"Only 12% percent responded that their organizations have a high level of competency with agile practices across the organization, and only 4% report that agile practices are enabling greater adaptability to market conditions.."
Look hi. I'm not going to comment about whether the Latest Greatest Fully-Buzzword-Compliant Management Trend is actually backed by reproduceable research or anything. I'm just going to comment about maths. If 12% of your respondents report a high level of competency in a system, and 4% report that that system is actually doing any good whatsoever... If we assume roughly equal levels of response to both questions then we have a system that, when implemented at "a high level of competency" self-reports that system as having a positive effect roughly 1 time in 3. Random chance should have a positive effect 1 time in 2. And self-reported success rates run notoriously high...
You know they're talking about Apple, right? The company whose mission statement is essentially "make stuff for people to stare at while walking instead of paying attention to their surroundings"?
"These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC,"
And so it is important to note, as difficult as it has been for legitimate commenters, that the 180,000-plus comments that they have received, as of this writing, are presumably a small fraction of the actual number of people who attempted to comment on the issue.
"what is so special and different about Apple's electronics that many Apple users would never dream of switching to a non-Apple product."
Asking "what makes them so special you would use them in the first place" is a very different question than "what makes them so special you would never switch away." Many - though by no means all, or even a majority of - Apple users stay with Apple out of pure momentum; Apple does a very good job of both a) making it very easy to upgrade from one Apple product to the next and take your stuff with you, and b) making it very hard to get your stuff out again if you do choose to leave the brand.
Simple. The existing user is happy if the software does not change, and continues to do what they want it to do without them having to learn anything new. They don't care about new features, they just want it to keep doing the old ones in the same way. The company makes money if their software changes enough over time that people have to keep buying new copies. There are a bunch of different ways to accomplish this (e.g. changing file formats - aka Officescation - so that earlier versions can't cope with the default file format of newer versions) but they want to make the minimum changes necessary to sell the software again, so they don't waste resources fixing things that aren't broke.
No one wants to make it easier to use for new users. There's no money in it. Old users will find the old interface - and absolutely nothing else - to be easy to use, because they already know how it works. New users are stuck solving a problem, and are forced to learn something no matter what. They don't have the choice, and will spend whatever time is necessary to solve their problem, in the process becoming the next round of "now I know how to make it work; just don't touch anything" voters. In the meantime, the harder the system was to learn, the more likely that the people invested in it will want to leverage their existing knowledge rather than learn a new system, so the more likely they are to become "loyal" customers.
Seriously. Just google "wordstar keybindings" if you don't believe me.
That distilling all the reviews down to a single number removed any actual useful commentary they had, and just encourages people to only watch movies that people have already watched. Which in turn encourages the industry to keep producing movies that are identical to the ones we have already watched. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was _ruining_ the industry, but I could buy the argument that it had a negative effect.
Any such validity is instantly negated, however, by the fact that we're talking about the guy who made "Bambi vs Godzilla 2: the DCification." Do you know what is destroying your industry sir? You. Personally. One movie at a time.
I've had this conversation with a number of content creators who are switching to video (and audio podcasts.) The most common complaint I hear from people about text content switching to video is that it takes more effort and more time to consume video; the equivalent of a 20-minute video takes maybe 5-minutes to read as text, and it's easier to read an article piecemeal around other activity (work). The video tends to consume 20 minutes straight. On the other hand, the most common reason I'm given by creators for switching to video is that it takes less effort to create. There's an overhead, of course, while you first get your technology sorted out, and _professional_ quality video requires editing, etc., but _amateur_ video takes essentially as long to create as it does to watch. Writing takes effort, and proofreading, and thought to distil your ideas down to coherent sentences.
(I am certain that there are exceptions to this - people who write text in a single pass as fast as they can type, and/or people who agonise over the scripts of their amateur video for hours. I'm not saying this is _always_ true, I'm describing a general trend only among those half a dozen or so authors I've spoken to, and spoken to their audiences. I'd be interested to hear about others' experiences.)
So what I'm saying is, video is the lazier option - less effort for me to create, more effort for you to consume. That being the case, it's almost certainly the wave of the future for "creators" on Facebook.
"The first time i saw an Apple watch on someone's wrist i honestly thought they were wearing an ironic throwback time piece. Then i realized they were wearing an expensive, highly redundant, cheap looking piece of trash."
I'm not really their market, not wearing a watch or having any use for wearables, but do you really think there's much overlap between the group of people who will buy a high-tech smart watch, and the group of people who would buy technology of any sort from a company called Fossil?
To get a "free"degree in a German university, a US-educated high school graduate would have to be able to pass a course in a university system that hasn't yet been devalued by a pay-for-degrees mentality. So not likely, really.
Kill competitors early by hiring them yourself, then jerking them around until they die. When you're big and they're small, you're bound to have better lawyers.
Job security in IT isn't terrible as it is, but if you make it so everyone writes their own code, instead of hiring professionals? I'll be getting paid to fix people's bugs for forever and a day, and the people I'll be rescuing will be genuinely happy with contract negotiations along the lines of "sure, yeah, take whatever you want; just don't make me go back in there again."
There is a reason I quite happily pay an expert to do my plumbing. Take whatever you want man; just don't make me go back in there again.
Idiots who are rich enough to afford the ticket will probably take it as a badge of honor, and/or vie for getting pulled over in the weirdest places.
I remember when they put breathalyzers in Australian pubs so people could check if they were legal to drive home... and then had to take them out again when people started having contests to see who could blow the highest BA levels before passing out.
Slashdot Mirror
Study Funded and Performed by Major Graphics Card Manufacturer Finds You Should Buy A New More-Expensive Graphics Card.
Yeah, that's definitely shocking.
"Only 12% percent responded that their organizations have a high level of competency with agile practices across the organization, and only 4% report that agile practices are enabling greater adaptability to market conditions.."
Look hi. I'm not going to comment about whether the Latest Greatest Fully-Buzzword-Compliant Management Trend is actually backed by reproduceable research or anything. I'm just going to comment about maths. If 12% of your respondents report a high level of competency in a system, and 4% report that that system is actually doing any good whatsoever... If we assume roughly equal levels of response to both questions then we have a system that, when implemented at "a high level of competency" self-reports that system as having a positive effect roughly 1 time in 3. Random chance should have a positive effect 1 time in 2. And self-reported success rates run notoriously high...
You know they're talking about Apple, right? The company whose mission statement is essentially "make stuff for people to stare at while walking instead of paying attention to their surroundings"?
"These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC,"
And so it is important to note, as difficult as it has been for legitimate commenters, that the 180,000-plus comments that they have received, as of this writing, are presumably a small fraction of the actual number of people who attempted to comment on the issue.
"what is so special and different about Apple's electronics that many Apple users would never dream of switching to a non-Apple product."
Asking "what makes them so special you would use them in the first place" is a very different question than "what makes them so special you would never switch away." Many - though by no means all, or even a majority of - Apple users stay with Apple out of pure momentum; Apple does a very good job of both a) making it very easy to upgrade from one Apple product to the next and take your stuff with you, and b) making it very hard to get your stuff out again if you do choose to leave the brand.
Simple. The existing user is happy if the software does not change, and continues to do what they want it to do without them having to learn anything new. They don't care about new features, they just want it to keep doing the old ones in the same way. The company makes money if their software changes enough over time that people have to keep buying new copies. There are a bunch of different ways to accomplish this (e.g. changing file formats - aka Officescation - so that earlier versions can't cope with the default file format of newer versions) but they want to make the minimum changes necessary to sell the software again, so they don't waste resources fixing things that aren't broke.
No one wants to make it easier to use for new users. There's no money in it. Old users will find the old interface - and absolutely nothing else - to be easy to use, because they already know how it works. New users are stuck solving a problem, and are forced to learn something no matter what. They don't have the choice, and will spend whatever time is necessary to solve their problem, in the process becoming the next round of "now I know how to make it work; just don't touch anything" voters. In the meantime, the harder the system was to learn, the more likely that the people invested in it will want to leverage their existing knowledge rather than learn a new system, so the more likely they are to become "loyal" customers.
Seriously. Just google "wordstar keybindings" if you don't believe me.
(This post was written in emacs. I rest my case.)
That distilling all the reviews down to a single number removed any actual useful commentary they had, and just encourages people to only watch movies that people have already watched. Which in turn encourages the industry to keep producing movies that are identical to the ones we have already watched. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was _ruining_ the industry, but I could buy the argument that it had a negative effect.
Any such validity is instantly negated, however, by the fact that we're talking about the guy who made "Bambi vs Godzilla 2: the DCification." Do you know what is destroying your industry sir? You. Personally. One movie at a time.
Well, if you refuse to sufficiently fund your state schools then it turns out they start acting like for-profit enterprises...
...registered the center of the bar as a Pokestop.
...to the same 9 and a half million users. Well done!
I've had this conversation with a number of content creators who are switching to video (and audio podcasts.) The most common complaint I hear from people about text content switching to video is that it takes more effort and more time to consume video; the equivalent of a 20-minute video takes maybe 5-minutes to read as text, and it's easier to read an article piecemeal around other activity (work). The video tends to consume 20 minutes straight. On the other hand, the most common reason I'm given by creators for switching to video is that it takes less effort to create. There's an overhead, of course, while you first get your technology sorted out, and _professional_ quality video requires editing, etc., but _amateur_ video takes essentially as long to create as it does to watch. Writing takes effort, and proofreading, and thought to distil your ideas down to coherent sentences.
(I am certain that there are exceptions to this - people who write text in a single pass as fast as they can type, and/or people who agonise over the scripts of their amateur video for hours. I'm not saying this is _always_ true, I'm describing a general trend only among those half a dozen or so authors I've spoken to, and spoken to their audiences. I'd be interested to hear about others' experiences.)
So what I'm saying is, video is the lazier option - less effort for me to create, more effort for you to consume. That being the case, it's almost certainly the wave of the future for "creators" on Facebook.
Stamp-sized SSDs; that's awesome!
What's a stamp?
Precisely. Do they list all the things touted as "game-changing" that turned out to be toys?
"The first time i saw an Apple watch on someone's wrist i honestly thought they were wearing an ironic throwback time piece. Then i realized they were wearing an expensive, highly redundant, cheap looking piece of trash."
Yeah, but at least it was still ironic...
I'm not really their market, not wearing a watch or having any use for wearables, but do you really think there's much overlap between the group of people who will buy a high-tech smart watch, and the group of people who would buy technology of any sort from a company called Fossil?
"provides better visibility"
Then what idiot ad company exec came up with "Vision Zero" as the name?
To get a "free"degree in a German university, a US-educated high school graduate would have to be able to pass a course in a university system that hasn't yet been devalued by a pay-for-degrees mentality. So not likely, really.
Kill competitors early by hiring them yourself, then jerking them around until they die. When you're big and they're small, you're bound to have better lawyers.
Boy, that'd be embarassing...
Job security in IT isn't terrible as it is, but if you make it so everyone writes their own code, instead of hiring professionals? I'll be getting paid to fix people's bugs for forever and a day, and the people I'll be rescuing will be genuinely happy with contract negotiations along the lines of "sure, yeah, take whatever you want; just don't make me go back in there again."
There is a reason I quite happily pay an expert to do my plumbing. Take whatever you want man; just don't make me go back in there again.
Two words: Crystal Skull.
Yeah but... imagine the harm to Sony's reputation if an unreleased M. Night movie got out...
Elizabeth Moon. Someone's apparently been reading it.
Good book, by the way.
Don't be silly; the internet has no shame.
3.2 seconds.
Idiots who are rich enough to afford the ticket will probably take it as a badge of honor, and/or vie for getting pulled over in the weirdest places.
I remember when they put breathalyzers in Australian pubs so people could check if they were legal to drive home... and then had to take them out again when people started having contests to see who could blow the highest BA levels before passing out.