be parented, not the way the child needs to be parented. You have to look at the entire school and the benefits every other person might have gained from being there, not just a single person's misery, because your child is not you and may take a different path than you did. What can be done, if they experience the same pitfalls, is give them the out that you weren't given as a kid. Avoiding the possibility by removing the opportunities altogether is a dangerous approach.
I think IBM's management must know the company is in its death throes, they're just slowly shedding people to minimize chaos.
I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Sometimes managing is about managing decline instead of managing product and people. IBM could ignore the signs and implode like a supermassive star on the cusp, or it could shed weight and slowly bleed off in a more safe way, and possibly find a niche in the process. Two companies, one who slowly died and one who resurrected themselves doing a similar downsizing approach, are AOL and Apple.
As a matter of fact, I think its *illegal* to open office my job. I work in payroll. We have a divider, a locked door, our own machines, and our own storage. Sticking us in an open area is just asking for an eventual lawsuit.
Your argument amounts to 'because THE LAW.' That is not a valid argument. It has been shown time and time again that it is unsafe to travel 15mph slower than other traffic in most conditions, regardless of speed limits. The law, in this case, is intended to create a safe environment for driving but is failing in those circumstances. The law in some states says that its illegal to do anything but missionary sex, does that mean we should follow it? Hell no. Part of rooting out bad laws is civil disobedience. If people didn't disobey laws and codes that didn't make sense, then there would be no way to find out which laws didn't make sense. Well, unless you want to rely on lawyers, politicians, and lawmakers to make those decisions for us. Sorry, but they move too slow, too inefficiently, and too innacurately.
I have the same problem as you. I don't only use 3 fingers, but I tend to 'hover' above the keys rather than rest them on the keys themselves.
I think I've found the reason I can't type faster on mechanicals, and its precisely the above mentioned hovering. The mechanical keyboards always have higher keycaps, and I tend to have far higher mistake counts on the mechanical. I really think I could enjoy mechanicals if the keys themselves weren't twice the height of the keyboard frame and didnt' have such insane depths.
All that said, I have noticed a quicker reaction time on the mechanical keyboards in games, enough to be noticeable on the MX Browns. This works well for me because I'm not moving my hand very often when gaming on a keyboard. I wish I could get the best of both worlds with a low-keyheight mechanical keyboard, but I haven't been able to find one.
I work in finance, commonly dealing with payroll systems and data. There's a lot of stuff you can't or discuss in a standard email, and the secure stuff I do send, I only provide the password verbally to the recipient. On top of this, most agencies I need to interact with (state gov'ts/IRS/unions/EBAs) don't have anything available except voice discussion or snailmail.
Its the same reason makeup is aesthetically better. Makeup for actors and normals alike are a way of blending out imperfections to regress to a norm. We actually find the average more beautiful than the eccentric when it comes to the human figure. 24fps and motion blur also blends out imperfections, but filming imperfections. With HFR, you feel like you're watching someone being filmed as it becomes too obvious that there's a camera involved due to movement imperfections/etc. That' a 4th wall violation and takes away from immersion.
When you remember someone's face, do you remember every freckle, mole, shade, and strand of hair? If you were to draw it on a paper, wouldn't it look closer to a drawing than a realistic representation? That's whats going on here. Movies with their theatrical effects are tapping into that, so its like you're watching a memory. You make it too real feeling or present 4th wall realizations and you remove the suspension of disbeleif.
All that said, 24fps has its limitations. Transformers was where I found this most obvious, they had to do all the transformations in slowmo for you to actually catch what was going on, and even then it was still too overwhelming to catch without the extra frames. I think HFR will be more successful if they add in some effects to reduce the obviousness that its being shot by a camera. What they are/will be, I don't know. I think camera stability, shooting angles, scene switching, and motion blur all need to be reworked for it to look a lot better. That's a tall order and its gonna take some time.
Also, to add, they only use these fuels far from coastal waters. For instance, they aren't allowed to use these fuels within 100 or so miles of Los Angeles. Some shipowners have even stopped using the dirtier fuel entirely as a simplification measure.
Magnetic suspension? That sounds quite costly on a power budget, and a lot of these probes have really tight power budgets. Plus, you'd have to build in the ability for it to not get ripped apart during launch, which means overengineering the magnetic suspension just to get it off the ground even though that excess capability will never be used in space. I'd think mechanical reaction wheels would be a cinch to lock in comparison.
I'm probably wrong, but that was my initial gut thoughts on the subject.
Its on your customers not giving enough information in their wire transfers. That's something thats chosen when you initiate the wire, there is plenty of space for the information you request.
There are several ways to reduce the problem at least, all by accounting and billing methods. On accounting, there should be amounts sitting out there in an account waiting to clear for the incoming payments. The ambiguous payments are a small subset of the total and will likely be identifiable simply by amounts outstanding for smaller quantities. If you have too many duplicate amounts with ambiguous payments, and you have less than 100 frequent wire clients with this issue, you could implement collective invoicing on a monthly basis for those clients, something commonly managed by the collections dept and part of key client management anyway. That would significantly reduce the quantity of incoming payments and also make them more unique values. You'd still have to call to verify payment, but this way you could call the client directly instead.
While true, I was quite surprised at how expensive banking seems to be in Canada. Almost nowhere in the US do you actually have to pay for a bank account, let alone have such onerous transaction count limits or savings account transfer limits. I do wish we had the electronic transfers to inidividuals, but its not worth $10/mo to me.
Its a smart business method. My conglomerate group used to do the internal thing, but the past decade has consisted of making sure each business unit functions acceptably in the market on its own. The sister companies compete with outside clients for jobs, etc. It ensures that you don't end up with a bloated business unit riding on the laurels of another. When that happens, you get a single point of failure for all business units.
I'm agnostic but I really liked that movie. I think it really captured what it means to live to that religious principle because it showed both the right and wrong way to do it. Was the director's cut really that good? I might have to check it out.
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Unions generally don't mature from their inception, its kind of a self-selective process. The goal of union leadership is more bodies, more pay, and more dues. As a result, they are inherently anti-progress, anti-tech, and anti-change. If they tried to align more with the companies they work with in setting production goals instead of man-hour quotas, I think the relationships would be much more amicable. Another poster got it right that the problem is with 'monopoly unions' or unions that control the labor force of an entire industry with no competition and sometimes no competition/advancement allowed (forced via contracts). In those situations, the most high-profile being the Teamsters, UAW, and the two coastwide Longshore unions, its about the union and the union only, industry be damned. Then people wonder why GM and Chrysler had to be bailed out, hostess crashes and burns, and several shipping terminals go bankrupt.
On another note, I feel the adversarial process is the bane of the 20th/21st centuries. It has turned prosecution/defense into a farce, it creates uncooperative industry issues like the unions/companies mentioned above, and it has turned congress into a wasted existence. Too many lawyers are bringing the adversarial process into places where it doesn't belong and ruining any chance of cooperation and advancement.
I think part of the flat icon craze is directly related to touch interfaces. Our mind, like it or not, sees 'bubbly' icons or buttons like the old XP start menu as an item where pressing on the edges is no good, like accidentally pressing the edge of a real-world rounded button and it not fully depressing. In a touch interface, this gives the illusion that the contact area is much smaller than it actually is, and makes for a hesitant approach. 'Flat' icons or targets give the impression that you can register a press on any part of the item. This is important on touch interfaces where tactile feedback is limited and your big fingers block what you're actually pressing.
This becomes quite obvious when looking at some of the old touchscreen keyboard UIs on the early touchscreen-era phones. The start of 'flat' UIs didn't come from windows 8, it came from the touchscreen phone. As someone else mentioned, DPI scaling might also be a factor, but this also came from the DPI race on touchscreen phones.
SteamBoxen are contingent on them figuring out the controller, which as I recall they've poured a lot of resources into. The draw of the SteamBox is that you can play PC games designed for PCs in the living room as well as the typical console games. Ever try to play an RTS on a TV with a controller? It is flat-out torture. That's why they are trying to work the touchpad into one of the d-pads on their controller, so you could play games like Dota 2 or Civ5 or any RTS in the living room. If they don't get that aspect of the SteamBox working, then its simply another console and has no defining draw that separates it from the others.
"Attribute not to malice what can be easily explained by incompetence."
I know it seems like something that people should easily understand and know, but our society (and in this case beaurocracy) is naturally populated by specialists/savants because of the way we approach and reward work. All some of these people see and do every day involves chasing bad guys, and some of them really can't think outside of their benefits of the change to see the damaging implications. Its kinda like multinationals naming a product that sounds like offensive slang in a foreign language without knowing. Or, a more obvious and closer-to-home example for this crowd, the manager / corporate officer that cripples IT security in response to non-IT complaints that their computers are inflexible and hindering their work.
It could very well be malice, but don't rule out incompetence.
About a decade ago, a one-shot FX series called Dirt came out. It was about the celebrity tabloid journalism industry, I thought it was pretty interesting even though I'm not into that kind of stuff. One of the more interesting parts of it was that there was a schizophrenic photographer, and they did a couple segments from his perspective during periods when he was on and off his meds. I have no idea if their portrayal is how it acutally is, but I thought it matched what we've been described to as the symptoms. When the show was through his perspective, it was hard to tell what was real and what wasn't real sometimes.
Another name for these:
ton(UK) 2240lb = Long Ton
ton(US) 2000lb = Short Ton
Tonne or Metric ton 1000kg (2204.62lb) = Metric Ton
The volume isn't anything to scoff at either. I just did some numbers to get a visual perspective of the plastic mass we're talking about, in terms of container ships. 8 million metric tons at standard container size and weight (1 TEU = one twenty-foot equivalent unit, average loaded weight of 20 metric tons) and with high-capacity containerships averaging 15,000 TEU, thats 27 fully loaded ships. Thats approximately 350 meters long, 50 meters wide, and 15 meters deep of containers stacked 14-high per ship. That's a lot of material.
'Rods from God' becomes much more feasible when you imagine space mining enterprise. In the distant future with captured asteroids in earth orbit, obtaining mass already in space and re-purposing it for orbital weaponry is mostly just a math exercise.
When most people refer to LEGOs, they aren't referencing the company directly but the blocks used to build. Like Q-Tip, LEGO has become the go-to example of building blocks to the point where people call other brands LEGOs. In that sense, the additional S is fine and it explains why so many people reference to them as such.
All road costs are not created equal, and all road values are not created equal. Roads on the coast are more expensive because of required hurricane evacuation routes, and roads in the mountains are insanely expensive for little population, but serve to benefit the people passing through the mountains as much if not more than the people living there. I live in North Carolina, and we have both mountains and ocean, and spending the taxes based on population would make Charlotte and Raleigh great but make the mountains unpassable. The GP's suggestion would cripple a single-geography state like mountainous West Virginia, and in turn cripple Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky.
This is where parents end up having an opposite effect. If you take your experiences and position them as the only possible outcome for your child, you're simply parenting the way you wanted to be parented, not the way the child needs to be parented. You have to look at the entire school and the benefits every other person might have gained from being there, not just a single person's misery, because your child is not you and may take a different path than you did. What can be done, if they experience the same pitfalls, is give them the out that you weren't given as a kid. Avoiding the possibility by removing the opportunities altogether is a dangerous approach.
I think IBM's management must know the company is in its death throes, they're just slowly shedding people to minimize chaos.
I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head. Sometimes managing is about managing decline instead of managing product and people. IBM could ignore the signs and implode like a supermassive star on the cusp, or it could shed weight and slowly bleed off in a more safe way, and possibly find a niche in the process. Two companies, one who slowly died and one who resurrected themselves doing a similar downsizing approach, are AOL and Apple.
But what if he's 5 times as fast! That's gotta count for something.
As a matter of fact, I think its *illegal* to open office my job. I work in payroll. We have a divider, a locked door, our own machines, and our own storage. Sticking us in an open area is just asking for an eventual lawsuit.
Your argument amounts to 'because THE LAW.' That is not a valid argument. It has been shown time and time again that it is unsafe to travel 15mph slower than other traffic in most conditions, regardless of speed limits. The law, in this case, is intended to create a safe environment for driving but is failing in those circumstances. The law in some states says that its illegal to do anything but missionary sex, does that mean we should follow it? Hell no. Part of rooting out bad laws is civil disobedience. If people didn't disobey laws and codes that didn't make sense, then there would be no way to find out which laws didn't make sense. Well, unless you want to rely on lawyers, politicians, and lawmakers to make those decisions for us. Sorry, but they move too slow, too inefficiently, and too innacurately.
I have the same problem as you. I don't only use 3 fingers, but I tend to 'hover' above the keys rather than rest them on the keys themselves.
I think I've found the reason I can't type faster on mechanicals, and its precisely the above mentioned hovering. The mechanical keyboards always have higher keycaps, and I tend to have far higher mistake counts on the mechanical. I really think I could enjoy mechanicals if the keys themselves weren't twice the height of the keyboard frame and didnt' have such insane depths.
All that said, I have noticed a quicker reaction time on the mechanical keyboards in games, enough to be noticeable on the MX Browns. This works well for me because I'm not moving my hand very often when gaming on a keyboard. I wish I could get the best of both worlds with a low-keyheight mechanical keyboard, but I haven't been able to find one.
Because in games, you're interacting with the content. Any delay in interaction is extremely jarring. Movies and such don't have this issue.
I work in finance, commonly dealing with payroll systems and data. There's a lot of stuff you can't or discuss in a standard email, and the secure stuff I do send, I only provide the password verbally to the recipient. On top of this, most agencies I need to interact with (state gov'ts/IRS/unions/EBAs) don't have anything available except voice discussion or snailmail.
Its the same reason makeup is aesthetically better. Makeup for actors and normals alike are a way of blending out imperfections to regress to a norm. We actually find the average more beautiful than the eccentric when it comes to the human figure. 24fps and motion blur also blends out imperfections, but filming imperfections. With HFR, you feel like you're watching someone being filmed as it becomes too obvious that there's a camera involved due to movement imperfections/etc. That' a 4th wall violation and takes away from immersion.
When you remember someone's face, do you remember every freckle, mole, shade, and strand of hair? If you were to draw it on a paper, wouldn't it look closer to a drawing than a realistic representation? That's whats going on here. Movies with their theatrical effects are tapping into that, so its like you're watching a memory. You make it too real feeling or present 4th wall realizations and you remove the suspension of disbeleif.
All that said, 24fps has its limitations. Transformers was where I found this most obvious, they had to do all the transformations in slowmo for you to actually catch what was going on, and even then it was still too overwhelming to catch without the extra frames. I think HFR will be more successful if they add in some effects to reduce the obviousness that its being shot by a camera. What they are/will be, I don't know. I think camera stability, shooting angles, scene switching, and motion blur all need to be reworked for it to look a lot better. That's a tall order and its gonna take some time.
Also, to add, they only use these fuels far from coastal waters. For instance, they aren't allowed to use these fuels within 100 or so miles of Los Angeles. Some shipowners have even stopped using the dirtier fuel entirely as a simplification measure.
Magnetic suspension? That sounds quite costly on a power budget, and a lot of these probes have really tight power budgets. Plus, you'd have to build in the ability for it to not get ripped apart during launch, which means overengineering the magnetic suspension just to get it off the ground even though that excess capability will never be used in space. I'd think mechanical reaction wheels would be a cinch to lock in comparison.
I'm probably wrong, but that was my initial gut thoughts on the subject.
Its on your customers not giving enough information in their wire transfers. That's something thats chosen when you initiate the wire, there is plenty of space for the information you request.
There are several ways to reduce the problem at least, all by accounting and billing methods. On accounting, there should be amounts sitting out there in an account waiting to clear for the incoming payments. The ambiguous payments are a small subset of the total and will likely be identifiable simply by amounts outstanding for smaller quantities. If you have too many duplicate amounts with ambiguous payments, and you have less than 100 frequent wire clients with this issue, you could implement collective invoicing on a monthly basis for those clients, something commonly managed by the collections dept and part of key client management anyway. That would significantly reduce the quantity of incoming payments and also make them more unique values. You'd still have to call to verify payment, but this way you could call the client directly instead.
While true, I was quite surprised at how expensive banking seems to be in Canada. Almost nowhere in the US do you actually have to pay for a bank account, let alone have such onerous transaction count limits or savings account transfer limits. I do wish we had the electronic transfers to inidividuals, but its not worth $10/mo to me.
Its a smart business method. My conglomerate group used to do the internal thing, but the past decade has consisted of making sure each business unit functions acceptably in the market on its own. The sister companies compete with outside clients for jobs, etc. It ensures that you don't end up with a bloated business unit riding on the laurels of another. When that happens, you get a single point of failure for all business units.
I'm agnostic but I really liked that movie. I think it really captured what it means to live to that religious principle because it showed both the right and wrong way to do it. Was the director's cut really that good? I might have to check it out.