And as a person filling out surveys who knows (just a little) about math and statistics, I think of ratings on a bell curve. On a 1-10 scale almost nothing is actually a 1 or a 10. On that scale I would rate a 5 as average service and give a 7 or 8 to what I think is well above average service, 9 would be excellent service. You would only get a 10 if there was no possible way to do any better under any circumstances and you completely exceeded all of my expectations. Unfortunately people get dinged if they don't get all 10s. Sucks to be you if I have to fill out your survey.
My thoughts exactly. I sometimes piss people off on upwork because I give feedback as it should be. 3 is average, 4 is above average, and 5 is "there is no way to do any better at exceeding my expectations". And that's what 5 is - "exceeds expectations". If you do exactly the job that I paid you to do in the timeframe specified then welcome to "3" - you did what is expected. It's unfortunate that many people expect to get a "I exceeded your expectations" reward for not exceeding my expectations.
The market is changing though, and with the phone and tablet, Apple capitalizes on that change.
Don't agree with the strategy, but it makes business sense.
I don't buy it. iPhone sales aren't up, and I'm pretty sure tablet sales plateaued a few years ago. The Apple Watch was pretty much DOA, and they give it a table in the store. They really just need to get their shit together, upgrade the macs and macbooks, and start marketing them again. Again, I have no idea how they can botch this so badly. I don't expect them to come out with another iPhone-type success, but it shouldn't be that difficult to maintain standard upgrade paths for the few products that they have.
I hate to say it, but Tim Cook is just destroying Apple. At the Apple store in our mall now, they have just two tables devoted to MacBooks. On the walls, they have a Mac Mini, a tower, and a couple of iMacs. It's obvious that it's simply not something they're pushing hard. The extra tables that had MacBooks on them last year now have phones and tablets. And Apple TVs - they're pushing those hard. They are showing less than half the Macs that they were showing a year ago. To put it into perspective, the Best Buy has nearly as many MacBooks on display as the Apple store.
Now, you could say they're responding to lowered demand, but they really need to get their shit together. The proper response is to figure out why the demand is lower (hint: no significant upgrades since Jobs died 5 years ago) and fix it. It's really not that difficult for them to maintain their market position, it's amazing that they could screw it up this badly.
This gets to the heart of the issue we have in the states - people want the absolute best of what they *think* Europe has in their "socialist" countries. They think "free college" really means "free college for anybody who wants to show up for however long they want to be there", which is nothing like what Europe has.
I'm actually all for actual free education like Europe has, but the left would go nuts (okay, that horse left the barn a couple of months ago) if they realized how few people get to go to college, and how few "women's studies" and such courses were available.
They may have voted, but if 65% wanted priority given to alternative energy sources over fossil fuel development, yet half of all the voters, roughly, voted for the candidate who is "Captain Coal", then clearly, a lot of people voted AGAINST THEIR OWN INTEREST.
Right, because Hillary would have totally owned this one <eyeroll>
The Democrats idea for promoting "alternate energy" is giving large sums of money to Democrat donors like Solyndra. It doesn't actually help anybody except the cronies and the party, in case you're wondering.
If there is an actual medical/statistical reason for separating groups like that, I'm genuinely curious, otherwise whats the point?
Because there are actual differences between the races - both genetic and cultural - that can make a certain disease more prevalent in different races. This is a good example, by the way.
The problem with Trump and most of his campaign is that he's promising a quick, easy solution to a difficult problem: how do American workers stay competitive in a stage of increasingly easier global shipments?
And the problem with Trump's alternative is that she claims there was no problem. Democrats don't seem to get the utter incoherency of their position: America has no problems and Trump can't fix the really bad problems that America has.
In general, the various 'identity theft' type laws which make it illegal to access others accounts don't have exceptions because it's a stolen computer.
True, but look up the "clean hands doctrine". Criminals can't use the courts to get relief.
As someone else said, surely the Saudis care greatly about these issues. Their fundraising dried up - the only reason they were able to handle the 2% overhead is because they didn't need to advertise and it was a pay-for-play scheme. When the "play" side disappeared, so did the "pay" side.
You think there's going to be ~less~ fraud and abuse under a Trump presidency?
He's got a Dept. of Education cabinet pick who blames a clerical error on her being VP of her mother's charity for 17 years, an HHS pick who passed laws to specifically help his stock picks (and I don't mean made it easier to trade stocks - he bought stocks and then helped pass laws that made those company's stock prices go up), and a pick for Sec State who wants to reduce sanctions on Russia so his former company, Exxon (they're tiny, you might not have heard of them), can get billions of dollars worth of investment off the ground there, also helping his stock prices.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Yes, even if all that's true it pales in comparison to what Clinton would have done.
Did you that the "Clinton Global Initiative" just shuttered operations? I mean, who could have seen that coming? You'd think since she isn't President of the USA she would have more time for her, um, charitable work. It's almost like it was a massive scam meant to give the Clintons a slush fund to live the big life on "donations" from people who wanted to buy influence. Nah, couldn't be.
The preferred alternative of pure monitor plus streaming box could be marketed as 'modular TV'.
My monitor is probably close. It's a vizio 42" UHD TV, but has no tuner. So it's not really a "TV". It does have "smart" stuff built in - hulu and such, but I can also go on my phone and open netflix, choose a movie, and then tell it I want to watch it in 4K glory on the monitor. It rocks.
It doesn't have a microphone or camera, but it does directly connect to the internet. But it actually does what I want a TV to do, which is to allow me to watch netflix and amazon content at high resolutions.
As a comparison, comcast just added netflix to the cable box that they insist I use in order to get 300mb internet, but they only show in 720p. Bastards.
I've spent a lot of time in retail and - news flash - everybody does that. When Kroger has a "plus card" deal they always show you the "savings" vs. the MSRP, even if that's not what the item was priced at before the sale. Publix does that with their 2-for-1 deals - you get two items as the MSRP of one. You will save good money doing that, but it's not exactly half price.
This is normal. Once again, Canada shows why government must, of necessity, be reined in.
There quite well was a flaw in the test. You can't turn off caching and then claim to have a real-world test. It is correct that they found a bug for Apple, but nonetheless they shouldn't turn off caching when doing tests like this.
By not disabling the cache Safari will just reload the web page from disk, instead of downloading it all over wifi. In normal use you don't sit around reloading the same page all day, you surf to different web sites, so caching extends battery life to unrealistic levels.
On your normal web site, the actual page content is a pretty small part of the overall download. As images, stylesheets, and javascript files are cached the only thing that loads from page to page is the actual HTML. I develop using Rails, and we have an asset system now that allows us to tell the browser to cache the non-HTML assets for a year, so they'll hopefully never be reloaded. If using standard jquery and such, you can use a CDN that'll have the same sorts of policies to promote caching.
Turning off the cache is not a normal setting, and Consumer Reports should *not* be doing that while claiming to do "real world testing".
If they paid branding consultants millions to come up with "Altaba", somebody deserves to be beaten black and blue with a briefcase, including the consultants.
I'm guessing it's the same people who thought Marissa Meyer was worth tens of millions of dollars.
This stuff is so clueless. I live in the very low tax state of Tennessee, and our roads are at least as good as California's. Indiana and New Hampshire have horrible freeze/thaw cycles all winter long (I spent my first 30 years living in Indiana) that destroys asphalt. We don't have this here or in CA, and road maintenance is simple in comparison.
Our sales tax is about what CA's sales tax is but we have no income tax. With proper spending it can work.
Mine's a little different as I bought it as Service Merchandise which closed in 2002. I think I got it the year that they closed and paid $300 or $400 for it. It's still my watch.
It doesn't run Android or anything. But it has a slide rule around the bezel and is actually made for making some aviation calculations simple. It also handles all time zones, shows utc on the face at all times, has a couple of alarms, a countdown timer, and a stopwatch. It's solar powered and I've never replaced the battery. It's also water-resistant. I've never had trouble with the watch. I just now realized that it's 15+ years old, and has lasted far longer than any other watch that I've owned.
I know there are some amazing computerized watches out there, but a slide rule is the ultimate nerd accessory, right? Also, show me your second generation Apple Watch in 15 years.
Jobs took a company that was nearly bankrupt and turned it into the world's most valuable company.
Do you truly, in the deepest of your heart, believe that he accomplished that alone?
Of course not. What kind of stupid question is that?
He was a leader. As such his main work was motivating others to accomplish the goals that he and his helpers set out. That's not an easy job and there's a reason that you don't see much of it. Elon Musk probably operates on the same level, Bill Gates also. There's a reason you know these names.
Apple has done nothing since Jobs died. Literally, they have coasted. I could grab the local McDonald's manager and put him in Tim Cook's place and get - at worst - the same result.
The sad thing is that he's screwed up stuff that didn't need screwed up. How hard would it have been to simply do standard upgrades to the MacBook Pro line, for instance? They had years, and the best they could do is remove the top row of keys and most usable external ports. They didn't even upgrade the memory capacity - still stuck at 16GB. I had 16GB in my MBP from a few years ago. Come on.
It's frustrating to see what's happened to the company. I personally could have done a much better job of running it (yes, I'm going there) than Tim Cook. At this point, most products have been damaged (no headphone jack, no usb ports, etc.) with little in return. Worse yet, they believe this damage is somehow better - that progress is being made. They seemingly don't understand the concept of a synergistic ecosystem. Hell, even Microsoft is starting to figure this out.
I have no trouble with the fact that they haven't really rolled out another iPhone-sized project since Jobs died. Those sorts of things come around once in a generation and I don't expect such. But you'd think they could have at least maintained standard upgrade paths for the existing products. They've failed to even do that simple task.
The question that never seems to get asked is: Why do these executives get these incredible salaries? Does anybody - apart from the tiny elite at the top - really think it is good value for money?
That's not really the question. Steve Jobs was demonstrably worth hundreds of billions of dollars to Apple's shareholders.
The real question is "why do these executives continue to get incredible salaries when they demonstrably do nothing for the company?"
The issue is that they're being paid as if they're founders when, in fact, they're simply running a ship that someone else built and set out to sea. It's not the same job and nowhere near as difficult. Jobs took a company that was nearly bankrupt and turned it into the world's most valuable company. Unless Cook seriously steps up his game he either needs to be paid $100K/year for the job he's doing or replaced. If he's not replaced soon, Apple will likely be irreparably harmed.
Hahahahaha. Yes, sure. As long as you get a perfect signal, anyway.
This gets into one of the biggest problems with digital broadcasting - it's generally all or nothing. With analog, there's graceful degradation as the signal quality falls, and in an emergency situation that's preferable as people can still determine what's being broadcast even if it's very faint and low quality. With digital, if your signal isn't strong enough you'll get nothing.
It seems to me that the best way forward for Norway would be to get rid of *some* FM stations to open up the bandwidth but leave others going. It's stupid to waste all the radios they currently own.
If you live there, you might want to contact your parliamentarians to let them know that going through with this means they'll be looking for a job after the next election.
Slashdot Mirror
And as a person filling out surveys who knows (just a little) about math and statistics, I think of ratings on a bell curve. On a 1-10 scale almost nothing is actually a 1 or a 10. On that scale I would rate a 5 as average service and give a 7 or 8 to what I think is well above average service, 9 would be excellent service. You would only get a 10 if there was no possible way to do any better under any circumstances and you completely exceeded all of my expectations. Unfortunately people get dinged if they don't get all 10s. Sucks to be you if I have to fill out your survey.
My thoughts exactly. I sometimes piss people off on upwork because I give feedback as it should be. 3 is average, 4 is above average, and 5 is "there is no way to do any better at exceeding my expectations". And that's what 5 is - "exceeds expectations". If you do exactly the job that I paid you to do in the timeframe specified then welcome to "3" - you did what is expected. It's unfortunate that many people expect to get a "I exceeded your expectations" reward for not exceeding my expectations.
It's a fact that Donald Trump has said some scary stupid shit about nuclear weapons. It's not just speculation to reason that the President of the US might act in accordance with his stated positions.
Right. On the other hand, his predecessor helping Iran get closer to nuclear capabilities didn't move the clock.
Odd, isn't it?
The market is changing though, and with the phone and tablet, Apple capitalizes on that change.
Don't agree with the strategy, but it makes business sense.
I don't buy it. iPhone sales aren't up, and I'm pretty sure tablet sales plateaued a few years ago. The Apple Watch was pretty much DOA, and they give it a table in the store. They really just need to get their shit together, upgrade the macs and macbooks, and start marketing them again. Again, I have no idea how they can botch this so badly. I don't expect them to come out with another iPhone-type success, but it shouldn't be that difficult to maintain standard upgrade paths for the few products that they have.
I hate to say it, but Tim Cook is just destroying Apple. At the Apple store in our mall now, they have just two tables devoted to MacBooks. On the walls, they have a Mac Mini, a tower, and a couple of iMacs. It's obvious that it's simply not something they're pushing hard. The extra tables that had MacBooks on them last year now have phones and tablets. And Apple TVs - they're pushing those hard. They are showing less than half the Macs that they were showing a year ago. To put it into perspective, the Best Buy has nearly as many MacBooks on display as the Apple store.
Now, you could say they're responding to lowered demand, but they really need to get their shit together. The proper response is to figure out why the demand is lower (hint: no significant upgrades since Jobs died 5 years ago) and fix it. It's really not that difficult for them to maintain their market position, it's amazing that they could screw it up this badly.
This gets to the heart of the issue we have in the states - people want the absolute best of what they *think* Europe has in their "socialist" countries. They think "free college" really means "free college for anybody who wants to show up for however long they want to be there", which is nothing like what Europe has.
I'm actually all for actual free education like Europe has, but the left would go nuts (okay, that horse left the barn a couple of months ago) if they realized how few people get to go to college, and how few "women's studies" and such courses were available.
They may have voted, but if 65% wanted priority given to alternative energy sources over fossil fuel development, yet half of all the voters, roughly, voted for the candidate who is "Captain Coal", then clearly, a lot of people voted AGAINST THEIR OWN INTEREST.
Right, because Hillary would have totally owned this one <eyeroll>
The Democrats idea for promoting "alternate energy" is giving large sums of money to Democrat donors like Solyndra. It doesn't actually help anybody except the cronies and the party, in case you're wondering.
If there is an actual medical/statistical reason for separating groups like that, I'm genuinely curious, otherwise whats the point?
Because there are actual differences between the races - both genetic and cultural - that can make a certain disease more prevalent in different races. This is a good example, by the way.
The problem with Trump and most of his campaign is that he's promising a quick, easy solution to a difficult problem: how do American workers stay competitive in a stage of increasingly easier global shipments?
And the problem with Trump's alternative is that she claims there was no problem. Democrats don't seem to get the utter incoherency of their position: America has no problems and Trump can't fix the really bad problems that America has.
In general, the various 'identity theft' type laws which make it illegal to access others accounts don't have exceptions because it's a stolen computer.
True, but look up the "clean hands doctrine". Criminals can't use the courts to get relief.
So, um, why shut it down? Odd, isn't it?
LOL! Not really.
As someone else said, surely the Saudis care greatly about these issues. Their fundraising dried up - the only reason they were able to handle the 2% overhead is because they didn't need to advertise and it was a pay-for-play scheme. When the "play" side disappeared, so did the "pay" side.
You think there's going to be ~less~ fraud and abuse under a Trump presidency?
He's got a Dept. of Education cabinet pick who blames a clerical error on her being VP of her mother's charity for 17 years, an HHS pick who passed laws to specifically help his stock picks (and I don't mean made it easier to trade stocks - he bought stocks and then helped pass laws that made those company's stock prices go up), and a pick for Sec State who wants to reduce sanctions on Russia so his former company, Exxon (they're tiny, you might not have heard of them), can get billions of dollars worth of investment off the ground there, also helping his stock prices.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Yes, even if all that's true it pales in comparison to what Clinton would have done.
Did you that the "Clinton Global Initiative" just shuttered operations? I mean, who could have seen that coming? You'd think since she isn't President of the USA she would have more time for her, um, charitable work. It's almost like it was a massive scam meant to give the Clintons a slush fund to live the big life on "donations" from people who wanted to buy influence. Nah, couldn't be.
http://www.inquisitr.com/38991...
The preferred alternative of pure monitor plus streaming box could be marketed as 'modular TV'.
My monitor is probably close. It's a vizio 42" UHD TV, but has no tuner. So it's not really a "TV". It does have "smart" stuff built in - hulu and such, but I can also go on my phone and open netflix, choose a movie, and then tell it I want to watch it in 4K glory on the monitor. It rocks.
It doesn't have a microphone or camera, but it does directly connect to the internet. But it actually does what I want a TV to do, which is to allow me to watch netflix and amazon content at high resolutions.
As a comparison, comcast just added netflix to the cable box that they insist I use in order to get 300mb internet, but they only show in 720p. Bastards.
I've spent a lot of time in retail and - news flash - everybody does that. When Kroger has a "plus card" deal they always show you the "savings" vs. the MSRP, even if that's not what the item was priced at before the sale. Publix does that with their 2-for-1 deals - you get two items as the MSRP of one. You will save good money doing that, but it's not exactly half price.
This is normal. Once again, Canada shows why government must, of necessity, be reined in.
Nobody cares.
Signed,
The sane people of the world
Where's the Windows version of Swift?
Waiting for someone who's not a jackass to write it. I'd start with the Ubuntu version:
https://swift.org/download/#re...
There quite well was a flaw in the test. You can't turn off caching and then claim to have a real-world test. It is correct that they found a bug for Apple, but nonetheless they shouldn't turn off caching when doing tests like this.
By not disabling the cache Safari will just reload the web page from disk, instead of downloading it all over wifi. In normal use you don't sit around reloading the same page all day, you surf to different web sites, so caching extends battery life to unrealistic levels.
On your normal web site, the actual page content is a pretty small part of the overall download. As images, stylesheets, and javascript files are cached the only thing that loads from page to page is the actual HTML. I develop using Rails, and we have an asset system now that allows us to tell the browser to cache the non-HTML assets for a year, so they'll hopefully never be reloaded. If using standard jquery and such, you can use a CDN that'll have the same sorts of policies to promote caching.
Turning off the cache is not a normal setting, and Consumer Reports should *not* be doing that while claiming to do "real world testing".
If they paid branding consultants millions to come up with "Altaba", somebody deserves to be beaten black and blue with a briefcase, including the consultants.
I'm guessing it's the same people who thought Marissa Meyer was worth tens of millions of dollars.
This stuff is so clueless. I live in the very low tax state of Tennessee, and our roads are at least as good as California's. Indiana and New Hampshire have horrible freeze/thaw cycles all winter long (I spent my first 30 years living in Indiana) that destroys asphalt. We don't have this here or in CA, and road maintenance is simple in comparison.
Our sales tax is about what CA's sales tax is but we have no income tax. With proper spending it can work.
So, this is a bit of a repeat, but I'll answer as I did last time. I have a Citizen Eco-Drive Skyhawk:
https://www.amazon.com/Citizen...
Mine's a little different as I bought it as Service Merchandise which closed in 2002. I think I got it the year that they closed and paid $300 or $400 for it. It's still my watch.
It doesn't run Android or anything. But it has a slide rule around the bezel and is actually made for making some aviation calculations simple. It also handles all time zones, shows utc on the face at all times, has a couple of alarms, a countdown timer, and a stopwatch. It's solar powered and I've never replaced the battery. It's also water-resistant. I've never had trouble with the watch. I just now realized that it's 15+ years old, and has lasted far longer than any other watch that I've owned.
I know there are some amazing computerized watches out there, but a slide rule is the ultimate nerd accessory, right? Also, show me your second generation Apple Watch in 15 years.
And lisp, don't forget that.
They're making advances in iPhones? I'd be interested to hear more about this.
Jobs took a company that was nearly bankrupt and turned it into the world's most valuable company.
Do you truly, in the deepest of your heart, believe that he accomplished that alone?
Of course not. What kind of stupid question is that?
He was a leader. As such his main work was motivating others to accomplish the goals that he and his helpers set out. That's not an easy job and there's a reason that you don't see much of it. Elon Musk probably operates on the same level, Bill Gates also. There's a reason you know these names.
Apple has done nothing since Jobs died. Literally, they have coasted. I could grab the local McDonald's manager and put him in Tim Cook's place and get - at worst - the same result.
The sad thing is that he's screwed up stuff that didn't need screwed up. How hard would it have been to simply do standard upgrades to the MacBook Pro line, for instance? They had years, and the best they could do is remove the top row of keys and most usable external ports. They didn't even upgrade the memory capacity - still stuck at 16GB. I had 16GB in my MBP from a few years ago. Come on.
It's frustrating to see what's happened to the company. I personally could have done a much better job of running it (yes, I'm going there) than Tim Cook. At this point, most products have been damaged (no headphone jack, no usb ports, etc.) with little in return. Worse yet, they believe this damage is somehow better - that progress is being made. They seemingly don't understand the concept of a synergistic ecosystem. Hell, even Microsoft is starting to figure this out.
I have no trouble with the fact that they haven't really rolled out another iPhone-sized project since Jobs died. Those sorts of things come around once in a generation and I don't expect such. But you'd think they could have at least maintained standard upgrade paths for the existing products. They've failed to even do that simple task.
When the stock crashes, it ain't gonna be pretty.
The question that never seems to get asked is: Why do these executives get these incredible salaries? Does anybody - apart from the tiny elite at the top - really think it is good value for money?
That's not really the question. Steve Jobs was demonstrably worth hundreds of billions of dollars to Apple's shareholders.
The real question is "why do these executives continue to get incredible salaries when they demonstrably do nothing for the company?"
The issue is that they're being paid as if they're founders when, in fact, they're simply running a ship that someone else built and set out to sea. It's not the same job and nowhere near as difficult. Jobs took a company that was nearly bankrupt and turned it into the world's most valuable company. Unless Cook seriously steps up his game he either needs to be paid $100K/year for the job he's doing or replaced. If he's not replaced soon, Apple will likely be irreparably harmed.
carries less hiss and clearer sound
Hahahahaha. Yes, sure. As long as you get a perfect signal, anyway.
This gets into one of the biggest problems with digital broadcasting - it's generally all or nothing. With analog, there's graceful degradation as the signal quality falls, and in an emergency situation that's preferable as people can still determine what's being broadcast even if it's very faint and low quality. With digital, if your signal isn't strong enough you'll get nothing.
It seems to me that the best way forward for Norway would be to get rid of *some* FM stations to open up the bandwidth but leave others going. It's stupid to waste all the radios they currently own.
If you live there, you might want to contact your parliamentarians to let them know that going through with this means they'll be looking for a job after the next election.