Really, DRM on Blu-Ray is far far far down on most peoples' priority lists. Compared to everything else, for most people it's not very important. Their time is limited, and they care about the important things.
if this is true then politicians shouldn't be spending any time on these issues, including passing law. after all, why pass law on something few care about? oh right, money.
nominally, 1080p=1920x1080 720p=1280x720 480p=720x480 some displays vary slightly (1920x1088 for ex or 1366x768) dvds are 480p not 720p.
Finally, video is almost never played back 1:1 with pixel resolution. it is played back anamorphically which makes your talk about native resolution irrelevant. The pixels of the video source are stretched and filtered by the tv and/or playback device to fit the configured aspect ratio and number of display pixels.
tv today is the flavored water compared to tv of the past. it's almost ALL 'reality tv' based, just with different 'flavors' of show types. instead of a documentary on some aspect of nature, it'll be an hour of people talking about their feelings about it instead of facts being presented in an interesting way. instead of a cop drama where the excitement comes from the suspense/action involved with who-did-it, it's all about the personal lives of the cops...boring...and the shows that were supposed to be about relationships? oh they just added girly-vampires to those.. there. that makes it all different, right?
sadly, even movies suffer from this now, but they're the only medium (besides books but I"m talking video here) that has sufficient detail to keep my interest. i wish they'd do them justice on bluray. it's also sad that virtually every dvd/bluray purchase requires a ton of research thanks to all the pointless 'editions' they release, each having flaws the other does not.
either your display isn't good, or your eyes aren't great. upscaled dvd looks grainy and oversharp. This is a result of the algorithmic attempt at generating sharper/smoother edge gradients in the picture. it still lacks detail however. it's the difference between having high res textures in a game vs low res textures with a high res detail map placed on them.
Yes, I realize most people can't tell the difference. Lucky me.
There is one thing that dvd and bluray have over any streaming service: ownership of the media. a disc I can play anytime. streaming is done at the behest of others. I'll pay $10-15 for a dvd/bluray..I'd pay about $.05 for a streamed version of the movie that only works so long as I have a subscription.
discrimination knows no social boundaries. all we've done is normalized the bigotry of certain groups as some kind of 'balance' against the bigotry of others. this solves nothing.
no, actually, today, it's the opposite. it's ok to ban someone for being too white, too male, or too straight because the activism has built up assumptions that this group doesn't ever need any protection. The irony here is that the activism has been so strong that it's actually causing a discriminatory backwash. piecemeal discrimination protection like this is the root of the problem. The law says people are not to be discriminated based on race, gender, or lifestyle, but the enforcement of these laws is very selective. only some groups are actually protected. the intelligent are not among them either.
The real issue here is that people are being judged on non relevant attributes. If you're blind, you're not gonna make a good street cop. A wise and intelligent white male would make an excellent street cop (among other things). So would a black male..or white female..etc. Why? because gender and race are irrelevant. Intelligence and wisdom are relevant.
https only works one way and doesn't offer authentication of any kind really.. it's just http wrapped in SSL. scp/sftp is beyond the average GUI user. torrent requires that.torrent files be sent to the user before he can download.. it distributes load, yes, but it's not meant to let someone grab some files from a host somewhere.
ftps is as secure as any other secure socket connection assuming it was implemented well. badly implemented ssl is not restricted to ftps.
So the internet was supposed to be about a slave labor force working for nothing?
false dilemma. the net was originally about people willing to put up data for sharing. profit was not a required motive. nowadays people want me to pay for my bandwidth AND their bandwidth too. no thanks. putting something up on the internet does not entitle you to a profit. you can of course try..
Free does not always equal better and if there is anything we should support with our money, its probably a free and independent press.
so you think the NYT is a good example of a 'free and independent' press? wow. I hope you realize that most of the 'old media' is supported mainly by a strict financial hierarchy funded by a very very small percentage of the US population...corporations and governments. The only thing reading the NYT (along with the rest) is to get an idea of what those in power (public and private sectors) want you to be thinking and talking about. To do this, they have to give you some of the truth, but rarely does all of it coincide with whatever interests they have in posting the story in the first place. There's very little real independent journalism left in the world. None of it shows up in the mainstream media without heavy omission/censorship/fact-skewing.
I've about had it with companies this big looking to get out of paying taxes. We've got a congress that wants to cut a supplemental nutrition program for infants and pregnant women in poverty so Amazon can skip out on taxes, pay lobbyists and provide unfair competition to mom and pop bookstores.
or how about those women take responsibility for themselves and get abortions if they can't afford to have those kids? isn't that what they wanted the right to choose for? that way less tax needs to be paid because of irresponsible behavior.
I say fuck 'em. I've got no problem paying taxes and I've got no problem paying the stiff sales tax we've got here in Chicago. They like to use the nice internet the government made for them but they don't want to give anything back. Meanwhile, Borders is closing stores and the little bookstores where I shop can't even make ends meet.
I guess you aren't counted among those who DO have a problem paying it..literally. you know...like those poor helpless women you mentioned?
If your state isn't providing any value to you, then you may have a problem, yes, but instead of not paying taxes, you should probably consider getting what you want out of the government. You do have a right to petition them after all.
where do you live? here in the states that would get you nowhere unless your wealth amounts to millions at a minimum.
Are they not providing enough law and order? Not stopping enough pollution? Perhaps not protecting your rights in some ways??
too much 'law', too much micromanagement of my life. protecting my rights is easy: just repeal the garbage laws which were bought and paid for by the wealthy.
Or are you one of those types that believes you can do it all yourself?
false dilemma. a nanny state does not help someone who cannot do it all himself. it takes his rights away while throwing him a few bones every now and then.. subsistence is not existence in a free nation.
just because lots of idiots use-curves peak the annoyance factors of bad guis below their conscious perceptions, doesn't mean new-guis are superior to what came before. change for the sake of change is not always better.
Re:How To Tweak GNOME 3
on
GNOME 3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
like kde 4, windows vista/7 and osx, it suffers from web 2.0 syndrome: 1. useless extra borders, huge icons with lots of space between them. computers are tools, not art museums. no, not a false dichotomy as it's possible to make an efficient space look decent. the problems come when the artists and marketers get free reign over interface design and coherence.
2. searching for everything? god I hate this garbage. It's a lot easier to just know where the icon is and click it. I don't want to search for every god damned thing on my computer when I want to use it. this 'feature' is just a crutch for a shitty launch interface. I always turn that indexing garbage off no matter what OS I use because it's always indexing when I'm trying to do something intensive that it's useless heuristics assume isn't 'that' intensive. please stop. just stop.. do things when I tell you to do them. if I want something automated, I'll automate it.. leave the feature in if you like just leave it off by default, thanks.
3. useless animations.. Instant response is important and should be expected from computers clocking at microwave frequencies. if your bloated OS/app/desktop environment lags on a modern desktop, you're doing it wrong.
4. the final thing. tons of extra clicks. why? every new desktop env seems to take longer to configure to a usable state, longer to get at the software and files I need, and more difficult to back up in such a way that I know I got my data and (here's the hard part) my custom configurations stored in a way so that when I have to format, I don't have to work that hard restoring everything. then there's the little bits of functionality spread all over the place syndrome. all modern interfaces suffer from this.. gnome 3 is no different.
I suspect your stats are misleading, gleaned from particular institutions with particular agendas and ideologies.. the only truthful thing one can say about discrimination is that: 1. it happens to everyone sometimes. deal with it. if it's institutionalized, you should be able to do something about it assuming the discrimination is based upon irrelevant attributes, regardless of what attributes are at issue. this is NOT what the current politics supports, though this is what's preached in their speeches. 2. all of the activist groups (especially the politically established ones) preach tolerance at the expense of liberty while practicing (lobbying for law) institutionalized bigotry towards the other side(s) 3. being 'uppity' about something does not mean the argument is wrong.. in the same way that blacks were being 'uppity' about their rights, the political movements which support them are dead set on ensuring that whites are held down. it's ok to build a school for poor non-white kids, but not poor white kids. it's ok to have a womens-only college, but forget about a men-only college. politicians find every loophole in the book to shut down one side, while openly ignoring grievous abuse by the other. all part of what political correctness does: prevent rational discussion, and most importantly, critique of ideas, solely to prevent 'offense' of others' 'feelings.' it's a dirty trick that's been around a long time..
if you're gonna complain about cliches, at least focus on the present. duke is the exception, not the norm these days. what's wrong with a bit of male-archetype cliche? there's tons of 'girl power' moments in the media, making them a cliche stereotype in their own right. hell there are whole shows devoted to showing women in power, running everything, while the males are either kiss-up-captain-save-a-hos, criminals, or, some kind of sex abusers. oh right, I forgot, according to the feminist, male assertion of any kind = 'misogyny', but when females do it to males, it's 'empowerment.' I'm wonderin if the relatively recent intolerance towards the duke character has more to do with increasing gynocentricity and less to do with the drama surrounding the game's development. I say this because in the last few years I've noticed a lot of 'male chauvinist' critiques as a reason to diss the game. sure, they've always been there, even back in the 90s, but today, it seems like the most common complaint. Everyone knows there are far more pertinent attributes that can make a game suck.
The duke aint' PC.. that's what makes him cool. characters like this are the vaccine to the real-damage that the PC-shielding of ideology can do to society. it prevents critique of any kind out of "respect for others' feelings." I'm sure I"ll be modded down into oblivion for even suggesting this. oh well.
he's not really talking about that.. he's talking about apple's publishing policy. apple is a censorious bitch that tends to be left-biased in terms of plebeian politics.
Atleast I know I can somehow just suddenly decide and stop being interested in other girls, no matter how hard I'd try.
I'm sure the insecure feminists, monogamist religious, as well as many LGBT types would LOVE to figure out how to do this.. hetero male sex drive is blamed as the first cause for all the 'problems' related to gender issues by these groups.
still a bloated mess. X11/vnc/ms remote desktop et al are far superior for this than some stupid html/gtk wrapper. what will they think of next? oh wait, I know, they'll use some trendy half-interpreted half compiled language to code this in, increasing the bloat and slowness by multiple factors.. yuck. the stacks the industry is building these days are disgustingly obtuse... and all for the sake of moving execution control away from the consumer (so he can be charged over and over).
just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be. in this case, a 'cloud' centric computing future does NOT look like this utopia you speak of solely out of YOUR convenience.
I assume we can agree that in the end, progress is made by individual contributors -- in programming, these would be the people who can code algorithms; in my field (systems engineering) it's the people who can figure out how to, say, manage systems well and efficiently. Basically, really smart individual contributors.
ok, agreed.
All other things being equal, one could make a pretty convincing case then that, basically, managers don't directly contribute to a company's bottom line. I think so far it sounds like we generally agree.
well actually not quite.. GOOD managers do contribute. though, a lot of times, I don't think their contributions justify the often HUGE salary differences between them and the people who work for them. we reward upper management too much, to the point where fields like engineering barely pay for the schooling required, never mind reward. In the case of google, a technically minded first generation management created a low resistance path from directive to result because those in charge understood and could relate to those who work for them.. bring in a bunch of business management school graduates and you'll see the problems begin because they don't really understand technology, nor the kind of mindset that is good with it, and most importantly, they don't want to. business school (like law enforcement, but for more intelligent people) attracts the sort of person who wants to run things/have authority but not really work all that hard. no this does not mean that all business majors are lazy. they're not, but they seem to graduate with this insular attitude where they think it's their workers' jobs to stretch and meet their whims solely due to title. meanwhile they have no idea what it is they're managing.
However, saying that the people who make progress are the code writers doesn't mean that progress is measured purely in your ability to go into your desk/cubicle/office/palace and write code by your lonesome. Your stuff has to work with other people's stuff.
nah, I didn't mean this unilaterally, but you're right. teamwork is important. It's just that in the last decade or so it's been heavily propagandized as 'the' most important thing at the expense of actual capability. while there are exceptions, one can plot elements of sociability and elements of intuitive thinking ability on a graph, and you'll see the population cluster at opposite ends. surprise, surprise, technical people are not the most social! good tech firms set up their management so that they can deal with at least some of this idiosyncrasy so that they can retain the best people. the ones who can't or simply don't want to out of some sense of hurt feelings, produce mediocre products at best. google (at the beginning anyway) was a rare exception because the owners themselves were very technical and had the brains to start up a successful company.
At its most unstructured, then, a reasonably complex environment requires engineers to work with other engineers to figure out how their stuff will work together. In the worst case, this is ad-hoc and tactical; at the best case, this is how SOAs are designed and APIs are agreed upon. You could argue, of course, that this sort of negotiation work should be done by managers -- and I'd then argue you're wrong because this is the core of what being really good technical engineers is all about.
well it depends what the owners want to produce and how well they actually understand it.. if you leave the engineers to design it all, it will probably work well, but not fit the expectations a non technical management because they don't even know what they want, except that it be something their customers want (resulting in the customer not getting what he wants). most of their technical background comes from what they see in movies (yes this is actually a big problem in society). imo, a big part of google's success up to this point has be
Slashdot Mirror
Really, DRM on Blu-Ray is far far far down on most peoples' priority lists. Compared to everything else, for most people it's not very important. Their time is limited, and they care about the important things.
if this is true then politicians shouldn't be spending any time on these issues, including passing law. after all, why pass law on something few care about? oh right, money.
your numbers are wrong
nominally,
1080p=1920x1080
720p=1280x720
480p=720x480
some displays vary slightly (1920x1088 for ex or 1366x768)
dvds are 480p not 720p.
Finally, video is almost never played back 1:1 with pixel resolution. it is played back anamorphically which makes your talk about native resolution irrelevant. The pixels of the video source are stretched and filtered by the tv and/or playback device to fit the configured aspect ratio and number of display pixels.
so much good tv? *cough*
tv today is the flavored water compared to tv of the past. it's almost ALL 'reality tv' based, just with different 'flavors' of show types. instead of a documentary on some aspect of nature, it'll be an hour of people talking about their feelings about it instead of facts being presented in an interesting way. instead of a cop drama where the excitement comes from the suspense/action involved with who-did-it, it's all about the personal lives of the cops...boring. ..and the shows that were supposed to be about relationships? oh they just added girly-vampires to those.. there. that makes it all different, right?
sadly, even movies suffer from this now, but they're the only medium (besides books but I"m talking video here) that has sufficient detail to keep my interest. i wish they'd do them justice on bluray. it's also sad that virtually every dvd/bluray purchase requires a ton of research thanks to all the pointless 'editions' they release, each having flaws the other does not.
either your display isn't good, or your eyes aren't great. upscaled dvd looks grainy and oversharp. This is a result of the algorithmic attempt at generating sharper/smoother edge gradients in the picture. it still lacks detail however. it's the difference between having high res textures in a game vs low res textures with a high res detail map placed on them.
Yes, I realize most people can't tell the difference. Lucky me.
There is one thing that dvd and bluray have over any streaming service: ownership of the media. a disc I can play anytime. streaming is done at the behest of others. I'll pay $10-15 for a dvd/bluray..I'd pay about $.05 for a streamed version of the movie that only works so long as I have a subscription.
discrimination knows no social boundaries. all we've done is normalized the bigotry of certain groups as some kind of 'balance' against the bigotry of others. this solves nothing.
no, actually, today, it's the opposite. it's ok to ban someone for being too white, too male, or too straight because the activism has built up assumptions that this group doesn't ever need any protection. The irony here is that the activism has been so strong that it's actually causing a discriminatory backwash. piecemeal discrimination protection like this is the root of the problem. The law says people are not to be discriminated based on race, gender, or lifestyle, but the enforcement of these laws is very selective. only some groups are actually protected. the intelligent are not among them either.
The real issue here is that people are being judged on non relevant attributes. If you're blind, you're not gonna make a good street cop. A wise and intelligent white male would make an excellent street cop (among other things). So would a black male..or white female..etc. Why? because gender and race are irrelevant. Intelligence and wisdom are relevant.
I think the point is that these new environments are causing people who usually do not do much customization to HAVE to do a lot of it.
https only works one way and doesn't offer authentication of any kind really.. it's just http wrapped in SSL. .torrent files be sent to the user before he can download.. it distributes load, yes, but it's not meant to let someone grab some files from a host somewhere.
scp/sftp is beyond the average GUI user.
torrent requires that
ftps is as secure as any other secure socket connection assuming it was implemented well. badly implemented ssl is not restricted to ftps.
So the internet was supposed to be about a slave labor force working for nothing?
false dilemma. the net was originally about people willing to put up data for sharing. profit was not a required motive. nowadays people want me to pay for my bandwidth AND their bandwidth too. no thanks. putting something up on the internet does not entitle you to a profit. you can of course try..
Free does not always equal better and if there is anything we should support with our money, its probably a free and independent press.
so you think the NYT is a good example of a 'free and independent' press? wow. I hope you realize that most of the 'old media' is supported mainly by a strict financial hierarchy funded by a very very small percentage of the US population...corporations and governments. The only thing reading the NYT (along with the rest) is to get an idea of what those in power (public and private sectors) want you to be thinking and talking about. To do this, they have to give you some of the truth, but rarely does all of it coincide with whatever interests they have in posting the story in the first place. There's very little real independent journalism left in the world. None of it shows up in the mainstream media without heavy omission/censorship/fact-skewing.
Not just false, but extremely, incredibly, amazingly false.
maybe it should be..
I've about had it with companies this big looking to get out of paying taxes. We've got a congress that wants to cut a supplemental nutrition program for infants and pregnant women in poverty so Amazon can skip out on taxes, pay lobbyists and provide unfair competition to mom and pop bookstores.
or how about those women take responsibility for themselves and get abortions if they can't afford to have those kids? isn't that what they wanted the right to choose for? that way less tax needs to be paid because of irresponsible behavior.
I say fuck 'em. I've got no problem paying taxes and I've got no problem paying the stiff sales tax we've got here in Chicago. They like to use the nice internet the government made for them but they don't want to give anything back. Meanwhile, Borders is closing stores and the little bookstores where I shop can't even make ends meet.
I guess you aren't counted among those who DO have a problem paying it..literally. you know...like those poor helpless women you mentioned?
If your state isn't providing any value to you, then you may have a problem, yes, but instead of not paying taxes, you should probably consider getting what you want out of the government. You do have a right to petition them after all.
where do you live? here in the states that would get you nowhere unless your wealth amounts to millions at a minimum.
Are they not providing enough law and order? Not stopping enough pollution? Perhaps not protecting your rights in some ways??
too much 'law', too much micromanagement of my life. protecting my rights is easy: just repeal the garbage laws which were bought and paid for by the wealthy.
Or are you one of those types that believes you can do it all yourself?
false dilemma. a nanny state does not help someone who cannot do it all himself. it takes his rights away while throwing him a few bones every now and then.. subsistence is not existence in a free nation.
or maybe we need a taxation system that isn't insane to begin with.
just because lots of idiots use-curves peak the annoyance factors of bad guis below their conscious perceptions, doesn't mean new-guis are superior to what came before. change for the sake of change is not always better.
like kde 4, windows vista/7 and osx, it suffers from web 2.0 syndrome:
1. useless extra borders, huge icons with lots of space between them. computers are tools, not art museums. no, not a false dichotomy as it's possible to make an efficient space look decent. the problems come when the artists and marketers get free reign over interface design and coherence.
2. searching for everything? god I hate this garbage. It's a lot easier to just know where the icon is and click it. I don't want to search for every god damned thing on my computer when I want to use it. this 'feature' is just a crutch for a shitty launch interface. I always turn that indexing garbage off no matter what OS I use because it's always indexing when I'm trying to do something intensive that it's useless heuristics assume isn't 'that' intensive. please stop. just stop.. do things when I tell you to do them. if I want something automated, I'll automate it.. leave the feature in if you like just leave it off by default, thanks.
3. useless animations.. Instant response is important and should be expected from computers clocking at microwave frequencies. if your bloated OS/app/desktop environment lags on a modern desktop, you're doing it wrong.
4. the final thing. tons of extra clicks. why? every new desktop env seems to take longer to configure to a usable state, longer to get at the software and files I need, and more difficult to back up in such a way that I know I got my data and (here's the hard part) my custom configurations stored in a way so that when I have to format, I don't have to work that hard restoring everything. then there's the little bits of functionality spread all over the place syndrome. all modern interfaces suffer from this.. gnome 3 is no different.
I suspect your stats are misleading, gleaned from particular institutions with particular agendas and ideologies.. the only truthful thing one can say about discrimination is that:
1. it happens to everyone sometimes. deal with it. if it's institutionalized, you should be able to do something about it assuming the discrimination is based upon irrelevant attributes, regardless of what attributes are at issue. this is NOT what the current politics supports, though this is what's preached in their speeches.
2. all of the activist groups (especially the politically established ones) preach tolerance at the expense of liberty while practicing (lobbying for law) institutionalized bigotry towards the other side(s)
3. being 'uppity' about something does not mean the argument is wrong.. in the same way that blacks were being 'uppity' about their rights, the political movements which support them are dead set on ensuring that whites are held down. it's ok to build a school for poor non-white kids, but not poor white kids. it's ok to have a womens-only college, but forget about a men-only college. politicians find every loophole in the book to shut down one side, while openly ignoring grievous abuse by the other. all part of what political correctness does: prevent rational discussion, and most importantly, critique of ideas, solely to prevent 'offense' of others' 'feelings.' it's a dirty trick that's been around a long time..
humans are omnivores not herbivores. we need to eat both in order to be healthier.
if you're gonna complain about cliches, at least focus on the present. duke is the exception, not the norm these days. what's wrong with a bit of male-archetype cliche? there's tons of 'girl power' moments in the media, making them a cliche stereotype in their own right. hell there are whole shows devoted to showing women in power, running everything, while the males are either kiss-up-captain-save-a-hos, criminals, or, some kind of sex abusers. oh right, I forgot, according to the feminist, male assertion of any kind = 'misogyny', but when females do it to males, it's 'empowerment.' I'm wonderin if the relatively recent intolerance towards the duke character has more to do with increasing gynocentricity and less to do with the drama surrounding the game's development. I say this because in the last few years I've noticed a lot of 'male chauvinist' critiques as a reason to diss the game. sure, they've always been there, even back in the 90s, but today, it seems like the most common complaint. Everyone knows there are far more pertinent attributes that can make a game suck.
The duke aint' PC.. that's what makes him cool. characters like this are the vaccine to the real-damage that the PC-shielding of ideology can do to society. it prevents critique of any kind out of "respect for others' feelings." I'm sure I"ll be modded down into oblivion for even suggesting this. oh well.
he's not really talking about that.. he's talking about apple's publishing policy. apple is a censorious bitch that tends to be left-biased in terms of plebeian politics.
whoops.. missed your username.. my bad. still, though, I think my point is valid.
Atleast I know I can somehow just suddenly decide and stop being interested in other girls, no matter how hard I'd try.
I'm sure the insecure feminists, monogamist religious, as well as many LGBT types would LOVE to figure out how to do this.. hetero male sex drive is blamed as the first cause for all the 'problems' related to gender issues by these groups.
still a bloated mess. X11/vnc/ms remote desktop et al are far superior for this than some stupid html/gtk wrapper. what will they think of next? oh wait, I know, they'll use some trendy half-interpreted half compiled language to code this in, increasing the bloat and slowness by multiple factors.. yuck. the stacks the industry is building these days are disgustingly obtuse... and all for the sake of moving execution control away from the consumer (so he can be charged over and over).
just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be. in this case, a 'cloud' centric computing future does NOT look like this utopia you speak of solely out of YOUR convenience.
I assume we can agree that in the end, progress is made by individual contributors -- in programming, these would be the people who can code algorithms; in my field (systems engineering) it's the people who can figure out how to, say, manage systems well and efficiently. Basically, really smart individual contributors.
ok, agreed.
All other things being equal, one could make a pretty convincing case then that, basically, managers don't directly contribute to a company's bottom line. I think so far it sounds like we generally agree.
well actually not quite.. GOOD managers do contribute. though, a lot of times, I don't think their contributions justify the often HUGE salary differences between them and the people who work for them. we reward upper management too much, to the point where fields like engineering barely pay for the schooling required, never mind reward. In the case of google, a technically minded first generation management created a low resistance path from directive to result because those in charge understood and could relate to those who work for them.. bring in a bunch of business management school graduates and you'll see the problems begin because they don't really understand technology, nor the kind of mindset that is good with it, and most importantly, they don't want to. business school (like law enforcement, but for more intelligent people) attracts the sort of person who wants to run things/have authority but not really work all that hard. no this does not mean that all business majors are lazy. they're not, but they seem to graduate with this insular attitude where they think it's their workers' jobs to stretch and meet their whims solely due to title. meanwhile they have no idea what it is they're managing.
However, saying that the people who make progress are the code writers doesn't mean that progress is measured purely in your ability to go into your desk/cubicle/office/palace and write code by your lonesome. Your stuff has to work with other people's stuff.
nah, I didn't mean this unilaterally, but you're right. teamwork is important. It's just that in the last decade or so it's been heavily propagandized as 'the' most important thing at the expense of actual capability. while there are exceptions, one can plot elements of sociability and elements of intuitive thinking ability on a graph, and you'll see the population cluster at opposite ends. surprise, surprise, technical people are not the most social! good tech firms set up their management so that they can deal with at least some of this idiosyncrasy so that they can retain the best people. the ones who can't or simply don't want to out of some sense of hurt feelings, produce mediocre products at best. google (at the beginning anyway) was a rare exception because the owners themselves were very technical and had the brains to start up a successful company.
At its most unstructured, then, a reasonably complex environment requires engineers to work with other engineers to figure out how their stuff will work together. In the worst case, this is ad-hoc and tactical; at the best case, this is how SOAs are designed and APIs are agreed upon. You could argue, of course, that this sort of negotiation work should be done by managers -- and I'd then argue you're wrong because this is the core of what being really good technical engineers is all about.
well it depends what the owners want to produce and how well they actually understand it.. if you leave the engineers to design it all, it will probably work well, but not fit the expectations a non technical management because they don't even know what they want, except that it be something their customers want (resulting in the customer not getting what he wants). most of their technical background comes from what they see in movies (yes this is actually a big problem in society). imo, a big part of google's success up to this point has be