I find modern business loaded with people with both integrity and long-term committment. Not everyone, not everywhere, but enough that the situation is no where near as dismal as you make it out.
come back to me after you've been through a few 'oops, we missed the quarter numbers we told wall street' layoffs, a few 'hmmm, we pay our people too much here in North America, fresh grads in India are cheaper' outsourcings, a few 'let's just make it an even 80 hour workweek, if they don't like it, hey, they can quit' startups, a few 'well, we can't pay you much, but here are a lot of stock options, and btw, yeah, we're going to spend $10mil+ in advertising this quarter, and look at the ceo's Porsche in the parking lot' dot bombs, and we'll see what you think about all this.
Yes, there ARE some good companies, with good vision, good long term planning, pride in hiring qualified people and retaining them (as opposed to hiring cheap grads and having a 50% attrition year over year), pride in providing good benefits and so on, but in my 10 years experience they are definitely the exception rather than the rule. And Wall Street being the way it is, it seems that companies that provide numbers no matter what (by laying off people, doing shady deals, or outright lying) are the most rewarded, at least in the short term (yeah, they crash and burn in the long run, but the execs will have made their millions before that happens).
And btw, I don't absolutely have anything against exec compensation per se, if somebody does a great job, hey, they should be paid accordingly, HOWEVER exec compensation where just for sitting in that chair you make millions in options and golden parachutes in my opinion don't foster good leadership, they just foster a 'who cares' attitude.
When we see a good idea that might cut into the profits of our existing products, do we say "Okay, how can we suppress this?" Never.
exactly, you being a good R&D person will submit a patent, but the decision to act on that patent or not is not yours to make, and I wouldn't be surprised if the executives decided to sit on it (and not license it) if it proves too disruptive to your business model. I would also not be surprised at all if such a patent would be so obfuscated in its filing to make it very non-obvious to others that it would actually be a useful invention.
In any case in my opinion nowadays the biggest issues that prevent innovation are Wall Street and Litigation: if your company can't provide quarter over quarter profit increases you get slaughtered on the altar of the stock market (saying something like 'trust us, we might have 2-3 lean years but we will eventually do well' would be cause to immediately change CEO/board), and if you commercialize anything that has an even small risk factor you are painting a huge target on your back for litigation lawyers (say, you discover a cancer cure that cures 99% of the cases, however it might have fatal side effects for the other 1%, it will likely never get to market because regardless of how many disclaimers your patients will sign, the 1% will sue you for sure).
Until companies will stop operating as if a '1 year' plan is long term, and a quarterly plan is 'medium term', constantly fighting fires and so on, I am afraid that innovation will suffer. Linking decision makers' compensation to short term company performance (via stocks) is hardly a good way to motivate those executives to make anything but short-term-gain/long-term-who-cares decisions. As much as a stock market might be useful in some cases, I feel that the current situation is very detrimental to the economy as a whole.
If executives' compensation was not tied to short term profits things would be much better: I would totally be for restricting executives' options so that they would not be exerciseable for a MINIMUM of 15 years from when they were granted, if this simple change was made I feel things would be a lot better (I also would bet that outsourcing as it is now would pretty much disappear, after all firing most of your creative and experienced local staff just to save some money for a year so your options are worth a ton more, only to basically not be competitive anymore in 3-4 years due to your best staff having disappeared, would not be very attractive anymore).
what makes you think that you'll have to aim as precisely on the console as on the PC to score a hit? Also I think you'll be surprised by just how good some console players are... I wouldn't be surprised if at the top top top level maybe PC players will slightly edge console players, however at lower levels it will be a wash.
no, it was not Goodwill, it was the Salvation Army, anyways hopefully the electronic recycling place I brought it to will do the right thing, although I have the feeling that they'll just stick all the electronics in a container to be shipped to China/India to be taken apart instead:(
funny, just yesterday I tried to go to a thrift store with a (perfectly working) 17" and they refused to take it because 'we already have too many, nobody buys those anymore': I ended up having to go to the local electronic recycling workplace, which really sucked, as I hate throwing away perfectly working things.
you wish! the bean counters at most companies will frown on ANY expense for employees, ESPECIALLY if it's for one employee only, since at that point other employees might want it as well.
The way things are nowadays in terms of hardware I don't see why any developer should be expected to work on less than a dual or quad core workstation, with two 24"/30" lcd monitors, 4 gigs of ram, plenty of sata disk space in raid and ergonomic keyboard, mouse, chair etc. etc. etc. heck, even if they were given a fully loaded dual-quad-core workstation for 10 grand, it'd still be only a fraction of their yearly salary, and would very much positively impact productivity.
Instead you still see companies giving their employees pentium 4s at 2.5GHz with maybe 1 gig of ram and 80gigs of ide disk, a single 19" (if not 17") 1280x1024 crt and the absolute cheapest keyboards/mice/chair possible (often the mouse doesn't even have a scroll wheel and the chair is the local staples $100 special). Same deal with managers more often than not getting laptops, ergonomic chairs, big monitors,... when often 'individual contributors' could use all of them more.
If hospitals were run the same way as computer companies surgeons would operate with box cutters and duct tape, and diagnose with an old x-ray machine, while the hospital managers would have MRI machines in their offices and clip their cigars with surgical grade scalpels...
Regarding the OP's problem the solution is simple: they should pony up $200 of their own money and buy their own secondary monitor, when the audit comes either they can show the second monitor is theirs or take it home that day and bring it back once the audit is done.
Now, I don't know what it was like to be a board-game playing kid in the 50s,
not sure about the 50s, but in the mid-70s when I was a kid in Europe we had only two crappy tv channels and no video games, so in the summer we spent most of the day playing outside, save when it was super hot (around noon-2pm) or rainy and then the board games came out: together with Risk, Monopoly was one of our favorites, we were between 7 and 9 years old and we had absolutely no problems with following the official rules and/or having enough attention span to run a game in an hour and a half or so...
on the other hand we also ate only during meals (save a mid-afternoon snack), nobody drank any soda (water all the time), and basically sugary treats were just that, treats, like a cup of ice-cream a few times a week: I think kids nowadays are way too full of sugar/hfcs and sedentary to be able to have a reasonable attention span...
three more weeks with enough sunlight after work to actually do something (run, bike,...) is all that matters... heck, if they made DST 2 hours long and all year round it'd be awesome, rather than being dark at 4:30 in the winter at least it'd stay bright until 6:30, who cares if the sun comes up at 8am or 10am, daylight after work is a lot more important...
as much as I personally loved the box art (and that I'd have bought the game even if it had come in a blank cardboard box) I've heard many times that it was one of the reasons why the game didn't sell as well as it could (I bet that if they had put Fall From Grace on the box sales would've easily been 2x...)
actually it should be http://www.toyota.us/ (which doesn't seem to exist) that brings you to the Toyota USA page according to your line of reasoning, there are plenty of.com sites that refer to non-US-based businesses after all.
Given that many, many teachers give out broadly similar assignments all over the country, how many years it will be until most possible ways of talking, say, of what Dante meant in a certain canto in the Inferno, will be in the database and will make it impossible to write a paper without being suspected of plagiarizing? Especially if the system runs with a very low threshold (say, 3-4 words in a row that are the same = plagiarizing)
It would really be interesting if all the published books on one particular subject (again, say, the Divine Comedy) were submitted to this service and a check was run about just how much 'plagiarizing' and 'original thinking' there is going around...
if I had a ps3 and an lcd tv I'd probably leave it on, it looks quite cool in my opinion... of course people with plasmas and dlp would prefer turning it off instead...
I like that folding got a significant speedup, don't misunderstand me, I just don't particularly care for the fanboyism that's happening with people going on on how much more powerful the PS3 is than a PC and yadda yadda yadda. I really appreciate that the PS3 crowd is contributing so much, although I think this might die off a bit when the novelty factor won't be there anymore.
Although the folding folks were smart to put on an animated 3d screensaver with the client which will make it that much more likely that folks will keep this running, I wonder about burn-in of the white-on-dark text line statistics that I've seen on the various videos: I wonder if those could be disabled (or if they orbit around the screen).
a GPU would be even better, since you could get 2.4x the TFLOPS for half of the watts easily (100-130W for the GPU, 30-40W for the rest of the system idling). Heck, if I was a supercomputer manufacturer I'd just put a laptop-friendly slow CPU on an SLI motherboard with two GPUs and with a solid state read-only flash for booting, removing even more power-related overhead and failure points.
because now the bosses will make sure that she *is* replaceable, and once she is she will be let go and somebody at her original (lower) salary will be hired: you have to remember that for managers/execs everybody is pretty much a cog, and if you can get a cheaper cog somewhere else you will be let go.
The right way to approach this situation is to tell the new job that you will start a month late, to tell the old job that you realize they are in a bind, and that they can have your services on contract for a month to transfer information for $200/hr, $400/hr for overtime: this way she'll make a pile of money *and* she'll have a job to go to afterwards where she'll be sure she won't be replaced asap.
Business relationships are not personal relationships, management treats individual workers like expendable resources, why shouldn't you behave the same way?
amen, I've bought all ID games from doom 1 up to and including quake 3, even way back when I was living in Europe I did the honorable thing and ordered them directly from ID, but after reading up on doom3 and playing it at a friends' house I was very underwhelmed and decided for the first time to give it a pass. I was SO looking forward to doom with an updated engine, but that's not what doom 3 is about at all (at least judging from the reviews and from my 2 hours or so playtest), the engine might be great, but that's about it: and it's interesting to see how HL2 basically created a 'better doom' with the ravenholm levels, which were genuinely creepy and atmospheric.
And this is news how?
on
Is Vista a Trap?
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· Score: 5, Informative
win98 -> 2000, lots of problems with lack of drivers for older hardware 2000 -> XP still problems with lack of drivers for older hardware (although maybe not as many) XP -> Vista well, what do you think?
Respecting your competitors should be rule #1 in business as well as in sports: if you don't respect your competitors odds are you're going to end up losing whatever competition you're in, because you're going to start taking things personally and let that influence your thinking, instead of focusing all your energies on the competition in the most objective and level headed way possible.
if it's not dead I think it's definitely suffering, especially due to the retarded copy protections that games use these days. I haven't bought a PC game in quite a while and passed on several because of Starforce (I don't want it to nuke my dvd drive, or make my pc crash all the time) and securom v7 (registry keys with embedded weird control characters that make them unremovable, not to mention the probable security-hole sudo-like service).
Sucks because I really really really wanted to play GTR, GTR2 and Supreme Commander... oh well, at least Company of Heroes was not protected, thank God. I am afraid what kind of stuff the new games coming out later in the year (bioshock etc.) will use though, I wonder if it's time to have a separate dual boot partition just for games and their shoddy copy protection.
- big space set up as a cube farm so everybody hears everything and it's nearly impossible to concentrate? - cubes are set up in a way so that PHBs can walk around and see what everybody is doing without any sort of privacy? - only office pictured is a 4-person office with desks facing the corners so again there's no privacy whatsoever? - nobody playing games in the gaming area but just one person taking some sort of nap? - snacks around the office so workers don't ever need to leave and can get right back down to work?
this is making the news just because it's google, the working arrangements are the same as a million other valley startups: as much as MS-bashing is de-rigueur here on/. I do think they treat their workers a lot better: having a real office with a door that closes and a window beats every massage/gamesroom/freesnacks/... cubicle farm: I know, I've worked in both and my productivity level is hugely better when I can concentrate without being distracted by coworker xyz on the phone, or other coworkers having an impromptu meeting on things I couldn't care less (hint: that's what 4-person meeting rooms are for).
I feel ripped off when I can beat the whole game, and there is nothing left offered. Do I get mad that I can't beat Ninja Gaiden Black on master? No, because I can beat it on normal, and given enough time, probably even on hard.
you're missing my point: I don't mind at all if games have the hard, super hard, nightmare, whatever modes, but I don't agree when the lowest difficulty setting is basically impossible and it prevents you from seeing most of the rest of the game (in story mode) or 1/5th of the tracks (as I think most people can unlock up to diamond difficulty, but unlocking ax is practically impossible).
Your ninja gaiden example is perfect: how would you feel if the developer placed a master-level opponent 1/5th of the game in on 'easy'? Would you enjoy that? With no codes and no way whatsoever around it?
The GameCube version of "F-Zero" includes a race set on a course full of 90-degree turns and expert opponents. I'll never beat it. I'll never see the rest of the game.
same thing happened to me, no way I'll ever be able to beat that mission in story mode, or beat all the cups in diamond to unlock AX, and due to the fact that for some bizarre reason there are NO CODES for f-zero-gx I just stopped playing it, and basically stopped playing my gc altogether due to the huge amounts of frustration f-zero gx caused.
Note to Nintendo: if you sell a game, make sure that there is some sort of code to use to unlock all the game has to offer, or a reduced difficulty level, I paid for the whole game and to be locked out of 1/5th of the tracks (likely among the best ones) and 4/5ths of the story mode does not feel right.
they put (the entirely forgettable, purely eye candy, shallow as a puddle) Oblivion at #3, what do you expect? Still I can't believe they didn't put FarCry in there, easily should've been in the top-5.
maybe, just maybe, this could be related to the fact that most music on the market today is not worth the plastic it's pressed on? I don't remember how long it's been since I bought a CD of a 'contemporary' artist that gets radio play, pretty much all of the CDs I bought during the last 10+ years have been
= classical music (super hard to find in stores, amazon.com here I come) = jazz (again, very hard to find a store with a decent selection, amazon.com) = import world music (as if I could find this in stores, again, amazon.com) = classic rock albums (you'd think that most stores would have, say, the complete Queen or Led Zeppelin discography, yeah, right, they might have the 'best of' or 'greatest hits' but never the actual albums: amazon.com again)
see a trend here? Why would I go in a physical store and order a CD there (that may or may not arrive in 3-4 weeks) when I can order them from the comfort of my own home and I know I'll receive them within a week tops? And even if I was into the 'latest and greatest' (cough cough) why would I go in a record store and not just get the record on iTunes? After all given how current music is mastered (levels, normalization, etc.) it's not like iTunes AAC files sound that much worse than the actual CDs.
If you really wanted to go after the real causes of retail record stores closing I suggest going after amazon.com and itunes, which in my opinion have a LOT more to do with that than music piracy.
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come back to me after you've been through a few 'oops, we missed the quarter numbers we told wall street' layoffs, a few 'hmmm, we pay our people too much here in North America, fresh grads in India are cheaper' outsourcings, a few 'let's just make it an even 80 hour workweek, if they don't like it, hey, they can quit' startups, a few 'well, we can't pay you much, but here are a lot of stock options, and btw, yeah, we're going to spend $10mil+ in advertising this quarter, and look at the ceo's Porsche in the parking lot' dot bombs, and we'll see what you think about all this.
Yes, there ARE some good companies, with good vision, good long term planning, pride in hiring qualified people and retaining them (as opposed to hiring cheap grads and having a 50% attrition year over year), pride in providing good benefits and so on, but in my 10 years experience they are definitely the exception rather than the rule. And Wall Street being the way it is, it seems that companies that provide numbers no matter what (by laying off people, doing shady deals, or outright lying) are the most rewarded, at least in the short term (yeah, they crash and burn in the long run, but the execs will have made their millions before that happens).
And btw, I don't absolutely have anything against exec compensation per se, if somebody does a great job, hey, they should be paid accordingly, HOWEVER exec compensation where just for sitting in that chair you make millions in options and golden parachutes in my opinion don't foster good leadership, they just foster a 'who cares' attitude.
exactly, you being a good R&D person will submit a patent, but the decision to act on that patent or not is not yours to make, and I wouldn't be surprised if the executives decided to sit on it (and not license it) if it proves too disruptive to your business model. I would also not be surprised at all if such a patent would be so obfuscated in its filing to make it very non-obvious to others that it would actually be a useful invention.
In any case in my opinion nowadays the biggest issues that prevent innovation are Wall Street and Litigation: if your company can't provide quarter over quarter profit increases you get slaughtered on the altar of the stock market (saying something like 'trust us, we might have 2-3 lean years but we will eventually do well' would be cause to immediately change CEO/board), and if you commercialize anything that has an even small risk factor you are painting a huge target on your back for litigation lawyers (say, you discover a cancer cure that cures 99% of the cases, however it might have fatal side effects for the other 1%, it will likely never get to market because regardless of how many disclaimers your patients will sign, the 1% will sue you for sure).
Until companies will stop operating as if a '1 year' plan is long term, and a quarterly plan is 'medium term', constantly fighting fires and so on, I am afraid that innovation will suffer. Linking decision makers' compensation to short term company performance (via stocks) is hardly a good way to motivate those executives to make anything but short-term-gain/long-term-who-cares decisions. As much as a stock market might be useful in some cases, I feel that the current situation is very detrimental to the economy as a whole.
If executives' compensation was not tied to short term profits things would be much better: I would totally be for restricting executives' options so that they would not be exerciseable for a MINIMUM of 15 years from when they were granted, if this simple change was made I feel things would be a lot better (I also would bet that outsourcing as it is now would pretty much disappear, after all firing most of your creative and experienced local staff just to save some money for a year so your options are worth a ton more, only to basically not be competitive anymore in 3-4 years due to your best staff having disappeared, would not be very attractive anymore).
what makes you think that you'll have to aim as precisely on the console as on the PC to score a hit? Also I think you'll be surprised by just how good some console players are... I wouldn't be surprised if at the top top top level maybe PC players will slightly edge console players, however at lower levels it will be a wash.
no, it was not Goodwill, it was the Salvation Army, anyways hopefully the electronic recycling place I brought it to will do the right thing, although I have the feeling that they'll just stick all the electronics in a container to be shipped to China/India to be taken apart instead :(
funny, just yesterday I tried to go to a thrift store with a (perfectly working) 17" and they refused to take it because 'we already have too many, nobody buys those anymore': I ended up having to go to the local electronic recycling workplace, which really sucked, as I hate throwing away perfectly working things.
you wish! the bean counters at most companies will frown on ANY expense for employees, ESPECIALLY if it's for one employee only, since at that point other employees might want it as well.
... when often 'individual contributors' could use all of them more.
The way things are nowadays in terms of hardware I don't see why any developer should be expected to work on less than a dual or quad core workstation, with two 24"/30" lcd monitors, 4 gigs of ram, plenty of sata disk space in raid and ergonomic keyboard, mouse, chair etc. etc. etc. heck, even if they were given a fully loaded dual-quad-core workstation for 10 grand, it'd still be only a fraction of their yearly salary, and would very much positively impact productivity.
Instead you still see companies giving their employees pentium 4s at 2.5GHz with maybe 1 gig of ram and 80gigs of ide disk, a single 19" (if not 17") 1280x1024 crt and the absolute cheapest keyboards/mice/chair possible (often the mouse doesn't even have a scroll wheel and the chair is the local staples $100 special). Same deal with managers more often than not getting laptops, ergonomic chairs, big monitors,
If hospitals were run the same way as computer companies surgeons would operate with box cutters and duct tape, and diagnose with an old x-ray machine, while the hospital managers would have MRI machines in their offices and clip their cigars with surgical grade scalpels...
Regarding the OP's problem the solution is simple: they should pony up $200 of their own money and buy their own secondary monitor, when the audit comes either they can show the second monitor is theirs or take it home that day and bring it back once the audit is done.
not sure about the 50s, but in the mid-70s when I was a kid in Europe we had only two crappy tv channels and no video games, so in the summer we spent most of the day playing outside, save when it was super hot (around noon-2pm) or rainy and then the board games came out: together with Risk, Monopoly was one of our favorites, we were between 7 and 9 years old and we had absolutely no problems with following the official rules and/or having enough attention span to run a game in an hour and a half or so...
on the other hand we also ate only during meals (save a mid-afternoon snack), nobody drank any soda (water all the time), and basically sugary treats were just that, treats, like a cup of ice-cream a few times a week: I think kids nowadays are way too full of sugar/hfcs and sedentary to be able to have a reasonable attention span...
three more weeks with enough sunlight after work to actually do something (run, bike, ...) is all that matters... heck, if they made DST 2 hours long and all year round it'd be awesome, rather than being dark at 4:30 in the winter at least it'd stay bright until 6:30, who cares if the sun comes up at 8am or 10am, daylight after work is a lot more important...
as much as I personally loved the box art (and that I'd have bought the game even if it had come in a blank cardboard box) I've heard many times that it was one of the reasons why the game didn't sell as well as it could (I bet that if they had put Fall From Grace on the box sales would've easily been 2x...)
actually it should be http://www.toyota.us/ (which doesn't seem to exist) that brings you to the Toyota USA page according to your line of reasoning, there are plenty of
Given that many, many teachers give out broadly similar assignments all over the country, how many years it will be until most possible ways of talking, say, of what Dante meant in a certain canto in the Inferno, will be in the database and will make it impossible to write a paper without being suspected of plagiarizing? Especially if the system runs with a very low threshold (say, 3-4 words in a row that are the same = plagiarizing)
It would really be interesting if all the published books on one particular subject (again, say, the Divine Comedy) were submitted to this service and a check was run about just how much 'plagiarizing' and 'original thinking' there is going around...
if I had a ps3 and an lcd tv I'd probably leave it on, it looks quite cool in my opinion... of course people with plasmas and dlp would prefer turning it off instead...
I like that folding got a significant speedup, don't misunderstand me, I just don't particularly care for the fanboyism that's happening with people going on on how much more powerful the PS3 is than a PC and yadda yadda yadda. I really appreciate that the PS3 crowd is contributing so much, although I think this might die off a bit when the novelty factor won't be there anymore.
Although the folding folks were smart to put on an animated 3d screensaver with the client which will make it that much more likely that folks will keep this running, I wonder about burn-in of the white-on-dark text line statistics that I've seen on the various videos: I wonder if those could be disabled (or if they orbit around the screen).
a GPU would be even better, since you could get 2.4x the TFLOPS for half of the watts easily (100-130W for the GPU, 30-40W for the rest of the system idling). Heck, if I was a supercomputer manufacturer I'd just put a laptop-friendly slow CPU on an SLI motherboard with two GPUs and with a solid state read-only flash for booting, removing even more power-related overhead and failure points.
... besides the number of PS3 owners that are running this? The PS3 seems to be significantly slower than the GPU client for example
GPU: 41tflop 697cpus
PLAYSTATION®3 346tflop 14138cpus
so basically the GPUs are 2.4x as powerful as the PS3s.
because now the bosses will make sure that she *is* replaceable, and once she is she will be let go and somebody at her original (lower) salary will be hired: you have to remember that for managers/execs everybody is pretty much a cog, and if you can get a cheaper cog somewhere else you will be let go.
The right way to approach this situation is to tell the new job that you will start a month late, to tell the old job that you realize they are in a bind, and that they can have your services on contract for a month to transfer information for $200/hr, $400/hr for overtime: this way she'll make a pile of money *and* she'll have a job to go to afterwards where she'll be sure she won't be replaced asap.
Business relationships are not personal relationships, management treats individual workers like expendable resources, why shouldn't you behave the same way?
amen, I've bought all ID games from doom 1 up to and including quake 3, even way back when I was living in Europe I did the honorable thing and ordered them directly from ID, but after reading up on doom3 and playing it at a friends' house I was very underwhelmed and decided for the first time to give it a pass. I was SO looking forward to doom with an updated engine, but that's not what doom 3 is about at all (at least judging from the reviews and from my 2 hours or so playtest), the engine might be great, but that's about it: and it's interesting to see how HL2 basically created a 'better doom' with the ravenholm levels, which were genuinely creepy and atmospheric.
win98 -> 2000, lots of problems with lack of drivers for older hardware
2000 -> XP still problems with lack of drivers for older hardware (although maybe not as many)
XP -> Vista well, what do you think?
Respecting your competitors should be rule #1 in business as well as in sports: if you don't respect your competitors odds are you're going to end up losing whatever competition you're in, because you're going to start taking things personally and let that influence your thinking, instead of focusing all your energies on the competition in the most objective and level headed way possible.
if it's not dead I think it's definitely suffering, especially due to the retarded copy protections that games use these days. I haven't bought a PC game in quite a while and passed on several because of Starforce (I don't want it to nuke my dvd drive, or make my pc crash all the time) and securom v7 (registry keys with embedded weird control characters that make them unremovable, not to mention the probable security-hole sudo-like service).
Sucks because I really really really wanted to play GTR, GTR2 and Supreme Commander... oh well, at least Company of Heroes was not protected, thank God. I am afraid what kind of stuff the new games coming out later in the year (bioshock etc.) will use though, I wonder if it's time to have a separate dual boot partition just for games and their shoddy copy protection.
- big space set up as a cube farm so everybody hears everything and it's nearly impossible to concentrate?
/. I do think they treat their workers a lot better: having a real office with a door that closes and a window beats every massage/gamesroom/freesnacks/... cubicle farm: I know, I've worked in both and my productivity level is hugely better when I can concentrate without being distracted by coworker xyz on the phone, or other coworkers having an impromptu meeting on things I couldn't care less (hint: that's what 4-person meeting rooms are for).
- cubes are set up in a way so that PHBs can walk around and see what everybody is doing without any sort of privacy?
- only office pictured is a 4-person office with desks facing the corners so again there's no privacy whatsoever?
- nobody playing games in the gaming area but just one person taking some sort of nap?
- snacks around the office so workers don't ever need to leave and can get right back down to work?
this is making the news just because it's google, the working arrangements are the same as a million other valley startups: as much as MS-bashing is de-rigueur here on
Your ninja gaiden example is perfect: how would you feel if the developer placed a master-level opponent 1/5th of the game in on 'easy'? Would you enjoy that? With no codes and no way whatsoever around it?
Note to Nintendo: if you sell a game, make sure that there is some sort of code to use to unlock all the game has to offer, or a reduced difficulty level, I paid for the whole game and to be locked out of 1/5th of the tracks (likely among the best ones) and 4/5ths of the story mode does not feel right.
they put (the entirely forgettable, purely eye candy, shallow as a puddle) Oblivion at #3, what do you expect? Still I can't believe they didn't put FarCry in there, easily should've been in the top-5.
maybe, just maybe, this could be related to the fact that most music on the market today is not worth the plastic it's pressed on? I don't remember how long it's been since I bought a CD of a 'contemporary' artist that gets radio play, pretty much all of the CDs I bought during the last 10+ years have been
= classical music (super hard to find in stores, amazon.com here I come)
= jazz (again, very hard to find a store with a decent selection, amazon.com)
= import world music (as if I could find this in stores, again, amazon.com)
= classic rock albums (you'd think that most stores would have, say, the complete Queen or Led Zeppelin discography, yeah, right, they might have the 'best of' or 'greatest hits' but never the actual albums: amazon.com again)
see a trend here? Why would I go in a physical store and order a CD there (that may or may not arrive in 3-4 weeks) when I can order them from the comfort of my own home and I know I'll receive them within a week tops? And even if I was into the 'latest and greatest' (cough cough) why would I go in a record store and not just get the record on iTunes? After all given how current music is mastered (levels, normalization, etc.) it's not like iTunes AAC files sound that much worse than the actual CDs.
If you really wanted to go after the real causes of retail record stores closing I suggest going after amazon.com and itunes, which in my opinion have a LOT more to do with that than music piracy.