From a legal perspective, it seems stupid to approach people and ask them to to surrender their shares. Firing them straight up if they are truly "MIA" as Pincus claims would be justifiable. There's nothing wrong with letting go an employee who doesn't meet expectations. Asking them to surrender their shares, THEN firing them makes your motivations clear.
This simply confirms that Zynga is a company with no morals.
While it is interesting to see a UI expert dissect a piece of software, this piece reminds me a bit of folks who do analysis of lottery ticket numbers and then try to convince us that the winners are geniuses. We all know of a bazillion games that are similar shoot-projectile-random-result games (golf, bowling, Bloons, Peggle, Darts) and why they are addictive. Angry Birds is good, but the amazing success probably has more to do with social mania than UI design. OH, and hitching your corporate bandwagon to the iOS.
A lot of the time this happens, it's because management wants to take a more aggressive strategy that shareholders won't support. Nobody has a crystal ball that can guarantee increased profits. If management fundamentally disagrees with ownership about where the company should go, a MBO is usally the result of a lot of meetings where management puts forward proposals and gets repeatedly shot down.
This is the see-saw private industry has been on for 50 years. Do you make each unit independent and agile with its own all-powerful General Manager? Do you consolidate similar support organizations (IT, finance) to HQ thereby giving up uniqueness in favor of standardization? Having spent a lot of time with Mgmt Consultants, I can assure you the current kick is towards consolidation. In 10 years, the consultants will be telling us each organization needs the customization which is only capable by rolling out 20 agile, independent installations. I imagine that this CIO is spending a lot of time with IBM guys with dollar signs in their eyes and pushing their make-work agenda.
What's hilarious is that everyone pretty much understands you give up agility by consolidating back-office functions. The tradeoff is hopefully more cost savings and perhaps better quality/standardization. Saying it will be MORE agile is pretty much a bald-faced lie.
It's actually a lot like the world of yesterday... Humanity has spent the vast majority of its development in small communities where everyone knew everything about everyone and you married your cousin's cousin. Think how few people actually lived in cities until 1900 or later. Our concept of privacy is an extremely recent concept.
That sentiment doesn't really pass the economics sniff test. The publisher is going to pay you a percentage of the lifetime value of your work. If the lifetime value goes down via shortened copyright time, they're going to pay you less...
A) a conspiracy of the MSM to prevent word getting out B) the MSM knows their audience better than your and the 50+ crowd who read mainstream newspapers and watch the evening news really don't care about a bunch of kids protesting
I'm gonna go with B. The liberal old folks likely remember their days protesting the Vietnam War/Civil Rights and feel like this is amateur hour. The conservative old folks, well they hate any kind of protest.
Nobody under 50 watches the evening news these days- there's a reason why every commercial is either Cialis or some other drug for seniors.
Who cares? The same thing could be said of WoW and Everquest. Heck, If we travel back in time, there's probably some holier-than-thou nerd complaining that UO is just a MUD with graphics . The fact that SWTOR follows many of the coventions of the MMORPG genre is hardly an argument for (or against) whether it will be a bad game.
I swear I'm not trying to troll here. The argument that OSS is "innovative" has another strike against it as we see the reinvention of computing with mobile devices. Everyone who's pushing the state of the art ahead is working in private industry. Nothing groundbreaking has come from the open source world even though computing has been turned upside down in the last couple of years. The theorists would say that this is the perfect time to break old paradigms, but every open-source effort is pretty much completely derivative from a functionality standpoint.
The open-source model is great, but current events are showing that the pioneers are going to come from closed-source developers.
He also claimed that "at least 30 people died." Turns out there are 3 deaths (including the pilot) the next morning.
This is why you have to be careful listening to first hand blog reports without discretion- people involved in tragic events are rarely capable of making an accurate assessment of the situation.
When nothing interesting has happened for the last 50 years in {TOPIC} and you want to get more funding for {PROJECT}, the best way to do it is to trot out the term "Tipping Point."
Note to self: Use the term Tipping Point more often.
"Rather than providing evidence of SAP's actual use of the copyrighted works, and objectively verifiable number of customers lost as a result, Oracle presented evidence of the purported value of the intellectual property as a whole, elicited self-serving testimony from its executives regarding the price they claim they would have demanded in an admittedly fictional negotiation, and proffered the speculative opinion of its damages expert, which was based on little more than guesses about the parties' expectations."
This comment from the judge is fascinating considering every software company out there pegs their piracy losses at face value rather than pointing to evidence of lost sales.
Measles isn't terrible. Almost everyone over 65 has had the measles. Just like all of us in our 30s had Chicken Pox, but our kids won't because of vaccination.
I've been following this for a few days. Most of the world couldn't care less about the DRM. The problem is that the port is terrible.
Quite a few people pre-ordered the game on Steam to get a TF2 hat. Then they found out the port stinks, and now want to not have to pay for a bad game. Word got around that you could get refunds by claiming that you were hoodwinked w/r/t DRM. It then seems that EVERYONE started claiming this, and Steam clamped down on the refunds.
It could simply be Affirmative Action catching up with a population. These sorts of studies always attempt to correct for "achievement" somehow, but two PhDs from Harvard may not be equally talented if one were to receive the position through some sort of AA. Sometimes things like this simply aren't measure
To be fair, I think you did complain precisely that the companies clearly didn't grow and shrink by 10%, therefore the measurement must be "contrived" because of its volatility. I'm not going to defend everything about the stock market. However, critics don't create. Hopefully we can agree there's got to be a method to allocate assets to places that can create a good return. What's your methodology?
Anyone remotely connected to finance will agree there are short term shocks to the market. They eventually settle. The mechanic is identical to an analog scale that bounces between high/low weights until it settles on an accurate measurement. To say that any instrument of measurement is incorrect because it is not accurate in real time is quite ridiculous when you think about it.
The article suspects a space elevator could be built for $18 Billion? And they're worried about doing a study to explore who will pay for it? That much money is budget dust for any major country. Once the technology is there, I'm sure Boeing or Bechtel will be more than happy to take taxpayer money to work on the project and "create jobs."
In fairness, sometimes it's win/win/win (acquiror/acquisition/consumer) when a company with a nicely developed sales channel buys up a little invention and puts some wood behind the arrow.
I used to work for a major heavy equipment manufacturer and scout around looking for neat inventions to put on our products. One was a patent by a nice dude with a high school degree that was totally awesome. We picked it up from him, made him a boatload of cash, and threw our engineering resources behind it and got it into the GLOBAL market in less than a year.
Everyone got more out of it than they put in, and the customers loved it. I guarantee if a big company hadn't bought it, the dude would still be moving like 5 units a month via mail order.
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From a legal perspective, it seems stupid to approach people and ask them to to surrender their shares. Firing them straight up if they are truly "MIA" as Pincus claims would be justifiable. There's nothing wrong with letting go an employee who doesn't meet expectations. Asking them to surrender their shares, THEN firing them makes your motivations clear.
This simply confirms that Zynga is a company with no morals.
While it is interesting to see a UI expert dissect a piece of software, this piece reminds me a bit of folks who do analysis of lottery ticket numbers and then try to convince us that the winners are geniuses. We all know of a bazillion games that are similar shoot-projectile-random-result games (golf, bowling, Bloons, Peggle, Darts) and why they are addictive. Angry Birds is good, but the amazing success probably has more to do with social mania than UI design. OH, and hitching your corporate bandwagon to the iOS.
A lot of the time this happens, it's because management wants to take a more aggressive strategy that shareholders won't support. Nobody has a crystal ball that can guarantee increased profits. If management fundamentally disagrees with ownership about where the company should go, a MBO is usally the result of a lot of meetings where management puts forward proposals and gets repeatedly shot down.
This is the see-saw private industry has been on for 50 years. Do you make each unit independent and agile with its own all-powerful General Manager? Do you consolidate similar support organizations (IT, finance) to HQ thereby giving up uniqueness in favor of standardization? Having spent a lot of time with Mgmt Consultants, I can assure you the current kick is towards consolidation. In 10 years, the consultants will be telling us each organization needs the customization which is only capable by rolling out 20 agile, independent installations. I imagine that this CIO is spending a lot of time with IBM guys with dollar signs in their eyes and pushing their make-work agenda.
What's hilarious is that everyone pretty much understands you give up agility by consolidating back-office functions. The tradeoff is hopefully more cost savings and perhaps better quality/standardization. Saying it will be MORE agile is pretty much a bald-faced lie.
You made quite a few claims there, but I didn't see any evidence to back it up. I personally didn't see anywhere the "stated purpose" you mentioned.
Where does the Foundation or BG say all these things?
It's funny that the first claim is for a "hexothermal" reaction of nickel and hydrogen.
Anyways...The patent mentions catalysts, but doesn't specify them. So for now, the sauce is still secret...
It's actually a lot like the world of yesterday... Humanity has spent the vast majority of its development in small communities where everyone knew everything about everyone and you married your cousin's cousin. Think how few people actually lived in cities until 1900 or later. Our concept of privacy is an extremely recent concept.
They didn't craft that language. That's just the bucket created by the USPTO that the examiner looks at when trying to research for a US Trademark.
Look up any game trademarks and you'll see the same thing.
That sentiment doesn't really pass the economics sniff test. The publisher is going to pay you a percentage of the lifetime value of your work. If the lifetime value goes down via shortened copyright time, they're going to pay you less...
Well, I have to decide whether it's
A) a conspiracy of the MSM to prevent word getting out
B) the MSM knows their audience better than your and the 50+ crowd who read mainstream newspapers and watch the evening news really don't care about a bunch of kids protesting
I'm gonna go with B. The liberal old folks likely remember their days protesting the Vietnam War/Civil Rights and feel like this is amateur hour. The conservative old folks, well they hate any kind of protest.
Nobody under 50 watches the evening news these days- there's a reason why every commercial is either Cialis or some other drug for seniors.
Who cares? The same thing could be said of WoW and Everquest. Heck, If we travel back in time, there's probably some holier-than-thou nerd complaining that UO is just a MUD with graphics . The fact that SWTOR follows many of the coventions of the MMORPG genre is hardly an argument for (or against) whether it will be a bad game.
I swear I'm not trying to troll here. The argument that OSS is "innovative" has another strike against it as we see the reinvention of computing with mobile devices. Everyone who's pushing the state of the art ahead is working in private industry. Nothing groundbreaking has come from the open source world even though computing has been turned upside down in the last couple of years. The theorists would say that this is the perfect time to break old paradigms, but every open-source effort is pretty much completely derivative from a functionality standpoint.
The open-source model is great, but current events are showing that the pioneers are going to come from closed-source developers.
He also claimed that "at least 30 people died." Turns out there are 3 deaths (including the pilot) the next morning.
This is why you have to be careful listening to first hand blog reports without discretion- people involved in tragic events are rarely capable of making an accurate assessment of the situation.
When nothing interesting has happened for the last 50 years in {TOPIC} and you want to get more funding for {PROJECT}, the best way to do it is to trot out the term "Tipping Point."
Note to self: Use the term Tipping Point more often.
"Rather than providing evidence of SAP's actual use of the copyrighted works, and objectively verifiable number of customers lost as a result, Oracle presented evidence of the purported value of the intellectual property as a whole, elicited self-serving testimony from its executives regarding the price they claim they would have demanded in an admittedly fictional negotiation, and proffered the speculative opinion of its damages expert, which was based on little more than guesses about the parties' expectations."
This comment from the judge is fascinating considering every software company out there pegs their piracy losses at face value rather than pointing to evidence of lost sales.
Measles isn't terrible. Almost everyone over 65 has had the measles. Just like all of us in our 30s had Chicken Pox, but our kids won't because of vaccination.
A period of acceleration followed by a quick deceleration is often a signal of dissatisfaction with a controller.
I've been following this for a few days. Most of the world couldn't care less about the DRM. The problem is that the port is terrible.
Quite a few people pre-ordered the game on Steam to get a TF2 hat. Then they found out the port stinks, and now want to not have to pay for a bad game. Word got around that you could get refunds by claiming that you were hoodwinked w/r/t DRM. It then seems that EVERYONE started claiming this, and Steam clamped down on the refunds.
It could simply be Affirmative Action catching up with a population. These sorts of studies always attempt to correct for "achievement" somehow, but two PhDs from Harvard may not be equally talented if one were to receive the position through some sort of AA. Sometimes things like this simply aren't measure
To be fair, I think you did complain precisely that the companies clearly didn't grow and shrink by 10%, therefore the measurement must be "contrived" because of its volatility. I'm not going to defend everything about the stock market. However, critics don't create. Hopefully we can agree there's got to be a method to allocate assets to places that can create a good return. What's your methodology?
Anyone remotely connected to finance will agree there are short term shocks to the market. They eventually settle. The mechanic is identical to an analog scale that bounces between high/low weights until it settles on an accurate measurement. To say that any instrument of measurement is incorrect because it is not accurate in real time is quite ridiculous when you think about it.
What's the probability of these hitting the ISS?
The article suspects a space elevator could be built for $18 Billion? And they're worried about doing a study to explore who will pay for it? That much money is budget dust for any major country. Once the technology is there, I'm sure Boeing or Bechtel will be more than happy to take taxpayer money to work on the project and "create jobs."
I agree... I was kind of thinking of the brainstorming phases...
In fairness, sometimes it's win/win/win (acquiror/acquisition/consumer) when a company with a nicely developed sales channel buys up a little invention and puts some wood behind the arrow.
I used to work for a major heavy equipment manufacturer and scout around looking for neat inventions to put on our products. One was a patent by a nice dude with a high school degree that was totally awesome. We picked it up from him, made him a boatload of cash, and threw our engineering resources behind it and got it into the GLOBAL market in less than a year.
Everyone got more out of it than they put in, and the customers loved it. I guarantee if a big company hadn't bought it, the dude would still be moving like 5 units a month via mail order.