Well, I remember at the time, I thought like you did, its overpriced, no way I'm getting one, cant copy the songs back to the pc...
But, I had just traded up from my rca flash based player to an Archos 5 gig, 4 AA batteries driven monster, and I was pretty happy with it till it broke:( Somebody offered me a good deal on an Ipod, about half price, still pretty expensive for me, but i figured what the hey, I can always sell it if I don't like it... Screw the specs, the experience of listening to music on an Ipod was so good! I still remember updating my Archos player with the rockbox firmware and that made it easier to listen to music, but it was still clunky and slow. Along came the Ipod and it was all about the music.
True, they weren't competing with the flash based players, but once you got used to listening to music on the Ipod, everything else was a mess. I'm not trying to say you're wrong, not at all, I'm trying to say that the hype was true, it really was about the user experience, specs had nothing to do with it, thats why they were able to dominate the market even wen it was just so expensive, it was really worth it.
"I know what I want Mr. Jobs, I need Apple to make devices I want with the options I want. And one of those options is... lots of options and price ranges. Until then, I'll continue to go elsewhere. "
My first reply to this is nitpicky: Jobs is dead. I assure you that you do not want lots of options and certainly not price ranges, you want one device, that has features that are useful to you and also features that you want, even if they are not useful, you want one device, just one. I'm convinced you will not go and buy the whole range of Iphones available just because you want lots of options. What you probably mean here, is you want something that's within your price range.
"...But for the most part, Apple products were perceived as easy to use and dependable and really were more about packaging existing technologies into better containers that true innovation"
I don't understand what the problem is here.
"But Apple did it in a way that meant no thinking was required. Some called it intuitive, yet I and others have stumbled over such idiotic interface choices like using the trash can to eject"
The weird part is that, thats not the correct way to eject, I always got the feeling that it was added in because some people are too lazy to RTFM (Or the help files anyway) and they figured, well, people keep draggin the disc to the trash, make it eject the damn disc already... Which would be pretty smart.:)
"And holding a button down to power off" I hope this is not the way you turn your pc off... And last time I checked, all phones work the same way, hold a button to power off...
And one more thing...
"Sure, they make sense and are easy to use once you are shown, but that didn't make them intuitive."
I don't see the problem here. Is the benchmark intuitiveness? Or is this just comparing Apple products to some kind of platonic ideal of a device in a perfect world?
I'm not picking on you, okay? but I've found that some people really get a lot out of school, but some other people just go to confirm what they already suspect to be true, I guess this is what was meant by starting with the right person. someone who has a certain set of life skills, learned any which way.
I guess this is what you meant by saying "I was just as guilty. One of the things that made business school lots of fun for me was seeing just how ignorant and biased I had been with respect to management, marketing, etc." You learned this in school, other people learn this in other ways.
I forgot, this is critical: when hiring new people, only pick people that are better than you, never pick someone if you can do his job for him. Most people don't know this but this is what keeps you from being a PHB. And when you learn to manage the best, you are the best.
Oh yeah... promote the hell out of whatever you do... when you do something right, make sure everybody knows it. Make sure people get used to thinking of you as consistently good.
While you will undoubtedly need to grow into the new position, you probably already have either, the necessary skills or equivalent skills you can bring to bear. Here are some key points to consider:
1: Make sure you understand what your new job is, in other words, what is expected of you by management, most likely your new job is to make sure the finished product gets done on time, budget and spec. Once you realize this is your job, find a way to make sure this happens.
The reason I've seen people fail to make this type of transition is because they lose sight of what is expected of them, I had a coworker who used his new position to tell management personnel that they were stupid and were unreasonable in their treatment of employees.
He was demoted within a couple of weeks.
2: Your job is to make sure things get done, some people are good a doing this by being "slave drivers", some do it different ways.
you've probably have had good bosses in the past, do what they did. If you have a good relationship with other managers there, talk to them and ask for advice on how to deal with the day to day challenges of your new job, you might not always agree with their advice but you'll at least get some good advice to get you started in the right direction.
3: Its just a job, meaning, all you have to do is learn how to do it, whoever tells you that you have to be born with it has a very poor opinion of himself at the least. here is the skill set:
*Planning
*Getting people to do what you say (very hard for some people, easier for others)
*Time management
*Getting things done (or making sure things get done)
*Being able to spot pitfalls from a mile away
*interoffice politics (Hardest thing for some people to learn how to do, but like Dylan said, swallow your pride, you won't die, it's not poison"
3: Most importantly, are you comfortable telling people what to do? when the time comes, can you fire somebody? Are you able to not care what other people may think of you? (meaning you wont do things just so people think you're a "good guy" can you be a PHB?)
Hope this helps!
Really, the internet is dead, long live web 2.0.
Not that its going to survive for long but clearly things are not what they used to, now you have to watch what you say on the web.
Now when you look for knowledge on the internet all you find is stuff to buy on the web.
Now its hard to surf the internet because it tries to narrow your focus so much, trying to give you more of what you want.
I'm not trying to make much sense here people, but I suspect some of you can at least visualize the present that I'm describing as the dead, (not failed), promises of the past.
I think its time to stop reading slashdot.
Thank you Rob.
You could start by:
1) Formally dissolving the company
2) Nullifying all issued stock as the company is dissolved and no longer has any value or shares
3) Auctioning off all material goods, patents, and merchandise to the highest bidder, with all proceeds to go to:
a) The poor defendant in an amount determined by a jury, and then tripled
b) All non-managerial and non-legal team, particularly any that were paid in stock
4) Immediately freeze all managerial and legal team fiscal assets
5) Nullify the corporate veil
6) Arrest all managerial and legal team members. Throw the whole book at them... include RICO charges if possible
7) Follow up with SWAT team raid of justice department members involved in collusion. Throw them into general populace if convicted.
Fining somebody who makes billions a percent of that is irrelevant. I want to see someone executed for this perversion of justice.
I 'm with you up to 6, because it is utterly reasonable. How else can you stop a corporation when all they have to do to get away with this kind of thing is, at worse, to budget fo it?
This is how the corporations are going to take over the world, because nobody takes action to stop them.
The only possible solution for this is to dismantle CISCO, no matter the consecuences, youll say, oh but what about peoples jobs. well, it looks like if you work at cisco your job isnt worth much to begin with, this is about the long run, if measures are not taken to ensure that companies cannot abuse the power they already have, then there will come a point where there is no stopping them.
You definitely underestimate the issue at hand, Older people are accustomed to doing things one way, this will still be true in 30 years, so when a new way of doing things comes along, we will fall out of step because we will become stubborn and cling, like elderly people to our set ways.
Seriously though, sounds like you are at your balance point. all you need to do is watch your diet and along with the exercise over a long amount of time, you will see the benefits.
I am currently overweight but Im working on losing that weight, in the last two months I've noticeably lost weight and keep dropping.
In order to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you consume each day, this means that your diet is more important than your exercise routine. (Lets say that you spent 300 calories biking to and from work, eating some hostess cupcakes will easily replenish that, so you can just drop the hohos along with the biking and you'll get the same benefit.)
Weight training will give you the benefit of burning more calories while at rest, so the results are not immediate, but they payoff in the long run.
So the best way to lose weight is to:
Start by dropping 500 calories from your diet each day, (drop the snacks and the sodas or eat lightly smaller portions).
Get some exercise going, any exercise is good but strength training will get you more results. Make sure you use proper form and avoid over training, you can easily find info on this.
After you notice a plateau in your weight loss, drop an extra 500 calories a day by changing what you eat, its time to start counting calories, if you keep note of what you eat and how many calories you're consuming it will be easy to see what to substitute for example: using mustard for your sandwich instead of mayo.
Finally, don't buy something just because its low fat, instead check the amount of calories it has, low fat does not mean low calorie.
Once you start checking the calories of the products you buy , always check the portions, you'll find that juice sometimes has more calories than soda, and other interesting things.
I teach a class on pc repair, and this "problem" is right at the top of my list of "things to learn to teach".
I find that most of the people that take the class bring a lot of misconceptions which are very hard to overcome in some cases, but, I also find that the younger the person that takes the class, the easier it is for them to accepts the facts that I teach. (Class participants are anywhere from 16 to 46 years old, the majority are from 23 to 36)
Kids know more about this subject than we want to believe, its just trained out of them by punishing them for making us feel stupid when we get asked a question we dont have the answer to.
With that in mind, I'll present the major findings of my research:
Books to read:
The demon haunted world, science as a candle in the dark. Carl sagan
Great book that touches on the need for critical thinking and the meta aspects to evaluating information, as well as very specific cases whre it is applied. (And beautifully written too, engaging and awe inspiring, i wish i could write like this man)
A minigude to critical thining - Joe Lau - Depatment of filosophy University of Hong Kong
This paper is useful for introducing the general concept of critical thinking as well as the necessary skills. Very brief and very concise.
There is more, this is just a starting point.
Things to teach:
People lie!, sometimes on purpose and sometimes not, but people do not always tell you things that are true, just what they believe to be true.
People (as a general rule), accept new information on any given topic as factual and without challenge, any information that contradicts what is already "known" is interpreted as an attempt to deceive for some unknown purpose. (This is healthy skepticism at work, the problem is not exercising it earlier)
Do not accept statements at face value! Always try to understand what is meant by what is said. Eg. a layman tells you that he cannot access his email, he might mean:
The computer wont turn on.
I can't find Outlook Express
No internet access
I don't know how to check my email, and so on.
Accept information with varying degrees of trust. Eg. Factual, trustworthy, tentative, not trustworthy, unreliable source, etc.
How to be wrong. It does not mean to learn to fail, thats a different skillset, it means that you wont always be right and that its very hard to always be right on the first try. People who are willing to pursue something even if its been proven ineffective, lack this skill. And it usually hurts other people more than the person responsible, thats why its hard to detect when youre wrong.
Most important skill to learn:
Hold yourself to the most rigorous standards you can think of, even more so than other people. You will find that even if youre wrong and everybody knows about it, they still wont tell you, this is because most people will not apreciate being proven wrong either, so the only person that can keep you honest is yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you, exactly what i was thinking!
Well, I remember at the time, I thought like you did, its overpriced, no way I'm getting one, cant copy the songs back to the pc...
But, I had just traded up from my rca flash based player to an Archos 5 gig, 4 AA batteries driven monster, and I was pretty happy with it till it broke :(
Somebody offered me a good deal on an Ipod, about half price, still pretty expensive for me, but i figured what the hey, I can always sell it if I don't like it...
Screw the specs, the experience of listening to music on an Ipod was so good! I still remember updating my Archos player with the rockbox firmware and that made it easier to listen to music, but it was still clunky and slow. Along came the Ipod and it was all about the music.
True, they weren't competing with the flash based players, but once you got used to listening to music on the Ipod, everything else was a mess. I'm not trying to say you're wrong, not at all, I'm trying to say that the hype was true, it really was about the user experience, specs had nothing to do with it, thats why they were able to dominate the market even wen it was just so expensive, it was really worth it.
"I know what I want Mr. Jobs, I need Apple to make devices I want with the options I want. And one of those options is ... lots of options and price ranges. Until then, I'll continue to go elsewhere. "
My first reply to this is nitpicky: Jobs is dead.
I assure you that you do not want lots of options and certainly not price ranges, you want one device, that has features that are useful to you and also features that you want, even if they are not useful, you want one device, just one. I'm convinced you will not go and buy the whole range of Iphones available just because you want lots of options. What you probably mean here, is you want something that's within your price range.
"...But for the most part, Apple products were perceived as easy to use and dependable and really were more about packaging existing technologies into better containers that true innovation"
I don't understand what the problem is here.
"But Apple did it in a way that meant no thinking was required. Some called it intuitive, yet I and others have stumbled over such idiotic interface choices like using the trash can to eject"
The weird part is that, thats not the correct way to eject, I always got the feeling that it was added in because some people are too lazy to RTFM (Or the help files anyway) and they figured, well, people keep draggin the disc to the trash, make it eject the damn disc already... Which would be pretty smart. :)
"And holding a button down to power off"
I hope this is not the way you turn your pc off... And last time I checked, all phones work the same way, hold a button to power off...
And one more thing...
"Sure, they make sense and are easy to use once you are shown, but that didn't make them intuitive."
I don't see the problem here. Is the benchmark intuitiveness? Or is this just comparing Apple products to some kind of platonic ideal of a device in a perfect world?
But power users can always open the terminal and get all the power they need right? oh wait, this is a linux window manager discussion...
I'm not picking on you, okay? but I've found that some people really get a lot out of school, but some other people just go to confirm what they already suspect to be true, I guess this is what was meant by starting with the right person. someone who has a certain set of life skills, learned any which way. I guess this is what you meant by saying "I was just as guilty. One of the things that made business school lots of fun for me was seeing just how ignorant and biased I had been with respect to management, marketing, etc." You learned this in school, other people learn this in other ways.
I forgot, this is critical: when hiring new people, only pick people that are better than you, never pick someone if you can do his job for him. Most people don't know this but this is what keeps you from being a PHB. And when you learn to manage the best, you are the best. Oh yeah... promote the hell out of whatever you do... when you do something right, make sure everybody knows it. Make sure people get used to thinking of you as consistently good.
While you will undoubtedly need to grow into the new position, you probably already have either, the necessary skills or equivalent skills you can bring to bear. Here are some key points to consider: 1: Make sure you understand what your new job is, in other words, what is expected of you by management, most likely your new job is to make sure the finished product gets done on time, budget and spec. Once you realize this is your job, find a way to make sure this happens. The reason I've seen people fail to make this type of transition is because they lose sight of what is expected of them, I had a coworker who used his new position to tell management personnel that they were stupid and were unreasonable in their treatment of employees. He was demoted within a couple of weeks. 2: Your job is to make sure things get done, some people are good a doing this by being "slave drivers", some do it different ways. you've probably have had good bosses in the past, do what they did. If you have a good relationship with other managers there, talk to them and ask for advice on how to deal with the day to day challenges of your new job, you might not always agree with their advice but you'll at least get some good advice to get you started in the right direction. 3: Its just a job, meaning, all you have to do is learn how to do it, whoever tells you that you have to be born with it has a very poor opinion of himself at the least. here is the skill set: *Planning *Getting people to do what you say (very hard for some people, easier for others) *Time management *Getting things done (or making sure things get done) *Being able to spot pitfalls from a mile away *interoffice politics (Hardest thing for some people to learn how to do, but like Dylan said, swallow your pride, you won't die, it's not poison" 3: Most importantly, are you comfortable telling people what to do? when the time comes, can you fire somebody? Are you able to not care what other people may think of you? (meaning you wont do things just so people think you're a "good guy" can you be a PHB?) Hope this helps!
Really, the internet is dead, long live web 2.0. Not that its going to survive for long but clearly things are not what they used to, now you have to watch what you say on the web. Now when you look for knowledge on the internet all you find is stuff to buy on the web. Now its hard to surf the internet because it tries to narrow your focus so much, trying to give you more of what you want. I'm not trying to make much sense here people, but I suspect some of you can at least visualize the present that I'm describing as the dead, (not failed), promises of the past. I think its time to stop reading slashdot. Thank you Rob.
hundreds of thousands? Big freakin' deal.
You could start by: 1) Formally dissolving the company 2) Nullifying all issued stock as the company is dissolved and no longer has any value or shares 3) Auctioning off all material goods, patents, and merchandise to the highest bidder, with all proceeds to go to: a) The poor defendant in an amount determined by a jury, and then tripled b) All non-managerial and non-legal team, particularly any that were paid in stock 4) Immediately freeze all managerial and legal team fiscal assets 5) Nullify the corporate veil 6) Arrest all managerial and legal team members. Throw the whole book at them... include RICO charges if possible 7) Follow up with SWAT team raid of justice department members involved in collusion. Throw them into general populace if convicted.
Fining somebody who makes billions a percent of that is irrelevant. I want to see someone executed for this perversion of justice.
I 'm with you up to 6, because it is utterly reasonable. How else can you stop a corporation when all they have to do to get away with this kind of thing is, at worse, to budget fo it?
This is how the corporations are going to take over the world, because nobody takes action to stop them. The only possible solution for this is to dismantle CISCO, no matter the consecuences, youll say, oh but what about peoples jobs. well, it looks like if you work at cisco your job isnt worth much to begin with, this is about the long run, if measures are not taken to ensure that companies cannot abuse the power they already have, then there will come a point where there is no stopping them.
On a semi related note, I read this on boingboing yesterday about 24 hours ago, slashdot seems to be slipping.
You definitely underestimate the issue at hand, Older people are accustomed to doing things one way, this will still be true in 30 years, so when a new way of doing things comes along, we will fall out of step because we will become stubborn and cling, like elderly people to our set ways.
5 years... 5 years people, once your car finds out it can get free pr0n on the internet, we're all screwed!
I can explain why I hate sometihng, but this will not translate that same hate to you, so you will probably not understand.
I'm thinking Microsoft just wants to put new systems out there till they get to X. Just putting it out there.
Does anyone know how to get the pid for the idle process? i need to kill it.
Seriously though, sounds like you are at your balance point. all you need to do is watch your diet and along with the exercise over a long amount of time, you will see the benefits.
In order to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you consume each day, this means that your diet is more important than your exercise routine. (Lets say that you spent 300 calories biking to and from work, eating some hostess cupcakes will easily replenish that, so you can just drop the hohos along with the biking and you'll get the same benefit.)
Weight training will give you the benefit of burning more calories while at rest, so the results are not immediate, but they payoff in the long run.
So the best way to lose weight is to:
Start by dropping 500 calories from your diet each day, (drop the snacks and the sodas or eat lightly smaller portions).
Get some exercise going, any exercise is good but strength training will get you more results. Make sure you use proper form and avoid over training, you can easily find info on this.
After you notice a plateau in your weight loss, drop an extra 500 calories a day by changing what you eat, its time to start counting calories, if you keep note of what you eat and how many calories you're consuming it will be easy to see what to substitute for example: using mustard for your sandwich instead of mayo.
Finally, don't buy something just because its low fat, instead check the amount of calories it has, low fat does not mean low calorie.
Once you start checking the calories of the products you buy , always check the portions, you'll find that juice sometimes has more calories than soda, and other interesting things.
I teach a class on pc repair, and this "problem" is right at the top of my list of "things to learn to teach".
I find that most of the people that take the class bring a lot of misconceptions which are very hard to overcome in some cases, but, I also find that the younger the person that takes the class, the easier it is for them to accepts the facts that I teach. (Class participants are anywhere from 16 to 46 years old, the majority are from 23 to 36)
Kids know more about this subject than we want to believe, its just trained out of them by punishing them for making us feel stupid when we get asked a question we dont have the answer to.
With that in mind, I'll present the major findings of my research:
Books to read:
The demon haunted world, science as a candle in the dark. Carl sagan
Great book that touches on the need for critical thinking and the meta aspects to evaluating information, as well as very specific cases whre it is applied. (And beautifully written too, engaging and awe inspiring, i wish i could write like this man)
A minigude to critical thining - Joe Lau - Depatment of filosophy University of Hong Kong
http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/misc/miniguide.pdf
This paper is useful for introducing the general concept of critical thinking as well as the necessary skills. Very brief and very concise.
There is more, this is just a starting point.
Things to teach:
Most important skill to learn:
Hold yourself to the most rigorous standards you can think of, even more so than other people. You will find that even if youre wrong and everybody knows about it, they still wont tell you, this is because most people will not apreciate being proven wrong either, so the only person that can keep you honest is yourself.