Back in the days of the BlackBerry Curve, they basically did something close enough to that. Unfortunately, once BlackBerry 10 came around, they totally forgot the importance of having a cheap-low-end even if its not profitable. You basically need those junk devices to build your platform's userbase to the level that people care about it enough to support your better devices.
Microsoft understood this back when they were more seriously pushing the various Windows Phone incarnations. Unfortunately, they failed to provide a compelling platform for anyone who wanted something more than "the cheap thing the phone store was offering for scraps." This kept things going for a while, and did result in a larger (if still unimpressive) userbase than BlackBerry 10 managed, but wasn't enough long-term.
Um... side projects aren't "jobs to qualify experience" when talking to HR.
For the right kind of company, they can certainly help. Especially if its a small company and/or startup that looks at you as an individual, not just as a name in a stack of resumes. But for the normal way you go through "the process" earlier in your career? I wish someone would have noticed.
And what sucks is that if you're not doing that on the job, taking classes or learning on your own means nothing. You have to have on the job experience to get a job.
This is something that really pissed me off early in my career. It didn't matter how much I learned/tinkered/grew on my own. My knowledge and ability was basically irrelevant unless I could qualify it by related job experience. This was even more frustrating at the time, because I had a stable job I didn't want to leave, but which wasn't giving me that "qualified" experience necessary to get the job I actually wanted.
Honestly, I don't see how VR could fail. It's a incredible feature for a lot of game (Try Elite Dangerous with a X52 joystick and I dare you to tell me otherwise).
Yes, its an incredible feature for Elite Dangerous with a good HOTAS setup. In fact, I don't really like playing that game without VR now that I've experienced it with VR.
The problem is that most other VR-enabled games feel like glorified tech demos, that I wouldn't really bother playing seriously if I weren't looking for something to use VR for.
I just hope that Valve/HTC and Facebook/Oculus are willing to bankroll VR for long enough for the rest of the content to catch up.
The Cisco-made "Wireless Business Gateway" one. And I'm referring to the device's web admin interface, which you likely rarely touch (but do use on occasion). I don't use my unit's WiFi either, but it still wants to broadcast a couple SSIDs "for the heck of it". (I manually disabled the internal SSIDs it sets up, and I had Comcast turn off the public'ish "xfinitywifi" SSID they knew about, but it still wants to broadcast "XFINITY" and "SSID-2.4", neither of which they acknowledge the existence of.)
And its interesting to see how different browsers handle this.
I have a cable modem with a web admin interface that's *extremely* slow to respond to any requests. It works fine via Firefox, if I'm very patient. Its totally unusable via Chrome. (Its Comcast's high-end "wireless business gateway" device, and something I'm basically stuck with if I want my current service package)
My first car, a Ford, seemed to get 3 recall notices every month. Basically, every wiring harness in the entire car was eventually going to get a recall notice. After a few years, I stopped getting those.
My second car, a Toyota, never got any recall notices. I don't know if its because they didn't issue any, or if they simply never made it to my mailing address (and were handled by the service center invisibly).
I've now had a Tesla for almost two years. The only recall notice I ever got was clearly a fleet-wide CYA, and not something about a real problem. In general, it seems like Tesla is so afraid of the potential appearance of certain issues, that they do issue fleet-wide recall notices for things other manufacturers wouldn't even pay attention to. (Basically, something bad was noticed on one car, and to avoid even the potential for risk, they decided to check all cars for that issue.) Of course, I also don't have "Rev A" of the car, so most teething issues were likely solved long before mine was built.
Except analog magnetic tape is one of those "intermediate shitty formats" that provided convenience in its day and bridged the time gap between the older "good" formats and the newer "good" formats.
And when I complain about such things, the usual reaction I get from people is something like... Haha! Why the heck are you even doing VLANs at home? I don't have any problems. Your use case doesn't matter, why should anyone waste time on it?
Seriously, I'm sick and tired of people saying such things. I do have multiple VLANs on my network, and you know what? For everything *except* SONOS, it actually works just fine. All I needed to do was run a few services on my router to make sure things connected (e.g. an mDNS daemon).
Don't even get me started on medium format digital prices either. They are just insane.
This is one important part that everyone else here is oblivious to, since they probably think that all photography derives from the 35mm format.
It is *much* easier to make a larger piece of film than it is to make a larger digital sensor. There are cameras that take film that is larger than 35mm.
Sure, at the 35mm level, you can probably argue that there's not much reason to bother with film on the quality/resolution front anymore. But the moment you go to medium/large format films and cameras, film can give you something that would probably cost the same as a small car if you tried to find a matching digital camera.
There are also a lot of interesting camera designs from over the years, in the world of medium format photography. None of these designs have digital equivalents.
That's why we need these companies to get to the point where they can diversify their product lines. So they can make normal cars with sane performance, while also having a dedicated sportscar line for bragging rights. It may not happen until Tesla's next-gen roadster, or projects like the Rimac Concept One turn into mass-production vehicles, but it'll hopefully happen someday.
They were also so smug about how Americans had their cars and fuel "unreasonably cheap," when what really happened is that Europeans just taxed their stuff by ridiculous amount making it unaffordable.
I wonder if this over-taxation was responsible for the diesel obsession.
Considering that everyone keeps acting like Flash is no longer required or relevant or should be cared about...
Oh wait, every other website across the ENTIRE INTERNET still seems to at least attempt to use Flash. Seriously, turn on Firefox's plugin prompting setting and just try browsing the web.
At least most of them no longer break if you are missing the plugin, or don't let it run. But they still try.
The only other large group of people I know using MacBooks are developers who wanted a desktop Unix that IT would be willing to support. With the loss of the function keys and the abysmal max memory spec, the new MacBook Pros are worthless for that crowd. They might be pushed towards Linux, but with Microsoft starting to push Linux dev tools into Windows, the "IT supported" requirement probably means they'll hook back to Windows instead.
Its not just IT... Its also commercial software vendors who make things we all sometimes need to use, even if not as our primary tools. Regardless, I've often felt that this is a surprisingly large/significant market for Apple products that Apple themselves seems willfully ignorant of. I've even felt that the growth of this market was at the significant expense of desktop Linux. Heck, come out to Silicon Valley sometime and just look at how large a percentage of software developers are using Apple laptops.
Almost makes me feel back in the 00's when companies made real things and added real value and then were rewarded appropriately.
I have no idea what the hell is going on with the markets anymore. I was honestly expect Tesla stock to drop for *cynical wall st reasons*
-K
Back then, it was probably just tech companies still making real things. Everything else had probably already been shipped overseas. Of course soon after, it seems like all the big tech companies just spun-off, outsourced, or divested their "actually building products" divisions to transform themselves into nebulous "enterprise solutions providers."
While I wouldn't attribute the form letter response to any intentional malice (likely just a keyword match from a script), it does highlight something politicians have been doing in their stump speeches for a while that really pisses me off.
They all act like "offshoring" and "foreigners taking American jobs" are problems exclusive to the manufacturing sector, and the solution is "retraining" and "more higher education."
The whole problem of IT-sector workers being replaced simply doesn't fit this mold. These people are already highly trained, already have that education, and yet their jobs are still leaving*.
(* though at least its sometimes cyclical, and its not like their entire career field and supporting infrastructure has left the country, but those cycles can still be painful)
Best course of action --- ask female computer science people (and I don't mean a person who brought Microsoft Bob to an unsuspecting world, but real female computer science people) what obstacles they faced and what would they do to remove them.
I also wish that when people did ask real female CS people for commentary, or to show as representatives of their fields in a public forum, they actually did that. Far too often it seems like they hold up project managers and various support roles as shining examples of "women in tech", rather than actual software developers.
I have, but it was 12 hours into a hurricane-induced power outage.
Regardless, the whole "gov't mandated safety-critical reliability" crap is the only reason, IMHO, to actually have a land line these days. If you don't get that bit, then why even bother in the first place?
I'm still wondering what the Android-land replacement for the Q10 is. My wife is still using a Q10, and doesn't really know what to switch to. And yes, she hates typing on touchscreens. I personally switched from the Passport to the Priv, but the Priv is a bit to big for her (and the battery would likely die on her too quickly).
System requirements (and boot time) aside, the BB10 incarnation of QNX actually ran really well. (I see the "Tablet OS" as more of a tech demonstrator, that didn't really live long once BB10 was out.)
The problem is that they stopped putting real effort into marketing the devices (and designing new ones) about 6 months post-launch, and just coasted on inertia (and existing plans, half of them canceled) since. Once those existing projects reached completion, and the momentum fell off... well here we are.
I switched to the Priv (Android) as a gentle introduction to a reality I'd ultimately have to accept. Of course I immediately noticed that: - The Passport got better cellular reception - The Passport had much better battery life - The Passport was much better at multitasking - The Passport never got laggy
However, the Priv ran all the "official" versions of the software everyone wants you to be running these days... and at the end of the day, that's unfortunately all that matters. (Yes, I'm aware of the BB10 Android Runtime, but it became increasingly unusable as Google Play service dependencies increased, plus keeping things updated was a pain.)
Activity trackers are not a useful tool for increasing your amount of regular physical activity. That's not really what they're designed for. They are, however, a useful tool for quantitatively bragging about your physical activity on Twitter and Facebook:-)
Of course now you need permission from the SJWs and the companies running those services but WTF, it's not the gubermint, right?
Actually, you don't... There are enough ways to get your word out, that pissing off SJWs may add a lot of noise (and maybe some difficulty), but it won't deny you a platform all-together.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the days of the BlackBerry Curve, they basically did something close enough to that. Unfortunately, once BlackBerry 10 came around, they totally forgot the importance of having a cheap-low-end even if its not profitable. You basically need those junk devices to build your platform's userbase to the level that people care about it enough to support your better devices.
Microsoft understood this back when they were more seriously pushing the various Windows Phone incarnations. Unfortunately, they failed to provide a compelling platform for anyone who wanted something more than "the cheap thing the phone store was offering for scraps." This kept things going for a while, and did result in a larger (if still unimpressive) userbase than BlackBerry 10 managed, but wasn't enough long-term.
Um... side projects aren't "jobs to qualify experience" when talking to HR.
For the right kind of company, they can certainly help. Especially if its a small company and/or startup that looks at you as an individual, not just as a name in a stack of resumes. But for the normal way you go through "the process" earlier in your career? I wish someone would have noticed.
And what sucks is that if you're not doing that on the job, taking classes or learning on your own means nothing. You have to have on the job experience to get a job.
This is something that really pissed me off early in my career. It didn't matter how much I learned/tinkered/grew on my own. My knowledge and ability was basically irrelevant unless I could qualify it by related job experience. This was even more frustrating at the time, because I had a stable job I didn't want to leave, but which wasn't giving me that "qualified" experience necessary to get the job I actually wanted.
Honestly, I don't see how VR could fail. It's a incredible feature for a lot of game (Try Elite Dangerous with a X52 joystick and I dare you to tell me otherwise).
Yes, its an incredible feature for Elite Dangerous with a good HOTAS setup. In fact, I don't really like playing that game without VR now that I've experienced it with VR.
The problem is that most other VR-enabled games feel like glorified tech demos, that I wouldn't really bother playing seriously if I weren't looking for something to use VR for.
I just hope that Valve/HTC and Facebook/Oculus are willing to bankroll VR for long enough for the rest of the content to catch up.
The Cisco-made "Wireless Business Gateway" one. And I'm referring to the device's web admin interface, which you likely rarely touch (but do use on occasion). I don't use my unit's WiFi either, but it still wants to broadcast a couple SSIDs "for the heck of it". (I manually disabled the internal SSIDs it sets up, and I had Comcast turn off the public'ish "xfinitywifi" SSID they knew about, but it still wants to broadcast "XFINITY" and "SSID-2.4", neither of which they acknowledge the existence of.)
And its interesting to see how different browsers handle this.
I have a cable modem with a web admin interface that's *extremely* slow to respond to any requests. It works fine via Firefox, if I'm very patient. Its totally unusable via Chrome.
(Its Comcast's high-end "wireless business gateway" device, and something I'm basically stuck with if I want my current service package)
My first car, a Ford, seemed to get 3 recall notices every month. Basically, every wiring harness in the entire car was eventually going to get a recall notice. After a few years, I stopped getting those.
My second car, a Toyota, never got any recall notices. I don't know if its because they didn't issue any, or if they simply never made it to my mailing address (and were handled by the service center invisibly).
I've now had a Tesla for almost two years. The only recall notice I ever got was clearly a fleet-wide CYA, and not something about a real problem. In general, it seems like Tesla is so afraid of the potential appearance of certain issues, that they do issue fleet-wide recall notices for things other manufacturers wouldn't even pay attention to. (Basically, something bad was noticed on one car, and to avoid even the potential for risk, they decided to check all cars for that issue.) Of course, I also don't have "Rev A" of the car, so most teething issues were likely solved long before mine was built.
And somehow, those five people always have enough time to be available to poo-poo on any Internet thread discussing EVs :-)
Except analog magnetic tape is one of those "intermediate shitty formats" that provided convenience in its day and bridged the time gap between the older "good" formats and the newer "good" formats.
And when I complain about such things, the usual reaction I get from people is something like... Haha! Why the heck are you even doing VLANs at home? I don't have any problems. Your use case doesn't matter, why should anyone waste time on it?
Seriously, I'm sick and tired of people saying such things. I do have multiple VLANs on my network, and you know what? For everything *except* SONOS, it actually works just fine. All I needed to do was run a few services on my router to make sure things connected (e.g. an mDNS daemon).
Don't even get me started on medium format digital prices either. They are just insane.
This is one important part that everyone else here is oblivious to, since they probably think that all photography derives from the 35mm format.
It is *much* easier to make a larger piece of film than it is to make a larger digital sensor.
There are cameras that take film that is larger than 35mm.
Sure, at the 35mm level, you can probably argue that there's not much reason to bother with film on the quality/resolution front anymore. But the moment you go to medium/large format films and cameras, film can give you something that would probably cost the same as a small car if you tried to find a matching digital camera.
There are also a lot of interesting camera designs from over the years, in the world of medium format photography. None of these designs have digital equivalents.
That's why we need these companies to get to the point where they can diversify their product lines. So they can make normal cars with sane performance, while also having a dedicated sportscar line for bragging rights. It may not happen until Tesla's next-gen roadster, or projects like the Rimac Concept One turn into mass-production vehicles, but it'll hopefully happen someday.
They were also so smug about how Americans had their cars and fuel "unreasonably cheap," when what really happened is that Europeans just taxed their stuff by ridiculous amount making it unaffordable.
I wonder if this over-taxation was responsible for the diesel obsession.
Considering that everyone keeps acting like Flash is no longer required or relevant or should be cared about...
Oh wait, every other website across the ENTIRE INTERNET still seems to at least attempt to use Flash. Seriously, turn on Firefox's plugin prompting setting and just try browsing the web.
At least most of them no longer break if you are missing the plugin, or don't let it run. But they still try.
The only other large group of people I know using MacBooks are developers who wanted a desktop Unix that IT would be willing to support. With the loss of the function keys and the abysmal max memory spec, the new MacBook Pros are worthless for that crowd. They might be pushed towards Linux, but with Microsoft starting to push Linux dev tools into Windows, the "IT supported" requirement probably means they'll hook back to Windows instead.
Its not just IT... Its also commercial software vendors who make things we all sometimes need to use, even if not as our primary tools.
Regardless, I've often felt that this is a surprisingly large/significant market for Apple products that Apple themselves seems willfully ignorant of. I've even felt that the growth of this market was at the significant expense of desktop Linux. Heck, come out to Silicon Valley sometime and just look at how large a percentage of software developers are using Apple laptops.
Almost makes me feel back in the 00's when companies made real things and added real value and then were rewarded appropriately.
I have no idea what the hell is going on with the markets anymore. I was honestly expect Tesla stock to drop for *cynical wall st reasons*
-K
Back then, it was probably just tech companies still making real things. Everything else had probably already been shipped overseas.
Of course soon after, it seems like all the big tech companies just spun-off, outsourced, or divested their "actually building products" divisions to transform themselves into nebulous "enterprise solutions providers."
Only thing crazier, would be to put balloons around a lander and let it bounce to a landing. Could you even imaging such a thing?
Ahh yes, Pathfinder, Spirit, and Opportunity :-)
While I wouldn't attribute the form letter response to any intentional malice (likely just a keyword match from a script), it does highlight something politicians have been doing in their stump speeches for a while that really pisses me off.
They all act like "offshoring" and "foreigners taking American jobs" are problems exclusive to the manufacturing sector, and the solution is "retraining" and "more higher education."
The whole problem of IT-sector workers being replaced simply doesn't fit this mold. These people are already highly trained, already have that education, and yet their jobs are still leaving*.
(* though at least its sometimes cyclical, and its not like their entire career field and supporting infrastructure has left the country, but those cycles can still be painful)
Best course of action --- ask female computer science people (and I don't mean a person who brought Microsoft Bob to an unsuspecting world, but real female computer science people) what obstacles they faced and what would they do to remove them.
I also wish that when people did ask real female CS people for commentary, or to show as representatives of their fields in a public forum, they actually did that. Far too often it seems like they hold up project managers and various support roles as shining examples of "women in tech", rather than actual software developers.
I have, but it was 12 hours into a hurricane-induced power outage.
Regardless, the whole "gov't mandated safety-critical reliability" crap is the only reason, IMHO, to actually have a land line these days. If you don't get that bit, then why even bother in the first place?
I'm still wondering what the Android-land replacement for the Q10 is.
My wife is still using a Q10, and doesn't really know what to switch to. And yes, she hates typing on touchscreens.
I personally switched from the Passport to the Priv, but the Priv is a bit to big for her (and the battery would likely die on her too quickly).
System requirements (and boot time) aside, the BB10 incarnation of QNX actually ran really well.
(I see the "Tablet OS" as more of a tech demonstrator, that didn't really live long once BB10 was out.)
The problem is that they stopped putting real effort into marketing the devices (and designing new ones) about 6 months post-launch, and just coasted on inertia (and existing plans, half of them canceled) since. Once those existing projects reached completion, and the momentum fell off... well here we are.
I switched to the Priv (Android) as a gentle introduction to a reality I'd ultimately have to accept. Of course I immediately noticed that:
- The Passport got better cellular reception
- The Passport had much better battery life
- The Passport was much better at multitasking
- The Passport never got laggy
However, the Priv ran all the "official" versions of the software everyone wants you to be running these days... and at the end of the day, that's unfortunately all that matters.
(Yes, I'm aware of the BB10 Android Runtime, but it became increasingly unusable as Google Play service dependencies increased, plus keeping things updated was a pain.)
Activity trackers are not a useful tool for increasing your amount of regular physical activity. That's not really what they're designed for. :-)
They are, however, a useful tool for quantitatively bragging about your physical activity on Twitter and Facebook
Of course now you need permission from the SJWs and the companies running those services but WTF, it's not the gubermint, right?
Actually, you don't... There are enough ways to get your word out, that pissing off SJWs may add a lot of noise (and maybe some difficulty), but it won't deny you a platform all-together.