I've seen studies that show that new CEOs that make more business and operational changes sooner are worse for a company than those that make fewer and more delayed changes. I wish I could find it. It might have been in HBR.
I hate managers / CEOs who try to change as much as possible as soon as possible, but I'd be happy to have a new CEO experiment with improving employee amenities in their first few weeks.
Not everyone lives in the type of city/state that you live in.
There are resources for anonymous HIV testing within reach of just about any community in the nation. Reply back if you're trying to find it in a particular city, and I'll do some digging.
But many people can't bear to ask someone to perform the test on them.
If you want to find out your HIV status, there's really no substitute for having it performed by someone trained to do it, and trained to privately answer every random question you have with zero judgement. For those of you who haven't done it, it's literally the most banal, undramatic process ever. HIV testing is absolutely routine and doesn't make anyone think less of you.
If you want to be tested at home, the Home Access brand kits will run about $50, and offer 99.9% reliability. The catch being the 72 hour turnaround time. I'm not thrilled with OraSure's reliability. 1 false positive in 5,000 isn't too bad, while 1 false negative out of 12 is kind of terrible. This isn't testing for high cholesterol, it's literally "Hey baby, no need to use a condom, I'm clean!"
I don't think it's easy to set a clear metric for how much personal use is too much. People can't work without taking mini mental breaks over the course of a day. That's just not how our minds function, after a certain point you just end up grinding your mental gears and accomplishing progressively less and less quality work.
On the other hand, those few minutes per hour can easily add-up when dropped into a spreadsheet or log output. When viewed in a clinical, abstract sense it can look bad, but from the perspective of an employee's supervisors, they might see a really useful subordinate who is getting a lot of good work done.
Ten minutes an hour on Facebook, CNN and Twitter might seem light an easy thing to eliminate through policy restrictions, but the impact of long stretches of uninterrupted tasks can more than negate any gains made by forcing an employee's eyes away from news or sports scores.
I work in a creative field, and thankfully, our HR and IT departments have been nice enough to say basically be reasonable about your personal use, get your work done, don't go to anything NWS, and don't download random crap. We have a good degree of control over our machines, but if anything, it's engendered more respect for IT, rather than sent us down into a death spiral of violations and data leakage.
A little trust from IT makes us feel like IT is working with us, rather than against us. While we know that doing anything monumentally stupid would be A Bad Thing, there's a sense that we both want to stay out of each other's way and each do our part to keep the machines up and running with as few problems as possible.
It's night and day compared to my first corporate IT experience back in the '90s. Displays locked at ridiculously low resolutions, time and date usually set wrong, and not even enough privileges to double click on the time in the task bar and look at the calendar. You could tell that management / IT wasn't just reasonably paranoid, but completely distrusting and disrespectful of the rest of the staff.
Since 2007, RIM has introduced 37 models. The company, in a statement, said it did not know how many models were on the market.
Adding to the shopping confusion are RIM’s product names, which generally rely on four-digit model numbers and sometimes have different products sharing a name. The BlackBerry Torch 9850 and 9860 are touch-screen phones that are on some shelves next to the BlackBerry Torch 9800 and 9810, touch-screen phones with slide-out keyboards. (The model number differences reflect models adapted for different cellphone systems.)
By contrast, Apple has introduced only four iPhones since 2008 and all were basically the same phone with differences in the amount of storage, or upgrades from older models.
Ironic that RIM is losing-out to the likes of Apple, by making the same mistake Apple did back in the dark days of the '90s, when it seemed like there was a new Performa out every week.
Once upon a time... about three months ago.... a Facebook user would press the "Share on Facebook" button in Instagram, and the selected photo would be uploaded to their "Instagram Photos" album.
"$USER has uploaded $NUMBER of photos to the album Instagram Photos" would appear on their timeline or wall, along with a collage of thumbnails. Comments and likes associated with the wall post were attached to the photo itself.
Now, the same action produces a completely different result that is a UI disaster. The post on a user's wall - and the comment thread and likes that go with it - are completely disconnected from the photo itself. If you click through to the photo, you find the comments are missing, they are attached to the action of uploading, not the photo.
Clicking-through to the full-sized photo presents an entirely separate comment thread. A user scrolling through photos in an album won't find the bulk of interactions associated with it.
Furthermore, each individual photo is now a separate, and huge wall post. A few photos pushes all other content off the page.
On top of all this, sharing a photo to Facebook at any time after it is shared to Instagram dumps the photo into the the entirely separate "Wall Photos" album. Because that makes sense.
Why do all the cable TV networks, and producers, and actors, and writers and all the people associated with movies and such think that they deserve to be wealthy for what is essentially putting on a puppet show?
What is it about people always trying to argue the rank and file make "too much"?
And why do you think that people who work on TV shows and films get wealthy from it?
Time for a little reality:
The vast majority of people involved in TV / film production work very, very hard. Many work ridiculous hours (Get home at midnight, be back on the lot ready to work at 5:30am -- weekends off? LOL! ), get laid-off every few months, live uncertain lives where they're never sure where the next paycheck will come from... or when. It's not glamorous, it's not easy, and it's the kind of thing that pushes you to the point of complete physical and mental collapse.
And for most, the pay is NOT that great. Especially when you take into account the long stretches of unemployment.
But yeah, whine away about how we're undeserving of paychecks that keep us above the poverty line most of the time.
As for the people who make more, let's look at the writers for your average TV show. It's true, they get paid a lot more than a PA or production coordinator, but I've also heard of them locking themselves in their offices for days at a time to get scripts delivered / endless notes addressed on time. As in: They don't stop working and they don't go home. At all. Every day they have producers, actors, executives, agents and talent's hangers-on sending in notes about every last comma. That's not even hyperbole.
Then they lose their jobs within a few months or years. And "I just finished writing for X" doesn't necessarily get you much. There's always thousands of newer and hungrier writers scrambling to take the job they were hoping to get next.
Heathkits would imperil children. They'd be inspired to go on and build things of their own, but anything they'd make would violate 100 frivolous patents, so what's the point in inventing anything?
I gave up notions of being a programmer years ago, so I have to ask... is it really that challenging to create something that presents you with a small number of on-screen choices and counts the replies to each one, with a lockout period in-between?
Funny, mine had email contacts and calendar since day one via BlackBerry Bridge.
If customers who want email need to tether your tablet to a Blackberry phone for almost a year, then your R&D organization is a complete failure, and managers, directors and VPs need to be get fired.
True, but I highly doubt Larry Silverstein would have been so eager to pay over two billion dollars to lease the towers in July of 2001 if they weren't financially viable.
The WTC was 95% leased on 9/11, and the upper floors were hugely popular with tenants. Windows on the World had great food and superb service, but its location had something to do with the fact it was the highest-grossing restaurant in the nation.
But if you're going to build a bunch of 70 and 80 story buildings, you might as well make a twin for 1WTC, and reduce the size of another building on the site.
- We only get one tower back - It will be 104 stories vs 110 of the old WTC, but even then, it's not really 104 stories. - 1WTC will skip floors 2 to 19. - 1WTC will skip floors 93 to 99. - 1WTC will forgo an outdoor observation deck. - 1WTC will be the same dimensions as the old WTC at its base, before tapering-off dramatically by the upper floors, leaving little useable space.
Interesting. I always thot the difference is soaps was that they were taped rather than filmed. I guess you learn something every day.:)
In the end, it's all about lighting.
Even the fanciest cameras on the best set will result in a crap image if the lighting is not done properly. This cannot be overstated. Amateurs obsess over whether they have the most "professional" (read: latest, greatest and most expensive) cameras, while the professionals obsess over whether they have the lighting just so. The quality of the camera is incredibly important, but not the most important thing.
Fewer and fewer primetime shows are shot on film these days, and it's extremely difficult for the audience to tell that Community is done digitally, while Mad Men is filmed on Kodak Vision 3.
Now, this doesn't discount the fact soaps might be using older, crappier cameras in addition to the flat lighting and high frame rates, but in the end, good lights and good sound recording / design are the two things that make someone who knows everything or almost nothing about TV or film perceive something to be "good" looking.
Yes, I am incapable of editing my own comment prior to posting. That should have been:
I've noticed that too. I can never figure out why daytime soap operas look so much different than prime-time shows. Is it the framerate that does it? I was beginning to think that the crappy dialogue and crappy plot were becoming visible.
It's the frame rate + lighting.
Shows like Community or 30 Rock are what's known as single camera. They are lit and shot as though they're feature films. This takes time. I love watching people visit a set for the first time and witness the hours it can take to perfect the lighting for a single shot of a single scene which may be built from multiple shots and end up as a few seconds of screen time in the finished product. But it looks cinematic. You get shadows and a true sense of depth. Frankly, it just looks more interesting than the alternative.
On the other hand, show like The Big Bang Theory or Whitney are multi-cam. Multiple cameras run simultaneously and capture the entire scene at once. Consequently, the sets are lit so they can be shot from a whole bunch of angles without moving lights. Everything looks very flat, and very stage-y. Even real-world props often fall into a strange uncanny valley.
Check out any episode of 30 Rock and then one of the live episodes if you want to see a great comparison between single and multi-cam.
If you think that's the only implication, then I think you're a bit naiive.
If you're concerned about your IP, you shouldn't use cloud storage.
Microsoft's SkyDrive terms aren't a lot different
* You understand that Microsoft may need, and you hereby grant Microsoft the right, to use, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, and display content posted on the service solely to the extent necessary to provide the service.*
I think the last line makes it significantly different than the Google EULA.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen studies that show that new CEOs that make more business and operational changes sooner are worse for a company than those that make fewer and more delayed changes. I wish I could find it. It might have been in HBR.
I hate managers / CEOs who try to change as much as possible as soon as possible, but I'd be happy to have a new CEO experiment with improving employee amenities in their first few weeks.
Cats in zero G? It's been done.
I imagine the ISS would be shredded all the way to the cold, dead vacuum of space about an hour after the arrival of the first catstronaut.
Not everyone lives in the type of city/state that you live in.
There are resources for anonymous HIV testing within reach of just about any community in the nation. Reply back if you're trying to find it in a particular city, and I'll do some digging.
Can one have a test done anonymously by a professional?
Yes. It's incredibly easy to do, and you're unlikely to get charged for it.
But many people can't bear to ask someone to perform the test on them.
If you want to find out your HIV status, there's really no substitute for having it performed by someone trained to do it, and trained to privately answer every random question you have with zero judgement. For those of you who haven't done it, it's literally the most banal, undramatic process ever. HIV testing is absolutely routine and doesn't make anyone think less of you.
I mean, in some places, you can even get it done for free while shopping at a thrift store.
If you want to be tested at home, the Home Access brand kits will run about $50, and offer 99.9% reliability. The catch being the 72 hour turnaround time. I'm not thrilled with OraSure's reliability. 1 false positive in 5,000 isn't too bad, while 1 false negative out of 12 is kind of terrible. This isn't testing for high cholesterol, it's literally "Hey baby, no need to use a condom, I'm clean!"
Thank you for an honest answer.
I don't think it's easy to set a clear metric for how much personal use is too much. People can't work without taking mini mental breaks over the course of a day. That's just not how our minds function, after a certain point you just end up grinding your mental gears and accomplishing progressively less and less quality work.
On the other hand, those few minutes per hour can easily add-up when dropped into a spreadsheet or log output. When viewed in a clinical, abstract sense it can look bad, but from the perspective of an employee's supervisors, they might see a really useful subordinate who is getting a lot of good work done.
Ten minutes an hour on Facebook, CNN and Twitter might seem light an easy thing to eliminate through policy restrictions, but the impact of long stretches of uninterrupted tasks can more than negate any gains made by forcing an employee's eyes away from news or sports scores.
I work in a creative field, and thankfully, our HR and IT departments have been nice enough to say basically be reasonable about your personal use, get your work done, don't go to anything NWS, and don't download random crap. We have a good degree of control over our machines, but if anything, it's engendered more respect for IT, rather than sent us down into a death spiral of violations and data leakage.
A little trust from IT makes us feel like IT is working with us, rather than against us. While we know that doing anything monumentally stupid would be A Bad Thing, there's a sense that we both want to stay out of each other's way and each do our part to keep the machines up and running with as few problems as possible.
It's night and day compared to my first corporate IT experience back in the '90s. Displays locked at ridiculously low resolutions, time and date usually set wrong, and not even enough privileges to double click on the time in the task bar and look at the calendar. You could tell that management / IT wasn't just reasonably paranoid, but completely distrusting and disrespectful of the rest of the staff.
Serious question here: Do you ever go on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Pandora, Spotify or any other non-work related sites while at work?
Stark white, with clear silhouettes of multicolored bugs crawling across the surface.
It reads: "OS X Mountain Lion - 99% of our team was reassigned to iOS 6. But hey, only $30!"
NY Times
Ironic that RIM is losing-out to the likes of Apple, by making the same mistake Apple did back in the dark days of the '90s, when it seemed like there was a new Performa out every week.
Once upon a time... about three months ago.... a Facebook user would press the "Share on Facebook" button in Instagram, and the selected photo would be uploaded to their "Instagram Photos" album.
"$USER has uploaded $NUMBER of photos to the album Instagram Photos" would appear on their timeline or wall, along with a collage of thumbnails. Comments and likes associated with the wall post were attached to the photo itself.
Now, the same action produces a completely different result that is a UI disaster. The post on a user's wall - and the comment thread and likes that go with it - are completely disconnected from the photo itself. If you click through to the photo, you find the comments are missing, they are attached to the action of uploading, not the photo.
Clicking-through to the full-sized photo presents an entirely separate comment thread. A user scrolling through photos in an album won't find the bulk of interactions associated with it.
Furthermore, each individual photo is now a separate, and huge wall post. A few photos pushes all other content off the page.
On top of all this, sharing a photo to Facebook at any time after it is shared to Instagram dumps the photo into the the entirely separate "Wall Photos" album. Because that makes sense.
Why do all the cable TV networks, and producers, and actors, and writers and all the people associated with movies and such think that they deserve to be wealthy for what is essentially putting on a puppet show?
What is it about people always trying to argue the rank and file make "too much"?
And why do you think that people who work on TV shows and films get wealthy from it?
Time for a little reality:
The vast majority of people involved in TV / film production work very, very hard. Many work ridiculous hours (Get home at midnight, be back on the lot ready to work at 5:30am -- weekends off? LOL! ), get laid-off every few months, live uncertain lives where they're never sure where the next paycheck will come from... or when. It's not glamorous, it's not easy, and it's the kind of thing that pushes you to the point of complete physical and mental collapse.
And for most, the pay is NOT that great. Especially when you take into account the long stretches of unemployment.
But yeah, whine away about how we're undeserving of paychecks that keep us above the poverty line most of the time.
As for the people who make more, let's look at the writers for your average TV show. It's true, they get paid a lot more than a PA or production coordinator, but I've also heard of them locking themselves in their offices for days at a time to get scripts delivered / endless notes addressed on time. As in: They don't stop working and they don't go home. At all. Every day they have producers, actors, executives, agents and talent's hangers-on sending in notes about every last comma. That's not even hyperbole.
Then they lose their jobs within a few months or years. And "I just finished writing for X" doesn't necessarily get you much. There's always thousands of newer and hungrier writers scrambling to take the job they were hoping to get next.
I was referring to new Macbook Pros w/o Ethernet.
Sorry, I should have been more clear.
How often do you really need gigabit?
Almost anyone working in media production will likely answer "Every day".
WiFi isn't a solution when users are transferring 300GB+ at a time over the network.
Heathkits would imperil children. They'd be inspired to go on and build things of their own, but anything they'd make would violate 100 frivolous patents, so what's the point in inventing anything?
I gave up notions of being a programmer years ago, so I have to ask... is it really that challenging to create something that presents you with a small number of on-screen choices and counts the replies to each one, with a lockout period in-between?
I'm asking seriously here.
All of his friends went over to work on iOS and he's been left to pick up the slack. ;)
Funny, mine had email contacts and calendar since day one via BlackBerry Bridge.
If customers who want email need to tether your tablet to a Blackberry phone for almost a year, then your R&D organization is a complete failure, and managers, directors and VPs need to be get fired.
True, but I highly doubt Larry Silverstein would have been so eager to pay over two billion dollars to lease the towers in July of 2001 if they weren't financially viable.
"Too big"?
The WTC was 95% leased on 9/11, and the upper floors were hugely popular with tenants. Windows on the World had great food and superb service, but its location had something to do with the fact it was the highest-grossing restaurant in the nation.
But if you're going to build a bunch of 70 and 80 story buildings, you might as well make a twin for 1WTC, and reduce the size of another building on the site.
- We only get one tower back
- It will be 104 stories vs 110 of the old WTC, but even then, it's not really 104 stories.
- 1WTC will skip floors 2 to 19.
- 1WTC will skip floors 93 to 99.
- 1WTC will forgo an outdoor observation deck.
- 1WTC will be the same dimensions as the old WTC at its base, before tapering-off dramatically by the upper floors, leaving little useable space.
Interesting. I always thot the difference is soaps was that they were taped rather than filmed. I guess you learn something every day. :)
In the end, it's all about lighting.
Even the fanciest cameras on the best set will result in a crap image if the lighting is not done properly. This cannot be overstated. Amateurs obsess over whether they have the most "professional" (read: latest, greatest and most expensive) cameras, while the professionals obsess over whether they have the lighting just so. The quality of the camera is incredibly important, but not the most important thing.
Fewer and fewer primetime shows are shot on film these days, and it's extremely difficult for the audience to tell that Community is done digitally, while Mad Men is filmed on Kodak Vision 3.
Now, this doesn't discount the fact soaps might be using older, crappier cameras in addition to the flat lighting and high frame rates, but in the end, good lights and good sound recording / design are the two things that make someone who knows everything or almost nothing about TV or film perceive something to be "good" looking.
Yes, I am incapable of editing my own comment prior to posting. That should have been:
I've noticed that too. I can never figure out why daytime soap operas look so much different than prime-time shows. Is it the framerate that does it? I was beginning to think that the crappy dialogue and crappy plot were becoming visible.
It's the frame rate + lighting.
Shows like Community or 30 Rock are what's known as single camera. They are lit and shot as though they're feature films. This takes time. I love watching people visit a set for the first time and witness the hours it can take to perfect the lighting for a single shot of a single scene which may be built from multiple shots and end up as a few seconds of screen time in the finished product. But it looks cinematic. You get shadows and a true sense of depth. Frankly, it just looks more interesting than the alternative.
On the other hand, show like The Big Bang Theory or Whitney are multi-cam. Multiple cameras run simultaneously and capture the entire scene at once. Consequently, the sets are lit so they can be shot from a whole bunch of angles without moving lights. Everything looks very flat, and very stage-y. Even real-world props often fall into a strange uncanny valley.
Check out any episode of 30 Rock and then one of the live episodes if you want to see a great comparison between single and multi-cam.
If you think that's the only implication, then I think you're a bit naiive.
If you're concerned about your IP, you shouldn't use cloud storage.
Microsoft's SkyDrive terms aren't a lot different
* You understand that Microsoft may need, and you hereby grant Microsoft the right, to use, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, and display content posted on the service solely to the extent necessary to provide the service.*
I think the last line makes it significantly different than the Google EULA.
But I'll take this, too.