Considering it is a form of ritualized suicide, in which the protagonist is doing himself in slowly over a matter of months or years, claustrophobia is small time.
Granted, the monk is also meditating to achieve a form of enlightenment, but I have a hard time seeing the value of his last 6 months or so of isolated life in which the only thing he communicates to the world is: "nailed it, my body didn't decay."
If you've got a loyal customer base, that's future money to be made - if they are losing money today with that loyal customer base, that's mismanagement, they can fix that in the future. Even if they fire every engineer and sell every factory, they can still sell the brand to someone who will make "Sony gear" and get those customers to buy the new products.
Agree about the movie studio branding, but, why does it matter what the name of the division is if the accounting is already separated? I suppose it would make sense to split the stock so you could buy Sony pictures separately from Sony electronics - if you care about such things.
I get that you love your PS3 for what you use it for. Anytime I turn mine on (and I'll be damned if I leave it in standby heating the room for months on end just so it can auto-update), I've got a ton of update hassle to wait through.
Defending the OtherOS thing is just hillarious, do you work for Sony legal? It was an arrogant, obnoxious move that took a single piece of hardware in my living room, that I bought and paid for and presumed I had some semblance of ownership of that used to do two things and told me, sorry Buzz Lightyear, you must choose.... What if you bought a car to go to work during the week and to do personal errands on weekends - how would you feel if a TOS agreement changed about the personal errands thing, telling you that if you ever want to drive your car to work again, you can no longer use it for personal errands without doing 6 hours of reconfiguration work to switch the "use mode"?
As for the media thing, we have a collection of DVDs, mostly kids stuff that they watch over and over. Being kids, if we watched from the discs, we'd have to buy the discs over and over, not to mention buying the player over and over - my 2nd PS3 (first one YLOD'ed after about 18 months, didn't really feel like doing the toaster oven reflow repair to get its 300W power draw back online since units 50% more power efficient had been released), 2nd PS3 lost its disc drive capability about 60 days after we got it - sure it was covered by warranty, but I had just gone through 12 months of warranty repair hell on the Vaio (4 months of downtime, bad screen, wait for onsite repair, onsite repair tries 3 times and fails, had to mail to factory for a month to get it done, then overheating at the 11 month mark, again mailed to factory for a month to have them declare that the fans were full of dust, a year later - being very careful to run the notebook only in the most dust free locations possible, the fans are packed out again, requiring disassembly to address or the thing will overheat after a few minutes of any processor load - f-ing joke.) So, no, not interested in sending the new PS3 back for warranty work with a chance that the kids stuck a postcard in the slot or something - open it myself, no, it's not the kids, it's defective mechanicals, but now I've voided the warranty by looking. Matters not, we mostly use games from the hard drive and movies from the server anyway... so, about that movie format thing, backing up our own owned videos from DVD to a file server - only specific types of DLNA servers were recognized (maybe that has improved with later software updates, wouldn't know, don't care), and after carefully selecting and ordering and installing a compatible media server, only specific MP4 encodings were recognized, had hunt down the specifics on the internet, because the first three formats I tried didn't work, so now the bulk of those backed up DVDs are encoded in the PS3 specific MP4 encoding format - once you know what that is, you can replicate it all day long, but if you had a previously made collection of videos, too bad, so sad.
So, sure, if you spend your life on the PS3, you can work around the pain and get some enjoyment out of it. Obviously, they can't be completely useless to everybody or they wouldn't still have 500 square feet of space in every Target and WalMart. But, ask yourself, how many hours a week do you spend on your PS3? How many hours cumulative since 2007? If, instead of playing PS3 all that time, you had been spending that time at a cash register, asking: "you want fries with that?" for $7.50 an hour and banking all that money, could you now afford one of these: http://www.chevrolet.com/2014-... ? For the lazy, that costs a little over 7000 hours at $7.50 an hour, or about 17 hours a week since 2007.
Mr. PS3 defender, do you spend less than 2.5 hours a day playing video games?
Whether Sony spins off the PS3/games division, or spins off everything else and keeps PS3/games, or - most likely - organizes PS3 and games in their own business units while keeping the Sony brand on all of it, only really matters for consumer brand perception.
I don't see Sony leaving the TV type electronics or movie businesses anytime soon.
>I think what should happen is that we should streamline OUR lives and be rid of Sony.
Done. Bought a PS3 in around 2008, and won a killer Vaio notebook in a contest around 2009 - severely disappointed in both for multiple reasons. Sony is off my approved vendor list, I just don't consider products with their brand anymore. Haven't encountered anything since the PS3 that is a "Sony exclusive" that I remotely care about owning.
I do give the PS3 credit for one thing, video games are essentially a way to waste time, and PS3 has taken that to a whole new level, wasting tons of time without even having to play the game at all. Update required x 100, only plays media in very specific formats, Alternate OS takes an inordinate amount of time to install, Alternate OS pulled as a feature after spending an inordinate amount of time giving it a chance to "own" my living room TV. Done.
I have an Intel NUC running the TV now, and instead of PS3 games, I have Steam. Instead of a crappy Media cataloging and playing experience I have Kodi and VLC. Instead of a gimped up web browser, I have Gimp and Chrome. Much better now.
In 1988, I was passed over for a D-base job because I "didn't have D-base experience." Two weeks later, the position was still unfilled. What the hiring manager didn't grasp was that, in 2 weeks, I could have learned enough D-base skills to do what they need... but, not everybody can learn like that, and the hiring manager wants a "sure thing" instead of trying one and having to can them and find another one a month later.
What OP is bitching about is that "general principles and skills" translates to being able to learn new stuff quickly, which is all that programming is about, anyway. Any particular skill you have today will likely be less important than another skill within 5 years - what really matters is the ability to learn the next thing.
As for your "engineering" friend who can't be bothered with the minutiae, "engineers" like him were likely responsible for events like this:
I met a retired, highly successful CEO when he was about 70. The two quotes I remember from him are: "Hey, wanna go to the bar and pick up some babes." and "Hiring people was the hardest part of the business, if I succeeded 50% of the time in picking a person who didn't make things worse than they already are, I considered myself to be doing well."
Personally, I've "picked" about a dozen people out of the hiring pool, some with a little more pressure to "fill the positions yesterday" than others. People are consistently surprising, often better used for something other than what they were hired for. If you can recognize that, and work people into roles where they contribute the best, that is the true skill of management.
As for getting your foot in the door - it sucks, there's just not another word for it. Before the internet, it was about personal contacts and first impressions. Now, your hiring gauntlet is crammed full of so much noise that it is amazing that anybody gets found. I was "panned" for a gig that I am supremely qualified to do, 2 decades of experience doing exactly what they want and rave reviews from everybody I've ever worked with, people taking me to lunch 3 months after I leave a job trying to get me to come back. These people made up their mind about me based on 5 minutes of poor audio quality phone interview. The job is programming, not verbal knowledge regurgitation based on garbled descriptions - but, that's their hiring criteria, and I suppose they communicate with their people through crappy phone lines all the time, so it is an important skill, for them.
Keep looking, don't be afraid to take an offer and then move on if something better comes along: your employers will be tossing you to the curb the next time they screw up sales and economic climate forecasting, with "employment at will" you have every right to move on to better things when the opportunity comes your way.
In one sense, I totally get the traditional "learn to think for yourselves" approach to education.
In another, I have seen "Smartboards" used very effectively by several teachers in different situations.
Elementary kids "signing in" to class on the smartboard - not exactly deep thinking, but a basic life skill of making your presence known at a place you are required to be - reducing workload on the teacher for attendance taking and reporting, and getting the kids at least minimally engaged before morning announcements.
Virtual field trips via Google Images. Let's visit Scotland today - multimedia presentation put together by an elementary school teacher with minimal prep time and very high student engagement. Ability to go interactive on questions "Anybody know what hagus is?" Do you want to learn more about the highlands or the cities?
Life skills: let's check the weather... what does this mean, how would you dress, let's see some videos of people in these weather situations...
I did a Masters Thesis in 1990, just before the Internet became "a thing." My access to research materials was dismal. I was driving to various libraries and finding different stuff at each one, none had anything approaching a complete picture of the subject (basically, any subject specific enough to do a Masters Thesis on). My access to communicate with colleagues in the field was equally dismal. I'd spend hours on microfiche, in a library I had to drive to and pay to park at, to find the name of an interesting person, look that person up with directory assistance, find out that he's dead and I'm talking to his son, long distance at $20 an hour when minimum wage was $3.35/hr. His son was cool, it was a great 15 minute conversation, but it was tremendously expensive in time and money to have that conversation and gain that bit of knowledge.
In some ways, the quality of communication was better than what you get today with e-mail and blogs, because once you engaged with someone, you usually got a lot more of their attention. But, you could die of old age before finding the kind of depth of information that's available via internet on virtually any esoteric subject today.
You don't need special anything. You can make more progress with special considerations, and this is true of every student, everywhere on the bell curve. It's just that the differences are more dramatic for the anomalies.
At 12 years old / 1980, my school bus was dropping me off 3/4 mile from home - closest stop on the route (through a typical suburban neighborhood.)
At 10 years old, I was riding my bicycle 5+ miles from home, alone. It wasn't even imagined to be a CPS involveable issue.
Could I have been kidnapped? Sure. Just like every other unsupervised kid, everywhere in the world, 35 years ago, and today.
Rich Columbians are moving to the US so they can let their kids play on the street without fear of kidnapping, but, if you don't make yourself a target like that (1% wealthy in a poor and relatively lawless country), you shouldn't have to worry.
Here, I think the pendulum has swung to the other side, where we are now fearing the government that is "protecting us" more than the people they are protecting us from.
If you produce value so far in excess of the cost of the equipment that it doesn't matter what the equipment costs, then, yes, that can be a very intelligent thing to do.
This isn't a common commuter vehicle, but it serves its owner's purposes very well:
Slashdot Mirror
Retro.
Way better to weigh the costs...
The more enlightened employers also consider morale and mental health, not just as HR tokens, but as actual productivity tools
silicon - cone is for... cones.
Considering it is a form of ritualized suicide, in which the protagonist is doing himself in slowly over a matter of months or years, claustrophobia is small time.
Granted, the monk is also meditating to achieve a form of enlightenment, but I have a hard time seeing the value of his last 6 months or so of isolated life in which the only thing he communicates to the world is: "nailed it, my body didn't decay."
If you've got a loyal customer base, that's future money to be made - if they are losing money today with that loyal customer base, that's mismanagement, they can fix that in the future. Even if they fire every engineer and sell every factory, they can still sell the brand to someone who will make "Sony gear" and get those customers to buy the new products.
Agree about the movie studio branding, but, why does it matter what the name of the division is if the accounting is already separated? I suppose it would make sense to split the stock so you could buy Sony pictures separately from Sony electronics - if you care about such things.
I get that you love your PS3 for what you use it for. Anytime I turn mine on (and I'll be damned if I leave it in standby heating the room for months on end just so it can auto-update), I've got a ton of update hassle to wait through.
Defending the OtherOS thing is just hillarious, do you work for Sony legal? It was an arrogant, obnoxious move that took a single piece of hardware in my living room, that I bought and paid for and presumed I had some semblance of ownership of that used to do two things and told me, sorry Buzz Lightyear, you must choose.... What if you bought a car to go to work during the week and to do personal errands on weekends - how would you feel if a TOS agreement changed about the personal errands thing, telling you that if you ever want to drive your car to work again, you can no longer use it for personal errands without doing 6 hours of reconfiguration work to switch the "use mode"?
As for the media thing, we have a collection of DVDs, mostly kids stuff that they watch over and over. Being kids, if we watched from the discs, we'd have to buy the discs over and over, not to mention buying the player over and over - my 2nd PS3 (first one YLOD'ed after about 18 months, didn't really feel like doing the toaster oven reflow repair to get its 300W power draw back online since units 50% more power efficient had been released), 2nd PS3 lost its disc drive capability about 60 days after we got it - sure it was covered by warranty, but I had just gone through 12 months of warranty repair hell on the Vaio (4 months of downtime, bad screen, wait for onsite repair, onsite repair tries 3 times and fails, had to mail to factory for a month to get it done, then overheating at the 11 month mark, again mailed to factory for a month to have them declare that the fans were full of dust, a year later - being very careful to run the notebook only in the most dust free locations possible, the fans are packed out again, requiring disassembly to address or the thing will overheat after a few minutes of any processor load - f-ing joke.) So, no, not interested in sending the new PS3 back for warranty work with a chance that the kids stuck a postcard in the slot or something - open it myself, no, it's not the kids, it's defective mechanicals, but now I've voided the warranty by looking. Matters not, we mostly use games from the hard drive and movies from the server anyway... so, about that movie format thing, backing up our own owned videos from DVD to a file server - only specific types of DLNA servers were recognized (maybe that has improved with later software updates, wouldn't know, don't care), and after carefully selecting and ordering and installing a compatible media server, only specific MP4 encodings were recognized, had hunt down the specifics on the internet, because the first three formats I tried didn't work, so now the bulk of those backed up DVDs are encoded in the PS3 specific MP4 encoding format - once you know what that is, you can replicate it all day long, but if you had a previously made collection of videos, too bad, so sad.
So, sure, if you spend your life on the PS3, you can work around the pain and get some enjoyment out of it. Obviously, they can't be completely useless to everybody or they wouldn't still have 500 square feet of space in every Target and WalMart. But, ask yourself, how many hours a week do you spend on your PS3? How many hours cumulative since 2007? If, instead of playing PS3 all that time, you had been spending that time at a cash register, asking: "you want fries with that?" for $7.50 an hour and banking all that money, could you now afford one of these: http://www.chevrolet.com/2014-... ? For the lazy, that costs a little over 7000 hours at $7.50 an hour, or about 17 hours a week since 2007.
Mr. PS3 defender, do you spend less than 2.5 hours a day playing video games?
Not if you are a butterfly:
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
Blame Dr. Who.
People are bored with food, transportation is still interesting.
Say it with me Beavis:
Uber, crash, heh heh
Whether Sony spins off the PS3/games division, or spins off everything else and keeps PS3/games, or - most likely - organizes PS3 and games in their own business units while keeping the Sony brand on all of it, only really matters for consumer brand perception.
I don't see Sony leaving the TV type electronics or movie businesses anytime soon.
What they need are PlayStation games. Gotta have a PS3 in the living room in order to sell games into it.
Still small potatoes compared to movies, but probably a more reliable ROI.
>I think what should happen is that we should streamline OUR lives and be rid of Sony.
Done. Bought a PS3 in around 2008, and won a killer Vaio notebook in a contest around 2009 - severely disappointed in both for multiple reasons. Sony is off my approved vendor list, I just don't consider products with their brand anymore. Haven't encountered anything since the PS3 that is a "Sony exclusive" that I remotely care about owning.
I do give the PS3 credit for one thing, video games are essentially a way to waste time, and PS3 has taken that to a whole new level, wasting tons of time without even having to play the game at all. Update required x 100, only plays media in very specific formats, Alternate OS takes an inordinate amount of time to install, Alternate OS pulled as a feature after spending an inordinate amount of time giving it a chance to "own" my living room TV. Done.
I have an Intel NUC running the TV now, and instead of PS3 games, I have Steam. Instead of a crappy Media cataloging and playing experience I have Kodi and VLC. Instead of a gimped up web browser, I have Gimp and Chrome. Much better now.
Yes, but the Mars colony will be globally communicated in (near) real-time, and recorded for posterity.
In 1988, I was passed over for a D-base job because I "didn't have D-base experience." Two weeks later, the position was still unfilled. What the hiring manager didn't grasp was that, in 2 weeks, I could have learned enough D-base skills to do what they need... but, not everybody can learn like that, and the hiring manager wants a "sure thing" instead of trying one and having to can them and find another one a month later.
What OP is bitching about is that "general principles and skills" translates to being able to learn new stuff quickly, which is all that programming is about, anyway. Any particular skill you have today will likely be less important than another skill within 5 years - what really matters is the ability to learn the next thing.
As for your "engineering" friend who can't be bothered with the minutiae, "engineers" like him were likely responsible for events like this:
http://www.dot.state.mn.us/i35...
I met a retired, highly successful CEO when he was about 70. The two quotes I remember from him are: "Hey, wanna go to the bar and pick up some babes." and "Hiring people was the hardest part of the business, if I succeeded 50% of the time in picking a person who didn't make things worse than they already are, I considered myself to be doing well."
Personally, I've "picked" about a dozen people out of the hiring pool, some with a little more pressure to "fill the positions yesterday" than others. People are consistently surprising, often better used for something other than what they were hired for. If you can recognize that, and work people into roles where they contribute the best, that is the true skill of management.
As for getting your foot in the door - it sucks, there's just not another word for it. Before the internet, it was about personal contacts and first impressions. Now, your hiring gauntlet is crammed full of so much noise that it is amazing that anybody gets found. I was "panned" for a gig that I am supremely qualified to do, 2 decades of experience doing exactly what they want and rave reviews from everybody I've ever worked with, people taking me to lunch 3 months after I leave a job trying to get me to come back. These people made up their mind about me based on 5 minutes of poor audio quality phone interview. The job is programming, not verbal knowledge regurgitation based on garbled descriptions - but, that's their hiring criteria, and I suppose they communicate with their people through crappy phone lines all the time, so it is an important skill, for them.
Keep looking, don't be afraid to take an offer and then move on if something better comes along: your employers will be tossing you to the curb the next time they screw up sales and economic climate forecasting, with "employment at will" you have every right to move on to better things when the opportunity comes your way.
Go on.
>Raising the gas tax isn't a great solution, because people with low MPG are often those who can afford it least
Used vehicles 30mpg are plentiful:
http://www.autotrader.com/cars...
If you can't afford your low mpg vehicle, that's a message that you need to change.
I'd much rather live in a country that taxes its gasoline heavily than one that puts GPS trackers in all my vehicles and makes me pay per mile driven.
In one sense, I totally get the traditional "learn to think for yourselves" approach to education.
In another, I have seen "Smartboards" used very effectively by several teachers in different situations.
Elementary kids "signing in" to class on the smartboard - not exactly deep thinking, but a basic life skill of making your presence known at a place you are required to be - reducing workload on the teacher for attendance taking and reporting, and getting the kids at least minimally engaged before morning announcements.
Virtual field trips via Google Images. Let's visit Scotland today - multimedia presentation put together by an elementary school teacher with minimal prep time and very high student engagement. Ability to go interactive on questions "Anybody know what hagus is?" Do you want to learn more about the highlands or the cities?
Life skills: let's check the weather... what does this mean, how would you dress, let's see some videos of people in these weather situations...
I did a Masters Thesis in 1990, just before the Internet became "a thing." My access to research materials was dismal. I was driving to various libraries and finding different stuff at each one, none had anything approaching a complete picture of the subject (basically, any subject specific enough to do a Masters Thesis on). My access to communicate with colleagues in the field was equally dismal. I'd spend hours on microfiche, in a library I had to drive to and pay to park at, to find the name of an interesting person, look that person up with directory assistance, find out that he's dead and I'm talking to his son, long distance at $20 an hour when minimum wage was $3.35/hr. His son was cool, it was a great 15 minute conversation, but it was tremendously expensive in time and money to have that conversation and gain that bit of knowledge.
In some ways, the quality of communication was better than what you get today with e-mail and blogs, because once you engaged with someone, you usually got a lot more of their attention. But, you could die of old age before finding the kind of depth of information that's available via internet on virtually any esoteric subject today.
You don't need special anything. You can make more progress with special considerations, and this is true of every student, everywhere on the bell curve. It's just that the differences are more dramatic for the anomalies.
How about an object with internal features that cannot be determined without opening it up?
At 12 years old / 1980, my school bus was dropping me off 3/4 mile from home - closest stop on the route (through a typical suburban neighborhood.)
At 10 years old, I was riding my bicycle 5+ miles from home, alone. It wasn't even imagined to be a CPS involveable issue.
Could I have been kidnapped? Sure. Just like every other unsupervised kid, everywhere in the world, 35 years ago, and today.
Rich Columbians are moving to the US so they can let their kids play on the street without fear of kidnapping, but, if you don't make yourself a target like that (1% wealthy in a poor and relatively lawless country), you shouldn't have to worry.
Here, I think the pendulum has swung to the other side, where we are now fearing the government that is "protecting us" more than the people they are protecting us from.
2000 satellites sure does sound like a much denser constellation - bandwidth is likely more limited by regulations than technology.
If you produce value so far in excess of the cost of the equipment that it doesn't matter what the equipment costs, then, yes, that can be a very intelligent thing to do.
This isn't a common commuter vehicle, but it serves its owner's purposes very well:
http://www.motorsportsetc.com/...