It's upper management's job to weed out "laziness and incompetence". Don't blame the workers if you hired incompetent workers. Blame yourself! But of course the trend is cheaper... I want the cheapest. Well, you get the cheapest, someone not qualified or barely qualified for their role. My girlfriend just finished working for a Fortune 500. Her salary was over $100k/yr. The company was trying to hire people for similar positions for much, much less, and surprisingly no one qualified seemed to want the job. Lots of people were interviewed, and they were all rejected. My girlfriend obviously will hold out for a similar salary in her next job. If she doesn't get it from an employer, she can easily get it through consulting. People will pay for the skills, but apparently corporations don't want to keep skilled people on the full time payroll.
at some point each project has to make a lot more money than previous projects to keep revenues and profits the same or growing.
Ahh yes. How many corporate leaders can't see past the share price? How many managers can't seem to think past their next bonus cheque? I'd say pretty much all of them. That leads to a lack of vision - work becomes about the job instead of about whatever it is that the company started doing. And yeah, no one wants to OK a risky project, and they forget that a successful company is BUILT on risk. The unsuccessful ones fail long before "making it big". Again, it's vision. If you know what you want then it's just a question of finding the most sensible path towards it. But familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saying goes.
I'm not sure I buy the argument that better games require huge budgets. If that were true, then there would be no more new companies, since obviously a start-up isn't going to be able to match the multi-million dollars a company like EA can pour into a project (unless they use kickstarter, lol!). Vision, once again. Games don't HAVE to be done with the absolute latest graphics and technology. They have to be fun and unique to differentiate themselves from the rest, a slightly different way of doing things, a minor change to the view of the "game world", slightly different interface, etc. Combine that with fun and you get a good game.
I don't think it's all the fault of accountants. Human nature encourages nepotism and favoring friends, regardless of actual quality of work. So after a while all the management positions end up filled with mediocre managers who all got the job because they were buddy-buddy with someone, not because they had earned it or had real leadership skills. And once a corporation becomes mediocre, it will stay mediocre. It's very easy to be a mediocre worker in a quality environment, you just have to know how to look busy or failing that, how to intimidate people. However it's almost impossible to be a quality worker in a mediocre environment. You end up discouraged, unsupported, even hated by co-workers until you become mediocre yourself.
The anthropogenic crowd keeps saying that. All science is up for debate all the time, you just need to present a better hypothesis. Saying "it's not up for debate" shows just how afraid you are of the weakness of your argument.
Well that's ok then. A panel has decided on an arbitrary "upper limit", and of course the planet will obey the panel. At one point, when everything you do to stop global warming fails, you'll come to realize that perhaps there are forces far greater than man at work. Failure to recognize this is sheer arrogance.
It's not so much the guns. I live in Costa Rica - police with automatic weapons is the norm. You go anywhere important (bank, jewelry store, etc) and there's always a guard with a shotgun. So like I say, it wasn't the weapons per se, it was the obvious tactical deployment forcing all passengers to walk very close to the officers and the dog, while receiving dirty looks from said officers. This was "in your face" policing. I would think it's ok for the police to make me feel like a criminal if I've done something, but I haven't done anything. Still I felt as if at any moment they were going to grab me. And obviously that was the intent - to intimidate the passengers: "You're in America now and we won't take any shit from you". Yeah well, keep your police state.
I got my perspective adjusted for me a few years ago when getting off an international flight in Miami. Three large policemen in body armor with assault rifles and with one of the most vicious looking black dog I have ever seen, standing at a "choke point" in the tunnels that lead from the plane to immigration. They stood in such a way that you had to pass near the dog, either on the right or the left.. And I thought to myself - this is the "new" America. Well I haven't been back. I plan on actively avoiding it if I can. They can dick around with other people.
Yeah it's just metadata. Like if I rob a bank electronically and put the money in my bank account. It's just metadata, numbers, an electronic "bank balance". It's only real when I go to the ATM... right.
It's just another half-assed job. Computer tech is full of half-ass ideas that sounded pretty good but were never completed. The 640k limit and protected mode. Expanded/Extended memory through A20. Half assed effort by Lotus, IBM and Microsoft. Operating systems - sold as secure, almost as insecure as ever. About the only good thing is they don't usually automatically install malware from the internet without asking you first. Half assed. Trusted Computing - half assed. UEFI, half assed.
I don't know if it's a lack of budget, or if computer techies (not your regular coders but the guys that come up with this stuff and implement it) really have such short attention spans. Or maybe it's just a marketing thing - give us a new tech word we can market for this generation, it doesn't have to work, we'll just pretend it's something good and make people want it.
Yes, I'm using a Microsoft keyboard and it has sleep and log off buttons. However TFA and I were talking about the old, old keyboards, when MS-DOS (and Ctrl-Alt-Del) was coded. Not many of those had a reboot key, it certainly wasn't "standard" on the IBM PC. But yeah, keyboards have evolved.
Someone needs to tame that wild pointer before it pokes someone in the eye! Seriously though, isn't this part of all that "information sharing" we're doing now, since nothing is private anymore and the gov't feels entitled to read your email?
That was back when programmers were also engineers, and they realized the risk of accidentally hitting a single key and wiping the contents of RAM without saving. A complex key combination avoids accidents. I really don't see a problem with it. And considering that (most) keyboards still haven't evolved a "reboot" key, there doesn't seem to be great demand. Hell even the "Windows Start" key is probably the least utilized key on my keyboard, only good to tab me out of FPS games by accident and get me killed when I meant to hit Ctrl or Alt.
Mission creep. It always happens. First it's to prevent "child porn" or "terrorism". Then someone gets a bright idea - "but we can get x this way too!". And then someone else wants to use it for their pet agenda. What you end up with is police in body armor and assault rifles storming your house to confiscate files in a civil (not even criminal!) case, Kim Dotcom style.
As a gaming rig? Sure. You'll be one of those guys in the forum screaming about when the patch to fix the problems for Mac is coming out. Or why won't "x" work my Mac? I prefer to be absolutely compatible.
It's still pretty much common sense. You want a fast CPU, so not the top of the line $1000 chip, take a step back or two and go for the one selling in the $300-$500 range. Motherboard for that chip from someone you trust - ASUS, Gigabyte, etc. Again never the $500 "gamer" board, take a step back, there are some really nice ones for $200 or so. Latest generation graphics card, or top end from last generation (assuming the prices have come down), plenty of memory on the card. Power supply that can feed the card what it needs and then some. Plenty of system RAM. SSD hard drive. Water/Air cooling system for your CPU type. And you're set! Shouldn't take a whole "day" to check those out. An hour or two would suffice.
It's been a long time since a "real" war. No or very few politicians alive actually remember one. Growing populations, greed and corruption are putting more pressure on resources; population on the demand side, corruption and greed on the waste side, so even if we have more, we actually have "less". Everyone is pissing around their individual post and marking their territory - Russia, Japan, China, US. The world is basically divided into 2 camps: US/Euro and some allies, vs Russia/China and some allies. Even if China and Russia are not outright allies, they realize they have to co-operate. Throw in another economic crisis and I see the powder-keg going off. Easily. So your analogy to 19th/20th century is correct. "It's that time again".
Just like Japan used to be known for only exporting crappy knockoffs in the 1960's and 70's. Hey you know what, maybe this whole industrialization process has something like a life cycle and goes through phases as it matures. If that's true to bad for the Americans, mocking a young industrial base that will grow up to be bigger than all the industry in the world combined. Kinda like the abusive parent realizing that one day his kid is going to be bigger than him...
Slashdot Mirror
It's upper management's job to weed out "laziness and incompetence". Don't blame the workers if you hired incompetent workers. Blame yourself! But of course the trend is cheaper... I want the cheapest. Well, you get the cheapest, someone not qualified or barely qualified for their role. My girlfriend just finished working for a Fortune 500. Her salary was over $100k/yr. The company was trying to hire people for similar positions for much, much less, and surprisingly no one qualified seemed to want the job. Lots of people were interviewed, and they were all rejected. My girlfriend obviously will hold out for a similar salary in her next job. If she doesn't get it from an employer, she can easily get it through consulting. People will pay for the skills, but apparently corporations don't want to keep skilled people on the full time payroll.
at some point each project has to make a lot more money than previous projects to keep revenues and profits the same or growing.
Ahh yes. How many corporate leaders can't see past the share price? How many managers can't seem to think past their next bonus cheque? I'd say pretty much all of them. That leads to a lack of vision - work becomes about the job instead of about whatever it is that the company started doing. And yeah, no one wants to OK a risky project, and they forget that a successful company is BUILT on risk. The unsuccessful ones fail long before "making it big". Again, it's vision. If you know what you want then it's just a question of finding the most sensible path towards it. But familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saying goes.
I'm not sure I buy the argument that better games require huge budgets. If that were true, then there would be no more new companies, since obviously a start-up isn't going to be able to match the multi-million dollars a company like EA can pour into a project (unless they use kickstarter, lol!). Vision, once again. Games don't HAVE to be done with the absolute latest graphics and technology. They have to be fun and unique to differentiate themselves from the rest, a slightly different way of doing things, a minor change to the view of the "game world", slightly different interface, etc. Combine that with fun and you get a good game.
Companies that encourage creative people right from the get-go, and reward creativity.
I don't think it's all the fault of accountants. Human nature encourages nepotism and favoring friends, regardless of actual quality of work. So after a while all the management positions end up filled with mediocre managers who all got the job because they were buddy-buddy with someone, not because they had earned it or had real leadership skills. And once a corporation becomes mediocre, it will stay mediocre. It's very easy to be a mediocre worker in a quality environment, you just have to know how to look busy or failing that, how to intimidate people. However it's almost impossible to be a quality worker in a mediocre environment. You end up discouraged, unsupported, even hated by co-workers until you become mediocre yourself.
The warming is not up for debate
The anthropogenic crowd keeps saying that. All science is up for debate all the time, you just need to present a better hypothesis. Saying "it's not up for debate" shows just how afraid you are of the weakness of your argument.
Well that's ok then. A panel has decided on an arbitrary "upper limit", and of course the planet will obey the panel. At one point, when everything you do to stop global warming fails, you'll come to realize that perhaps there are forces far greater than man at work. Failure to recognize this is sheer arrogance.
It's not so much the guns. I live in Costa Rica - police with automatic weapons is the norm. You go anywhere important (bank, jewelry store, etc) and there's always a guard with a shotgun. So like I say, it wasn't the weapons per se, it was the obvious tactical deployment forcing all passengers to walk very close to the officers and the dog, while receiving dirty looks from said officers. This was "in your face" policing. I would think it's ok for the police to make me feel like a criminal if I've done something, but I haven't done anything. Still I felt as if at any moment they were going to grab me. And obviously that was the intent - to intimidate the passengers: "You're in America now and we won't take any shit from you". Yeah well, keep your police state.
I got my perspective adjusted for me a few years ago when getting off an international flight in Miami. Three large policemen in body armor with assault rifles and with one of the most vicious looking black dog I have ever seen, standing at a "choke point" in the tunnels that lead from the plane to immigration. They stood in such a way that you had to pass near the dog, either on the right or the left.. And I thought to myself - this is the "new" America. Well I haven't been back. I plan on actively avoiding it if I can. They can dick around with other people.
Yeah it's just metadata. Like if I rob a bank electronically and put the money in my bank account. It's just metadata, numbers, an electronic "bank balance". It's only real when I go to the ATM... right.
It's just another half-assed job. Computer tech is full of half-ass ideas that sounded pretty good but were never completed. The 640k limit and protected mode. Expanded/Extended memory through A20. Half assed effort by Lotus, IBM and Microsoft. Operating systems - sold as secure, almost as insecure as ever. About the only good thing is they don't usually automatically install malware from the internet without asking you first. Half assed. Trusted Computing - half assed. UEFI, half assed.
I don't know if it's a lack of budget, or if computer techies (not your regular coders but the guys that come up with this stuff and implement it) really have such short attention spans. Or maybe it's just a marketing thing - give us a new tech word we can market for this generation, it doesn't have to work, we'll just pretend it's something good and make people want it.
Plus the games are still going to suck.
Yes, I'm using a Microsoft keyboard and it has sleep and log off buttons. However TFA and I were talking about the old, old keyboards, when MS-DOS (and Ctrl-Alt-Del) was coded. Not many of those had a reboot key, it certainly wasn't "standard" on the IBM PC. But yeah, keyboards have evolved.
I usually tend to avoid anything marketed as "gaming", because it usually turns out to be overpriced junk. This sounds like a useful feature however :)
Someone needs to tame that wild pointer before it pokes someone in the eye! Seriously though, isn't this part of all that "information sharing" we're doing now, since nothing is private anymore and the gov't feels entitled to read your email?
That was back when programmers were also engineers, and they realized the risk of accidentally hitting a single key and wiping the contents of RAM without saving. A complex key combination avoids accidents. I really don't see a problem with it. And considering that (most) keyboards still haven't evolved a "reboot" key, there doesn't seem to be great demand. Hell even the "Windows Start" key is probably the least utilized key on my keyboard, only good to tab me out of FPS games by accident and get me killed when I meant to hit Ctrl or Alt.
They are if you choose to share it. If you don't want other people to know about it then keep it to yourself. Then only you and the NSA will know.
Mission creep. It always happens. First it's to prevent "child porn" or "terrorism". Then someone gets a bright idea - "but we can get x this way too!". And then someone else wants to use it for their pet agenda. What you end up with is police in body armor and assault rifles storming your house to confiscate files in a civil (not even criminal!) case, Kim Dotcom style.
It's also very hard to vote for political appointees.
If it's such a big problem how about you announce it at 4pm when the market is closed?
I'll just go with a 27" iMac for $1999
As a gaming rig? Sure. You'll be one of those guys in the forum screaming about when the patch to fix the problems for Mac is coming out. Or why won't "x" work my Mac? I prefer to be absolutely compatible.
It's still pretty much common sense. You want a fast CPU, so not the top of the line $1000 chip, take a step back or two and go for the one selling in the $300-$500 range. Motherboard for that chip from someone you trust - ASUS, Gigabyte, etc. Again never the $500 "gamer" board, take a step back, there are some really nice ones for $200 or so. Latest generation graphics card, or top end from last generation (assuming the prices have come down), plenty of memory on the card. Power supply that can feed the card what it needs and then some. Plenty of system RAM. SSD hard drive. Water/Air cooling system for your CPU type. And you're set! Shouldn't take a whole "day" to check those out. An hour or two would suffice.
It's been a long time since a "real" war. No or very few politicians alive actually remember one. Growing populations, greed and corruption are putting more pressure on resources; population on the demand side, corruption and greed on the waste side, so even if we have more, we actually have "less". Everyone is pissing around their individual post and marking their territory - Russia, Japan, China, US. The world is basically divided into 2 camps: US/Euro and some allies, vs Russia/China and some allies. Even if China and Russia are not outright allies, they realize they have to co-operate. Throw in another economic crisis and I see the powder-keg going off. Easily. So your analogy to 19th/20th century is correct. "It's that time again".
Just like Japan used to be known for only exporting crappy knockoffs in the 1960's and 70's. Hey you know what, maybe this whole industrialization process has something like a life cycle and goes through phases as it matures. If that's true to bad for the Americans, mocking a young industrial base that will grow up to be bigger than all the industry in the world combined. Kinda like the abusive parent realizing that one day his kid is going to be bigger than him...
Metadata. Yeah, keep telling yourself it's just metadata.
They care about battery life, that's why it's always mentioned.
Yeah ok, they care about battery life, but bling is far, far more important.