I think that if people are prone to thinking anthromorphically, they should be told that The Internet Is Not Your Friend. It's really not. It's more like one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. Immensely powerful, but utterly alien, and just as likely to destroy you as to help you. Asking trivially worded questions and accepting the first answer (or, anything on the first page, usually) is almost always the wrong thing to do, and courts disaster. To have any chance of success requires some knowledge of how to phrase a request, and how to recognize which answers are gibberish, a trap, or truly helpful.
Like you, I've been doing this for so long that I don't even think about using double quotes and ordering to narrow down results, and to be very skeptical of the answers. It surprises me occasionally that others don't know how to do this.
Good to hear they're making a version of Windows specifically for professional use. It should then come without all the crap bloatware, ads, and telemetry, right? Right?
Almost certainly not. But it still sounds better than what we have currently. I'm especially glad that Microsoft specifically sees network file transfer performance as a thing. Wow, I remember the early days of Vista, when it took forever to transfer files and the M$ techs would just shrug their shoulders and say "that's how it works".
I personally would use this, as I still need Windows for a few important applications. But I'd be inclined to let other people "test" it "in the field" for a year or so first. (In other words, see what other hapless customers experience before moving to it myself.)
Well, except that, they weren't trying to demonstrate a practical ready-for-consumer flying car, they were just trying to make a roughly car size object hover for the cameras. I submit that many engineering students could do at least that using off-the-shelf parts. Test by: They have. Check out that youtube video of a guy flying around a few feet above the surface of a lake on a battery powered platform. Not ready for consumers, maybe, but at least a proof of concept.
So I guess my next question is, are big car companies just too complex and tied down by process to innovate to this degree? Or maybe it really does take MIT students using their own funds to really push the envelope.
Ok wait. I'm not defending him, just observing from my own experience that there is a certain type of slacker, let's call him "wally", who will put a significant amount of energy and creativity into finding new ways to game the system. It isn't laziness, it's.. let's say, aggressive slacking. I don't know how prevalent it is, but I've personally observed this.
I was talking to my daughter last night why the take-and-bake pizza took 45 minutes to pick up from the store. I called ahead, and what they made was as different from what I asked for as was possible using normal menu items. The guy argued with me, saying this is the only order with my name so I must have ordered it. I insisted they make what I actually ordered. The guy behind me, who had also ordered ahead, had the same experience.
So I told him to make it over. That turned out to be a mistake. There were four people on duty, and three of them were aggressively slacking -- putting away cardboard boxes, moving empty tubs around on carts, everything except making pizzas. During rush hour. On a Friday. So the one guy was splitting his time between making pizzas for a crowd of people and hopping back to the register to take orders. This went on for a very long time. He was presiding over a crowd of angry customers when I finally left with my pizza -- made wrong *again* but this time I just took what I got.
I related this to my 22 year old daughter at home, and she said it's a "thing" amongst young workers now. She says it's called "the slacking game". Intentionally getting orders wrong is part of it, and stringing out trivial chores -- like recycling boxes -- until the next break is also part of it. Apparently a lot of imagination goes into how to slack. She says there's often a "designated worker", and everyone else does as little as possible. That matches what I was seeing.
So take this as just another story if you wish, but it matches my observations. I realize I'm arguing against my own position, up there, that it's in the best interests of the company to let sick people go home. I've seen it go either way, and I'm not sure what the solution is. I do know that I don't want to be working next to someone who has something contagious. Come to think of it, I also don't want to be depending on someone who is practising creative slacking, either.
I'm having difficulty seeing what the trouble is. There's a whole bunch of existing drone technology -- sensors, controllers -- that they could leverage. Is it Not Invented Here syndrome, and are they trying to start from scratch? Or is there some issue with scaling the technology up to the size of a car? We already have drone platforms that can be ridden and controlled by a human.
In counterpoint, I realize this is only another data point, and doesn't necessarily mean anything, but a few years ago in a different company, we had a guy in the department who was actually physically coughing up blood (as personally witnessed) but refused to leave his cube because (as we all knew) downsizing was on the horizon and he didn't want to be seen as a slacker.
The rest of us who were in close proximity went to management and threatened to all go home sick if *he* didn't. They finally escorted him out of the building.
And then a few weeks later we were all outsourced, but oh well...
One of the things I can say about that company is that I never coughed up blood while I was there.
Hm. My understanding of "bricked", which is probably out of date, is to put the device in a state where nothing can fix it short of physically replacing components. I guess language and its uses marches on.
Penalizing workers for staying home when they're sick is a really bad idea. Because, naturally, people will come to work sick rather than risk a penalty, potentially spreading the illness to other workers and to customers. This seldom ends well, either for the parties involved or for the company.
There are still good movies being made (for a reasonable definition of "good"), but they're almost always not blockbusters and are usually independently produced. The trick is to find them.
The two most common business plans for films seem to be:
(a) put in a lot of explosions and digital effects, create up to four trailers containing the only parts of the film worth watching, and market the living hell out of it. Get someone to say "a great popcorn flick [1]" and plaster that on the posters. Depend on first weekend to recoup 1/3 to 1/2 of your cost, expect a $70M drop on second weekend, make up the production and marketing costs in foreign markets. DVD sales are gravy.
Or (2), a director makes a film based on his own vision on a relative shoestring with little to no studio interference, and creates something actually worth watching. Being a low budget film, it's not marketed much, and the only people who actually see it are the ones specifically looking for that type of film. They enjoy the experience and tell their friends, making the film a modest success. In my opinion, Son of Rambow (2007), Pirate Radio (2009), About Time (2013), Predestination (2014) and Time Lapse (2014) are examples of (b).
Big hollywood studios tend to do (a), and small independent studios tend to do (b). The trick is to look for those films.
An then, most probably, see them at home, where you can have decent food and beer.
[1] A "popcorn flick" is apparently any $100m+ film with lots of eye candy but no plot or characterization.
So, there isn't the slightest possibility that (a) the movie really was crap, (b) the cost of making it was overblown, (c) prices to see it in-theater are outrageously high, and (d) more and more often, one's home system, which isn't being managed by bored, narcissistic teens, provides a better experience?
Or are they saying that they know that all the above is true, and their business model depends on people not knowing going in that they're about to have an expensive, lousy experience? Because that's what TFA seems to be saying.
(From TFA:)
> Brett Ratner, who directed such classics as Rush Hour and X-Men: The Last Stand, has called Rotten Tomatoes “the worst thing that we have in today’s movie culture.”
I remember The Last Stand. Clearly the worst of the X-men franchise, and one I really wish I hadn't wasted money in a theater to see. I would submit that this is a bit disingenuous.
> Over the weekend, some studio insiders talked about withholding critic screenings until the premiere or scrapping them entirely to prevent damage to future releases
In the past, refusing to screen for critics has been a sure sign that a production is in trouble, and that the studio hopes to make a few bucks off the turkey in the first weekend, before people realize how wretched it is. Good advice has been to steer away from films where the producers have made this decision. I guess they're saying that the new business model is to produce only turkeys and to depend on first weekend take from deluded moviegoers. $$PROFIT$$
Besides, there had already been a Baywatch movie. It was The SpongeBob SquarePants movie, released in 2004.
Ok thanks. To reiterate, so I'm sure I understand this, Windows Phone has with version 10 become "Windows 10 Mobile", which is based on the Windows code base, to distinguish from "Windows Mobile" which is based on the Windows CE code base, the last version of which was purported to have been released in 2013.
So, "Windows 10 Mobile", which runs on 32 bit ARM, is a different code base from "Windows Mobile", which also runs on 32 bit ARM.
And after abandoning Windows Mobile (the WinCE-based product) in favor of Windows Phone (later Windows 10 Mobile), Microsoft is now considering reviving Windows 10... no wait, Windows Mobile. I think I have it now.
> For example, a government could tell that a user is browsing Wikipedia, but couldn't tell that the user is specifically reading the page about Tiananmen Square.
What he said. Moreover, if you do need higher resolution or better color than your laser can provide, you can always go to a high end print shop and have it printed there. I think consumer inkjet printers is a dead industry that just doesn't realize it yet. Like cable TV. Moving forward on inertia only.
The business plan for liquid-ink printers was starting to get bizarre. I mean, if you were patient enough to wait for a sale at one of the geek warehouses, it was cost-effective to just throw out the printer and buy a new one, rather than mess around with replacement cartridges. A big advantage is that you'd get a new print head each time, which cured a lot of printer-related problems.
I've been recommending to customer to only use laser printers with dry toner (color or B/W as necessary) for internal use, (they've gotten very affordable) and outsource high resolution color printing. Dry toner cartridges last a very long time, and there's no print head clogging or cleaning cycles to worry about. ("Outsourcing" in this case means to a local print shop, not overseas.)
Outsourcing your "wet" print jobs, besides having the advantage of not having to fool around with gummed up print heads or cartridge replacement, also has the advantage of using such printers the way they "want" to be used -- shorter downtimes between jobs, and less chance for the ink to dry up.
At home, even though I make part of my living as a photographer, I have an inexpensive laser printer I use for most stuff. (Mostly flyers and misc printing.) The toner cartridge is something like $100 but in 7 years of use I have yet to buy one. For my photography, I have coveted one of those large carriage continuous feed 8 cartridge printers, but realistically, I don't need one, when the photo store a mile and a half away has the same model and will print photos up to poster size for much less than the per-print cost of owning one of the damned things. Even if someone gave me one for free, I probably couldn't afford to keep it going.
So although I really appreciate the decision, and have a private fantasy that it'll perhaps mean higher cost but higher quality printer hardware, in the final analysis, it doesn't matter, because liquid ink printers are a bad choice for most consumers in the first place.
So the real answer to the Fermi Paradox is... Before a coronal mass ejection hits the planet, civilization has to have developed... submarines. Well, *that's* counter-intuitive.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that if people are prone to thinking anthromorphically, they should be told that The Internet Is Not Your Friend. It's really not. It's more like one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. Immensely powerful, but utterly alien, and just as likely to destroy you as to help you. Asking trivially worded questions and accepting the first answer (or, anything on the first page, usually) is almost always the wrong thing to do, and courts disaster. To have any chance of success requires some knowledge of how to phrase a request, and how to recognize which answers are gibberish, a trap, or truly helpful.
Like you, I've been doing this for so long that I don't even think about using double quotes and ordering to narrow down results, and to be very skeptical of the answers. It surprises me occasionally that others don't know how to do this.
Good to hear they're making a version of Windows specifically for professional use. It should then come without all the crap bloatware, ads, and telemetry, right? Right?
Almost certainly not. But it still sounds better than what we have currently. I'm especially glad that Microsoft specifically sees network file transfer performance as a thing. Wow, I remember the early days of Vista, when it took forever to transfer files and the M$ techs would just shrug their shoulders and say "that's how it works".
I personally would use this, as I still need Windows for a few important applications. But I'd be inclined to let other people "test" it "in the field" for a year or so first. (In other words, see what other hapless customers experience before moving to it myself.)
Yes! Please God, let someone set this up somewhere!!
I desperately want to see one these things trying to deliver stuff.
To someone else...
Well, except that, they weren't trying to demonstrate a practical ready-for-consumer flying car, they were just trying to make a roughly car size object hover for the cameras. I submit that many engineering students could do at least that using off-the-shelf parts. Test by: They have. Check out that youtube video of a guy flying around a few feet above the surface of a lake on a battery powered platform. Not ready for consumers, maybe, but at least a proof of concept.
So I guess my next question is, are big car companies just too complex and tied down by process to innovate to this degree? Or maybe it really does take MIT students using their own funds to really push the envelope.
Almost none, in every excruciating detail. A significant number, in general description.
Ok wait. I'm not defending him, just observing from my own experience that there is a certain type of slacker, let's call him "wally", who will put a significant amount of energy and creativity into finding new ways to game the system. It isn't laziness, it's .. let's say, aggressive slacking. I don't know how prevalent it is, but I've personally observed this.
I was talking to my daughter last night why the take-and-bake pizza took 45 minutes to pick up from the store. I called ahead, and what they made was as different from what I asked for as was possible using normal menu items. The guy argued with me, saying this is the only order with my name so I must have ordered it. I insisted they make what I actually ordered. The guy behind me, who had also ordered ahead, had the same experience.
So I told him to make it over. That turned out to be a mistake. There were four people on duty, and three of them were aggressively slacking -- putting away cardboard boxes, moving empty tubs around on carts, everything except making pizzas. During rush hour. On a Friday. So the one guy was splitting his time between making pizzas for a crowd of people and hopping back to the register to take orders. This went on for a very long time. He was presiding over a crowd of angry customers when I finally left with my pizza -- made wrong *again* but this time I just took what I got.
I related this to my 22 year old daughter at home, and she said it's a "thing" amongst young workers now. She says it's called "the slacking game". Intentionally getting orders wrong is part of it, and stringing out trivial chores -- like recycling boxes -- until the next break is also part of it. Apparently a lot of imagination goes into how to slack. She says there's often a "designated worker", and everyone else does as little as possible. That matches what I was seeing.
So take this as just another story if you wish, but it matches my observations. I realize I'm arguing against my own position, up there, that it's in the best interests of the company to let sick people go home. I've seen it go either way, and I'm not sure what the solution is. I do know that I don't want to be working next to someone who has something contagious. Come to think of it, I also don't want to be depending on someone who is practising creative slacking, either.
I'm having difficulty seeing what the trouble is. There's a whole bunch of existing drone technology -- sensors, controllers -- that they could leverage. Is it Not Invented Here syndrome, and are they trying to start from scratch? Or is there some issue with scaling the technology up to the size of a car? We already have drone platforms that can be ridden and controlled by a human.
In counterpoint, I realize this is only another data point, and doesn't necessarily mean anything, but a few years ago in a different company, we had a guy in the department who was actually physically coughing up blood (as personally witnessed) but refused to leave his cube because (as we all knew) downsizing was on the horizon and he didn't want to be seen as a slacker.
The rest of us who were in close proximity went to management and threatened to all go home sick if *he* didn't. They finally escorted him out of the building.
And then a few weeks later we were all outsourced, but oh well...
One of the things I can say about that company is that I never coughed up blood while I was there.
Well, it's great for the developers. They get instant feedback from the user community on new releases.
Ok, most of that feedback is unprintable, but still, it is feedback, of a sort.
Every year it gets a little closer. Like the Babbage Analytic Engine, it may take 100 years.
Hm. My understanding of "bricked", which is probably out of date, is to put the device in a state where nothing can fix it short of physically replacing components. I guess language and its uses marches on.
I must have been using an accidentally released internal build all these years.
Penalizing workers for staying home when they're sick is a really bad idea. Because, naturally, people will come to work sick rather than risk a penalty, potentially spreading the illness to other workers and to customers. This seldom ends well, either for the parties involved or for the company.
There are still good movies being made (for a reasonable definition of "good"), but they're almost always not blockbusters and are usually independently produced. The trick is to find them.
The two most common business plans for films seem to be:
(a) put in a lot of explosions and digital effects, create up to four trailers containing the only parts of the film worth watching, and market the living hell out of it. Get someone to say "a great popcorn flick [1]" and plaster that on the posters. Depend on first weekend to recoup 1/3 to 1/2 of your cost, expect a $70M drop on second weekend, make up the production and marketing costs in foreign markets. DVD sales are gravy.
Or (2), a director makes a film based on his own vision on a relative shoestring with little to no studio interference, and creates something actually worth watching. Being a low budget film, it's not marketed much, and the only people who actually see it are the ones specifically looking for that type of film. They enjoy the experience and tell their friends, making the film a modest success. In my opinion, Son of Rambow (2007), Pirate Radio (2009), About Time (2013), Predestination (2014) and Time Lapse (2014) are examples of (b).
Big hollywood studios tend to do (a), and small independent studios tend to do (b). The trick is to look for those films.
An then, most probably, see them at home, where you can have decent food and beer.
[1] A "popcorn flick" is apparently any $100m+ film with lots of eye candy but no plot or characterization.
And entertaining, in a somewhat ghastly way.
So, there isn't the slightest possibility that (a) the movie really was crap, (b) the cost of making it was overblown, (c) prices to see it in-theater are outrageously high, and (d) more and more often, one's home system, which isn't being managed by bored, narcissistic teens, provides a better experience?
Or are they saying that they know that all the above is true, and their business model depends on people not knowing going in that they're about to have an expensive, lousy experience? Because that's what TFA seems to be saying.
(From TFA:)
> Brett Ratner, who directed such classics as Rush Hour and X-Men: The Last Stand, has called Rotten Tomatoes “the worst thing that we have in today’s movie culture.”
I remember The Last Stand. Clearly the worst of the X-men franchise, and one I really wish I hadn't wasted money in a theater to see. I would submit that this is a bit disingenuous.
> Over the weekend, some studio insiders talked about withholding critic screenings until the premiere or scrapping them entirely to prevent damage to future releases
In the past, refusing to screen for critics has been a sure sign that a production is in trouble, and that the studio hopes to make a few bucks off the turkey in the first weekend, before people realize how wretched it is. Good advice has been to steer away from films where the producers have made this decision. I guess they're saying that the new business model is to produce only turkeys and to depend on first weekend take from deluded moviegoers. $$PROFIT$$
Besides, there had already been a Baywatch movie. It was The SpongeBob SquarePants movie, released in 2004.
Wasn't Windows Phone supposed to have superseded Windows Mobile? What's next, the return of the resistive touch screen??
Is anyone at the helm at Microsoft?
8.x was Windows Phone. 10 is Windows Mobile
But 10 is a different Windows Mobile than the WinCE Windows Mobile than they're talking about here. Different code base.
Killer drones guided by mutant rat brains. It's only a matter of time.
Ok thanks. To reiterate, so I'm sure I understand this, Windows Phone has with version 10 become "Windows 10 Mobile", which is based on the Windows code base, to distinguish from "Windows Mobile" which is based on the Windows CE code base, the last version of which was purported to have been released in 2013.
So, "Windows 10 Mobile", which runs on 32 bit ARM, is a different code base from "Windows Mobile", which also runs on 32 bit ARM.
And after abandoning Windows Mobile (the WinCE-based product) in favor of Windows Phone (later Windows 10 Mobile), Microsoft is now considering reviving Windows 10... no wait, Windows Mobile. I think I have it now.
I have no idea what any of this means.
> For example, a government could tell that a user is browsing Wikipedia, but couldn't tell that the user is specifically reading the page about Tiananmen Square.
Well, until now. Gee thanks, guys.
Wasn't Windows Phone supposed to have superseded Windows Mobile? What's next, the return of the resistive touch screen??
Is anyone at the helm at Microsoft?
What he said. Moreover, if you do need higher resolution or better color than your laser can provide, you can always go to a high end print shop and have it printed there. I think consumer inkjet printers is a dead industry that just doesn't realize it yet. Like cable TV. Moving forward on inertia only.
The business plan for liquid-ink printers was starting to get bizarre. I mean, if you were patient enough to wait for a sale at one of the geek warehouses, it was cost-effective to just throw out the printer and buy a new one, rather than mess around with replacement cartridges. A big advantage is that you'd get a new print head each time, which cured a lot of printer-related problems.
I've been recommending to customer to only use laser printers with dry toner (color or B/W as necessary) for internal use, (they've gotten very affordable) and outsource high resolution color printing. Dry toner cartridges last a very long time, and there's no print head clogging or cleaning cycles to worry about. ("Outsourcing" in this case means to a local print shop, not overseas.)
Outsourcing your "wet" print jobs, besides having the advantage of not having to fool around with gummed up print heads or cartridge replacement, also has the advantage of using such printers the way they "want" to be used -- shorter downtimes between jobs, and less chance for the ink to dry up.
At home, even though I make part of my living as a photographer, I have an inexpensive laser printer I use for most stuff. (Mostly flyers and misc printing.) The toner cartridge is something like $100 but in 7 years of use I have yet to buy one. For my photography, I have coveted one of those large carriage continuous feed 8 cartridge printers, but realistically, I don't need one, when the photo store a mile and a half away has the same model and will print photos up to poster size for much less than the per-print cost of owning one of the damned things. Even if someone gave me one for free, I probably couldn't afford to keep it going.
So although I really appreciate the decision, and have a private fantasy that it'll perhaps mean higher cost but higher quality printer hardware, in the final analysis, it doesn't matter, because liquid ink printers are a bad choice for most consumers in the first place.
What, you mean using spelling and whole words and stuff?
Yes, I think that's what he meant. And expressing complete thoughts.
(This sounds like an episode of The X-Files.)
So the real answer to the Fermi Paradox is... Before a coronal mass ejection hits the planet, civilization has to have developed... submarines. Well, *that's* counter-intuitive.