The Metreon was never much of a mall. I'm not even sure it was meant to be given its proximity to Market Street, the real mall at the base of Powell, Union Square etc. Other than the Playstation store, there was really no reason to go there unless you were on your way to the Cinema upstairs.
It seemed more like a mini-expo center -- a place to put product in front of people who were looking to kill time before their movie started.
Microsoft has a different PR problem. Their success has trivialized their products. Even their high end software which is rather nice (if you are able to look at them threw un Fanboy/Zealot eyes) has the stigma of being sub-par home software. As well associating any and all PC problems that one has with Microsoft even if it isn't their fault. Really gives them a PR problem. Now I am not sure a retail store will fix it. Showing off the software is a much more difficult problem. It takes time to determine if you want or like the software. Vs. say a Mac which just looks cool and you feel that it can do what you want it to do. Most people felt they have been burned by Microsoft far more then people who felt burned by Apple so standard marketing will make them suspicious.
Nonsense. MS doesn't have a PR problem outside a tiny, albeit self-regarding, minority. The vast majority have no problem doing what they want to do on a MS operating system -- surf the web, work in Word and Excel, play games, edit their digital camera pictures etc.
If you want to help the economy, waste your money on some kind of pest management regime including exterminators and poisons.
If you want to help the Human Society, adopt a cat. Just hope you adopt one that is too dumb to realize that hunting rats is a hassle compared to dumpster diving or finding a soft-touch to feed it Fancy Feast every day.
The best way to get rid of rodents is to prevent them from entering your building(s). Period.
As we know, the only way a child can get their hands on a game is when their parents buy it for them. Children never borrow inappropriate games from their friends to play when their parents aren't looking.
If you aren't looking, you can't use any means of filtering what your child sees. That is, other than raising them to understand and respect the reasonable boundaries that you set. Sorry if that just sounds like more magical non-parent mumbo jumbo to you.
As the saying goes "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems".
As for Sonic...he has turned into junk food for little kids...and it shows. Little kids LOVE gimmicks and would be disappointed without one.
Sonic has always been junk food for little kids. The franchise has just been around long enough for some of those little kids to have grown up and out of it. Gimmicks? Did someone say "Blast Processing"?
It wouldn't be as convenient as a an iPhone, but it would me much more convenient than finding a pay phone (remember those?) and much cheaper than the convenience of a cell phone.
It wouldn't be worse than an "old days" cellphone with limited coverage because you wouldn't be paying for the (false) perception of convenience. You could, conceivably, get the same shitty service for free.
A facebook application can not be made with FBML alone.
Facebook apps reside on the *developer's server*. Unless your "application" consists solely of what they refer to as a "canvas page", you must use more than FBML. If you want it to integrate with the user's profile, interact with their friends list or be visible on their wall, FBML is not enough.
In addition to FBML and FBJS are the Facebook API and Facebook Query Language (FQL or "fecal" as l like to call it). To develop a Facebook application you need to build a web app that can respond to requests from Facebook's servers with API calls. That means actual proramming, coded by the app creator and deployed on their own server, not just posting some mark-up and JavaScript cut-and-pastes.
Incidentally, all this information is current as of about a month ago, so there is a high likelihood that it has already been deprecated.
Regardless, while FBML may not be "programming", neither are Facebook apps "a few lines of a data markup language". I'll grant that the title of this silly book may make it seem that way.
I found that this book offers nothing that isn't available for free at developers.facebook.com. Moreover, it is full of already obsolete information that can lead you on wild goose chases looking for features that have been altered or deprecated.
Even Facebook's own documentation is shoddy. Dead-tree edition of information on a trendy, half-assed technology? Good luck with that.
Enterprise applications should run on dedicated, fully optimized hardware that can be bolted to employees faces.
As far as a web browser for every employee, there are organizations that "value" productivity and organizations that actually understand how to maximize it.
Social security number has never been designed to be a fool proof identity verification authentication tool. High time the government site get hacked and all the SSNs of ALL Americans are out in the public. Then the onus will be on the banks and others to actually verify people's identity and come up with real authentication mechanisms. Right now it is a joke. Any Tom Dick or Harry can impersonate me if he knows my name and my SSN. How ridiculous is the expectation that I have to take efforts to keep my SSN secret, while the banks and credit issuers have no obligations to check if the applicant is really who he/she says who he/she is?
I would also like to see the day that all this gets so out of hand that none of this "personal" data can be used as a legitimate means of identity verification, i.e. when identity theft is not my problem, but the problem of whatever sucker institution failed to do due diligence and was taken by some crook.
Scratch that -- that day is long past, and nothing has changed. Greasing the wheels of commerce still trumps (what should be) my right to remain blameless and unconcerned when failed morals and policies of strangers collide. For that matter, selling id protection and clean-up service is an industry unto itself, no doubt with its own lobbyists reminding our politicians that they create jobs and tax revenue (and campaign contributions).
Re:The lack of tech understanding in popular cultu
on
Daemon
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· Score: 1
Maybe it wouldn't have affected effected revenue of the first movie but it would probably have pissed off Ludlum fans to see a technically sloppy adaptation of his book.
It may have pissed off Ludlum fans who a) didn't read anything about the movie before watching it (fan?) and b) believed that the intention of movie adaptations is to make them as faithful as possible to the original material.
Re:The lack of tech understanding in popular cultu
on
Daemon
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So far, outside of the South Park episode that mocked World of Warcraft (hilarious, yes) I haven't seen WoW or Guild Wars or any MMO mentioned in a popular feature film, or even YouTube used as a plot device, Twitter or even a realistic depiction of GPS technology. That will all change. The Bourne films started it, with grabbing a SIM card from a airport vendor and using it to dodge the CIA - we will see more savvy use of tech tips and tricks in the years to come used cogently by the screenwriters.
There was a Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode that dealt with MMOs IIRC.
That said, I am confident that there are vastly more people who care whether Troi and Riker hook up than believe that WoW deserves a more rigorous treatment within popular entertainment. There is tech savvy, and there is marketing savvy. That is why the Bourne series is still 99% Matt Damon punching, kicking, stabbing and shooting people.
I doubt that a significant portion of the audience noticed or cared about SIM cards, nor do I think it would have significantly impacted revenue if the Bourne character had evaded the CIA by re-mapping the keypad to scramble all his communications or some-such nonsense.
Re:Why people watch movies..
on
Daemon
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· Score: 1
There's times, though, when it's just plain aweful and it CAN wreck the story. Like the Batman movie that for some reason everyone's drooling about - the cell phone radar thing? Ohh, c'mon. I know the story is fiction but it's supposed to be grounded in reality and that's just too much. They could have easily just used something else that actually COULD exist and it wouldn't have made the whole thing so cheezy.
See, the cell-phone gimmick didn't diminish my enjoyment of the movie at all. A guy had half (exactly half) of his face burned off, FFS! But the cell phone made the "whole thing cheezy"!?
So a movie tramples some minutia that a minority of people happen to know more than average about, and suddenly they are convinced that the world gives a crap about how fake it is?
Perhaps it is the movies fault for not being immersive enough to rip you away from your tedious nit-picking. So be it, but I feel sorry for you because there was plenty to like.
Kelly needs to cut staff but is obviously squeamish about letting people go. Her best bet is to let d-bag Doug do the dirty work, after which giving him the axe will not only be easy, but gratifying. Then Kelly can avail herself of the current worker surplus to re-staff her leaner, meaner team. Chances are she will be able to trade-up across the board.
If being nice is the sharpest tool in Stuart's collection, he will fail hard trying to squeeze the necessary increase in productivity out of his empire of pampered loyalists.
Sure, Doug is wasting time with his machinations. So is Stuart with his guru schtick. The question is, who is more valuable to Kelly?
Keeping Stuart around will pretty much guarantee Kelly a bunch of hassle trying to get him to crack the whip followed by a belated and likely messier round of lay-offs. Kelly will look like a "Stuart" to her boss -- too worried about people's feelings to get the damn job done.
One the other hand, keeping Doug gets her immediate goals met, which makes her bosses happy. If her underlings aren't happy, well these are tough times, suck it up. Her bosses don't expect her and her team to be happy. They expect her and her team to realize that, for now, there is nowhere else to go except the unemployment line.
That's hardly an argument at all, just like your, *cough*, insightful earlier comment. You just state something as fact, without argument. Then you criticize my remark. That's very particular.
Well I guess/. mod points don't work the way *you* think they should either.
Now, you're suggesting a people manager does a worse job. What gives you exactly the idea a back stabber can do a better job? He already has the disadvantage of ill-motivated employees. This is the point where people with such strong opinion usually fail to produce something of weight, to retreat in silence. I wouldn't hire you either. The job market is flooded. Why hire an ass producing air when you can get a non-ass? Note that he didn't have better results.
I didn't suggest either necessarily would do a better job. Whether the manager is Mr. Nice Guy or Mr. Jerk is usually immaterial to whether they are good at their jobs. Most people are not managers, and as such make their judgements based on their own blinkered priorities. Scroll down and read the post titled "Incredible". Then get back to work.
Well, 5 years down the road, the backstabber is also fired, while the "nice guy" found a job through one of his former coworkers who thought he was amazing and good to work with (the guy was good but also made him look better!) The backstabber, can't find work, and has no references.
In the same vein:
"Well, 5 years down the road, the backstabber is also fired, while the "nice guy" travelled back in time where he discovered that we was really a crown prince who had been banished to a bleak future by an evil witch, but was now able to claim his throne. The backstabber, can't find work, and is trampled by a handsome cab.
I mean, as long as we are coming up with scenarios that have no basis in reality, why not make them somewhat interesting?
For one, it's common knowledge that when someone does that, it is to hide their lower ability.
Most "common knowledge" is BS. This is exactly the kind of soothing mumbo-jumbo that losers use to keep themselves warm at night while their secret crushes are screwing assholes of "lower ability" on giant piles of sweaty $100 bills.
You don't need a people-pleasing guru when there is a surplus of unemployed talent.
Don't get me wrong, I would prefer it if the world worked the way it does in your wistful daydreams, but if very clearly does not.
The point is, what is characterized in the story is not "backstabbing". The assumption among many here is that being nice means being better at a job, which is certainly not true. If Mr. Nice Manager is coddling employees who are introducing viruses to the company network, for example, then Mr. Nice Manager is the danger, not Mr. Backstabbing Manager who outs the dangerously inept even when they are on "his side".
Slashdot Mirror
The Metreon was never much of a mall. I'm not even sure it was meant to be given its proximity to Market Street, the real mall at the base of Powell, Union Square etc. Other than the Playstation store, there was really no reason to go there unless you were on your way to the Cinema upstairs.
It seemed more like a mini-expo center -- a place to put product in front of people who were looking to kill time before their movie started.
Microsoft has a different PR problem. Their success has trivialized their products. Even their high end software which is rather nice (if you are able to look at them threw un Fanboy/Zealot eyes) has the stigma of being sub-par home software. As well associating any and all PC problems that one has with Microsoft even if it isn't their fault. Really gives them a PR problem. Now I am not sure a retail store will fix it. Showing off the software is a much more difficult problem. It takes time to determine if you want or like the software. Vs. say a Mac which just looks cool and you feel that it can do what you want it to do. Most people felt they have been burned by Microsoft far more then people who felt burned by Apple so standard marketing will make them suspicious.
Nonsense. MS doesn't have a PR problem outside a tiny, albeit self-regarding, minority. The vast majority have no problem doing what they want to do on a MS operating system -- surf the web, work in Word and Excel, play games, edit their digital camera pictures etc.
That's rich. We're talking about a retail store. "Me-too". How about "me-2 zillion"?
The stores probably won't last long, but they will likely be able to put several million people in front of a high end PC running Windows 7.
Or they could take your advice and maybe catch up to the market shares of their competitors. Oh, wait. . .
That wasn't really a store. It was more of a really one demonstration showroom and it has been closed.
Huh? There were shrink-wrapped products and cash registers, IIRC. That is a store.
Cats = decapitated rotting carcasses.
If you want to help the economy, waste your money on some kind of pest management regime including exterminators and poisons.
If you want to help the Human Society, adopt a cat. Just hope you adopt one that is too dumb to realize that hunting rats is a hassle compared to dumpster diving or finding a soft-touch to feed it Fancy Feast every day.
The best way to get rid of rodents is to prevent them from entering your building(s). Period.
As we know, the only way a child can get their hands on a game is when their parents buy it for them. Children never borrow inappropriate games from their friends to play when their parents aren't looking.
If you aren't looking, you can't use any means of filtering what your child sees. That is, other than raising them to understand and respect the reasonable boundaries that you set. Sorry if that just sounds like more magical non-parent mumbo jumbo to you.
As the saying goes "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems".
As for Sonic...he has turned into junk food for little kids...and it shows. Little kids LOVE gimmicks and would be disappointed without one.
Sonic has always been junk food for little kids. The franchise has just been around long enough for some of those little kids to have grown up and out of it. Gimmicks? Did someone say "Blast Processing"?
It wouldn't be as convenient as a an iPhone, but it would me much more convenient than finding a pay phone (remember those?) and much cheaper than the convenience of a cell phone.
It wouldn't be worse than an "old days" cellphone with limited coverage because you wouldn't be paying for the (false) perception of convenience. You could, conceivably, get the same shitty service for free.
A facebook application can not be made with FBML alone.
Facebook apps reside on the *developer's server*. Unless your "application" consists solely of what they refer to as a "canvas page", you must use more than FBML. If you want it to integrate with the user's profile, interact with their friends list or be visible on their wall, FBML is not enough.
In addition to FBML and FBJS are the Facebook API and Facebook Query Language (FQL or "fecal" as l like to call it). To develop a Facebook application you need to build a web app that can respond to requests from Facebook's servers with API calls. That means actual proramming, coded by the app creator and deployed on their own server, not just posting some mark-up and JavaScript cut-and-pastes.
Incidentally, all this information is current as of about a month ago, so there is a high likelihood that it has already been deprecated.
Regardless, while FBML may not be "programming", neither are Facebook apps "a few lines of a data markup language". I'll grant that the title of this silly book may make it seem that way.
I found that this book offers nothing that isn't available for free at developers.facebook.com. Moreover, it is full of already obsolete information that can lead you on wild goose chases looking for features that have been altered or deprecated.
Even Facebook's own documentation is shoddy. Dead-tree edition of information on a trendy, half-assed technology? Good luck with that.
Thank god for safaribooksonline.
Word Count + Deadline = Insight!
I'd still be wary of working for a company that subjects people to that kind of release form. Or lie detector tests, for that matter.
They obviously use it as a ruse to find people who are confident enough in their potential value as employees to refuse to take the test.
I'm cool with that.
Enterprise applications should run on dedicated, fully optimized hardware that can be bolted to employees faces.
As far as a web browser for every employee, there are organizations that "value" productivity and organizations that actually understand how to maximize it.
Tony Blair's Ex bodyguard and some lady that owns an original Unicorn Jones art piece. I am luckily fairly invisible I guess.
But a little bit less so given what you just posted. . .
Social security number has never been designed to be a fool proof identity verification authentication tool. High time the government site get hacked and all the SSNs of ALL Americans are out in the public. Then the onus will be on the banks and others to actually verify people's identity and come up with real authentication mechanisms. Right now it is a joke. Any Tom Dick or Harry can impersonate me if he knows my name and my SSN. How ridiculous is the expectation that I have to take efforts to keep my SSN secret, while the banks and credit issuers have no obligations to check if the applicant is really who he/she says who he/she is?
I would also like to see the day that all this gets so out of hand that none of this "personal" data can be used as a legitimate means of identity verification, i.e. when identity theft is not my problem, but the problem of whatever sucker institution failed to do due diligence and was taken by some crook.
Scratch that -- that day is long past, and nothing has changed. Greasing the wheels of commerce still trumps (what should be) my right to remain blameless and unconcerned when failed morals and policies of strangers collide. For that matter, selling id protection and clean-up service is an industry unto itself, no doubt with its own lobbyists reminding our politicians that they create jobs and tax revenue (and campaign contributions).
Maybe it wouldn't have affected effected revenue of the first movie but it would probably have pissed off Ludlum fans to see a technically sloppy adaptation of his book.
It may have pissed off Ludlum fans who a) didn't read anything about the movie before watching it (fan?) and b) believed that the intention of movie adaptations is to make them as faithful as possible to the original material.
So far, outside of the South Park episode that mocked World of Warcraft (hilarious, yes) I haven't seen WoW or Guild Wars or any MMO mentioned in a popular feature film, or even YouTube used as a plot device, Twitter or even a realistic depiction of GPS technology. That will all change. The Bourne films started it, with grabbing a SIM card from a airport vendor and using it to dodge the CIA - we will see more savvy use of tech tips and tricks in the years to come used cogently by the screenwriters.
There was a Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode that dealt with MMOs IIRC.
That said, I am confident that there are vastly more people who care whether Troi and Riker hook up than believe that WoW deserves a more rigorous treatment within popular entertainment. There is tech savvy, and there is marketing savvy. That is why the Bourne series is still 99% Matt Damon punching, kicking, stabbing and shooting people.
I doubt that a significant portion of the audience noticed or cared about SIM cards, nor do I think it would have significantly impacted revenue if the Bourne character had evaded the CIA by re-mapping the keypad to scramble all his communications or some-such nonsense.
There's times, though, when it's just plain aweful and it CAN wreck the story. Like the Batman movie that for some reason everyone's drooling about - the cell phone radar thing? Ohh, c'mon. I know the story is fiction but it's supposed to be grounded in reality and that's just too much. They could have easily just used something else that actually COULD exist and it wouldn't have made the whole thing so cheezy.
See, the cell-phone gimmick didn't diminish my enjoyment of the movie at all. A guy had half (exactly half) of his face burned off, FFS! But the cell phone made the "whole thing cheezy"!?
So a movie tramples some minutia that a minority of people happen to know more than average about, and suddenly they are convinced that the world gives a crap about how fake it is?
Perhaps it is the movies fault for not being immersive enough to rip you away from your tedious nit-picking. So be it, but I feel sorry for you because there was plenty to like.
Keep your eye on the ball here.
Kelly needs to cut staff but is obviously squeamish about letting people go. Her best bet is to let d-bag Doug do the dirty work, after which giving him the axe will not only be easy, but gratifying. Then Kelly can avail herself of the current worker surplus to re-staff her leaner, meaner team. Chances are she will be able to trade-up across the board.
If being nice is the sharpest tool in Stuart's collection, he will fail hard trying to squeeze the necessary increase in productivity out of his empire of pampered loyalists.
Sure, Doug is wasting time with his machinations. So is Stuart with his guru schtick. The question is, who is more valuable to Kelly?
Keeping Stuart around will pretty much guarantee Kelly a bunch of hassle trying to get him to crack the whip followed by a belated and likely messier round of lay-offs. Kelly will look like a "Stuart" to her boss -- too worried about people's feelings to get the damn job done.
One the other hand, keeping Doug gets her immediate goals met, which makes her bosses happy. If her underlings aren't happy, well these are tough times, suck it up. Her bosses don't expect her and her team to be happy. They expect her and her team to realize that, for now, there is nowhere else to go except the unemployment line.
Again, not how I wish things were, but . . .
At least his mumbo jumbo made some sense. I think I'd need to study that sentence and maybe diagram it to figure out what you're trying to see.
Were you trying to see "say" there?
That's hardly an argument at all, just like your, *cough*, insightful earlier comment. You just state something as fact, without argument. Then you criticize my remark. That's very particular.
Well I guess /. mod points don't work the way *you* think they should either.
Now, you're suggesting a people manager does a worse job. What gives you exactly the idea a back stabber can do a better job? He already has the disadvantage of ill-motivated employees. This is the point where people with such strong opinion usually fail to produce something of weight, to retreat in silence. I wouldn't hire you either. The job market is flooded. Why hire an ass producing air when you can get a non-ass? Note that he didn't have better results.
I didn't suggest either necessarily would do a better job. Whether the manager is Mr. Nice Guy or Mr. Jerk is usually immaterial to whether they are good at their jobs. Most people are not managers, and as such make their judgements based on their own blinkered priorities. Scroll down and read the post titled "Incredible". Then get back to work.
Well, 5 years down the road, the backstabber is also fired, while the "nice guy" found a job through one of his former coworkers who thought he was amazing and good to work with (the guy was good but also made him look better!) The backstabber, can't find work, and has no references.
In the same vein:
"Well, 5 years down the road, the backstabber is also fired, while the "nice guy" travelled back in time where he discovered that we was really a crown prince who had been banished to a bleak future by an evil witch, but was now able to claim his throne. The backstabber, can't find work, and is trampled by a handsome cab.
I mean, as long as we are coming up with scenarios that have no basis in reality, why not make them somewhat interesting?
For one, it's common knowledge that when someone does that, it is to hide their lower ability.
Most "common knowledge" is BS. This is exactly the kind of soothing mumbo-jumbo that losers use to keep themselves warm at night while their secret crushes are screwing assholes of "lower ability" on giant piles of sweaty $100 bills.
You don't need a people-pleasing guru when there is a surplus of unemployed talent.
Don't get me wrong, I would prefer it if the world worked the way it does in your wistful daydreams, but if very clearly does not.
The point is, what is characterized in the story is not "backstabbing". The assumption among many here is that being nice means being better at a job, which is certainly not true. If Mr. Nice Manager is coddling employees who are introducing viruses to the company network, for example, then Mr. Nice Manager is the danger, not Mr. Backstabbing Manager who outs the dangerously inept even when they are on "his side".
In this uncertain time after layoffs are announced, the remaining people will be nervous and perhaps looking to leave on their own terms.
Talk about a false premise!