If you have the leverage to do it (seniority, centrality to key projects, etc.) you might be able to parlay the conflict.
"I've had several conflictual interactions with so-and-so recently and I'm worried that there is a power struggle emerging about key decisions. I'd like to nip this in the bud so that we can all get on with our work. To me, this speaks to ambiguous responsibilities and hierarchy, and I wonder if this is going to grow as an issue. For this reason and on the strength of my importance to what we're going, I think it would help to promote me so that the difference in seniority is clear, decisions have a single point of signoff, and someone is clearly accountable—i.e. me, since I take that responsibility seriously already. Think it over, but based on what's been going on, I think it would be best for the project/department/company if my title was increased to ___ and my current responsibility set were reiterated formally to the group, to stop this kind of confusion from turning into an issue that slows us down."
That only works if you are in a position with the rest of your co-workers and your management to make the claim, which—based on your question—I'm guessing your'e not. But if you are, do it and take the promotion, then you get to tell this person where to go and what to do going forward.
I should add—you have probably already screwed yourself over.
The right time to hit fan with shit is the FIRST time an incident happens. Show that you're worth a lot, and you know your worth, and you won't stand for it.
By waiting until it's a whole narrative and you're posting to Slashdot, when you do go to management about it, they're going to see you as someone that can't solve your own problems and lets them fester in secret and grow, then brings them up the chain when they're too big for you to solve. This is not a desirable characteristic in an employee.
Live and learn.
Next job, the first time someone fucks with you, tell them in no uncertain terms, "Unless you somehow get promoted ahead of me, you are NOT my manager and I won't stand for that shit. This is a boundary. I'm drawing it right now. Cross it and it'll be you or me around here."
Then, immediately tell your manager, "I just had a bad experience with X. They did Y which I found to be unacceptable and not conducive to my work. I set a boundary. It was conflictual. I told them that if they do it again, this will be a significant issue. I'm not leaving this on your plate or anything, but I did want you to be aware that that happened, and that that's what I said."
Raise hell with him/her and with management about him/her. Be ANGRY. Say you'll walk.
And then, if you have to, do it.
I speak from experience in my past. You do NOT want to go down the road of trying to "make it better in a non-confrontational way." Do you know what that makes you? A weakling. A loser. Someone who has to tiptoe around. Someone who spends too much time thinking strategically about how to get from mundane point A to mundane point B without experiencing problems.
Your productivity will fall. Your self-esteem will collapse. And you will find that you also enable the behavior, and it gets worse, and then worse again.
You're already a victim, and you're letting yourself stay one. Don't make yourself a target, too.
I know the whole schtick about "it's not that easy," and finances and economic realities and justice and whatever else. Used to be there, too.
The fact is, you will regret it in the end. All of the consequences you are hoping to avoid will happen, because you will lose the respect of your co-workers, your bos(ses), and you will lose your own productivity. Long term, you have one choice: confront or not. And not confronting is a SURE loss (again, long term). If you don't confront, WILL be out of a job eventually, you WILL find that you have been made worse for it with respect to your ability to do the next job.
If you confront and raise hell, you have a CHANCE of coming out of things intact. A chance may seem like a risk you don't want to take. But the other way, losing is a certainty.
So accept the hard truth that someone has decided to fuck you over, accept the hard truth that unless you metaphorically punch them in the face they WILL continue to do it and will intensify the behavior, and then grow a backbone and take your best shot back. Even if you lose that way, at least you took a shot. You didn't sit there like a weenie (which I did for far too long) and take it, then whine like a little girl, lose your self respect, and then find out that that's what everyone thinks of you and that's why you got let go despite taking shit like a hero. You're nobody's hero if you take shit. Management does not want employees that take shit.
I have 2TB SSD storage inside my MBP 17" and am fighting the temptation to back one of them to a spinner go to 3TB—mainly because I don't want to invest in installing more parts in a seven-year-old machine and can't stand the slowness of spinning hard drives.
When I'm in my home office, I am regularly plugged in to all three USB ports (and one of them leads straight to an 18-port USB hub that has about half the ports full at any time).
You can't even carry 3TB with you on a current MBP, under any circumstances, not to mention that you are severely overcharged for the storage that you do buy. And while I realize that it's still possible to use the USB peripherals, the thought of *more* cord spaghetti in adapter form is not appealing to me, and neither is the much more fragile set of smaller connectors anchoring so many devices. I am very suspicious that I would see the effects of the tiny-connector robustness in my uptimes or data integrity.
And I already use one external monitor in addition to my 17" screen, and I'm equally hesitant to investigate solutions that would push me to sit a second external monitor on my desktop and try to drive it, etc. but at my at 13" and 15" are just too small for comfort, to use all those pixels for what I need to use them for.
Maybe I'm an edge case. Maybe I'm "picky" as some people hint. But the fact is that "Pro" designations aren't just about specs, they're about flexibility and the long tail of different kinds of productivity that "professionals" engage in. Pro gear isn't sleek and elegant. Pro gear is powerful and above all flexible with high longevity so that investments can be amortized.
So the fact is that even if Apple added the USB ports back in, if that's all they did, I wouldn't be all that excited. It's just a different mindset and strategy at Apple than it used to be, big picture.
However, if they released tomorrow a 17" or 19" clamshell that had multiple internal SATA bays, RAM to 32 or 64GB, multiple full-sized USB ports along with an SAS port, and a renewed their commitment to some of their "professional" application lines, I'd pay $5-$10k for it happily.
They won't sell me one. That's their business decision to make, but then they're stuck worrying when a lot of people like me (and I'm far from the only one, in my circles there are a lot of people asking everyone to share what they buy next) go where they can get the work tools that they prefer, whether you call that a want or a need.
I just don't have the time or the inclination to fuck around with the current MBP products. I see a million roadblocks and stumbling points that I just don't want to deal with. I have other things to do.
The market has changed. It's not nearly as lucrative out there any longer to sell your team that develops and deploys bespoke solutions in mid-sized environments where people used to deploy and develop. This stuff is now typically done out-of-house through cloud/SaaS providers, often with a mix of turnkey and in-house tweaks. Since I'm not that interested in being anyone's staff monkey, and I'm not that interested in app development for mobile, nor in starting my own SaaS solution (though I've thought about it a couple of times), I've moved on to other things. I'm at an age in life where I want to earn based on what I enjoy working on in environments that I enjoy the work. Happily I have the CV to do that.
But it might well mean that I no longer get to play inside Mac OS in the future.
I don't want to put together a list of applications and conflicts because that will obscure the forest for the trees. But your case is emblematic of what I now deal with in Mac OS, too—and many other pros, besides.
I was 17 years on Linux and Solaris before that. I wrote a pile of books about *nix, founded a software company in *nix space, and so on. It was no small thing for me to switch to Apple.
I did it because it saved me bucketloads of time. All those annoyances of the sort that you describe weren't there in Mac OS in the late '00s, by and large. I gave it a try based on someone's suggestion and after that each time I hit a conflict or a hiccup and needed a workaround in Linux, I would find that I could do the same thing in Mac OS without having to fuck with it. I started using my "test" Mac OS system more and more because I wanted something done in the next 10 minutes, not in some unknown number of irritating hours.
Eventually I realized that I was spending >50% of my time performing tasks in Mac OS and that led me to purchase a shiny new Macbook Pro and decommission my Linux systems. There was a learning curve, but for a good 3-5 years, I was more productive on Mac OS than I'd ever been before.
And then the current epoch began. There's no obvious threshold moment at which "it all started," but at the start of 2017 I can say that there is an awful lot of "workaround crap" and booting now into a Windows virtual machine so that I can just get things done quickly. And the 17" Macbook Pro is starting to be flaky (the dreaded graphics chip problem in the 2010 unibody series) yet I can't see myself investing in another Apple computer given the current state of things.
So—to my shock after decades spent as a Linux evangelist—it may be time to go to Windows. Under new leadership, Windows seems to be headed in better directions, while Mac OS looks to be descending into the swamp.
I think you're probably right about that. It rings true and reflects typical human limitations. He's focused on what he knows, and has blind spots in what he doesn't know as well.
Except that the abandonment of larger displays and many ports makes their new hardware unsuitable for development compared to old hardware, and they don't have any plans for new hardware that is developer-friendly.
For me it wasn't about intuitiveness, it was about the lack of conflicts.
If you bought all Apple, you didn't need "workarounds." Versioning issues, compatibility issues, conflicts between apps and/or devices, weird workflow and hardware chains to get information from one place to another. Linux got worse and worse in that regard until I finally threw my hands and gave up on it in the late '00s.
Moving to Apple during that period was bliss. If it said "Apple" or "Mac" anywhere on it, or in the marketing materials, I was good to go—no conflicts. Sure there could still be learning curves for application UIs or similar, but that was time spent gaining knowledge that (presumably) would continue to have value over time, rather than hours and hours and hours spent for one-time workarounds (like the old yum/RPM dependency hell, or worse, compiling from source, or like trying to figure out the right chain of tools and applications to batch move data from one application to another).
I could just stick to Apple, have current best-of-breed hardware or nearly so, and not have to deal with those problems any longer. I could get right down to using the application/device/service, e.g., computing.
Now that is gone. Apple killed it off to focus instead on iOS. That could have worked if iOS maintained best-of-breed quality and they forged a direct relationship with end-users. But that didn't happen. iOS is stagnant and well behind Android for users and in many cases for developers, iCloud is a jungle, and end-users are still reliant on influencers and salespeople to make their decisions about device buys.
Apple killed "it just works" to pursue "iOS forever," but they have failed at "iOS forever" and it's now "iOS is desperately trying to maintain marketshare." If they even have to ask that question, and how having lost the influencers, iOS is in trouble.
Aperture is a good case study. I had half a million photos in it. It is no longer being maintained.
It's an ecosystem in disrepair.
Application A requires a newer version of Mac OS to support the latest hardware, features, integrations with third parties, and sync with its mobile apps. Meanwhile, if you upgrade Mac OS, Application B, no longer supported, will at some point stop functioning. And Application C requires new revision Apple hardware that hobbles your workflow in Applications A and B with mundane physical problems like lack of ports.
This sort of thing is happening all over the place in Apple land. Yes, you can spend hours of your workday and dollars that you don't want to spend finding lots of workarounds.
OR you can just see the writing on the wall, switch to Lightroom (for example) and plan a path to a platform where the conflicts don't exist.
The "it just works" philosophy was the exact OPPOSITE of version-and-abandonware hell. Version-and-abandonware hell was the reason that I left Linux for Mac OS in the late '00s. Sadly, I bought in just a couple of years before Apple would take the same route.
The viability question is bound up with influencers. I am one. I probably brought 50 people at four businesses over to Apple/Mac/iOS between 2008 and 2012 on the strength of my recommendations and after-hours assistance. Now? Now I recommend Windows 10 Surface and Android to most non-professional users that ask me.
I am a creative professional in the online, SaaS, new media publishing era. I should easily be in the traditional Mac OS demographic.
I am using a 17" 2010 MBP. It has been maxed to 16GB RAM and dual internal large SSDs. I regularly use all of the ports that it offers. Even though the screen resolution is lower, I use the larger screen because I often have side-by-side windows open running SublimeText and/or some IDE, and doing that on 15" or less introduces eyestrain, even with the higher resolutions (which are mostly supported only in a way that adds visual actuance/sharpness, not in a way that increases available workspace). Density is cute for photos, but for reading and working in text, density < surface area.
I was an iPhone early adopter. I had been using smartphones for years (Palm at the time that iPhone was released), and iOS was a revelation early on. Absolute game-changer once apps happened.
Talk to me in 2009/2010 and I am a hardcore Apple supporter. I am running my old Linux applications in X, have a shell window open all the time, have access to pro-grade multimedia and development tools, and every part of the product line enhances the productivity of every other part seamlessly. They get it and they are enabling me to do my work like nobody else.
I recommend Apple's ecosystem to friend/family/co-workers without hesitation.
Now? The Mac is 7 years old. There is no device currently in Apple's lineup that would better serve my needs. I can't buy something from Apple, at any price, that I'd want to replace it with.
Many of the Applications that I previously used on it—Aperture, Final Cut, even iWork—have either been retired by Apple or hobbled by Apple, leading me to purchase third party alternatives, e.g. from Adobe, that are also supported on other platforms. The transitions were a pain in the ass, but now I've made them, so I'm no longer facing the resistance to switching that comes from losing all your applications and workflows.
And while iOS was once inimitable, nothing like it, enables many more things than any competitor, now I use Samsung Galaxy Tab S machines and a Panasonic CM1 Android phone. They give me shell access, expandable storage to move files around, and hardware that is better for mobile (better camera, better portability/weight, etc.) than iOS does.
In short, I'm an savvy computing professional, not someone easily swayed by marketing speak, and Apple isn't selling a single thing that I want. I've gone from an Apple house (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Time Machine for router/backup) to a mixed house (Mac, Android phone, Android tablet, Roku, third-party NAS).
The only Apple item left is the Mac, and in a year or two it'll probably go and be replaced with a Dell/Samsung/Asus high-end machine running Linux.
There is no reason Apple had to lose me, they just didn't continue to make products that would enable me to get my work done more efficiently than the alternatives, which is what Apple used to do with shocking skill. But now?
Like I said, there's not a single thing in Apple's product line that I want to buy or that seems like a good investment from the productivity perspective. That's a complete and shocking inversion from the late '00s.
I now recommend Windows 10 or Linux and Android to everyone, and Chromebooks for those that just browse and type papers.
They abandoned productivity computing users almost entirely.
Appliance-style computers with high-end sensory specs, rather than modular ones with high-end throughput specs. Abandonment of "professional" tier applications, integrations, and support. Marketing and product development that targeted information consumption rather than production and manipulation. Modifications primarily to the computing platform whenever computing and mobile needed to be brought closer.
Not so long ago Mac OS was a compelling computing platform at the hardware and at the software level for many professionals, including many computing professionals like me (who were once hardcore Linux/*nix users).
This is no longer the case. With the changes that have been made over the last few years, Mac OS and related hardware are now also-rans, but ones that come at a significant cost premium and with significant limitations.
Meanwhile, they have avoided the (often controversial) wisdom of Steve Jobs, who tended to cannibalize existing product lines and userbases with new ones in order to stay ahead of the curve. Instead, they have worked hard not to cannibalize and/or risk the iOS userbase (designing instead for its lowest common denominator, which is low indeed) by upgrading or innovating in iOS.
The result is that Mac OS is no longer a viable (much less obvious) choice for professionals even in many of its traditional constituencies, while iOS has stagnated and is now significantly behind Android in many ways.
I don't think all of this would have happened under Steve Jobs, who would have continued to be controversial, and also would have continued to make gains but in often surprising ways that would only be grudgingly conceded later on.
With Tim Cook they got a traditional bean-counter who carried Apple back into the traditional corporate cycle of aggressive rise, complacent dominance, unavoidable fall.
I'm annoyed that I'll have to switch computing platforms again—the switch from Linux was not easy after 17 years when I made it in 2010—but I suspect that I will.
The physical attachment and interface of the Moto series is cool. But the "mods" are all wrong.
The only reason to be able to detach a module is because you don't want to have to lug it around, so you can detach it. This implies that when you attach to a module, you're explicitly in "I understand that it's bulky and I'm not lugging it around" mode at that moment.
Yet all the modules are severely compromised because they are still trying to be portable.
Half-assed mobile speakers in the Moto series. A half-assed digital camera.
Just take those two examples:
Instead of mobile speakers, how about a $199 stereo speaker system for a tabletop. Instead of having to fuck around with bluetooth and compromised battery life, the speakers are stationary, a home furnishing. You come and just drop your phone *on* it. Magnets hold it in place. It charges. And the screen comes on to the music player app and plays big, loud, full-sound music. Gotta run? Just yank the phone, now charged, off of it again. Make a boombox the same way—or something big enough (not those speakers) to actually make some sound and take to a beach party. Those things I'd be interested in. Tiny-ass speakers? Why am I going to lug around an extra thing for sound that's still basically one person big?
Same thing with the camera. A 12 megapixel 1 2/3" sensor. THAT'S A CAMERA PHONE ALL OVER AGAIN. I love the idea of a proper shutter button and a flash, but if your built-in camera is already not good enough, why slap an extra, bulky module on the back that... gives you another camera phone sensor? WTF? If you're willing to carry a camera, you're willing to carry a camera. So build one that's a centimeter thicker and has a full 1" sensor in it, and another one that is three centimeters thicker and looks like a DSLR camera body and can mount Micro Four Thirds lenses. It's just got a gap on the back where you can stick your phone, snap, with a magnet. Do so an the phone automatically goes into camera mode. You can mount pro lenses, and when you shoot, it stores on your camera SD card and you have all the photos available to cloud, apps, etc. without having to download from a proper camera or futz around with "camera wifi" that never works. As a shooter, I'd be interested in *both* of those camera modules. But not a bulky camera module that is just a camera phone all over again, so that you double the thickness and weight for (drum roll) the same crap cameraphone sensor that you have without the module.
I don't think it's a tech fail, and I do think that there is a market for modularity, but it's not in this "half as portable, but still half-functional" module crap. The value is a convenience value, i.e. a better, more capable version of Apple's original iPhone docking port that is magnetic, more capable, communicates with the phone sufficiently to enable tap-free adaptation to new modules, and that has a full-surface (rather than end-port) interface to enhance the physical security of the attachment when made. That's still modular, and it uses the phone as the brain of things to make life easier. I'd pay for that.
But I won't pay for extra for a phone just so that I can use "modules" when the modules are expensive, highly compromised, bulky things that I don't want. I have to want the modules to want a modular phone. A tiny speaker, a crap camera, etc. are not modules that I want, and extended batteries are already out there.
"Watch" two hours of TV on a regular TV and over that you hours you can also:
- Fold the laundry - Sort the mail - Cook dinner - Eat dinner - Wash up - Tidy the den after a day of use
Turn off the TV, you're ready to go to bed and read a book.
Watch two hours of 3D TV and you can either:
- Sit there and do nothing else, or - Take the glasses on and off over and over and over again, while still not getting much else done
People in western societies have hours of time to watch TV every week. Unless you create a TV system that prevents them from doing anything else while they watch it. In which case, they have precious little time to watch TV every week.
There are an awful lot of people out there hanging on to the last generation of non-glued MBP's, especially the 17" model, which has enough pixels and inches for legible side-by-wide windows, enough space inside for 2x storage devices, 16GB RAM capability, lots of ports, and a screwed-on bottom to enable in-house repairs (i.e. replacements of failing drives, fans, and so on, so that people can be back to work in an hour or two rather than waiting on Apple for service).
I know that we will not go to the newer MBPs for these reasons—and are probably going Linux with one of the Chinese hardware brands, as we are an SaaS firm in which most aren't keen on having to work in Windows, without the *nix-like command line and development environment.
[After 20 minutes on hold and/or waiting on live chat]
Q: Hi support, my device doesn't appear on my phone|won't talk properly on my network because happened suddenly|got new phone|got new router|etc. A: You need to run the latest update, that should fix the problem. Q: But I can't without my phone. A: I'll walk you through it. Step 1 in convoluted process X...
If nothing else, put the notification on the phone, but the button on the actual device. At least that way, if something isn't working, support can say: "Have you pressed the button? Please press the button and wait for 10 minutes, then try again."
They are time-consuming, failure-prone, complex, and require multiple steps. Once you have 15-20 devices, it could easily take you a month of infuriating weekends doing nothing else, assuming an hour fiddling with each device. What joy!
1. Update processes should be fixed so that they rarely fail and require only triggering, not heavy intervention 2. They should be easy to trigger, and the current update status should be easy to check
Re: #2, there should be a small LED-illuminated button somewhere on each device.
If the button is not illuminated, there are no updates available; device is current. If the button is glowing green, it indicates that a non-critical update is available. If the button is glowing yellow, it indicates that a security-critical update is available. Consumers press the button to run the update. While updating, the button will flash (either green or yellow) to indicate that an update is in progress and the device is offline. Once the update is complete, the illumination goes off again. If the update fails, the button glows red to show failure and that factory service is required.
If someone could walk through their house once a month and glance at each device to see whether an update is available, then press a button to run it, I suspect you'd see a lot more updating going on.
Another path to take is fully automatic updates, but this creates the problem for both consumer and remote support of figuring out whether a device has failed due to manufacturing defect, is offline for other issues, or is offline due to an update failure.
If the consumer is able to time the update for their own convenience, and can observe the result as it occurs and a status after the fact, they can phone in and say that they ran the update and it failed (glowing red) and support can address appropriately. Since consumer was given control over the timing of the update, they can be sure to run it when a failure or offline time won't cause critical problems for them in their living environment.
Of course all of this presumes that updates are available, which has historically not been something that manufacturers care about very much. That can only be fixed through legislation and public spending (i.e. company must provide updates for ten years and is liable for security issues; if company goes out of business, security updates must be funded publicly if total installation size is greater than some number N). This is a much harder problem to solve, as such legislation would be next to impossible to pass.
Of course all of this is a pipe dream, it's much more likely that instead we end up with a world of insecure devices and "hack insurance" that we have to pay for every month for IoT use that addresses homeowner loss and liability issues upon demonstrated security compromise. That's easy to implement and pass and has a ready-made lobby (insurance/financials), and doesn't require social responsibility on the part of companies or the public.
Given the small numbers of fires so far and the fact that they already limited charging, this makes me think that they now believe the problem will get worse over time—i.e. it's not just that a few units are affected by the poor design choice with battery tolerances, when exposed to just the right conditions, but that EVERY unit has an elevated likelihood of going up in smoke over time, i.e. the ticking time bomb phenomenon.
"We've analyzed their attack sir, and there is a danger."
Otherwise, this would seem to be quite a drastic move.
The problem with this computer that you wear on your wrist is that it doesn't do most things that I expect my computer to be able to do, is even worse for input than a phone, and the couple of things that it does do very well (tell time, show notifications, fitness tracking) are better done on a watch, a phone, and a fitness tracker.
My analog wristwatch is very highly legible, silent, accurate, and can withstand the elements and dives up to 300m. It is always visible, can be easily glanced at by someone across the table if they need to tell the time, and it rarely, if ever needs any kind of attention.
When I get a notification on my phone, I look at it, tap the notification, and can act immediately.
Get a notification on a smart watch and you have to look at it, then take out your phone, tap the notification, and act on it. The smart watch adds an unneeded extra step.
Fitness tracking was supposed to be the "killer app," but fitness activities are often both rough-n-tumble and happen outside in the elements. For that you want the cheapest, simplest device possible so that when you inevitably have to replace your destroyed one, you're not paying through the nose again (not to mention also losing your timekeeping for the period during which you are replacing it).
All this plus they are very high maintenance, needing to be charged all the time, limited in life span, and needing software updates from time to time, as well as the often finicky pairing with a phone—and the fact that there's not a single thing that I regularly do with my computer (or even phone) that I'd like to try doing on that tiny screen—and the fact that you can't even hack it to be used for low-input/low-output situations (say, embedded applications—not to mention the ridiculous cost)—and it's just not much of a wrist computer either.
Nope, I'm just gonna stick to my regular wristwatch, phone, fitness tracker, and computing devices. If I need mobile computing, a 5" Android display, octo-core CPU, and 32GB storage are already more than cramped enough.
She received threats from Getty about not paying for using the images... which SHE HERSELF had taken and placed into the public domain.
None of this would have happened if someone hadn't decided to go after licensing fees for images that were taken from the public domain. Yes, they're free to sell what's in the public domain if someone is willing to pay for them, but the images are in the public domain. To go after people for using the images that Getty/Alamy themselves pulled from the public domain, and demand payment whenever they see those images used... is slimy.
with no apparent upgrade path in the future, I'm more interested in the hardware. I can run Linux easily enough, though I'll miss some key applications that I use for work rather badly. But what I'll miss more are the ergonomics.
In particular, the entirely clean and corner-free outer casing (this is underrated—it means less potential for cracks due to corner impact and much less potential for snags on, say, soft bags and carriers that end up breaking plastic widgets of some kind off); the all-metal construction (worse for small impacts, yes, but holds up much better to wear and tear over time); the clean, distraction-free front (yes, unlike some other people, apparently, my mind does get cluttered up by clutter, and the Macbook Pro machines are so detail-free on the open side that the screen is the only thing to really look at); and most of all, the keyboard. Oh, how I'll miss the keyboards on the unibody Macs. As someone that types >100wpm, the low-key-travel, high-tactile-feedback Apple keyboard of recent years is the best I've ever used, bar none. PC keyboards make me very, very sad when I have to use them—squishy, low-feedback, high-key travel, slows my typing by at least 10-20wpm and slows my accuracy as well.
I'm worried about replacing OS X when I have to upgrade, but I'm even more worried about finding comparable hardware and ergonomics.
(1) There remains a culture of "high techism" in the U.S. by which all things electronic are seen as important, professional, and premium. This is buttressed by the fact that many of our thought and industry leaders are associated with high-tech and Silicon Valley. So in the absence of other forces there remains a presumption that a coder is by nature an "elite" person and deserves respect and pay in kind.
(2) There remain significant cultural differences between U.S. employers and qualified workers from beyond U.S. culture that are taking time to overcome. The greatest of these are qualitative, i.e. how to balance the productivity/high-quality equation. Overseas workers are more often accustomed to working toward the "productivity" end of the equation, while U.S. workers understand that inside the U.S. employers are often looking for "high-quality" and "creativity." There is an argument often made around here that non-U.S. workers are inherently lower-quality and less creative, but from what I've seen this is bunk. There is just a cognitive hump to overcome for non-U.S. workers—perhaps a bit more learning and a shift in expectations about what leads to firing vs. promotion in this marketplace.
(3) Cost of living is higher in the U.S., particularly in the areas where high-tech is centered. So there is a commensurate increase across the board in salaries and salary expectations for these areas, not just in tech.
given the properties of light photos, the nature of color, and the relationships between color as a perceptual phenomenon, photons, and objects of this scale, I would have imagined that "color" (as in natural color, i.e. color in the conventional sense and its relationship to perception and human anatomy) is not a terribly meaningful of important concept at this scale. Am I wrong?
This is color used as an unrelated tool—applying color to enhance, essentially, actuance. Yes?
Slashdot Mirror
If you have the leverage to do it (seniority, centrality to key projects, etc.) you might be able to parlay the conflict.
"I've had several conflictual interactions with so-and-so recently and I'm worried that there is a power struggle emerging about key decisions. I'd like to nip this in the bud so that we can all get on with our work. To me, this speaks to ambiguous responsibilities and hierarchy, and I wonder if this is going to grow as an issue. For this reason and on the strength of my importance to what we're going, I think it would help to promote me so that the difference in seniority is clear, decisions have a single point of signoff, and someone is clearly accountable—i.e. me, since I take that responsibility seriously already. Think it over, but based on what's been going on, I think it would be best for the project/department/company if my title was increased to ___ and my current responsibility set were reiterated formally to the group, to stop this kind of confusion from turning into an issue that slows us down."
That only works if you are in a position with the rest of your co-workers and your management to make the claim, which—based on your question—I'm guessing your'e not. But if you are, do it and take the promotion, then you get to tell this person where to go and what to do going forward.
I should add—you have probably already screwed yourself over.
The right time to hit fan with shit is the FIRST time an incident happens. Show that you're worth a lot, and you know your worth, and you won't stand for it.
By waiting until it's a whole narrative and you're posting to Slashdot, when you do go to management about it, they're going to see you as someone that can't solve your own problems and lets them fester in secret and grow, then brings them up the chain when they're too big for you to solve. This is not a desirable characteristic in an employee.
Live and learn.
Next job, the first time someone fucks with you, tell them in no uncertain terms, "Unless you somehow get promoted ahead of me, you are NOT my manager and I won't stand for that shit. This is a boundary. I'm drawing it right now. Cross it and it'll be you or me around here."
Then, immediately tell your manager, "I just had a bad experience with X. They did Y which I found to be unacceptable and not conducive to my work. I set a boundary. It was conflictual. I told them that if they do it again, this will be a significant issue. I'm not leaving this on your plate or anything, but I did want you to be aware that that happened, and that that's what I said."
Raise hell with him/her and with management about him/her. Be ANGRY. Say you'll walk.
And then, if you have to, do it.
I speak from experience in my past. You do NOT want to go down the road of trying to "make it better in a non-confrontational way." Do you know what that makes you? A weakling. A loser. Someone who has to tiptoe around. Someone who spends too much time thinking strategically about how to get from mundane point A to mundane point B without experiencing problems.
Your productivity will fall. Your self-esteem will collapse. And you will find that you also enable the behavior, and it gets worse, and then worse again.
You're already a victim, and you're letting yourself stay one. Don't make yourself a target, too.
I know the whole schtick about "it's not that easy," and finances and economic realities and justice and whatever else. Used to be there, too.
The fact is, you will regret it in the end. All of the consequences you are hoping to avoid will happen, because you will lose the respect of your co-workers, your bos(ses), and you will lose your own productivity. Long term, you have one choice: confront or not. And not confronting is a SURE loss (again, long term). If you don't confront, WILL be out of a job eventually, you WILL find that you have been made worse for it with respect to your ability to do the next job.
If you confront and raise hell, you have a CHANCE of coming out of things intact. A chance may seem like a risk you don't want to take. But the other way, losing is a certainty.
So accept the hard truth that someone has decided to fuck you over, accept the hard truth that unless you metaphorically punch them in the face they WILL continue to do it and will intensify the behavior, and then grow a backbone and take your best shot back. Even if you lose that way, at least you took a shot. You didn't sit there like a weenie (which I did for far too long) and take it, then whine like a little girl, lose your self respect, and then find out that that's what everyone thinks of you and that's why you got let go despite taking shit like a hero. You're nobody's hero if you take shit. Management does not want employees that take shit.
I have 2TB SSD storage inside my MBP 17" and am fighting the temptation to back one of them to a spinner go to 3TB—mainly because I don't want to invest in installing more parts in a seven-year-old machine and can't stand the slowness of spinning hard drives.
When I'm in my home office, I am regularly plugged in to all three USB ports (and one of them leads straight to an 18-port USB hub that has about half the ports full at any time).
You can't even carry 3TB with you on a current MBP, under any circumstances, not to mention that you are severely overcharged for the storage that you do buy. And while I realize that it's still possible to use the USB peripherals, the thought of *more* cord spaghetti in adapter form is not appealing to me, and neither is the much more fragile set of smaller connectors anchoring so many devices. I am very suspicious that I would see the effects of the tiny-connector robustness in my uptimes or data integrity.
And I already use one external monitor in addition to my 17" screen, and I'm equally hesitant to investigate solutions that would push me to sit a second external monitor on my desktop and try to drive it, etc. but at my at 13" and 15" are just too small for comfort, to use all those pixels for what I need to use them for.
Maybe I'm an edge case. Maybe I'm "picky" as some people hint. But the fact is that "Pro" designations aren't just about specs, they're about flexibility and the long tail of different kinds of productivity that "professionals" engage in. Pro gear isn't sleek and elegant. Pro gear is powerful and above all flexible with high longevity so that investments can be amortized.
So the fact is that even if Apple added the USB ports back in, if that's all they did, I wouldn't be all that excited. It's just a different mindset and strategy at Apple than it used to be, big picture.
However, if they released tomorrow a 17" or 19" clamshell that had multiple internal SATA bays, RAM to 32 or 64GB, multiple full-sized USB ports along with an SAS port, and a renewed their commitment to some of their "professional" application lines, I'd pay $5-$10k for it happily.
They won't sell me one. That's their business decision to make, but then they're stuck worrying when a lot of people like me (and I'm far from the only one, in my circles there are a lot of people asking everyone to share what they buy next) go where they can get the work tools that they prefer, whether you call that a want or a need.
I just don't have the time or the inclination to fuck around with the current MBP products. I see a million roadblocks and stumbling points that I just don't want to deal with. I have other things to do.
The market has changed. It's not nearly as lucrative out there any longer to sell your team that develops and deploys bespoke solutions in mid-sized environments where people used to deploy and develop. This stuff is now typically done out-of-house through cloud/SaaS providers, often with a mix of turnkey and in-house tweaks. Since I'm not that interested in being anyone's staff monkey, and I'm not that interested in app development for mobile, nor in starting my own SaaS solution (though I've thought about it a couple of times), I've moved on to other things. I'm at an age in life where I want to earn based on what I enjoy working on in environments that I enjoy the work. Happily I have the CV to do that.
But it might well mean that I no longer get to play inside Mac OS in the future.
had to be limited to what could go on a plane, I'd be out of business.
I don't want to put together a list of applications and conflicts because that will obscure the forest for the trees. But your case is emblematic of what I now deal with in Mac OS, too—and many other pros, besides.
I was 17 years on Linux and Solaris before that. I wrote a pile of books about *nix, founded a software company in *nix space, and so on. It was no small thing for me to switch to Apple.
I did it because it saved me bucketloads of time. All those annoyances of the sort that you describe weren't there in Mac OS in the late '00s, by and large. I gave it a try based on someone's suggestion and after that each time I hit a conflict or a hiccup and needed a workaround in Linux, I would find that I could do the same thing in Mac OS without having to fuck with it. I started using my "test" Mac OS system more and more because I wanted something done in the next 10 minutes, not in some unknown number of irritating hours.
Eventually I realized that I was spending >50% of my time performing tasks in Mac OS and that led me to purchase a shiny new Macbook Pro and decommission my Linux systems. There was a learning curve, but for a good 3-5 years, I was more productive on Mac OS than I'd ever been before.
And then the current epoch began. There's no obvious threshold moment at which "it all started," but at the start of 2017 I can say that there is an awful lot of "workaround crap" and booting now into a Windows virtual machine so that I can just get things done quickly. And the 17" Macbook Pro is starting to be flaky (the dreaded graphics chip problem in the 2010 unibody series) yet I can't see myself investing in another Apple computer given the current state of things.
So—to my shock after decades spent as a Linux evangelist—it may be time to go to Windows. Under new leadership, Windows seems to be headed in better directions, while Mac OS looks to be descending into the swamp.
I think you're probably right about that. It rings true and reflects typical human limitations. He's focused on what he knows, and has blind spots in what he doesn't know as well.
Except that the abandonment of larger displays and many ports makes their new hardware unsuitable for development compared to old hardware, and they don't have any plans for new hardware that is developer-friendly.
For me it wasn't about intuitiveness, it was about the lack of conflicts.
If you bought all Apple, you didn't need "workarounds." Versioning issues, compatibility issues, conflicts between apps and/or devices, weird workflow and hardware chains to get information from one place to another. Linux got worse and worse in that regard until I finally threw my hands and gave up on it in the late '00s.
Moving to Apple during that period was bliss. If it said "Apple" or "Mac" anywhere on it, or in the marketing materials, I was good to go—no conflicts. Sure there could still be learning curves for application UIs or similar, but that was time spent gaining knowledge that (presumably) would continue to have value over time, rather than hours and hours and hours spent for one-time workarounds (like the old yum/RPM dependency hell, or worse, compiling from source, or like trying to figure out the right chain of tools and applications to batch move data from one application to another).
I could just stick to Apple, have current best-of-breed hardware or nearly so, and not have to deal with those problems any longer. I could get right down to using the application/device/service, e.g., computing.
Now that is gone. Apple killed it off to focus instead on iOS. That could have worked if iOS maintained best-of-breed quality and they forged a direct relationship with end-users. But that didn't happen. iOS is stagnant and well behind Android for users and in many cases for developers, iCloud is a jungle, and end-users are still reliant on influencers and salespeople to make their decisions about device buys.
Apple killed "it just works" to pursue "iOS forever," but they have failed at "iOS forever" and it's now "iOS is desperately trying to maintain marketshare." If they even have to ask that question, and how having lost the influencers, iOS is in trouble.
Aperture is a good case study. I had half a million photos in it. It is no longer being maintained.
It's an ecosystem in disrepair.
Application A requires a newer version of Mac OS to support the latest hardware, features, integrations with third parties, and sync with its mobile apps. Meanwhile, if you upgrade Mac OS, Application B, no longer supported, will at some point stop functioning. And Application C requires new revision Apple hardware that hobbles your workflow in Applications A and B with mundane physical problems like lack of ports.
This sort of thing is happening all over the place in Apple land. Yes, you can spend hours of your workday and dollars that you don't want to spend finding lots of workarounds.
OR you can just see the writing on the wall, switch to Lightroom (for example) and plan a path to a platform where the conflicts don't exist.
The "it just works" philosophy was the exact OPPOSITE of version-and-abandonware hell. Version-and-abandonware hell was the reason that I left Linux for Mac OS in the late '00s. Sadly, I bought in just a couple of years before Apple would take the same route.
The viability question is bound up with influencers. I am one. I probably brought 50 people at four businesses over to Apple/Mac/iOS between 2008 and 2012 on the strength of my recommendations and after-hours assistance. Now? Now I recommend Windows 10 Surface and Android to most non-professional users that ask me.
I am a creative professional in the online, SaaS, new media publishing era. I should easily be in the traditional Mac OS demographic.
I am using a 17" 2010 MBP. It has been maxed to 16GB RAM and dual internal large SSDs. I regularly use all of the ports that it offers. Even though the screen resolution is lower, I use the larger screen because I often have side-by-side windows open running SublimeText and/or some IDE, and doing that on 15" or less introduces eyestrain, even with the higher resolutions (which are mostly supported only in a way that adds visual actuance/sharpness, not in a way that increases available workspace). Density is cute for photos, but for reading and working in text, density < surface area.
I was an iPhone early adopter. I had been using smartphones for years (Palm at the time that iPhone was released), and iOS was a revelation early on. Absolute game-changer once apps happened.
Talk to me in 2009/2010 and I am a hardcore Apple supporter. I am running my old Linux applications in X, have a shell window open all the time, have access to pro-grade multimedia and development tools, and every part of the product line enhances the productivity of every other part seamlessly. They get it and they are enabling me to do my work like nobody else.
I recommend Apple's ecosystem to friend/family/co-workers without hesitation.
Now? The Mac is 7 years old. There is no device currently in Apple's lineup that would better serve my needs. I can't buy something from Apple, at any price, that I'd want to replace it with.
Many of the Applications that I previously used on it—Aperture, Final Cut, even iWork—have either been retired by Apple or hobbled by Apple, leading me to purchase third party alternatives, e.g. from Adobe, that are also supported on other platforms. The transitions were a pain in the ass, but now I've made them, so I'm no longer facing the resistance to switching that comes from losing all your applications and workflows.
And while iOS was once inimitable, nothing like it, enables many more things than any competitor, now I use Samsung Galaxy Tab S machines and a Panasonic CM1 Android phone. They give me shell access, expandable storage to move files around, and hardware that is better for mobile (better camera, better portability/weight, etc.) than iOS does.
In short, I'm an savvy computing professional, not someone easily swayed by marketing speak, and Apple isn't selling a single thing that I want. I've gone from an Apple house (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Time Machine for router/backup) to a mixed house (Mac, Android phone, Android tablet, Roku, third-party NAS).
The only Apple item left is the Mac, and in a year or two it'll probably go and be replaced with a Dell/Samsung/Asus high-end machine running Linux.
There is no reason Apple had to lose me, they just didn't continue to make products that would enable me to get my work done more efficiently than the alternatives, which is what Apple used to do with shocking skill. But now?
Like I said, there's not a single thing in Apple's product line that I want to buy or that seems like a good investment from the productivity perspective. That's a complete and shocking inversion from the late '00s.
I now recommend Windows 10 or Linux and Android to everyone, and Chromebooks for those that just browse and type papers.
They abandoned productivity computing users almost entirely.
Appliance-style computers with high-end sensory specs, rather than modular ones with high-end throughput specs.
Abandonment of "professional" tier applications, integrations, and support.
Marketing and product development that targeted information consumption rather than production and manipulation.
Modifications primarily to the computing platform whenever computing and mobile needed to be brought closer.
Not so long ago Mac OS was a compelling computing platform at the hardware and at the software level for many professionals, including many computing professionals like me (who were once hardcore Linux/*nix users).
This is no longer the case. With the changes that have been made over the last few years, Mac OS and related hardware are now also-rans, but ones that come at a significant cost premium and with significant limitations.
Meanwhile, they have avoided the (often controversial) wisdom of Steve Jobs, who tended to cannibalize existing product lines and userbases with new ones in order to stay ahead of the curve. Instead, they have worked hard not to cannibalize and/or risk the iOS userbase (designing instead for its lowest common denominator, which is low indeed) by upgrading or innovating in iOS.
The result is that Mac OS is no longer a viable (much less obvious) choice for professionals even in many of its traditional constituencies, while iOS has stagnated and is now significantly behind Android in many ways.
I don't think all of this would have happened under Steve Jobs, who would have continued to be controversial, and also would have continued to make gains but in often surprising ways that would only be grudgingly conceded later on.
With Tim Cook they got a traditional bean-counter who carried Apple back into the traditional corporate cycle of aggressive rise, complacent dominance, unavoidable fall.
I'm annoyed that I'll have to switch computing platforms again—the switch from Linux was not easy after 17 years when I made it in 2010—but I suspect that I will.
So bluetooth is a charging technology now?
The physical attachment and interface of the Moto series is cool. But the "mods" are all wrong.
The only reason to be able to detach a module is because you don't want to have to lug it around, so you can detach it. This implies that when you attach to a module, you're explicitly in "I understand that it's bulky and I'm not lugging it around" mode at that moment.
Yet all the modules are severely compromised because they are still trying to be portable.
Half-assed mobile speakers in the Moto series. A half-assed digital camera.
Just take those two examples:
Instead of mobile speakers, how about a $199 stereo speaker system for a tabletop. Instead of having to fuck around with bluetooth and compromised battery life, the speakers are stationary, a home furnishing. You come and just drop your phone *on* it. Magnets hold it in place. It charges. And the screen comes on to the music player app and plays big, loud, full-sound music. Gotta run? Just yank the phone, now charged, off of it again. Make a boombox the same way—or something big enough (not those speakers) to actually make some sound and take to a beach party. Those things I'd be interested in. Tiny-ass speakers? Why am I going to lug around an extra thing for sound that's still basically one person big?
Same thing with the camera. A 12 megapixel 1 2/3" sensor. THAT'S A CAMERA PHONE ALL OVER AGAIN. I love the idea of a proper shutter button and a flash, but if your built-in camera is already not good enough, why slap an extra, bulky module on the back that... gives you another camera phone sensor? WTF? If you're willing to carry a camera, you're willing to carry a camera. So build one that's a centimeter thicker and has a full 1" sensor in it, and another one that is three centimeters thicker and looks like a DSLR camera body and can mount Micro Four Thirds lenses. It's just got a gap on the back where you can stick your phone, snap, with a magnet. Do so an the phone automatically goes into camera mode. You can mount pro lenses, and when you shoot, it stores on your camera SD card and you have all the photos available to cloud, apps, etc. without having to download from a proper camera or futz around with "camera wifi" that never works. As a shooter, I'd be interested in *both* of those camera modules. But not a bulky camera module that is just a camera phone all over again, so that you double the thickness and weight for (drum roll) the same crap cameraphone sensor that you have without the module.
I don't think it's a tech fail, and I do think that there is a market for modularity, but it's not in this "half as portable, but still half-functional" module crap. The value is a convenience value, i.e. a better, more capable version of Apple's original iPhone docking port that is magnetic, more capable, communicates with the phone sufficiently to enable tap-free adaptation to new modules, and that has a full-surface (rather than end-port) interface to enhance the physical security of the attachment when made. That's still modular, and it uses the phone as the brain of things to make life easier. I'd pay for that.
But I won't pay for extra for a phone just so that I can use "modules" when the modules are expensive, highly compromised, bulky things that I don't want. I have to want the modules to want a modular phone. A tiny speaker, a crap camera, etc. are not modules that I want, and extended batteries are already out there.
I mean that literally.
"Watch" two hours of TV on a regular TV and over that you hours you can also:
- Fold the laundry
- Sort the mail
- Cook dinner
- Eat dinner
- Wash up
- Tidy the den after a day of use
Turn off the TV, you're ready to go to bed and read a book.
Watch two hours of 3D TV and you can either:
- Sit there and do nothing else, or
- Take the glasses on and off over and over and over again, while still not getting much else done
People in western societies have hours of time to watch TV every week. Unless you create a TV system that prevents them from doing anything else while they watch it. In which case, they have precious little time to watch TV every week.
There are an awful lot of people out there hanging on to the last generation of non-glued MBP's, especially the 17" model, which has enough pixels and inches for legible side-by-wide windows, enough space inside for 2x storage devices, 16GB RAM capability, lots of ports, and a screwed-on bottom to enable in-house repairs (i.e. replacements of failing drives, fans, and so on, so that people can be back to work in an hour or two rather than waiting on Apple for service).
I know that we will not go to the newer MBPs for these reasons—and are probably going Linux with one of the Chinese hardware brands, as we are an SaaS firm in which most aren't keen on having to work in Windows, without the *nix-like command line and development environment.
[After 20 minutes on hold and/or waiting on live chat]
Q: Hi support, my device doesn't appear on my phone|won't talk properly on my network because happened suddenly|got new phone|got new router|etc.
A: You need to run the latest update, that should fix the problem.
Q: But I can't without my phone.
A: I'll walk you through it. Step 1 in convoluted process X...
If nothing else, put the notification on the phone, but the button on the actual device. At least that way, if something isn't working, support can say: "Have you pressed the button? Please press the button and wait for 10 minutes, then try again."
They are time-consuming, failure-prone, complex, and require multiple steps. Once you have 15-20 devices, it could easily take you a month of infuriating weekends doing nothing else, assuming an hour fiddling with each device. What joy!
1. Update processes should be fixed so that they rarely fail and require only triggering, not heavy intervention
2. They should be easy to trigger, and the current update status should be easy to check
Re: #2, there should be a small LED-illuminated button somewhere on each device.
If the button is not illuminated, there are no updates available; device is current.
If the button is glowing green, it indicates that a non-critical update is available.
If the button is glowing yellow, it indicates that a security-critical update is available.
Consumers press the button to run the update.
While updating, the button will flash (either green or yellow) to indicate that an update is in progress and the device is offline.
Once the update is complete, the illumination goes off again.
If the update fails, the button glows red to show failure and that factory service is required.
If someone could walk through their house once a month and glance at each device to see whether an update is available, then press a button to run it, I suspect you'd see a lot more updating going on.
Another path to take is fully automatic updates, but this creates the problem for both consumer and remote support of figuring out whether a device has failed due to manufacturing defect, is offline for other issues, or is offline due to an update failure.
If the consumer is able to time the update for their own convenience, and can observe the result as it occurs and a status after the fact, they can phone in and say that they ran the update and it failed (glowing red) and support can address appropriately. Since consumer was given control over the timing of the update, they can be sure to run it when a failure or offline time won't cause critical problems for them in their living environment.
Of course all of this presumes that updates are available, which has historically not been something that manufacturers care about very much. That can only be fixed through legislation and public spending (i.e. company must provide updates for ten years and is liable for security issues; if company goes out of business, security updates must be funded publicly if total installation size is greater than some number N). This is a much harder problem to solve, as such legislation would be next to impossible to pass.
Of course all of this is a pipe dream, it's much more likely that instead we end up with a world of insecure devices and "hack insurance" that we have to pay for every month for IoT use that addresses homeowner loss and liability issues upon demonstrated security compromise. That's easy to implement and pass and has a ready-made lobby (insurance/financials), and doesn't require social responsibility on the part of companies or the public.
Given the small numbers of fires so far and the fact that they already limited charging, this makes me think that they now believe the problem will get worse over time—i.e. it's not just that a few units are affected by the poor design choice with battery tolerances, when exposed to just the right conditions, but that EVERY unit has an elevated likelihood of going up in smoke over time, i.e. the ticking time bomb phenomenon.
"We've analyzed their attack sir, and there is a danger."
Otherwise, this would seem to be quite a drastic move.
The problem with this computer that you wear on your wrist is that it doesn't do most things that I expect my computer to be able to do, is even worse for input than a phone, and the couple of things that it does do very well (tell time, show notifications, fitness tracking) are better done on a watch, a phone, and a fitness tracker.
My analog wristwatch is very highly legible, silent, accurate, and can withstand the elements and dives up to 300m. It is always visible, can be easily glanced at by someone across the table if they need to tell the time, and it rarely, if ever needs any kind of attention.
When I get a notification on my phone, I look at it, tap the notification, and can act immediately.
Get a notification on a smart watch and you have to look at it, then take out your phone, tap the notification, and act on it. The smart watch adds an unneeded extra step.
Fitness tracking was supposed to be the "killer app," but fitness activities are often both rough-n-tumble and happen outside in the elements. For that you want the cheapest, simplest device possible so that when you inevitably have to replace your destroyed one, you're not paying through the nose again (not to mention also losing your timekeeping for the period during which you are replacing it).
All this plus they are very high maintenance, needing to be charged all the time, limited in life span, and needing software updates from time to time, as well as the often finicky pairing with a phone—and the fact that there's not a single thing that I regularly do with my computer (or even phone) that I'd like to try doing on that tiny screen—and the fact that you can't even hack it to be used for low-input/low-output situations (say, embedded applications—not to mention the ridiculous cost)—and it's just not much of a wrist computer either.
Nope, I'm just gonna stick to my regular wristwatch, phone, fitness tracker, and computing devices. If I need mobile computing, a 5" Android display, octo-core CPU, and 32GB storage are already more than cramped enough.
She received threats from Getty about not paying for using the images... which SHE HERSELF had taken and placed into the public domain.
None of this would have happened if someone hadn't decided to go after licensing fees for images that were taken from the public domain. Yes, they're free to sell what's in the public domain if someone is willing to pay for them, but the images are in the public domain. To go after people for using the images that Getty/Alamy themselves pulled from the public domain, and demand payment whenever they see those images used... is slimy.
with no apparent upgrade path in the future, I'm more interested in the hardware. I can run Linux easily enough, though I'll miss some key applications that I use for work rather badly. But what I'll miss more are the ergonomics.
In particular, the entirely clean and corner-free outer casing (this is underrated—it means less potential for cracks due to corner impact and much less potential for snags on, say, soft bags and carriers that end up breaking plastic widgets of some kind off); the all-metal construction (worse for small impacts, yes, but holds up much better to wear and tear over time); the clean, distraction-free front (yes, unlike some other people, apparently, my mind does get cluttered up by clutter, and the Macbook Pro machines are so detail-free on the open side that the screen is the only thing to really look at); and most of all, the keyboard. Oh, how I'll miss the keyboards on the unibody Macs. As someone that types >100wpm, the low-key-travel, high-tactile-feedback Apple keyboard of recent years is the best I've ever used, bar none. PC keyboards make me very, very sad when I have to use them—squishy, low-feedback, high-key travel, slows my typing by at least 10-20wpm and slows my accuracy as well.
I'm worried about replacing OS X when I have to upgrade, but I'm even more worried about finding comparable hardware and ergonomics.
(1) There remains a culture of "high techism" in the U.S. by which all things electronic are seen as important, professional, and premium. This is buttressed by the fact that many of our thought and industry leaders are associated with high-tech and Silicon Valley. So in the absence of other forces there remains a presumption that a coder is by nature an "elite" person and deserves respect and pay in kind.
(2) There remain significant cultural differences between U.S. employers and qualified workers from beyond U.S. culture that are taking time to overcome. The greatest of these are qualitative, i.e. how to balance the productivity/high-quality equation. Overseas workers are more often accustomed to working toward the "productivity" end of the equation, while U.S. workers understand that inside the U.S. employers are often looking for "high-quality" and "creativity." There is an argument often made around here that non-U.S. workers are inherently lower-quality and less creative, but from what I've seen this is bunk. There is just a cognitive hump to overcome for non-U.S. workers—perhaps a bit more learning and a shift in expectations about what leads to firing vs. promotion in this marketplace.
(3) Cost of living is higher in the U.S., particularly in the areas where high-tech is centered. So there is a commensurate increase across the board in salaries and salary expectations for these areas, not just in tech.
given the properties of light photos, the nature of color, and the relationships between color as a perceptual phenomenon, photons, and objects of this scale, I would have imagined that "color" (as in natural color, i.e. color in the conventional sense and its relationship to perception and human anatomy) is not a terribly meaningful of important concept at this scale. Am I wrong?
This is color used as an unrelated tool—applying color to enhance, essentially, actuance. Yes?