I paid $15 for the OS upgrade (before they fixed the loophole in their upgrade promo site), just to see what all the commotion was about. Upgrade went fairly smooth considering I did the unthinkable and actually tried to upgrade a Microsoft OS without starting from scratch (I imaged my boot drive ahead of time just in case).
I played around with the Modern UI apps for the first day or so, smirked at the not-so-subtly placed ads, installed Classic Shell and haven't bothered to go back to the Modern UI since. The Modern UI truly has no place on a desktop computer... or anything without a touchscreen for that matter. It's a consumption-oriented tablet UI that probably excels at keeping you occupied during an extended shit session. I'll stick to the desktop and benefit from Win8's tighter security and streamlined bootup/shutdown. With a couple tweaks, it's like a really well made service pack for Win7.
Cracking and Virus writing has NEVER been about the number of systems like the MS fanbois love to claim. It has always been about what is easier to attack.
Um, it's about both. Cracking and virus writing these days is mostly about making money. When your primary goal is to make money, you go for the low hanging fruit: Easy to find exploits that exist on as many systems as possible = biggest bang for your cracking/virus writing buck.
Maybe the maps debacle was funny to you and your friends, but if you were running a company and this kind of thing was allowed to stand with a wink and an 'ah shucks you'll do better next time' pat on the back, then I can assure you, you will be in charge of a failed organization faster than you can draft your resume.
I do have much experience with C-level executives and I've got to say it's a pretty mixed bag. Sure, you absolutely have a few sociopaths, but I just don't see how you can be so certain that the Forstall firing is a result of sociopathic scapegoating. If I was in charge of the company, I'd be looking for the root cause of the failure. Without knowing first hand, I suspect there were dozens of warning signs months ahead of the launch that there were problems, but if there was one job that Forstall should have been focused on as the leader of that division, it would have been to make sure he had fostered a culture of honest communication up the chain, not a bunch of CYA, pass the buck middle managers, which is what I suspect it got to. The only sane way to remediate culture starts with making changes at the top.
I'm not surprised that you got modded so highly for the old 'everyone above me on the corporate ladder is a sociopath' meme, as it certainly sits well among the 'downtrodden' Engineering types so common around these parts.
Could it also be possible that when part of a hierarchical organization fucks up really badly, someone near the top of that part of the organization should be ultimately held responsible, because it was that person's *job* to ensure that they'd hired the right people under them and put the right processes in place in order to avoid publicly embarrassing failures?
Or does believing that bit of 'business common sense' also make me a sociopath?
Probably true, I should have stated the inverse -- I suspect the percentage of same sex couples raising children would comprise less than 1% of families over the last 50 years.
In any case, the parent AC was responding to a previous AC who asked for evidence that it (being brought up by same-sex couples) mattered. The '50 years of sexual liberation' argument looks meaningless in that light because likely only a very small fraction of same sex couples raised kids during those 50 years.
Um, that's quite a block of text. I'm sure you make some valid arguments in there somewhere, but can I briefly bring attention to the words your fingers typed here:
Is the ability to search the internet using a proprietary algorithm and database almost instantly worth the steady erosion of our privacy and corresponding loss of civil liberty? Our founding fathers made the vote anonymous for a reason -- and in that day and age, the right to peacefully assemble was also the right to anonymously assemble.
I beg you to explain by what mechanism Google providing Internet search capabilities or any service for that matter -- services, I might add, that you may freely choose to use or not -- your right to privacy, anonymous voting, civil liberties and freedom of assembly have been eroded?
Has Google unbeknownst to me, taken away free will?
Well, during the "50 years of sexual liberation where youth descended into rampant suicide, depression, crime and delinquency" wouldn't you say the vast majority of children (like greater than 99%) were still brought up by different sex couples?
Why should the rule not be that, absent my express permission for them to track my comings and goings, they do not have permission?
Why should the rule be that the information you explicitly (or unknowingly) divulge through your web browser in the form of cookies, IP addresses, referers, information input into forms, and so on is NOT something you have essentially shared with that party as well as any 3rd-parties they wish to share it with?
As far as I'm concerned, if you hang your tighty whiteys on a clothesline, your neighbors have every right to sell T-shirts with a picture of your skid marked underwear on them. Don't like it? Get a dryer....or in this case, get blocking software or simply don't visit the site.
IE10's DNT implementation is a bad joke and as far as I'm concerned Yahoo! has every right to ignore it.
Taiwan remaining independent is more important to the US than it is to Taiwan.
Seems to me US companies will outsource to companies based in Taiwan or mainland China interchangeably these days, regardless of the fact that one is democratic and the other a supposed Communist dictatorship.
A kid basically ruined the guy's life, essentially just for lulz -- or for lack of anything constructive to do with his time. Fortunately, the kid did not understand how traceable IP addresses are and he was caught and confronted. Most interesting part of it was that the kid really didn't seem to truly comprehend what devastation he was causing to another human being, because he did it all remotely from the safety of his computer.
Reality is that this is just an extreme example of what goes on daily on semi-anonymous message boards (like this one). If we all had to show our faces, I'm sure we'd be a little more civil toward one another. Personally, I don't think I run a very high risk of ending up in the situation that this guy was in, since I value my online anonymity too much. I realize that for many, the temptation to spread their personal misery is just too great, and so they troll, which is really just a cry for attention -- something they probably didn't get enough of growing up.
If you have problems locating a major hub of Muskoka cottage country, you clearly have serious problems on your hands. I think we agree it's generally not a good situation and is distinctly uncharacteristic of Apple. Whether it's a one time thing or a common theme for Apple under Tim Cook, the maps need to be improved big time.
I'm not saying it's an excuse. Apple sucks, ok? I'm just saying that if you simply count one for every town/city, regardless of size, you're in a sense equating "Westmeath" Ontario with Toronto Ontario, which means you get a skewed view of the problem compared to a real-world perspective where 99.99% of the population will never visit Westmeath in their entire lives and Toronto probably comes up 1000 times an hour.
People use maps apps far more often to find *places* they haven't been to in towns they *have* been to.
Granted, they're clearly missing a shit-tonne of places, but having grown up in Ontario and having traveled to quite a few places in the province, I was a bit surprised to realize that I've never been to ANY of the 688 "Error Code 8" locations. Yes, none of them. I suspect that most are simply intersections with a town name and unique postal code, which is pretty common in rural Ontario. Not that I'm some kind of Apple apologist -- as a comprehensive mapping app, they should have this stuff covered, but when a third of the places in your dataset would never be used by 99% of the population, I contend that you've skewed the reality of the situation a bit.
[rant...] 5. Whoever came up with a six week release schedule needs to be placed into a monastery where they measure time by the seasons to gain some perspective. This places a heavy burden on enterprises and is a support burden. No other software product has this kind of release schedule and it goes against industry best practice.
Then I moved here and discovered that there's more to American beer than Coors Light and Budweiser (the latter now only American insofar as you consider the US-based arm of a Belgian company to be American.)
The truth is that there are dozens of smaller breweries and hundreds of microbreweries, none of which have superbowl-size advertising budgets, but offer plenty of world class American beer. But, to the extent that your primary lens on American culture is nationally syndicated television (as mine was), you'll continue to be out of touch with reality.
and this idiocy is what they've got out of it so far? Where's all the "security-built-right-into-the-hardware" goodness they've been using to justify the acquisition?
Windows Update has become a non-issue for most users since it mostly does it's thing in the background and during idle time these days. Clearly MS just left the broken old implementation in place because there were more impactful things to fix.
Betteridge's Law aside, can we please stop with the flying car shit?
If we ignore all the other hundreds of reasons why this won't work, I'll just point out that any serious proposal involving cars that fly around US cities would necessitate that we bury every single overhead wire in the continental United States to prevent destruction of the communications and electrical grids.
I logged into Outlook.com to see what the deal is. Well, it's not terrible I guess, but what's the sudden fascination with hiding functions in plain site? Can there not be a button that actually resembles a button before you mouse over it? Even then, instead of an obvious button that pops up on mouseover, there a subtle change in color to denote you're on a clickable area. I feel like I have to methodically scan the mouse back and forth across the screen to discover stuff that's hiding.
Example: Bet you didn't even notice that the word 'Outlook' in the top left corner of the page is actually a menu... Why is this better than say spending a pixel and putting a border around the damn thing? It can't be because it looks better this way, because if they were trying to make things look good, they wouldn't have forced the UI team to recycle DOS Shell.
I'm 1 for 2 with PCB swaps over the years. Swapping out the PC board is about as basic as it gets assuming you know how to turn a Torx screwdriver. Some newer drives have coded ROM chips that may also need to be moved from the original board to the replacement PCB. That was the case for a Samsung 1TB drive I recently lost. I did a PCB + ROM swap on it only to learn that the head servos had gone and the PCB was fine. I was out a total of $25 for the PCB + Shipping from China, which was a logical first step considering the next step required spending upwards of $1000+ for a clean room extraction.
In any case, I wouldn't generally recommend doing a surface mount ROM swap with a heat gun unless you know what you're doing, but I've been quite successful using a few layers of aluminum foil with a precise cut out for the chip to reduce the amount of heat that gets through to the rest of the board.
I doubt it. Unless Valve is able to miraculously get big name games ported to Linux on a consistent basis (not to mention having Linux capture more than 1% of the desktop market) it's not going to be the kind of serious alternative that keeps Microsoft honest. Don't get me wrong, I buy every Humble Bundle, but that's not the kind of games that Linux needs.
Notice how Valve is already running for the exits?
You may not have noticed, but the main reason Valve (and specifically Gabe Newell) feels that Windows 8 is the worst thing ever hoisted on humanity may have something to do with the fact that Windows 8 has a built-in facility (the Metro app store) that has ability to overtake the virtual monopoly that Valve has built with Steam for the digital delivery of PC games.
Win8 is really a shot across the bow of Valve's business model. They'd better have a plan B in place -- and no, Linux is not a viable plan B.
the PE ratio is still 60, meaning at this price, the market still expects very high growth for the foreseeable future. Anything less than that in the coming quarters could see the stock sinking further. Still feeling good about your FB IPO purchase?
That's not an exit interview. An exit interview is conducted by some HR flunky who has no real sway over anything. They're just doing their job and that typically involves recording your parting thoughts in your employee file. As the OP recommends, nothing particularly good will come to you as a result of being honest in an exit interview. Just smile and be friendly with the HR droid. You never know when you'll need a reference in the future and some anonymous HR person you never worked with looks up your file only to find a diatribe of complaints.
If you need a cathartic release, you're better off to go home and bash a printer with a baseball bat or something.
Slashdot Mirror
I paid $15 for the OS upgrade (before they fixed the loophole in their upgrade promo site), just to see what all the commotion was about. Upgrade went fairly smooth considering I did the unthinkable and actually tried to upgrade a Microsoft OS without starting from scratch (I imaged my boot drive ahead of time just in case).
I played around with the Modern UI apps for the first day or so, smirked at the not-so-subtly placed ads, installed Classic Shell and haven't bothered to go back to the Modern UI since. The Modern UI truly has no place on a desktop computer... or anything without a touchscreen for that matter. It's a consumption-oriented tablet UI that probably excels at keeping you occupied during an extended shit session. I'll stick to the desktop and benefit from Win8's tighter security and streamlined bootup/shutdown. With a couple tweaks, it's like a really well made service pack for Win7.
Cracking and Virus writing has NEVER been about the number of systems like the MS fanbois love to claim. It has always been about what is easier to attack.
Um, it's about both. Cracking and virus writing these days is mostly about making money. When your primary goal is to make money, you go for the low hanging fruit: Easy to find exploits that exist on as many systems as possible = biggest bang for your cracking/virus writing buck.
Maybe the maps debacle was funny to you and your friends, but if you were running a company and this kind of thing was allowed to stand with a wink and an 'ah shucks you'll do better next time' pat on the back, then I can assure you, you will be in charge of a failed organization faster than you can draft your resume.
I do have much experience with C-level executives and I've got to say it's a pretty mixed bag. Sure, you absolutely have a few sociopaths, but I just don't see how you can be so certain that the Forstall firing is a result of sociopathic scapegoating. If I was in charge of the company, I'd be looking for the root cause of the failure. Without knowing first hand, I suspect there were dozens of warning signs months ahead of the launch that there were problems, but if there was one job that Forstall should have been focused on as the leader of that division, it would have been to make sure he had fostered a culture of honest communication up the chain, not a bunch of CYA, pass the buck middle managers, which is what I suspect it got to. The only sane way to remediate culture starts with making changes at the top.
I'm not surprised that you got modded so highly for the old 'everyone above me on the corporate ladder is a sociopath' meme, as it certainly sits well among the 'downtrodden' Engineering types so common around these parts.
Could it also be possible that when part of a hierarchical organization fucks up really badly, someone near the top of that part of the organization should be ultimately held responsible, because it was that person's *job* to ensure that they'd hired the right people under them and put the right processes in place in order to avoid publicly embarrassing failures?
Or does believing that bit of 'business common sense' also make me a sociopath?
Probably true, I should have stated the inverse -- I suspect the percentage of same sex couples raising children would comprise less than 1% of families over the last 50 years.
In any case, the parent AC was responding to a previous AC who asked for evidence that it (being brought up by same-sex couples) mattered. The '50 years of sexual liberation' argument looks meaningless in that light because likely only a very small fraction of same sex couples raised kids during those 50 years.
Um, that's quite a block of text. I'm sure you make some valid arguments in there somewhere, but can I briefly bring attention to the words your fingers typed here:
Is the ability to search the internet using a proprietary algorithm and database almost instantly worth the steady erosion of our privacy and corresponding loss of civil liberty? Our founding fathers made the vote anonymous for a reason -- and in that day and age, the right to peacefully assemble was also the right to anonymously assemble.
I beg you to explain by what mechanism Google providing Internet search capabilities or any service for that matter -- services, I might add, that you may freely choose to use or not -- your right to privacy, anonymous voting, civil liberties and freedom of assembly have been eroded?
Has Google unbeknownst to me, taken away free will?
Well, during the "50 years of sexual liberation where youth descended into rampant suicide, depression, crime and delinquency" wouldn't you say the vast majority of children (like greater than 99%) were still brought up by different sex couples?
Why should the rule not be that, absent my express permission for them to track my comings and goings, they do not have permission?
Why should the rule be that the information you explicitly (or unknowingly) divulge through your web browser in the form of cookies, IP addresses, referers, information input into forms, and so on is NOT something you have essentially shared with that party as well as any 3rd-parties they wish to share it with?
As far as I'm concerned, if you hang your tighty whiteys on a clothesline, your neighbors have every right to sell T-shirts with a picture of your skid marked underwear on them. Don't like it? Get a dryer. ...or in this case, get blocking software or simply don't visit the site.
IE10's DNT implementation is a bad joke and as far as I'm concerned Yahoo! has every right to ignore it.
Taiwan remaining independent is more important to the US than it is to Taiwan.
Seems to me US companies will outsource to companies based in Taiwan or mainland China interchangeably these days, regardless of the fact that one is democratic and the other a supposed Communist dictatorship.
A kid basically ruined the guy's life, essentially just for lulz -- or for lack of anything constructive to do with his time. Fortunately, the kid did not understand how traceable IP addresses are and he was caught and confronted. Most interesting part of it was that the kid really didn't seem to truly comprehend what devastation he was causing to another human being, because he did it all remotely from the safety of his computer.
Reality is that this is just an extreme example of what goes on daily on semi-anonymous message boards (like this one). If we all had to show our faces, I'm sure we'd be a little more civil toward one another. Personally, I don't think I run a very high risk of ending up in the situation that this guy was in, since I value my online anonymity too much. I realize that for many, the temptation to spread their personal misery is just too great, and so they troll, which is really just a cry for attention -- something they probably didn't get enough of growing up.
Anyway, enough pontificating. Queue the trolls...
If you have problems locating a major hub of Muskoka cottage country, you clearly have serious problems on your hands. I think we agree it's generally not a good situation and is distinctly uncharacteristic of Apple. Whether it's a one time thing or a common theme for Apple under Tim Cook, the maps need to be improved big time.
I'm not saying it's an excuse. Apple sucks, ok? I'm just saying that if you simply count one for every town/city, regardless of size, you're in a sense equating "Westmeath" Ontario with Toronto Ontario, which means you get a skewed view of the problem compared to a real-world perspective where 99.99% of the population will never visit Westmeath in their entire lives and Toronto probably comes up 1000 times an hour.
People use maps apps far more often to find *places* they haven't been to in towns they *have* been to.
Granted, they're clearly missing a shit-tonne of places, but having grown up in Ontario and having traveled to quite a few places in the province, I was a bit surprised to realize that I've never been to ANY of the 688 "Error Code 8" locations. Yes, none of them. I suspect that most are simply intersections with a town name and unique postal code, which is pretty common in rural Ontario. Not that I'm some kind of Apple apologist -- as a comprehensive mapping app, they should have this stuff covered, but when a third of the places in your dataset would never be used by 99% of the population, I contend that you've skewed the reality of the situation a bit.
[rant...]
5. Whoever came up with a six week release schedule needs to be placed into a monastery where they measure time by the seasons to gain some perspective. This places a heavy burden on enterprises and is a support burden. No other software product has this kind of release schedule and it goes against industry best practice.
Simmer down and go here:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html
Then I moved here and discovered that there's more to American beer than Coors Light and Budweiser (the latter now only American insofar as you consider the US-based arm of a Belgian company to be American.)
The truth is that there are dozens of smaller breweries and hundreds of microbreweries, none of which have superbowl-size advertising budgets, but offer plenty of world class American beer. But, to the extent that your primary lens on American culture is nationally syndicated television (as mine was), you'll continue to be out of touch with reality.
and this idiocy is what they've got out of it so far? Where's all the "security-built-right-into-the-hardware" goodness they've been using to justify the acquisition?
they have no idea who their readers are or why they read Slashdot.
Windows Update has become a non-issue for most users since it mostly does it's thing in the background and during idle time these days. Clearly MS just left the broken old implementation in place because there were more impactful things to fix.
Betteridge's Law aside, can we please stop with the flying car shit?
If we ignore all the other hundreds of reasons why this won't work, I'll just point out that any serious proposal involving cars that fly around US cities would necessitate that we bury every single overhead wire in the continental United States to prevent destruction of the communications and electrical grids.
Uh, good luck with that.
I logged into Outlook.com to see what the deal is. Well, it's not terrible I guess, but what's the sudden fascination with hiding functions in plain site? Can there not be a button that actually resembles a button before you mouse over it? Even then, instead of an obvious button that pops up on mouseover, there a subtle change in color to denote you're on a clickable area. I feel like I have to methodically scan the mouse back and forth across the screen to discover stuff that's hiding.
Example: Bet you didn't even notice that the word 'Outlook' in the top left corner of the page is actually a menu... Why is this better than say spending a pixel and putting a border around the damn thing? It can't be because it looks better this way, because if they were trying to make things look good, they wouldn't have forced the UI team to recycle DOS Shell.
I'm 1 for 2 with PCB swaps over the years. Swapping out the PC board is about as basic as it gets assuming you know how to turn a Torx screwdriver. Some newer drives have coded ROM chips that may also need to be moved from the original board to the replacement PCB. That was the case for a Samsung 1TB drive I recently lost. I did a PCB + ROM swap on it only to learn that the head servos had gone and the PCB was fine. I was out a total of $25 for the PCB + Shipping from China, which was a logical first step considering the next step required spending upwards of $1000+ for a clean room extraction.
In any case, I wouldn't generally recommend doing a surface mount ROM swap with a heat gun unless you know what you're doing, but I've been quite successful using a few layers of aluminum foil with a precise cut out for the chip to reduce the amount of heat that gets through to the rest of the board.
I doubt it. Unless Valve is able to miraculously get big name games ported to Linux on a consistent basis (not to mention having Linux capture more than 1% of the desktop market) it's not going to be the kind of serious alternative that keeps Microsoft honest. Don't get me wrong, I buy every Humble Bundle, but that's not the kind of games that Linux needs.
Notice how Valve is already running for the exits?
You may not have noticed, but the main reason Valve (and specifically Gabe Newell) feels that Windows 8 is the worst thing ever hoisted on humanity may have something to do with the fact that Windows 8 has a built-in facility (the Metro app store) that has ability to overtake the virtual monopoly that Valve has built with Steam for the digital delivery of PC games.
Win8 is really a shot across the bow of Valve's business model. They'd better have a plan B in place -- and no, Linux is not a viable plan B.
the PE ratio is still 60, meaning at this price, the market still expects very high growth for the foreseeable future. Anything less than that in the coming quarters could see the stock sinking further. Still feeling good about your FB IPO purchase?
That's not an exit interview. An exit interview is conducted by some HR flunky who has no real sway over anything. They're just doing their job and that typically involves recording your parting thoughts in your employee file. As the OP recommends, nothing particularly good will come to you as a result of being honest in an exit interview. Just smile and be friendly with the HR droid. You never know when you'll need a reference in the future and some anonymous HR person you never worked with looks up your file only to find a diatribe of complaints.
If you need a cathartic release, you're better off to go home and bash a printer with a baseball bat or something.