I've got no mod points, so I just wanted to say thank you. I've seen half a dozen articles about the rivalry between these sets without getting as much useful information as in your short summary. Much appreciated.
I received a tech support question from someone whose "wireless stopped working." I tried troubleshooting, and got blank looks when I started talking about a wireless router. Eventually I backed up and asked how they connected, discovered "I just look for wireless and pick one but now they all have passwords," and realized they'd just been using their neighbors' services without even knowing how any of it worked. After that it was easy enough to explain how to get a wireless router and solve the problem, but I chuckled to myself a bit as the story unfolded.
You know what else you won't find in a 30-year-old paper dictionary? "Ninja." I know this because I tried to play that word in scrabble against my grandmother a while back. Oddly, she knew enough to ask, "You mean like those turtles?" but she refused to believe it was an actual word, and her dictionary failed to back me up.
Quite possibly the dictionary would actually be pushing 50 these days, now that I think about it, because that may have been a couple of decades ago, and it was old then.
Prolly is a pet slang I use a lot, but it's intentionally talking low. I can't imagine ever going 18 years without noticing probably.
Related to your #3, there's also using multiple exclamation points to indicate the degree of excitement, or multiple question marks to indicate some level of uncertainty in the question. At least my wife insists that's what she's doing when I ask her why one question has four marks, another has two, etc. I do not claim to understand the shades of meaning, and don't actually believe they're there for anyone but her (or perhaps her generation -- she's not that much younger than me, but enough we sometimes have a bit of cultural gap).
Also related to #3, I had a lengthy online chat with someone who I realized always used 'lol' at the end of every question, in place of the question mark. He had something else at the end of every statement to replace the period, but I forget what. You'd get a stream of "how do you do that lol is it like this lol oh I see what you mean [other code] but what about this lol" Not sure if that's common everywhere or just that one person I was talking to.
I tend to be a stickler for grammar, but "whom" is one of those words that never seemed to have any value for me. It's more complicated than it is useful, and I'd be happy to see it dropped. Maybe it's just a personal blind spot.
The problem is not the 1-5 scale, but the way your management utilizes it. Rest assured: your boss is the type that will try to find ways to not give you a raise every year, no matter what evaluation scale he uses.
Absolutely. Our company does a 1-5 scale, too, but they *expect* most of us to do pretty well. Other than a little baloney about "nobody is ever going to get a perfect 5", that's okay because the final score is an average of lots of subcomponents, and they've got a generous enough sliding scale. A 3 - 3.99 is a 3% raise, a 4 - 4.49 is a 4% raise, and 4.5 and up is a 5% raise. The total score works in a little general fluff (punctuality, attitude, resourcefulness, etc.) but the majority (80%) of our review is based on a set of personal goals with very clearly predefined "this is a 2, this is a 3,... this is a 5" metrics. There's no competition against co-workers, expectations are all very clearly laid out ahead of time (often I'm the one actually writing the specifics of the goal in the first place), and then it's up to me to meet what I said I would.
One of the worst evaluation setups I was involved in was when my eval outcome was decided prior to even meeting with me, and all I was handed was a document to sign. Before I even went to my evaluation meeting, I knew it was gonna be a 3-4 average, and I knew I was getting my standard 3% raise and production bonus.
Oddly, since our goals are very clearly predefined, I don't mind at all when most of our annual reviews come pre-filled. I generally already know what I'm getting to within a few tenths of a point, so when the boss fills it out and emails it to me with "let me know in the review if you have any comments" I've never really had anything to disagree with. At the actual review we may spend a few moments talking about why one component was particularly good or bad, but then a lot of the time is spent discussing the goals for next year.
Worse than that. The *real* morons stop *inside* the traffic circle, trying to attempt to yield to someone entering. And then there are the uber-morons who ignore the signage and the circle all together and do their best to drive straight through - cutting across multiple lanes multiple times, or driving up on the curb inside the circle.
I would gladly sell my services to Microsoft for a mere million. Even if I fail badly they'd only be out a small fraction of the losses they keep racking up buying large failures. Most likely I'd fail a lot less and get them a much better return on their investment.
It may just be a coincidence, but has anyone else noticed Gmail's spam filtering fall apart in the last couple of days? I normally get at most one spam per month, and in the past 24 hours I've had eight or nine pieces of spam slip through. It's a little disconcerting.
I will admit I have sometimes spent 20 or more minutes flipping through Netflix trying to find something I'm in the mood to watch, or just trying to remember what it is I might be interested in seeing, occasionally to the point of stalling out and never picking anything at all. I never had much trouble looking over a list of 20 movie channels and identifying the one movie playing I was most interested in (or, very rarely, realizing none of them were interesting) but for some reason when *everything* is on I don't know where to start.
Same effect with our DVD collection: I'm happy seeing most of the movies I own once a year, more or less, but since I own them there's never much pressure to decide, yes, this is the one I should watch right now, and I can stare at the shelf for a long time trying to decide what I'm in the mood for. But if that same movie is on TV, my thought process is more like, "Hey, that movie I like, it's on now so I'll watch it!" That's all well and good with a movie channel, but I can't tell you how many times I've picked one on broadcast TV, and then after the second or third commercial break I catch myself and say, "This is stupid, I have the DVD downstairs, why am I watching it with commercials?"
That's basically our setup, too. We just ditched cable a month ago to save a little on the cost, and went with a Roku. Netflix + Amazon + Hulu Plus gives us a ton of things to watch. Mostly I just want a movie now and then, but my wife burns through whole seasons of TV shows over the span of a week or two.
I don't have a good answer for sports, unfortunately. I know you can get some sports packages, but the only one I looked into - MLB.tv - has blackout rules which means your subscription gets you everything except live games of your local team... which is of course the one you probably want to watch. There's a delay (about an hour?) after each local game before you're allowed to watch it. This isn't always a problem, if, for instance, you want to catch the day game in the evening, or catch the summary of a late-night game you missed, or you're a fan of a team that's not local. I think you can also listen to a radio broadcast of the game live, if that's good enough for you.
As an aside, we've got the Roku upstairs, while downstairs we're making use of our PS3 to do Netflix and Amazon. Not sure if we've figured out if we can do Hulu on it or not. For general watching I think I find the Roku a little more convenient, and of course it's a lot cheaper, but being able to game on the PS3 is nice, too.
Ah, you have the facts to fill in my fuzzy memories. I was there as a parent-escorted teen in the early 90's and couldn't enjoy much, and wasn't even allowed to step away from the group of adults. Other than going to the comedy club and the new years shtick, the only thing I remember at all is a big screen or projection of a band playing techno music - something I wanted more of but that was nearly impossible to find in small-town Indiana.
Very wise. Agents only regulate themselves if there's a reason for the regulation. If all the incentive is to do Option A, they will only ever pick Option A. Regulation becomes necessary to make Option B a viable choice.
I think you start out well describing the shifting costs of wedding photographers, and how the business has adapted. That works well for them because they lost money in one field (prints) but were able to make it up in another field (charging for the service of taking the pictures).
You say the same thing needs to happen in music, but if the analysis for music is to lose money on the distribution and there's no place to make it up, that's not really going to work for them, is it? Maybe I simply missed it in your post, but I'm not seeing where you suggest they shift the costs to in order to have a viable business providing their service.
Sounds sort of mystical, but kind of confusing to me. The only should in my statement was a concession to your claim that life is a meritocracy. I don't think it is one, but it might be nice if it was.
And I'm definitely not talking about fairness on any level. Mostly I'm talking about predictability or sensibility of the outcome of an action. It's cliche to say "you reap what you sow," and maybe in some tautological sense it's also common to claim "if you got it, that must have been what you were asking for," but in my experience the actual result of an action is too unpredictable to make "your benefit is the result of your action" a useful guideline in any way.
It's cute that you think that. Perhaps it *should* be one, but it most definitely isn't. Some of my greatest rewards have come from minimal effort, while some of my greatest efforts have gotten me minimal reward.
Some people don't like multiplayer games, and I get that, but it does frustrate me when people rage about features that are peripheral to the game-as-designed.
I'm going to agree with the AC who also replied to you: the first two Diablos were viable single-player games. The rage is because they *broke* that option when they designed the third game. It's not an unreasonable complaint to want a sequel to be similar in style to the two previous editions. Nobody gives a flip about what the game designers chose to design; they want to play a new version of the old game they loved.
A similar mistake in redesign is why I avoided Dragon Age 2, and for the same reason I'm not going to buy this one, either.
Nah, just restart and keep guessing 'e'. When I lost my wheel I looked at a friend's, determined that E was a very common answer, and tended to be able to get in within 4 or 5 tries or less.
I watched a season of Ghost Hunters specifically to laugh at the silly acting every time there was a weird noise. I spent a lot of time thinking about doing a parody of their style, but with really obvious sources for the "strange activity."
More recently I've been a little impressed with a show that goes to a lot of trouble trying to debunk and/or recreate "supernatural" pictures and videos. They're still a little accepting of the idea that it *might* be a ghost or bigfoot or whatever for my tastes, but I like that they at least start out with the idea there's a rational explanation. Can't remember the name of the show at the moment, though.
Insightful. I'd feel gloomy about the failure of specialized channels, except I think most of us will eventually get by well enough with streaming services like Netflix and the like, where you can grab what you like from a pool of everything. The only concern there is that there's enough money, somewhere, to fund the right variety of shows in the first place so they're available to watch.
Ugh. I like my coffee, but I'm usually happy with two servings a day. Even assuming they meant literal 8-ounce "cups" and not "mugs full of it" I probably don't hit more than 3 cups total, four on a bad day. A pace closer to 9 cups per day would leave me feeling pretty awful.
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I've got no mod points, so I just wanted to say thank you. I've seen half a dozen articles about the rivalry between these sets without getting as much useful information as in your short summary. Much appreciated.
Yep, they were paying for wired internet, just hadn't realized they needed to do anything to make it wireless.
I received a tech support question from someone whose "wireless stopped working." I tried troubleshooting, and got blank looks when I started talking about a wireless router. Eventually I backed up and asked how they connected, discovered "I just look for wireless and pick one but now they all have passwords," and realized they'd just been using their neighbors' services without even knowing how any of it worked. After that it was easy enough to explain how to get a wireless router and solve the problem, but I chuckled to myself a bit as the story unfolded.
You know what else you won't find in a 30-year-old paper dictionary? "Ninja." I know this because I tried to play that word in scrabble against my grandmother a while back. Oddly, she knew enough to ask, "You mean like those turtles?" but she refused to believe it was an actual word, and her dictionary failed to back me up.
Quite possibly the dictionary would actually be pushing 50 these days, now that I think about it, because that may have been a couple of decades ago, and it was old then.
Prolly is a pet slang I use a lot, but it's intentionally talking low. I can't imagine ever going 18 years without noticing probably.
Related to your #3, there's also using multiple exclamation points to indicate the degree of excitement, or multiple question marks to indicate some level of uncertainty in the question. At least my wife insists that's what she's doing when I ask her why one question has four marks, another has two, etc. I do not claim to understand the shades of meaning, and don't actually believe they're there for anyone but her (or perhaps her generation -- she's not that much younger than me, but enough we sometimes have a bit of cultural gap).
Also related to #3, I had a lengthy online chat with someone who I realized always used 'lol' at the end of every question, in place of the question mark. He had something else at the end of every statement to replace the period, but I forget what. You'd get a stream of "how do you do that lol is it like this lol oh I see what you mean [other code] but what about this lol" Not sure if that's common everywhere or just that one person I was talking to.
I tend to be a stickler for grammar, but "whom" is one of those words that never seemed to have any value for me. It's more complicated than it is useful, and I'd be happy to see it dropped. Maybe it's just a personal blind spot.
The problem is not the 1-5 scale, but the way your management utilizes it. Rest assured: your boss is the type that will try to find ways to not give you a raise every year, no matter what evaluation scale he uses.
Absolutely. Our company does a 1-5 scale, too, but they *expect* most of us to do pretty well. Other than a little baloney about "nobody is ever going to get a perfect 5", that's okay because the final score is an average of lots of subcomponents, and they've got a generous enough sliding scale. A 3 - 3.99 is a 3% raise, a 4 - 4.49 is a 4% raise, and 4.5 and up is a 5% raise. The total score works in a little general fluff (punctuality, attitude, resourcefulness, etc.) but the majority (80%) of our review is based on a set of personal goals with very clearly predefined "this is a 2, this is a 3, ... this is a 5" metrics. There's no competition against co-workers, expectations are all very clearly laid out ahead of time (often I'm the one actually writing the specifics of the goal in the first place), and then it's up to me to meet what I said I would.
One of the worst evaluation setups I was involved in was when my eval outcome was decided prior to even meeting with me, and all I was handed was a document to sign. Before I even went to my evaluation meeting, I knew it was gonna be a 3-4 average, and I knew I was getting my standard 3% raise and production bonus.
Oddly, since our goals are very clearly predefined, I don't mind at all when most of our annual reviews come pre-filled. I generally already know what I'm getting to within a few tenths of a point, so when the boss fills it out and emails it to me with "let me know in the review if you have any comments" I've never really had anything to disagree with. At the actual review we may spend a few moments talking about why one component was particularly good or bad, but then a lot of the time is spent discussing the goals for next year.
Worse than that. The *real* morons stop *inside* the traffic circle, trying to attempt to yield to someone entering. And then there are the uber-morons who ignore the signage and the circle all together and do their best to drive straight through - cutting across multiple lanes multiple times, or driving up on the curb inside the circle.
I have seen both, many times.
I would gladly sell my services to Microsoft for a mere million. Even if I fail badly they'd only be out a small fraction of the losses they keep racking up buying large failures. Most likely I'd fail a lot less and get them a much better return on their investment.
Heck, you can basically say the same thing about IT, too. Once you know enough to understand the vocabulary, you're halfway there.
It may just be a coincidence, but has anyone else noticed Gmail's spam filtering fall apart in the last couple of days? I normally get at most one spam per month, and in the past 24 hours I've had eight or nine pieces of spam slip through. It's a little disconcerting.
I will admit I have sometimes spent 20 or more minutes flipping through Netflix trying to find something I'm in the mood to watch, or just trying to remember what it is I might be interested in seeing, occasionally to the point of stalling out and never picking anything at all. I never had much trouble looking over a list of 20 movie channels and identifying the one movie playing I was most interested in (or, very rarely, realizing none of them were interesting) but for some reason when *everything* is on I don't know where to start.
Same effect with our DVD collection: I'm happy seeing most of the movies I own once a year, more or less, but since I own them there's never much pressure to decide, yes, this is the one I should watch right now, and I can stare at the shelf for a long time trying to decide what I'm in the mood for. But if that same movie is on TV, my thought process is more like, "Hey, that movie I like, it's on now so I'll watch it!" That's all well and good with a movie channel, but I can't tell you how many times I've picked one on broadcast TV, and then after the second or third commercial break I catch myself and say, "This is stupid, I have the DVD downstairs, why am I watching it with commercials?"
That's basically our setup, too. We just ditched cable a month ago to save a little on the cost, and went with a Roku. Netflix + Amazon + Hulu Plus gives us a ton of things to watch. Mostly I just want a movie now and then, but my wife burns through whole seasons of TV shows over the span of a week or two.
... which is of course the one you probably want to watch. There's a delay (about an hour?) after each local game before you're allowed to watch it. This isn't always a problem, if, for instance, you want to catch the day game in the evening, or catch the summary of a late-night game you missed, or you're a fan of a team that's not local. I think you can also listen to a radio broadcast of the game live, if that's good enough for you.
I don't have a good answer for sports, unfortunately. I know you can get some sports packages, but the only one I looked into - MLB.tv - has blackout rules which means your subscription gets you everything except live games of your local team
As an aside, we've got the Roku upstairs, while downstairs we're making use of our PS3 to do Netflix and Amazon. Not sure if we've figured out if we can do Hulu on it or not. For general watching I think I find the Roku a little more convenient, and of course it's a lot cheaper, but being able to game on the PS3 is nice, too.
Ah, you have the facts to fill in my fuzzy memories. I was there as a parent-escorted teen in the early 90's and couldn't enjoy much, and wasn't even allowed to step away from the group of adults. Other than going to the comedy club and the new years shtick, the only thing I remember at all is a big screen or projection of a band playing techno music - something I wanted more of but that was nearly impossible to find in small-town Indiana.
Very wise. Agents only regulate themselves if there's a reason for the regulation. If all the incentive is to do Option A, they will only ever pick Option A. Regulation becomes necessary to make Option B a viable choice.
There's also that place in Disney World that's new year's eve every night, so it's got a good precedent.
Don't forget: playing from multiple computers!
I think you start out well describing the shifting costs of wedding photographers, and how the business has adapted. That works well for them because they lost money in one field (prints) but were able to make it up in another field (charging for the service of taking the pictures).
You say the same thing needs to happen in music, but if the analysis for music is to lose money on the distribution and there's no place to make it up, that's not really going to work for them, is it? Maybe I simply missed it in your post, but I'm not seeing where you suggest they shift the costs to in order to have a viable business providing their service.
Sounds sort of mystical, but kind of confusing to me. The only should in my statement was a concession to your claim that life is a meritocracy. I don't think it is one, but it might be nice if it was.
And I'm definitely not talking about fairness on any level. Mostly I'm talking about predictability or sensibility of the outcome of an action. It's cliche to say "you reap what you sow," and maybe in some tautological sense it's also common to claim "if you got it, that must have been what you were asking for," but in my experience the actual result of an action is too unpredictable to make "your benefit is the result of your action" a useful guideline in any way.
Life is a meritocracy.
Your benefit is the result of your action.
It's cute that you think that. Perhaps it *should* be one, but it most definitely isn't. Some of my greatest rewards have come from minimal effort, while some of my greatest efforts have gotten me minimal reward.
Some people don't like multiplayer games, and I get that, but it does frustrate me when people rage about features that are peripheral to the game-as-designed.
I'm going to agree with the AC who also replied to you: the first two Diablos were viable single-player games. The rage is because they *broke* that option when they designed the third game. It's not an unreasonable complaint to want a sequel to be similar in style to the two previous editions. Nobody gives a flip about what the game designers chose to design; they want to play a new version of the old game they loved.
A similar mistake in redesign is why I avoided Dragon Age 2, and for the same reason I'm not going to buy this one, either.
Nah, just restart and keep guessing 'e'. When I lost my wheel I looked at a friend's, determined that E was a very common answer, and tended to be able to get in within 4 or 5 tries or less.
I watched a season of Ghost Hunters specifically to laugh at the silly acting every time there was a weird noise. I spent a lot of time thinking about doing a parody of their style, but with really obvious sources for the "strange activity."
More recently I've been a little impressed with a show that goes to a lot of trouble trying to debunk and/or recreate "supernatural" pictures and videos. They're still a little accepting of the idea that it *might* be a ghost or bigfoot or whatever for my tastes, but I like that they at least start out with the idea there's a rational explanation. Can't remember the name of the show at the moment, though.
Insightful. I'd feel gloomy about the failure of specialized channels, except I think most of us will eventually get by well enough with streaming services like Netflix and the like, where you can grab what you like from a pool of everything. The only concern there is that there's enough money, somewhere, to fund the right variety of shows in the first place so they're available to watch.
Ugh. I like my coffee, but I'm usually happy with two servings a day. Even assuming they meant literal 8-ounce "cups" and not "mugs full of it" I probably don't hit more than 3 cups total, four on a bad day. A pace closer to 9 cups per day would leave me feeling pretty awful.