I don't know if they do any more or not. Steve Jobs on the other hand was anti pretty much anything that didn't put people under a thumb. He ranted on and hated on Ogg/Vorbis/Theora. One of the last things he did before he died was ensure ebooks would remain expensive, fought tooth and nail to make sure webm didn't happen and that if Quicktime wasn't the winner of the embedded video war in the W3C that it would at least be something that wasn't free and open.
That's a political reason - Apple and Microsoft secretly declared war on it BECAUSE it was open and free. I think it was Pioneer that made car stereos that had chips and firmware that supported Ogg natively, but they didn't intentionally build Ogg support into their players. Long story short, their players would play Ogg files, but there were issues with displaying titles and stuff. Not only would Pioneer not support it, they denied the fact they could play it back at all, even when the proof was in front of them, because they didn't want to lose Microsoft Plays For Sure certification. Turns out supporting Ogg would cause you lose that certification and at the time Pioneer was terrified of losing it because they failed to block it. Steve Jobs went on an anti-ogg rant declaring it a terrorist format and accused it of being "submarine patented".
The fact your car does NOT support it to me is all the more reason to embrace it and to encourage others to do so.
BTW, Volkswagen has supported it in the past, I don't know if they do now or not, and there's been a few others that have. (My Volkswagen is too bottom-budget and basic to support anything)
My hearing sucks. I have some frequency range deafness (oddly I can hear ranges most people my age can't), I can't filter out background noise so I'm basically useless in a conversation in a bar, food court, or when a TV is too loud. I even play music I'm listening too at lower volumes so I don't get overwhelmed. Even then I can tell Ogg sounds better than MP3 at similar bit-rates, but I really struggle to tell the difference between Ogg and Flak. Sometimes I can pick it up, usually I can't, may as well use Ogg.
You should experiment - I know Flak (and similar) will sound better to a good ears than the Ogg will, but KB for KB that Ogg will beat the crap out of an MP3. It may be worth going Flak on your 4TB HDD, but may on your 128 GB phone - if you're like me and you keep your whole collection with you. I consider Ogg the "sweet spot". Back in the day I bought AMD processors because I knew they were great. The Intel of the same clock speed might beat it by 8%, but I was paying 50% of what I would for the Intel - AMD won on bang for the buck. In this case I would say Ogg wins on bang for the KB. With my hearing the winner is clear.
Nope, I like JBL speakers because they sound good even when you don't blast them, and they still sound good when you do. Headphones, I've got a couple of pairs of JVC earbuds I picked up about ten years ago at Big Lots for $3 each, they were an awesome deal and I can definitely tell they're better than the ones I've seen for $4 and $5 since. Serious headset wise, I found a Turtle Beach headset that sounded incredibly awesome, wireless, bi-direction and dual input. Too bad the plastic frame was crap. I get binaural for use on my computers not only for music, games, and general use, but more importantly for talking - I've even bought binaural Bluetooth headsets for my phone, when you've got shit hearing and you have for 30 of your 40 years you start to figure that sort of thing out.
My phone has 128 GB of storage. I have 21 GB of Ogg/Vorbis files on it, considering it's still approximately 11 to 1, like MP3, just better quality afterward I think I'll stick with lossy.
My comment stands. When I was the young tech working on computers I hated having to deal with people in their 40's and 50's because they knew jack-shit about how to operate them with a few exceptions.
Now that I'm pushing 40 my favorite people to work with are the ones in their 40's and 50's because they know what they're doing, it's the 20 and 30 somethings that never bothered to learn how to use a computer even though they've had one in front of them their whole lives and they use one for a living.
Apple products take the thinking out of computing.
Most of the reality TV watching, dub-step listening, Pokemon playing public doesn't want to have to think for themselves. Apple has created a product that allows these sorts of people to buy products that work well and will allow them to do what the want to do, almost to the level of the experts in some cases, without having to fully engage their brains.
I know that's a dark and insulting way to look at it, but that's what I've seen. It's not always a bad thing, but sometimes it is.
When older -pre-data aged people use Apple products I think it's a wonderful thing. My own family for instance - I'm from an area that was low revenue (that's changed in the past decade) and isolated from urban life. Yeah, I grew up in the middle of a desert. Even though I grew up in the 80's and 90's it's more like the late sixties to early eighties on most people's calendars when they compare the reality I had to urban areas. Many people where I'm from were technology hostile until the 2000's, including my parents. This isn't a slight against my parents or those around me, it's just a cultural notation. The iPhone has allowed my mother to carry a smart phone and use it proficiently despite not having any sort of computer experience until her late 40's, early 50's.
The Mac has similar appeal.
For older generations I absolutely think Apple is awesome - it's like computers with training wheels. That being said I am a sometimes Mac user - I use a Mac as my main system at work. It's a solid system, I've started having a few issues with it lately, it's a Mid 2011 27" iMac, I think the HDD I put in here runs a bit too hot for it and it's locked up on occasion since doing that - rarely, and the fan runs a lot, and it needs to. Overall I can't complain - it's a good solid UNIX workstation that easy to user for both user level GUI stuff with the UNIX command line for real serious work (BTW iTerm 2 is awesome for my type).
Unfortunately there's a dark-side to this equation.
The younger people who use Apple products for trendy reasons are handicapping themselves.
See that part about growing up in the desert - a bit out of time? That's the best thing that ever happened to me professionally. My first computer was an IBM PC Convertible 2 - a really cool laptop. It ran a custom 8088 processor. I got it used about the first model Pentiums came out.
When the rest of the world was rockin' Windows - 95 was just around the corner, I had a dual floppy 8088. I had to learn to use a computer, the hard way, with a book and keyboard on IBM DOS 5.
I started my career when computers needed jumpers set for everything, CPU voltages, base clocks, multiplies, serial port addresses, interrupts, etc...
Even as technology improved and you didn't have to know the old skills I found knowing them helped. For instance Plug and Play took the jumpers away, but for a long time I found it wasn't smart about assigning IRQ's and that I could greatly improve the performance of a system by making sure as much of the hardware as I could spread out to different IRQ's instead of having everything on one like Intel chipsets had a bad habit of doing automatically.
It is rare that a modern Apple user will ever know anything more than "find the cable with a plug that fits in that hold and the other end fits in that hole over there". Apple has abused the different connector situation BTW. Even my advanced Mac people are trapped in an Apple tar pit which they understand little beyond, nor do they care to.
One of my previous jobs included doing I.T. work at power plants. During the 90's they automated a lot of the work at most power plants and were able to lay off up to 75% of their staff. Power plants basically run themselves. Now they're running into a problem. See, all they kept were the guys who were experienced and good at what they did. The problem is those inexperienced guys are the ones who learn from the go
That K1000 system I mentioned is a package manager. I have to get my "packages" from the people who make them, I have little to no power to influence them. An app store isn't all that different from a package manager, indeed I get apps on my work Mac and even occasionally from the Windows store for free that I used to download free.
It's not a good setup for deploying to users at this time, but there isn't a huge difference between a package manager and an app-store. Ubuntu's failed store proved that. I actually had stuff from the Ubuntu store also - it sucked because it loaded Apt down with more repositories than I wanted to wait for.
The goal is to avoid the problems of traditional Win32 apps that often run in the background and push their own updates. Microsoft wants to stop apps from hooking into the boot and sign-in process to handle all their own updates, which in turn slows down startup time.
In defense of Microsoft's decision I think this is a good idea (partially).
As a system's administrator I do what I can to shut-down scheduled jobs and launch on startup from apps that don't need it. I especially try to prevent apps that annoy the user by begging for updates from having their beg service run. Everything Adobe has touched in the past 20+ years, Java, even browsers do this. I use a Kace K1000 system to push updates to users, and I handle updates to those apps. I don't need users calling me for updates within an hour of Adobe releasing a new point revision on Acrobat reader. I'll have it pushed to the users within a couple of days depending on my work load.
That's what I do at work. I'm a Linux user at home. I've been saying for years using the Apt Package manager is easier than maintaining software on Windows. It's also easier than keeping up with software on a Mac. I've got both stand-alone software and software manager software both at work and at home - gamers - tell me Steam isn't 100x's better than the old fashioned keep up with the boxes, the disks and every single patch from a different website as well as the drivers in the days of yore.
I realize Microsoft is evil.
Apple I can chose between the store or manual installs - though it does progressively harass you more about unsigned stuff with each OS release. Linux - I can use an apt repository like I do for nearly everything, or I can download/install it separately like I do for Calibre and MakeMKV.
For students the lock-down thing may not be a bad idea. For corporations on the full-blown MS bandwagon it may not be a bad idea. That being said I've never worked for any company that didn't have one piece of poorly written software that doesn't comply to normal or modern conventions the whole place nearly runs on. That shitty software is going to have to run on something other than one of these - I see up uptick in Citrix use in the future...
I would jailbreak and replace the OS on this like I do nearly everything else for my own personal use, no surprise there, I haven't used Windows at home since 2000 was now. For handing out to users that don't have the good sense not to download stupid shit and cause problems for me, I could get behind something like this at a corporation.
First - there's the serious mistreatment. I.T. is treated like a pariah at many companies. We are an expense, and we are an expense that many companies have a difficult time grasping. "We send the plumber away after he fixes the toilet, why do we have this guy on the payroll after he fixed my printing issue?" Bean counters especially hate us, because the things we support and provide to the users are expensive. I don't care who the computer is for, I.T. is blamed for it being purchased for it needing support. This is very much a "shoot the messenger" problem. I've seen companies that get rid of their support people, and I've seen it hurt them in the end. I've seen executive assistants - the guard dog types - really hate on I.T. because their master had a computer problem that wasn't immediately fixed and you're expensive.
Second - there's the peer to peer mistreatment. We're I.T., we eat our own. We are continuously cruel towards one another, especially if we like you. Holding back and treating you like a customer means we really don't want you around or we consider you a volatile liability. It's something I've found as pretty much a universal culture among competent technical people. We like practical jokes, well placed insults, and picking at each others issues. We're like a bunch of junior high kids, never mind we're in our 30's and 40's. Most of the people I've seen have a problem with mistreatment seem to only have the problem after they become accepted as part of the group. Some people just don't know how to fit into the culture. This isn't a race or gender thing, I've seen acceptance and breakdowns in about every combination of race and gender you can imagine. We're geeks, competence is currency, if someone is placed in an I.T. area due to affirmative action or nepotism they aren't going to become part of the pack. If you can't pull your own weight they're not going to feel sorry for you, they're going to eat you for lunch. Most successful technical environments I've been in have been meritocracies with the exceptions of rule by the person signing the checks, in which case even those setups are virtual meritocracies where you have the alpha-geek and the guy who can over rule the alpha geek.
Third - the serious real discrimination. Most real discrimination I've seen comes from H.R. departments and busy-bodies. Forced diversity is discrimination. I've been in really good self-governing technical departments. Usually the more offensive and wolf-packish they are, the better they are. I have on occasion had the pack destroyed due to concern from busy-bodies who don't understand that mode of operation intentionally changing seating arrangements, injecting people who aren't exactly up to par, and intentionally injecting people with polar opposite personalities into the team (who don't even technically qualify for the job) just to break up the wolf pack. I saw the intentional pack breakup happen by an injection that increased the size of the team 25%. Productivity fell by 40% as the old wolf-pack had to drag anchors through the work day. FYI, in the situation I'm talking about - the rudest, crudest, and the leader of the pack was female, she was awesome, she told the dirtiest jokes I've ever heard and had a photographic memory, able to recall data at will that I had to look up. We had both Hispanics and Blacks on the team that were part of the pack. The intentional breakup had nothing to do with race or gender - they wanted to break up what they saw as a homogenized personality type. The injected individuals consisted of a white female, a white male who was tech savy in an engineering sense but was mild mannered and couldn't handle high pressure rapid fixes of in a monitored queue environment. He was the type who would spend a day or two getting at a problem the rest of us knew how to plow through. The third was a black female that could barely operate Outlook. In the end their attempt at diversification actually percentage wise increased the white percentage, it increased the female percentage as well, but it destroyed productivity.
I think the culture of tech fields can generate these feelings even when the cause is a bit different.
In comparison to Windows XP and the 900 reboot install and update cycle and the Windows 7 "you need to update Internet Explorer constantly even if you don't use it" cycle - yes.
Something I've run into since - I can't "run as a different user" properly anymore. My company has a rule for admins - you can't work from your admin account, so I've been right-clicking my Microsoft Management Console link and choosing "run as a different user". That quit working - now it says the super user doesn't have access to the management console, but if I actually do login with my admin account - like I'm not supposed - it works fine, just like it did before the update. I can probably figure out some rights changes and work arounds to make it work - but is that what I should be spending my time on?
I've been a Microsoft hater for close to two decades - I've recently softened up on them because Windows 8 and 10 really did introduce a bloat reduction, stability, and performance severely lacking in previous versions, but crap like this and less than ethical data collection and advertising in the system itself are keeping me from embracing it on my personal stuff.
You know - I have a case of Aspergers. I occasionally have issues picking up on jokes and what people are really getting at, but I've trained myself through the years and paying attention to mostly get by alright. Occasionally on Slashdot however I find that I get a reply from Drax the Destroyer and I don't feel so bad about the areas that I still have difficulties with.
I found competitors early on and Marine rushed Protus taking out all of their mining units before they had a single anything else. That was fun.
Also I loved going up against tanks. Find a group of tanks together and send a sacrificial peon up as close as you could get it to one of the tanks, then attack at pont blank range. All of the surrounding tanks will attack your peon destroying one of their own in the process and maybe doing damage to others.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say "his thumb" I said "a thumb".
If there's going to be cattle don't you want them under the control of a rancher, even if they're not yours?
I don't know if they do any more or not. Steve Jobs on the other hand was anti pretty much anything that didn't put people under a thumb. He ranted on and hated on Ogg/Vorbis/Theora. One of the last things he did before he died was ensure ebooks would remain expensive, fought tooth and nail to make sure webm didn't happen and that if Quicktime wasn't the winner of the embedded video war in the W3C that it would at least be something that wasn't free and open.
You explain it to me.
I used to buy I-River products specifically because they supported Ogg....
That's a political reason - Apple and Microsoft secretly declared war on it BECAUSE it was open and free. I think it was Pioneer that made car stereos that had chips and firmware that supported Ogg natively, but they didn't intentionally build Ogg support into their players. Long story short, their players would play Ogg files, but there were issues with displaying titles and stuff. Not only would Pioneer not support it, they denied the fact they could play it back at all, even when the proof was in front of them, because they didn't want to lose Microsoft Plays For Sure certification. Turns out supporting Ogg would cause you lose that certification and at the time Pioneer was terrified of losing it because they failed to block it. Steve Jobs went on an anti-ogg rant declaring it a terrorist format and accused it of being "submarine patented".
The fact your car does NOT support it to me is all the more reason to embrace it and to encourage others to do so.
BTW, Volkswagen has supported it in the past, I don't know if they do now or not, and there's been a few others that have. (My Volkswagen is too bottom-budget and basic to support anything)
My hearing sucks. I have some frequency range deafness (oddly I can hear ranges most people my age can't), I can't filter out background noise so I'm basically useless in a conversation in a bar, food court, or when a TV is too loud. I even play music I'm listening too at lower volumes so I don't get overwhelmed. Even then I can tell Ogg sounds better than MP3 at similar bit-rates, but I really struggle to tell the difference between Ogg and Flak. Sometimes I can pick it up, usually I can't, may as well use Ogg.
You should experiment - I know Flak (and similar) will sound better to a good ears than the Ogg will, but KB for KB that Ogg will beat the crap out of an MP3. It may be worth going Flak on your 4TB HDD, but may on your 128 GB phone - if you're like me and you keep your whole collection with you. I consider Ogg the "sweet spot". Back in the day I bought AMD processors because I knew they were great. The Intel of the same clock speed might beat it by 8%, but I was paying 50% of what I would for the Intel - AMD won on bang for the buck. In this case I would say Ogg wins on bang for the KB. With my hearing the winner is clear.
Nope, I like JBL speakers because they sound good even when you don't blast them, and they still sound good when you do. Headphones, I've got a couple of pairs of JVC earbuds I picked up about ten years ago at Big Lots for $3 each, they were an awesome deal and I can definitely tell they're better than the ones I've seen for $4 and $5 since. Serious headset wise, I found a Turtle Beach headset that sounded incredibly awesome, wireless, bi-direction and dual input. Too bad the plastic frame was crap. I get binaural for use on my computers not only for music, games, and general use, but more importantly for talking - I've even bought binaural Bluetooth headsets for my phone, when you've got shit hearing and you have for 30 of your 40 years you start to figure that sort of thing out.
My phone has 128 GB of storage. I have 21 GB of Ogg/Vorbis files on it, considering it's still approximately 11 to 1, like MP3, just better quality afterward I think I'll stick with lossy.
It's technically superior so why not?
Sony made the big one, Chumby the little one I have.
I actually miss these things working properly. I've seriously considered redoing the insides to something a bit more modern.
With a lot of work from I.T. staff, as we battle bullshit like the way GoTo meeting likes to run in AppData with randomized directory names....
Well, it's obvious from your comment you didn't read all of mine.
My comment stands. When I was the young tech working on computers I hated having to deal with people in their 40's and 50's because they knew jack-shit about how to operate them with a few exceptions.
Now that I'm pushing 40 my favorite people to work with are the ones in their 40's and 50's because they know what they're doing, it's the 20 and 30 somethings that never bothered to learn how to use a computer even though they've had one in front of them their whole lives and they use one for a living.
at a distance mostly.
Apple products take the thinking out of computing.
Most of the reality TV watching, dub-step listening, Pokemon playing public doesn't want to have to think for themselves. Apple has created a product that allows these sorts of people to buy products that work well and will allow them to do what the want to do, almost to the level of the experts in some cases, without having to fully engage their brains.
I know that's a dark and insulting way to look at it, but that's what I've seen. It's not always a bad thing, but sometimes it is.
When older -pre-data aged people use Apple products I think it's a wonderful thing. My own family for instance - I'm from an area that was low revenue (that's changed in the past decade) and isolated from urban life. Yeah, I grew up in the middle of a desert. Even though I grew up in the 80's and 90's it's more like the late sixties to early eighties on most people's calendars when they compare the reality I had to urban areas. Many people where I'm from were technology hostile until the 2000's, including my parents. This isn't a slight against my parents or those around me, it's just a cultural notation. The iPhone has allowed my mother to carry a smart phone and use it proficiently despite not having any sort of computer experience until her late 40's, early 50's.
The Mac has similar appeal.
For older generations I absolutely think Apple is awesome - it's like computers with training wheels. That being said I am a sometimes Mac user - I use a Mac as my main system at work. It's a solid system, I've started having a few issues with it lately, it's a Mid 2011 27" iMac, I think the HDD I put in here runs a bit too hot for it and it's locked up on occasion since doing that - rarely, and the fan runs a lot, and it needs to. Overall I can't complain - it's a good solid UNIX workstation that easy to user for both user level GUI stuff with the UNIX command line for real serious work (BTW iTerm 2 is awesome for my type).
Unfortunately there's a dark-side to this equation.
The younger people who use Apple products for trendy reasons are handicapping themselves.
See that part about growing up in the desert - a bit out of time? That's the best thing that ever happened to me professionally. My first computer was an IBM PC Convertible 2 - a really cool laptop. It ran a custom 8088 processor. I got it used about the first model Pentiums came out.
When the rest of the world was rockin' Windows - 95 was just around the corner, I had a dual floppy 8088. I had to learn to use a computer, the hard way, with a book and keyboard on IBM DOS 5.
I started my career when computers needed jumpers set for everything, CPU voltages, base clocks, multiplies, serial port addresses, interrupts, etc...
Even as technology improved and you didn't have to know the old skills I found knowing them helped. For instance Plug and Play took the jumpers away, but for a long time I found it wasn't smart about assigning IRQ's and that I could greatly improve the performance of a system by making sure as much of the hardware as I could spread out to different IRQ's instead of having everything on one like Intel chipsets had a bad habit of doing automatically.
It is rare that a modern Apple user will ever know anything more than "find the cable with a plug that fits in that hold and the other end fits in that hole over there". Apple has abused the different connector situation BTW. Even my advanced Mac people are trapped in an Apple tar pit which they understand little beyond, nor do they care to.
One of my previous jobs included doing I.T. work at power plants. During the 90's they automated a lot of the work at most power plants and were able to lay off up to 75% of their staff. Power plants basically run themselves. Now they're running into a problem. See, all they kept were the guys who were experienced and good at what they did. The problem is those inexperienced guys are the ones who learn from the go
That K1000 system I mentioned is a package manager. I have to get my "packages" from the people who make them, I have little to no power to influence them. An app store isn't all that different from a package manager, indeed I get apps on my work Mac and even occasionally from the Windows store for free that I used to download free.
It's not a good setup for deploying to users at this time, but there isn't a huge difference between a package manager and an app-store. Ubuntu's failed store proved that. I actually had stuff from the Ubuntu store also - it sucked because it loaded Apt down with more repositories than I wanted to wait for.
The goal is to avoid the problems of traditional Win32 apps that often run in the background and push their own updates. Microsoft wants to stop apps from hooking into the boot and sign-in process to handle all their own updates, which in turn slows down startup time.
In defense of Microsoft's decision I think this is a good idea (partially).
As a system's administrator I do what I can to shut-down scheduled jobs and launch on startup from apps that don't need it. I especially try to prevent apps that annoy the user by begging for updates from having their beg service run. Everything Adobe has touched in the past 20+ years, Java, even browsers do this. I use a Kace K1000 system to push updates to users, and I handle updates to those apps. I don't need users calling me for updates within an hour of Adobe releasing a new point revision on Acrobat reader. I'll have it pushed to the users within a couple of days depending on my work load.
That's what I do at work. I'm a Linux user at home. I've been saying for years using the Apt Package manager is easier than maintaining software on Windows. It's also easier than keeping up with software on a Mac. I've got both stand-alone software and software manager software both at work and at home - gamers - tell me Steam isn't 100x's better than the old fashioned keep up with the boxes, the disks and every single patch from a different website as well as the drivers in the days of yore.
I realize Microsoft is evil.
Apple I can chose between the store or manual installs - though it does progressively harass you more about unsigned stuff with each OS release.
Linux - I can use an apt repository like I do for nearly everything, or I can download/install it separately like I do for Calibre and MakeMKV.
For students the lock-down thing may not be a bad idea. For corporations on the full-blown MS bandwagon it may not be a bad idea. That being said I've never worked for any company that didn't have one piece of poorly written software that doesn't comply to normal or modern conventions the whole place nearly runs on. That shitty software is going to have to run on something other than one of these - I see up uptick in Citrix use in the future...
I would jailbreak and replace the OS on this like I do nearly everything else for my own personal use, no surprise there, I haven't used Windows at home since 2000 was now. For handing out to users that don't have the good sense not to download stupid shit and cause problems for me, I could get behind something like this at a corporation.
We're all mistreated and we mistreat each other.
First - there's the serious mistreatment. I.T. is treated like a pariah at many companies. We are an expense, and we are an expense that many companies have a difficult time grasping. "We send the plumber away after he fixes the toilet, why do we have this guy on the payroll after he fixed my printing issue?" Bean counters especially hate us, because the things we support and provide to the users are expensive. I don't care who the computer is for, I.T. is blamed for it being purchased for it needing support. This is very much a "shoot the messenger" problem. I've seen companies that get rid of their support people, and I've seen it hurt them in the end. I've seen executive assistants - the guard dog types - really hate on I.T. because their master had a computer problem that wasn't immediately fixed and you're expensive.
Second - there's the peer to peer mistreatment. We're I.T., we eat our own. We are continuously cruel towards one another, especially if we like you. Holding back and treating you like a customer means we really don't want you around or we consider you a volatile liability. It's something I've found as pretty much a universal culture among competent technical people. We like practical jokes, well placed insults, and picking at each others issues. We're like a bunch of junior high kids, never mind we're in our 30's and 40's. Most of the people I've seen have a problem with mistreatment seem to only have the problem after they become accepted as part of the group. Some people just don't know how to fit into the culture. This isn't a race or gender thing, I've seen acceptance and breakdowns in about every combination of race and gender you can imagine. We're geeks, competence is currency, if someone is placed in an I.T. area due to affirmative action or nepotism they aren't going to become part of the pack. If you can't pull your own weight they're not going to feel sorry for you, they're going to eat you for lunch. Most successful technical environments I've been in have been meritocracies with the exceptions of rule by the person signing the checks, in which case even those setups are virtual meritocracies where you have the alpha-geek and the guy who can over rule the alpha geek.
Third - the serious real discrimination. Most real discrimination I've seen comes from H.R. departments and busy-bodies. Forced diversity is discrimination. I've been in really good self-governing technical departments. Usually the more offensive and wolf-packish they are, the better they are. I have on occasion had the pack destroyed due to concern from busy-bodies who don't understand that mode of operation intentionally changing seating arrangements, injecting people who aren't exactly up to par, and intentionally injecting people with polar opposite personalities into the team (who don't even technically qualify for the job) just to break up the wolf pack. I saw the intentional pack breakup happen by an injection that increased the size of the team 25%. Productivity fell by 40% as the old wolf-pack had to drag anchors through the work day. FYI, in the situation I'm talking about - the rudest, crudest, and the leader of the pack was female, she was awesome, she told the dirtiest jokes I've ever heard and had a photographic memory, able to recall data at will that I had to look up. We had both Hispanics and Blacks on the team that were part of the pack. The intentional breakup had nothing to do with race or gender - they wanted to break up what they saw as a homogenized personality type. The injected individuals consisted of a white female, a white male who was tech savy in an engineering sense but was mild mannered and couldn't handle high pressure rapid fixes of in a monitored queue environment. He was the type who would spend a day or two getting at a problem the rest of us knew how to plow through. The third was a black female that could barely operate Outlook. In the end their attempt at diversification actually percentage wise increased the white percentage, it increased the female percentage as well, but it destroyed productivity.
I think the culture of tech fields can generate these feelings even when the cause is a bit different.
I thought if they were making money from me when I bought crap off of their site they could hold back on the advertising.
Also Amazon has been advertising - in non-invasive ways - for years.
In comparison to Windows XP and the 900 reboot install and update cycle and the Windows 7 "you need to update Internet Explorer constantly even if you don't use it" cycle - yes.
I got my wife one of those $50 Fire tablets when they were new.
Lot of good it does them when the battery is never charged.....
The very first thing I noticed after booting for the first time: they forgot how to draw boxes.
Something I've run into since - I can't "run as a different user" properly anymore. My company has a rule for admins - you can't work from your admin account, so I've been right-clicking my Microsoft Management Console link and choosing "run as a different user". That quit working - now it says the super user doesn't have access to the management console, but if I actually do login with my admin account - like I'm not supposed - it works fine, just like it did before the update. I can probably figure out some rights changes and work arounds to make it work - but is that what I should be spending my time on?
I've been a Microsoft hater for close to two decades - I've recently softened up on them because Windows 8 and 10 really did introduce a bloat reduction, stability, and performance severely lacking in previous versions, but crap like this and less than ethical data collection and advertising in the system itself are keeping me from embracing it on my personal stuff.
You know - I have a case of Aspergers. I occasionally have issues picking up on jokes and what people are really getting at, but I've trained myself through the years and paying attention to mostly get by alright. Occasionally on Slashdot however I find that I get a reply from Drax the Destroyer and I don't feel so bad about the areas that I still have difficulties with.
It's important to know, I have a toddler.
No more of these dime a dozen problems caused by cheap bribery, I only want to deal with massive high dollar issues caused by bribery!
I'm that guy.
I have to work for a living and I game on Linux. By the time a Linux port comes out and I actually have time to play it....
Yep, I beat Portal for the first time about October of last year.
I found competitors early on and Marine rushed Protus taking out all of their mining units before they had a single anything else. That was fun.
Also I loved going up against tanks. Find a group of tanks together and send a sacrificial peon up as close as you could get it to one of the tanks, then attack at pont blank range. All of the surrounding tanks will attack your peon destroying one of their own in the process and maybe doing damage to others.
Amatures!
Rock out some Meat Loaf, Anything for Love, 12 minutes!