If I was taking on a steep, rugged, slippery trail in the middle of nowhere, I'd want something like a Jeep. Four wheel drive, high ground clearance, rugged tires, etc. If I was on a race track and was looking for high speed performance, handling and braking, I'd take a Corvette.
(feel free to change the marques of the off road vehicle and sports car to suit your tastes and/or nationality.)
I've seen some real sales dunces over time, but we also have some really good ones that we work with. In particular, the guy we use for server purchases is excellent. He turns around quotes quick, keeps us appraised of order status, keeps us up to date on the product roadmap. He's been in the business long enough to understand the lingo, but will sit quietly and let his sales engineer answer technical questions. If we ask a question and can't get an answer, he will refer it on and then follow up to make sure we got the answer we needed. I don't know that he understands the answer, but much like TCP/IP, he doesn't care about the payload so much as it got delivered successfully.
I'm a tech person who generally tries to avoid sales people as much as possible, but I'd never in a million years suggest that sales is a "supporting role". If it were not for the sales staff where I work, I'd have no income, and consequently be living in a van down by the river. The engineering staff knows how to do a lot of great stuff, but getting the foot in the door at a customer and then getting them to buy our product isn't one of them. There are other departments a company might be able to get by without, but sales isn't one of them.
Without a product, you can't sell anything. Without a sales, you don't have income. Without income, you can't pay the people who make the product. (Repeat)
People are surprised that the most valuable company in the world got there by not being a charity? They are JUST now figuring this out?
Despite all the marketing, at its core, Apple is a profit-maximizing, shareholder-serving corporation that makes money by selling hardware and services. They are quite good at it, as well, with cash on hand that's larger than the GDP of some countries. They got here by figuring out ways to have people give them money.
And here's another little secret: any company with a significant advertising budget is doing THE SAME THING. When's the last time you saw flashy marketing for a bag of carrots or a gallon of milk? You only see that kind of thing for stuff you largely need to be convinced to buy because you don't strictly need it.
The bigger theme I was getting at was : it's above OP's pay grade to some extent, and that OP is to some extent distracted from doing the job they were hired to do -- TEACH ENGLISH. By putting together a weird and inconsistent environment that's entirely beside the point of what they are hired to do, OP is just making more work for themselves, and to what end? Are the students writing better essays? Are they scoring better on standardized tests? Are they getting into college? Are they thinking more critically? It doesn't matter if you have a $20, $170 or $1700 computer -- they are tools that allow you to do something. When I was learning English, papers were largely hand written, although printouts were also accepted. Given that computers were not ubiquitous at that time, sometimes it was vastly more efficient to bang out an essay in study hall and just get it done before I ever got home. Pen and paper were just fine then, and should still be just fine for OP to accept, as well.
As for the Detroit Public Schools, I would say that if they can't pay the teachers or maintain the buildings, there are bigger fish to fry before taking on any kind of technology, even if the purchase price of that technology was $0, given that the maintenance cost is decidedly non-zero. Someone's going to have to keep up with things, and that takes time AND money. Time and money that likely have better places to go.
Assumptions: - OP is not on the "technology committee" for their district.
Assertions: - OP does not want to be tech support (they mention it explcitly). If you don't want to support a bunch of computer problems, then don't require computers to complete the assignment.
In our school district, it's all Apple stuff -- iPads for students, and a lot of Apple hardware in the libraries and so on. I'm guessing Apple has a pretty steep educational discount, as our district isn't particularly wealthy (we aren't particularly poor, either). The vendor is kind of a secondary consideration to the curriculum, though -- and the teachers and staff integrated the Apple stuff into the curriculum so they are using the same applications across the district, so instruction is consistent and any bugs only have to be worked out once. From the IT side it's also vastly easier to have one vendor to deal with, and they can keep spare equipment around so when the inevitable happens and an iPad or iMac meets the floor somehow, they can reimage and replace it quickly. They also have school email accounts for students and staff which are managed in one place, and also sidestep a lot of nonsense with undeliverable mail, full mailboxes, usernames, etc. Since they control the infrastructure they can really do a lot of automation and also lock down the machines so the kids aren't playing Minecraft all day when they should be learning. The teachers can also blank every screen with the touch of a button to control distractions.
Compare that to a ragtag collection of Chromebooks, Windows PCs, Linux, Macs and whatever else may be dragged into the classroom. You get dragged down by anything and everything. Some kids set up a Minecraft game. Someone else is on WhatsApp all the time. Someone's craptacular Salvation Army PC wets the bed, losing all the data. Someone's email gets hacked.
Oh, and then there's the privacy concerns... keep in mind these kids are not adults, and their parents may have different ideas than you about their access to the Internet, watching videos and so on. And/or having their own email address that's outside of school control and oversight.
Then the teacher down the hall decides they want to do something that doesn't line up with what you are doing, and there's a new set of applications and websites for the parents to get peeved over.
Also, I'm not an Apple fanboy. You could do the above with Windows, Linux or Chromebooks. The key is that the district picks one thing and then you build around that one thing. Same reason businesses, colleges and so on pick one thing and try to stick to that as much as possible to keep administration sane.
Years ago, I got a used iPhone 3GS and a cheap AT&T GoPhone. Took the SIM card from GoPhone and put it in the iPhone. It worked instantly, no jailbreaking or funny business required aside from an APN change which took seconds. At the time, GoPhones were being marketed towards poor people, old people and drug dealers as far as I can tell. All I knew was that I had a reasonably new phone (the 4 had just come out), I had no contract and my monthly bill was around $20. Compare that to people who were shelling out close to $100 to AT&T for the iPhone contract. Even in my highest months of data usage, I never cracked $30. That's saving something approaching $1K/year. I have wifi at home and wifi at work so data only got really used on my commute, and that was pretty much Waze doing whatever magic it does to find traffic jams. Music and podcasts were always synced on wifi.
AT&T then figured out a lot of people were doing this and jacked up the price to $50/month. Screw that. I bought a Galaxy S4 and went to Ting. Bill is back to $25/month, phone keeps working fine. I don't feel a tremendous urge to get a S5, S6 or whatever the $new_shiny is because what this one does is perfectly adequate.
My kid is becoming of an age where it would be advantageous for her to have a phone. No way in hell is she getting some top of the line model, and no way in hell am I getting a contract for her to have a phone. If the handset is $60 and it works on Ting, I'll add that right on and set up the account so she can communicate with certain people, but at $60 when it gets inadvertently stepped on or dropped, I'm not going to care all that much.
Apple made a business decision to offer a three month trial period at no cost to people who want to try their service. Fine. They want to people to try their service.
Why they thought their "suppliers" would go along without getting any form of compensation is beyond me. When a new restaurant, supermarket or other business opens somewhere, it's really common to offer similar promotions or discounts where the business is going to lose money but then eventually capture enough new customers to then make the business profitable. They don't tell the power company, phone company, water company, ISP, office supply company, marketing firm or whoever else they use during this time that they are going to expect them to give them those things for free.
I also see this "work for free for promotion/portfolio building/experience" line used a lot for coders, designers, photographers, wedding planners and other occupations. It's generally a cheapskate trying to dodge paying a pile of money for a lot of hard work. Apple has now effectively become the world's most valuable cheapskate. I've never heard of someone telling a plumber or electrician that they are going to "work for free to get some promotion".
Also, Apple has more cash on hand (something like $170 billion) than the entire GDP of some countries and is quite literally the world's most valuable company, worth nearly double that of the second place Exxon Mobil. This decision (before they "changed their mind") reeked of greed and arrogance.
I have no illusion that the Clintons aren't billionaires, nor have the rosy colored glasses on that Obama isn't helping corporate interests in very powerful ways. Like I said, holding my nose to pull that lever so that some theocrat and/or "enforcer of morals" in chief isn't in power. Or some guy who has been indicted for abusing power for political gain. We've now got nearly two of those in the GOP running.
I read that article, too. It takes away from Hillary, but honestly the clown circus on the GOP side is going to wear themselves out finding their own faults and making themselves look godawful. Chris Christie should just throw in the towel now, too, since he's pretty much associated with convicted criminals.
I'd expect GOP potential candidates to be called into some back room at some billionaire's estate where they are politely told over Scotch and cigars lit with $100 bills that it would be in their best interest to spare the Old Party the embarrassment of them running, and to get back to towing the party line. Looking at the current crop, you have at most two people who actually have *something* of a shot, maybe a couple others who could come in as an "outsider", but the remainder are going to end up spending loads of time and money essentially writing the attack ads for the Democrats and associated PACs come the real election showdown. Hillary is going to sit around stockpiling money and letting the GOP tear themselves to bits with each one trying to sate the far right, which will produce a lot of on-camera sound bites of stuff that will sound godawful to anyone left in the center by the time the actual election rolls around.
I'm not a big fan of Hillary, but honestly the GOP at this point has me holding my nose and pulling the lever for her.
And now they are producing their own entertainment a la Netflix.
And they are making money from providing the back end for Netflix. So Amazon is producing their own content a la Netflix, AND Netflix is writing them a fat check every month. Netflix even has a public case study about how they use AWS... and contribute to making AWS better.
When I was a kid, we had a handful broadcast channels and I watched what was on because that was literally it. If I didn't like what was on, I found something else to do. Read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play a game, or go outside.
Then we got cable. More stuff to watch, woohoo. Plus those scrambled premium channels where you might catch a glimpse of a boob. But MTV and HBO were only unscrambled in the family room, and seeing the same video over and over again, or the same movie over and over again got boring. So I'd read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play a game or go outside.
Eventually I grew up and bought a cable subscription of my own. Hundreds of channels. At first, some were really good. Like Discovery. Then "reality TV" showed up, and the combination of cheap to produce + novelty become too irresistible for those cable networks that used to put out decent content and once again I'd read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play a game or go outside.
So then came YouTube. YouTube has some good stuff on it, but honestly a lot of it is poorly made crap that isn't worth watching. So I read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play with my kids, play a game or go outside. I largely skipped Vine, Instagram and the rest of the ocean of other self-promoting content platforms. There are some decent blogs out there, but honestly I see things like Tumblr and the content is generally pretty awful, and I've conceded that I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent. And they're actually really, really nice. They just have more time and energy to sort through the boatloads of content being produced and find the good stuff.
I cut off cable. Best decision, I get shows I'm willing to shell out for or that come off the antenna for free. I still have Internet. And now this "livestreaming" thing comes along, and I can't imagine how much deeper the spiral of "too much crappy content delivered at a rock bottom price of zero" is going to go. I'm betting that we'll see some standouts and people who create compelling content in this new medium, and I can totally get how it's going to be amazing for people who are living in shitbag countries with repressive regimes who try and control thought, but there are going to be plenty of livestreams that quite honestly suck.
I also remember Jennicam... it was novel for a while, but having a billion Jennicams is no longer novel... it's going to be clogging up the Internet with the boring everyday drek of life. I don't want to watch that, I live it.
People start and leave jobs for a variety of reasons. Maybe their spouse got a giant promotion but had to move. Maybe their parents are ailing and they are moving closer to take care of them. Maybe they just want to do something new, or change careers. There's a multitude of perfectly rational and otherwise sane reasons people change jobs.
Why are you even considering treating them like an asshole? If they have given their notice, they should be finishing things up. If there's a project they are working on that will not be completed, they should be working with who is going to take it over to transfer the knowledge. They should likely document anything they did that wasn't documented. So on and so forth. Maybe you go out of a good bye lunch or get a cake to wish them well in their new endeavor. But why treat them like an asshole? Who knows, maybe your firm will start going the wrong way and they will get you on at the new place.
Once they are gone, then you should have a procedure to deactivate the account, delete files, shut off email, have inbound mail forwarded to their old manager, etc.
If you DO think they are going to do stupid things, then they should have been fired a long time ago. But if they are just leaving with proper notice, you likely don't need to do anything special.
Yep. In my career, I've seen the rise and fall of RISC (on both Windows and *NIX), Apple's transition between several chip families, Sun's Sparc chips and even Intel trying to out-Intel with Itanium. You get hit with major roadblocks as well as death by a thousand cuts. It's extremely difficult to get it working in the first place, and then ongoing maintenance is no small feat, either.
I wonder if the Chinese government is "strongly favoring home grown solutions" with an ongoing infusion of funding, to do they just pay it lip service? China is a huge emerging market that plenty of vendors are trying to sell into, if they are really serious about this, it could actually provide the catalyst to make the ports happen. But no demand in the marketplace means little incentive for anything to happen.
Sure, you can put out a chip, but without a software stack of common applications (and operating systems) that you actually run on that stack, it's just something that consumes electricity.
So who is going to fund the porting effort of all the tools, libraries, etc? Anyone who thinks you just grab source code and recompile on a new platform has probably never tried it. It's a pile of work.
I got sick and tired of dealing with iTunes and its many failures and switched to Android. My wife still has an iDevice and regularly gripes when they change the interface, move stuff around for no reason and otherwise make the design "better".
My Android phone has no idea about my home PC because it doesn't have to. I don't see iTunes going anywhere, no way in hell I'm going back to the iOS ecosystem. I'm not likely to get another Samsung phone, which is what I have now -- I'll likely just go for the Nexus so I can skip the bloatware.
Software (or Greeks) that show up with something that appears to be one thing on the outside but carries an unpleasant surprise on the inside = a "Trojan horse"
A company adding features (including additional platforms), and doing so with advertised, promoted, supported and approved apps that say exactly what they are doing on an $APP_STORE is just a company trying to draw in new customers, and there's nothing nefarious about it.
I recall having a great time with these types of games with friends. They were kind of like karaoke without the singing part. The later editions with more options for setting difficultly per player (IIRC) made it even more fun since you could have some people who were more experienced being given more of a challenge while a newbie or less coordinated person could play at a lower difficulty level and still have fun.
The room full of crap that sat around was not fantastic, though. We live in a smaller house at one point, had the drum setup and a couple guitars. The drums were hard to store, got in the way and just sucked except when you were using them.
I'd probably be interested in picking up something like this if I could get a controller that would work with any arbitrary game, as I'm going to guess that there are going to be fun songs on both games. My kids always loved the guitars and they got some appreciation for non-kid music since the track selections were pretty decent. I'd also appreciate if they would bring the songs from earlier games forward, too.
In terms of being agnostic, it would be nice to bring your fake guitar to your friend's house and play whatever they had, irrespective of if it were Rock Band/Guitar Hero or Playstation/XBox. I'd bet overall they could move more copies rather than try and keep it siloed. I'd hope Activision would see at least part of that with their success with Skylanders -- you don't have skylanders for each platform, you can take them to your friend's house and play on any console.
What black magic happens when I use my credit card? Damned if I know. Magic happens, money comes out of my account and I get stuff. I don't care what incantation is encoded in the stripe, which manufacturer made the card reading machine or what communications technology is behind the scenes. It doesn't matter, because the business taking my money wants my money and I want the stuff.
Similarly, when I plug something into the wall I don't care who made the plug and the wires that provide the power. I don't even care where the power comes from. I just expect it to power up what I plugged into it.
If I can just wave my phone at something and money gets exchanged, then fine. But if I need to know too much about it, I'm just going to use my credit card or cash.
Evidently in other parts of the world they are exchanging money in rural villages with text messages on low-end dumb phones. Why must the first world get vendor lock-in bullshit to exchange money using a phone?
Slashdot Mirror
If I was taking on a steep, rugged, slippery trail in the middle of nowhere, I'd want something like a Jeep. Four wheel drive, high ground clearance, rugged tires, etc. If I was on a race track and was looking for high speed performance, handling and braking, I'd take a Corvette.
(feel free to change the marques of the off road vehicle and sports car to suit your tastes and/or nationality.)
Sweet Jesus. Will you get on with THE POINT?
I've seen some real sales dunces over time, but we also have some really good ones that we work with. In particular, the guy we use for server purchases is excellent. He turns around quotes quick, keeps us appraised of order status, keeps us up to date on the product roadmap. He's been in the business long enough to understand the lingo, but will sit quietly and let his sales engineer answer technical questions. If we ask a question and can't get an answer, he will refer it on and then follow up to make sure we got the answer we needed. I don't know that he understands the answer, but much like TCP/IP, he doesn't care about the payload so much as it got delivered successfully.
I'm a tech person who generally tries to avoid sales people as much as possible, but I'd never in a million years suggest that sales is a "supporting role". If it were not for the sales staff where I work, I'd have no income, and consequently be living in a van down by the river. The engineering staff knows how to do a lot of great stuff, but getting the foot in the door at a customer and then getting them to buy our product isn't one of them. There are other departments a company might be able to get by without, but sales isn't one of them.
Without a product, you can't sell anything.
Without a sales, you don't have income.
Without income, you can't pay the people who make the product.
(Repeat)
People are surprised that the most valuable company in the world got there by not being a charity? They are JUST now figuring this out?
Despite all the marketing, at its core, Apple is a profit-maximizing, shareholder-serving corporation that makes money by selling hardware and services. They are quite good at it, as well, with cash on hand that's larger than the GDP of some countries. They got here by figuring out ways to have people give them money.
And here's another little secret: any company with a significant advertising budget is doing THE SAME THING. When's the last time you saw flashy marketing for a bag of carrots or a gallon of milk? You only see that kind of thing for stuff you largely need to be convinced to buy because you don't strictly need it.
The bigger theme I was getting at was : it's above OP's pay grade to some extent, and that OP is to some extent distracted from doing the job they were hired to do -- TEACH ENGLISH. By putting together a weird and inconsistent environment that's entirely beside the point of what they are hired to do, OP is just making more work for themselves, and to what end? Are the students writing better essays? Are they scoring better on standardized tests? Are they getting into college? Are they thinking more critically? It doesn't matter if you have a $20, $170 or $1700 computer -- they are tools that allow you to do something. When I was learning English, papers were largely hand written, although printouts were also accepted. Given that computers were not ubiquitous at that time, sometimes it was vastly more efficient to bang out an essay in study hall and just get it done before I ever got home. Pen and paper were just fine then, and should still be just fine for OP to accept, as well.
As for the Detroit Public Schools, I would say that if they can't pay the teachers or maintain the buildings, there are bigger fish to fry before taking on any kind of technology, even if the purchase price of that technology was $0, given that the maintenance cost is decidedly non-zero. Someone's going to have to keep up with things, and that takes time AND money. Time and money that likely have better places to go.
Assumptions:
- OP is not on the "technology committee" for their district.
Assertions:
- OP does not want to be tech support (they mention it explcitly). If you don't want to support a bunch of computer problems, then don't require computers to complete the assignment.
In our school district, it's all Apple stuff -- iPads for students, and a lot of Apple hardware in the libraries and so on. I'm guessing Apple has a pretty steep educational discount, as our district isn't particularly wealthy (we aren't particularly poor, either). The vendor is kind of a secondary consideration to the curriculum, though -- and the teachers and staff integrated the Apple stuff into the curriculum so they are using the same applications across the district, so instruction is consistent and any bugs only have to be worked out once. From the IT side it's also vastly easier to have one vendor to deal with, and they can keep spare equipment around so when the inevitable happens and an iPad or iMac meets the floor somehow, they can reimage and replace it quickly. They also have school email accounts for students and staff which are managed in one place, and also sidestep a lot of nonsense with undeliverable mail, full mailboxes, usernames, etc. Since they control the infrastructure they can really do a lot of automation and also lock down the machines so the kids aren't playing Minecraft all day when they should be learning. The teachers can also blank every screen with the touch of a button to control distractions.
Compare that to a ragtag collection of Chromebooks, Windows PCs, Linux, Macs and whatever else may be dragged into the classroom. You get dragged down by anything and everything. Some kids set up a Minecraft game. Someone else is on WhatsApp all the time. Someone's craptacular Salvation Army PC wets the bed, losing all the data. Someone's email gets hacked.
Oh, and then there's the privacy concerns ... keep in mind these kids are not adults, and their parents may have different ideas than you about their access to the Internet, watching videos and so on. And/or having their own email address that's outside of school control and oversight.
Then the teacher down the hall decides they want to do something that doesn't line up with what you are doing, and there's a new set of applications and websites for the parents to get peeved over.
Also, I'm not an Apple fanboy. You could do the above with Windows, Linux or Chromebooks. The key is that the district picks one thing and then you build around that one thing. Same reason businesses, colleges and so on pick one thing and try to stick to that as much as possible to keep administration sane.
Years ago, I got a used iPhone 3GS and a cheap AT&T GoPhone. Took the SIM card from GoPhone and put it in the iPhone. It worked instantly, no jailbreaking or funny business required aside from an APN change which took seconds. At the time, GoPhones were being marketed towards poor people, old people and drug dealers as far as I can tell. All I knew was that I had a reasonably new phone (the 4 had just come out), I had no contract and my monthly bill was around $20. Compare that to people who were shelling out close to $100 to AT&T for the iPhone contract. Even in my highest months of data usage, I never cracked $30. That's saving something approaching $1K/year. I have wifi at home and wifi at work so data only got really used on my commute, and that was pretty much Waze doing whatever magic it does to find traffic jams. Music and podcasts were always synced on wifi.
AT&T then figured out a lot of people were doing this and jacked up the price to $50/month. Screw that. I bought a Galaxy S4 and went to Ting. Bill is back to $25/month, phone keeps working fine. I don't feel a tremendous urge to get a S5, S6 or whatever the $new_shiny is because what this one does is perfectly adequate.
My kid is becoming of an age where it would be advantageous for her to have a phone. No way in hell is she getting some top of the line model, and no way in hell am I getting a contract for her to have a phone. If the handset is $60 and it works on Ting, I'll add that right on and set up the account so she can communicate with certain people, but at $60 when it gets inadvertently stepped on or dropped, I'm not going to care all that much.
The Imperials claim a new system. The power of the Death Star will not be denied.
Apple made a business decision to offer a three month trial period at no cost to people who want to try their service. Fine. They want to people to try their service.
Why they thought their "suppliers" would go along without getting any form of compensation is beyond me. When a new restaurant, supermarket or other business opens somewhere, it's really common to offer similar promotions or discounts where the business is going to lose money but then eventually capture enough new customers to then make the business profitable. They don't tell the power company, phone company, water company, ISP, office supply company, marketing firm or whoever else they use during this time that they are going to expect them to give them those things for free.
I also see this "work for free for promotion/portfolio building/experience" line used a lot for coders, designers, photographers, wedding planners and other occupations. It's generally a cheapskate trying to dodge paying a pile of money for a lot of hard work. Apple has now effectively become the world's most valuable cheapskate. I've never heard of someone telling a plumber or electrician that they are going to "work for free to get some promotion".
Also, Apple has more cash on hand (something like $170 billion) than the entire GDP of some countries and is quite literally the world's most valuable company, worth nearly double that of the second place Exxon Mobil. This decision (before they "changed their mind") reeked of greed and arrogance.
I have no illusion that the Clintons aren't billionaires, nor have the rosy colored glasses on that Obama isn't helping corporate interests in very powerful ways. Like I said, holding my nose to pull that lever so that some theocrat and/or "enforcer of morals" in chief isn't in power. Or some guy who has been indicted for abusing power for political gain. We've now got nearly two of those in the GOP running.
I read that article, too. It takes away from Hillary, but honestly the clown circus on the GOP side is going to wear themselves out finding their own faults and making themselves look godawful. Chris Christie should just throw in the towel now, too, since he's pretty much associated with convicted criminals.
I'd expect GOP potential candidates to be called into some back room at some billionaire's estate where they are politely told over Scotch and cigars lit with $100 bills that it would be in their best interest to spare the Old Party the embarrassment of them running, and to get back to towing the party line. Looking at the current crop, you have at most two people who actually have *something* of a shot, maybe a couple others who could come in as an "outsider", but the remainder are going to end up spending loads of time and money essentially writing the attack ads for the Democrats and associated PACs come the real election showdown. Hillary is going to sit around stockpiling money and letting the GOP tear themselves to bits with each one trying to sate the far right, which will produce a lot of on-camera sound bites of stuff that will sound godawful to anyone left in the center by the time the actual election rolls around.
I'm not a big fan of Hillary, but honestly the GOP at this point has me holding my nose and pulling the lever for her.
And now they are producing their own entertainment a la Netflix.
And they are making money from providing the back end for Netflix. So Amazon is producing their own content a la Netflix, AND Netflix is writing them a fat check every month. Netflix even has a public case study about how they use AWS ... and contribute to making AWS better.
http://aws.amazon.com/solution...
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3013...
When I was a kid, we had a handful broadcast channels and I watched what was on because that was literally it. If I didn't like what was on, I found something else to do. Read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play a game, or go outside.
Then we got cable. More stuff to watch, woohoo. Plus those scrambled premium channels where you might catch a glimpse of a boob. But MTV and HBO were only unscrambled in the family room, and seeing the same video over and over again, or the same movie over and over again got boring. So I'd read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play a game or go outside.
Eventually I grew up and bought a cable subscription of my own. Hundreds of channels. At first, some were really good. Like Discovery. Then "reality TV" showed up, and the combination of cheap to produce + novelty become too irresistible for those cable networks that used to put out decent content and once again I'd read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play a game or go outside.
So then came YouTube. YouTube has some good stuff on it, but honestly a lot of it is poorly made crap that isn't worth watching. So I read a book, play with friends, play with toys, play with my kids, play a game or go outside. I largely skipped Vine, Instagram and the rest of the ocean of other self-promoting content platforms. There are some decent blogs out there, but honestly I see things like Tumblr and the content is generally pretty awful, and I've conceded that I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent. And they're actually really, really nice. They just have more time and energy to sort through the boatloads of content being produced and find the good stuff.
I cut off cable. Best decision, I get shows I'm willing to shell out for or that come off the antenna for free. I still have Internet. And now this "livestreaming" thing comes along, and I can't imagine how much deeper the spiral of "too much crappy content delivered at a rock bottom price of zero" is going to go. I'm betting that we'll see some standouts and people who create compelling content in this new medium, and I can totally get how it's going to be amazing for people who are living in shitbag countries with repressive regimes who try and control thought, but there are going to be plenty of livestreams that quite honestly suck.
I also remember Jennicam ... it was novel for a while, but having a billion Jennicams is no longer novel ... it's going to be clogging up the Internet with the boring everyday drek of life. I don't want to watch that, I live it.
People start and leave jobs for a variety of reasons. Maybe their spouse got a giant promotion but had to move. Maybe their parents are ailing and they are moving closer to take care of them. Maybe they just want to do something new, or change careers. There's a multitude of perfectly rational and otherwise sane reasons people change jobs.
Why are you even considering treating them like an asshole? If they have given their notice, they should be finishing things up. If there's a project they are working on that will not be completed, they should be working with who is going to take it over to transfer the knowledge. They should likely document anything they did that wasn't documented. So on and so forth. Maybe you go out of a good bye lunch or get a cake to wish them well in their new endeavor. But why treat them like an asshole? Who knows, maybe your firm will start going the wrong way and they will get you on at the new place.
Once they are gone, then you should have a procedure to deactivate the account, delete files, shut off email, have inbound mail forwarded to their old manager, etc.
If you DO think they are going to do stupid things, then they should have been fired a long time ago. But if they are just leaving with proper notice, you likely don't need to do anything special.
Yep. In my career, I've seen the rise and fall of RISC (on both Windows and *NIX), Apple's transition between several chip families, Sun's Sparc chips and even Intel trying to out-Intel with Itanium. You get hit with major roadblocks as well as death by a thousand cuts. It's extremely difficult to get it working in the first place, and then ongoing maintenance is no small feat, either.
I wonder if the Chinese government is "strongly favoring home grown solutions" with an ongoing infusion of funding, to do they just pay it lip service? China is a huge emerging market that plenty of vendors are trying to sell into, if they are really serious about this, it could actually provide the catalyst to make the ports happen. But no demand in the marketplace means little incentive for anything to happen.
Sure, you can put out a chip, but without a software stack of common applications (and operating systems) that you actually run on that stack, it's just something that consumes electricity.
So who is going to fund the porting effort of all the tools, libraries, etc? Anyone who thinks you just grab source code and recompile on a new platform has probably never tried it. It's a pile of work.
Good to know that dependency has been jettisoned!
I got sick and tired of dealing with iTunes and its many failures and switched to Android. My wife still has an iDevice and regularly gripes when they change the interface, move stuff around for no reason and otherwise make the design "better".
My Android phone has no idea about my home PC because it doesn't have to. I don't see iTunes going anywhere, no way in hell I'm going back to the iOS ecosystem. I'm not likely to get another Samsung phone, which is what I have now -- I'll likely just go for the Nexus so I can skip the bloatware.
Software (or Greeks) that show up with something that appears to be one thing on the outside but carries an unpleasant surprise on the inside = a "Trojan horse"
A company adding features (including additional platforms), and doing so with advertised, promoted, supported and approved apps that say exactly what they are doing on an $APP_STORE is just a company trying to draw in new customers, and there's nothing nefarious about it.
I recall having a great time with these types of games with friends. They were kind of like karaoke without the singing part. The later editions with more options for setting difficultly per player (IIRC) made it even more fun since you could have some people who were more experienced being given more of a challenge while a newbie or less coordinated person could play at a lower difficulty level and still have fun.
The room full of crap that sat around was not fantastic, though. We live in a smaller house at one point, had the drum setup and a couple guitars. The drums were hard to store, got in the way and just sucked except when you were using them.
I'd probably be interested in picking up something like this if I could get a controller that would work with any arbitrary game, as I'm going to guess that there are going to be fun songs on both games. My kids always loved the guitars and they got some appreciation for non-kid music since the track selections were pretty decent. I'd also appreciate if they would bring the songs from earlier games forward, too.
In terms of being agnostic, it would be nice to bring your fake guitar to your friend's house and play whatever they had, irrespective of if it were Rock Band/Guitar Hero or Playstation/XBox. I'd bet overall they could move more copies rather than try and keep it siloed. I'd hope Activision would see at least part of that with their success with Skylanders -- you don't have skylanders for each platform, you can take them to your friend's house and play on any console.
PaRappa the Rapper reboot?
"Kick punch, it's all in the mind..."
What black magic happens when I use my credit card? Damned if I know. Magic happens, money comes out of my account and I get stuff. I don't care what incantation is encoded in the stripe, which manufacturer made the card reading machine or what communications technology is behind the scenes. It doesn't matter, because the business taking my money wants my money and I want the stuff.
Similarly, when I plug something into the wall I don't care who made the plug and the wires that provide the power. I don't even care where the power comes from. I just expect it to power up what I plugged into it.
If I can just wave my phone at something and money gets exchanged, then fine. But if I need to know too much about it, I'm just going to use my credit card or cash.
Evidently in other parts of the world they are exchanging money in rural villages with text messages on low-end dumb phones. Why must the first world get vendor lock-in bullshit to exchange money using a phone?
Didn't make a splash then...
Not true. It was widely used in pr0n DVDs, I'd say it did make a few splashes.