I don't know what they do now, but yes, once upon a time payola was quite widespread. I presume that there's some sort of workaround to get away with it.
On a slightly different topic, I once got to go to a video game launch party. I've been having quite a lot of annoyance with the 10 point game review scale, and when I had a little bit too much time on my hands, I put in one sites review scores into a spreadsheet, and basically arrived at a bell curve with a median of 8 and average of... 7.5. It basically appeared like a normal distribution from 5-10, with the exception of a few outliers below 5. It practically meant that they had a 5 point scale, just that anything below 6 was just garbage. Now reason I mention this is because, it's quite widespread in the industry to give mediocre games a 7/10, where normally you'd think that seems good, if you're oblivious to its meaning, but reality is, most games getting a 7/10 are average at best.
Anyway, with that, the launch party; free food, free alcohol, nice hired venue, free copy of a special media edition of the game, if you were in the industry, as if you'd jeopardise access to these sorts of events by writing a poor review. After all, its an exercise in PR for them, if you pan the product, clearly they made a mistake in inviting you. So, that's one example for that industry. I'm sure there's some sorts of levers that the music industry has to entice radio stations to play their crap, as opposed to just about any other crap.
I think this time the pressure isn't from cost, rather the pressure for ethical clothing manufacture, which admittedly, has good intentions in trying to make manufacturers pay their workers more, but while that seems like a simple solution, to pay workers more, so is not employing people... Can't be exploiting your staff if you haven't got any...
The last 5 years have been quite stagnant, the last 2 have been a standstill. No point buying a new flagship, when they practically have no new technology, no better battery life, and just compete on meaningless specs to differentiate themselves.
The big thing to consider is, while it depreciates, you aren't really worse off until you sell it. So provided that it doesn't require any costly maintenance, or are required to replace it, it serves its purpose, while you realistically remain financially unchanged.
I'm starting to see that the only time it's worthwhile taking a loan, is when you don't need it. That's when banks/lenders give you better rates, after all you present no substantial risk to them. Whereas, if you can't afford the object, and you need a loan to pay for it, well, better off just living without it if you can.
The one that confounds me is, I have friends (mostly female ones) who take out loans to go on international holidays, probably can't afford them outright because, while they could have been building a career, they're out travelling, and while they're working, they're paying off a loan and not saving.
Actually here in Australia, these types of insurance policies tend to be relatively cheap. After all, someone with a collectible vintage car, that is worth a decent amount of money, they generally look after their pride and joy, garage it, and don't drive it a whole lot. The not driving to work bit is normal, and it's not meant to be a primary transportation vehicle.
I would argue, much less low level corruption, i.e. bribing your police, but at the upper levels, we probably have it just as much; they're just better at hiding it.
It's quite different here in Australia, cable/pay tv is not the norm here, most people have stuck with free-to-air tv. Streaming services, as a result are gaining in popularity, because they're a lot cheaper.
With that said, free to air audiences have dropped significantly, peak audiences are about half what they were from a decade ago (excluding sport). I really watch very little TV, and go months at a time without switching it on. I tend to find more interesting things published on youtube. While I'm not indicative of everyone, it is a trend that has been noticed. There was recent market research on TV viewing habits which found that baby boomers were the only age group to maintain their screen time, all others are in decline, especially current adults in their 20's.
This is spelling trouble for our TV networks, as their business model is significantly changing. One of the networks (there are only three free to air networks) here is close to going bankrupt.
Just about everything google has done has been with an intent of keeping users online so that they can be data mined and served ads. There may be a few reasons as to why this 'Instant Apps' is happening, I can only suspect, but possibly DRM is one issue, gaining control of what data gets collected in favour of alternative companies who don't own the platform (facebook, microsoft, snapchat, etc...), another maybe preventing things such as adblockers from working. After all, this will probably force google to be the bridge between app developers and users, or would google be the troll under the bridge...
I think you've just posted a concise history of the American automotive design. Joking aside, cars are one of the best examples of an iterative design process through experiential learning, rather than getting it right the first time. Cars are awash with examples of products going to market when they aren't quite ready. It still happens today.
Couldn't read the paper, due to paywall, but from the abstract, is there actually a scientific method involved at all?
I have the feeling that a lot of complaints on/. about the non technical posts mirror what's going on in the scientific community; in the quest of scientists maintaining their jobs they have to get funding, and resort to very similar tactics of popularism, rather than actual scientific endeavour.
I agree, I've read articles from a few years ago that based on spend, advertising on apple was most profitable, while advertising on android returned a net loss (i.e. don't recover the cost of advertising). This is where apple really got it right; premium product with premium customers. Android might have market share, but reality is, most of the users are worthless.
I suspect it's because the pendulum has swung the other way; activists of the 60's, 70's, 80's, are today's politicians, academics, journalists, writers and pundits, i.e. they form the establishment and have the benefit of not just political access but also the propagation of their ideologies through the media. They're collectively the group of people in positions of power, with something to hold on to and defend, which goes a long way to explain why all their idealism of decades past has very quickly been forgotten.
I think the term 'alt-right' is more so a pejorative term in an attempt to stem 'right wing' attitudes or conservatism going mainstream, that's why there's an incessant campaign to associate the attitudes with neo-nazis, white supremacists, and KKK. I wouldn't be surprised if there were provocateurs involved in the protests/riots, to give the media the footage they want. Not that it matters too much, the media have consistently proven themselves at being completely partisan with these issues, they're more propagandists today and have joined today's second estate rather than maintaining their fourth estate status.
And the problem is currently that the backroom collusion from within the parties means you have factions and faceless men in control, putting in their guys. Anyone who has talent for the role, in my mind won't be the backstabbing, conniving type of operator, unfortunately, it appears that the contest of party candidate selection essentially is a contest of who can be the biggest scoundrel of them all.
It has become so evident with parties whose core identity and values have been forgotten that they're filled with politicians who just don't care about the common good. They join their specific party because it's the politically expedient thing to do, not because of what it might stand for. Unfortunately a big part of the problem is also rusted on voters who still believe in party idealism.
We don't need a change of government as such, we need complete removal of our political 'class'. The problem we're facing is that the 'talent pool' is so shallow, all you see are career politicians with law degrees, who only know how to keep their respective snouts in the trough. They do not reflect general society, the system no longer serves its intended purpose. I'm not saying we need revolution, we need a change to get the right people in parliament.
I don't feel sorry for him at all. Turnbull only stands for his own ego. Anyone who believes that a goldman-sachs lawyer like turnbull has ever stood for anything honourable, well I have a harbour bridge to sell them...
As an Australian, us subjects really aren't bothered. It's entirely honorific and completely out of sight from regular life. We are our own country, we just happen to be part of the commonwealth, meaning the queen's head appears on our money. The one time in Australian political history where she was requested to intervene in a political situation was in 1975, and she either couldn't or wouldn't (not sure which exactly). All I can really say on the topic is, it does appear outdated and archaic today, to have a monarch, but with that said, the commonwealth has been successful and effective in establishing free societies, albeit that may be due to lessons learnt from the war of independence.
Actually, now that you make that analogy, it seems spot on. MS's approach has been to target 'enterprise' with their mobile products once it became clear the consumer attempt wasn't going anywhere (around 2013-2014). I've been quite sceptical about the strategy of targeting enterprise only, because the rise of the smartphone was decided by consumers, not enterprise. Browser wars appear to have gone in the same direction, while I'm purely an observer, it appears to me that even enterprise has been moving from IE/Edge purely because consumers, their staff, are so used to using something else. I'm now forced to use chrome at work (I prefer Opera though).
Yea, it's just the official end of mainstream support. Reality is WP8.1's last update was early to mid 2015. With this though, more apps will lose support and possibly stop working. While the OS worked quite well, third party support really dropped badly in the last couple of years, and from the position where it was, i.e. not very well supported to begin with, it just went dire for the platform.
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I don't know what they do now, but yes, once upon a time payola was quite widespread. I presume that there's some sort of workaround to get away with it.
On a slightly different topic, I once got to go to a video game launch party. I've been having quite a lot of annoyance with the 10 point game review scale, and when I had a little bit too much time on my hands, I put in one sites review scores into a spreadsheet, and basically arrived at a bell curve with a median of 8 and average of ... 7.5. It basically appeared like a normal distribution from 5-10, with the exception of a few outliers below 5. It practically meant that they had a 5 point scale, just that anything below 6 was just garbage. Now reason I mention this is because, it's quite widespread in the industry to give mediocre games a 7/10, where normally you'd think that seems good, if you're oblivious to its meaning, but reality is, most games getting a 7/10 are average at best.
Anyway, with that, the launch party; free food, free alcohol, nice hired venue, free copy of a special media edition of the game, if you were in the industry, as if you'd jeopardise access to these sorts of events by writing a poor review. After all, its an exercise in PR for them, if you pan the product, clearly they made a mistake in inviting you. So, that's one example for that industry. I'm sure there's some sorts of levers that the music industry has to entice radio stations to play their crap, as opposed to just about any other crap.
They won't get paid to play it...
I think this time the pressure isn't from cost, rather the pressure for ethical clothing manufacture, which admittedly, has good intentions in trying to make manufacturers pay their workers more, but while that seems like a simple solution, to pay workers more, so is not employing people... Can't be exploiting your staff if you haven't got any...
Assuming you hold the apple phone correctly!
The last 5 years have been quite stagnant, the last 2 have been a standstill. No point buying a new flagship, when they practically have no new technology, no better battery life, and just compete on meaningless specs to differentiate themselves.
The big thing to consider is, while it depreciates, you aren't really worse off until you sell it. So provided that it doesn't require any costly maintenance, or are required to replace it, it serves its purpose, while you realistically remain financially unchanged.
I'm starting to see that the only time it's worthwhile taking a loan, is when you don't need it. That's when banks/lenders give you better rates, after all you present no substantial risk to them. Whereas, if you can't afford the object, and you need a loan to pay for it, well, better off just living without it if you can.
The one that confounds me is, I have friends (mostly female ones) who take out loans to go on international holidays, probably can't afford them outright because, while they could have been building a career, they're out travelling, and while they're working, they're paying off a loan and not saving.
Actually here in Australia, these types of insurance policies tend to be relatively cheap. After all, someone with a collectible vintage car, that is worth a decent amount of money, they generally look after their pride and joy, garage it, and don't drive it a whole lot. The not driving to work bit is normal, and it's not meant to be a primary transportation vehicle.
I would argue, much less low level corruption, i.e. bribing your police, but at the upper levels, we probably have it just as much; they're just better at hiding it.
South park kind of touched on it a few years ago, but it was in the perspective of privacy.
Because that doesn't happen in the developed world...
It's quite different here in Australia, cable/pay tv is not the norm here, most people have stuck with free-to-air tv. Streaming services, as a result are gaining in popularity, because they're a lot cheaper.
With that said, free to air audiences have dropped significantly, peak audiences are about half what they were from a decade ago (excluding sport). I really watch very little TV, and go months at a time without switching it on. I tend to find more interesting things published on youtube. While I'm not indicative of everyone, it is a trend that has been noticed. There was recent market research on TV viewing habits which found that baby boomers were the only age group to maintain their screen time, all others are in decline, especially current adults in their 20's.
This is spelling trouble for our TV networks, as their business model is significantly changing. One of the networks (there are only three free to air networks) here is close to going bankrupt.
Just about everything google has done has been with an intent of keeping users online so that they can be data mined and served ads. There may be a few reasons as to why this 'Instant Apps' is happening, I can only suspect, but possibly DRM is one issue, gaining control of what data gets collected in favour of alternative companies who don't own the platform (facebook, microsoft, snapchat, etc...), another maybe preventing things such as adblockers from working. After all, this will probably force google to be the bridge between app developers and users, or would google be the troll under the bridge...
I think the truth behind that was that Russia's German scientists were better than the USA's German scientists!
Phrase more or less taken from "The Right Stuff".
I think you've just posted a concise history of the American automotive design. Joking aside, cars are one of the best examples of an iterative design process through experiential learning, rather than getting it right the first time. Cars are awash with examples of products going to market when they aren't quite ready. It still happens today.
Couldn't read the paper, due to paywall, but from the abstract, is there actually a scientific method involved at all?
I have the feeling that a lot of complaints on /. about the non technical posts mirror what's going on in the scientific community; in the quest of scientists maintaining their jobs they have to get funding, and resort to very similar tactics of popularism, rather than actual scientific endeavour.
I agree, I've read articles from a few years ago that based on spend, advertising on apple was most profitable, while advertising on android returned a net loss (i.e. don't recover the cost of advertising). This is where apple really got it right; premium product with premium customers. Android might have market share, but reality is, most of the users are worthless.
I suspect it's because the pendulum has swung the other way; activists of the 60's, 70's, 80's, are today's politicians, academics, journalists, writers and pundits, i.e. they form the establishment and have the benefit of not just political access but also the propagation of their ideologies through the media. They're collectively the group of people in positions of power, with something to hold on to and defend, which goes a long way to explain why all their idealism of decades past has very quickly been forgotten.
I think the term 'alt-right' is more so a pejorative term in an attempt to stem 'right wing' attitudes or conservatism going mainstream, that's why there's an incessant campaign to associate the attitudes with neo-nazis, white supremacists, and KKK. I wouldn't be surprised if there were provocateurs involved in the protests/riots, to give the media the footage they want. Not that it matters too much, the media have consistently proven themselves at being completely partisan with these issues, they're more propagandists today and have joined today's second estate rather than maintaining their fourth estate status.
In any case, culture wars never stop.
And the problem is currently that the backroom collusion from within the parties means you have factions and faceless men in control, putting in their guys. Anyone who has talent for the role, in my mind won't be the backstabbing, conniving type of operator, unfortunately, it appears that the contest of party candidate selection essentially is a contest of who can be the biggest scoundrel of them all.
It has become so evident with parties whose core identity and values have been forgotten that they're filled with politicians who just don't care about the common good. They join their specific party because it's the politically expedient thing to do, not because of what it might stand for. Unfortunately a big part of the problem is also rusted on voters who still believe in party idealism.
We don't need a change of government as such, we need complete removal of our political 'class'. The problem we're facing is that the 'talent pool' is so shallow, all you see are career politicians with law degrees, who only know how to keep their respective snouts in the trough. They do not reflect general society, the system no longer serves its intended purpose. I'm not saying we need revolution, we need a change to get the right people in parliament.
I don't feel sorry for him at all. Turnbull only stands for his own ego. Anyone who believes that a goldman-sachs lawyer like turnbull has ever stood for anything honourable, well I have a harbour bridge to sell them...
We don't actually. Our anthem was changed decades ago.
As an Australian, us subjects really aren't bothered. It's entirely honorific and completely out of sight from regular life. We are our own country, we just happen to be part of the commonwealth, meaning the queen's head appears on our money. The one time in Australian political history where she was requested to intervene in a political situation was in 1975, and she either couldn't or wouldn't (not sure which exactly). All I can really say on the topic is, it does appear outdated and archaic today, to have a monarch, but with that said, the commonwealth has been successful and effective in establishing free societies, albeit that may be due to lessons learnt from the war of independence.
Actually, now that you make that analogy, it seems spot on. MS's approach has been to target 'enterprise' with their mobile products once it became clear the consumer attempt wasn't going anywhere (around 2013-2014). I've been quite sceptical about the strategy of targeting enterprise only, because the rise of the smartphone was decided by consumers, not enterprise. Browser wars appear to have gone in the same direction, while I'm purely an observer, it appears to me that even enterprise has been moving from IE/Edge purely because consumers, their staff, are so used to using something else. I'm now forced to use chrome at work (I prefer Opera though).
Yea, it's just the official end of mainstream support. Reality is WP8.1's last update was early to mid 2015. With this though, more apps will lose support and possibly stop working. While the OS worked quite well, third party support really dropped badly in the last couple of years, and from the position where it was, i.e. not very well supported to begin with, it just went dire for the platform.