Good managers, on the other hand, are worth their weight in gold. Especially if you're a geek and want to spend your working hours with fun tech stuff, someone who handles the office politics for you and maintains your work environment, secures you the resources you need and generally removes obstacles from your path is priceless.
If your company is such that you can aggregate that lost time across a bunch of workers, you could probably reduce the headcount significantly if everybody just stayed on task all the time.
Only if you're an idiot who doesn't understand that downtime is necessary for every job that involves even rudimentary cognitive skills, and doubly so if you want creativity, no matter if it is artistic or problem-solving.
The human brain is not designed to perform at 100% for extended periods of time. It evolved to run on a fairly lazy average level most of the time, and have reserves for bursts in times of need. Then it needs time to recover.
In simple terms for managers: If you condense workload to eliminate low-performance times, your top and average performances drop and you end up with the same or less total productivity.
#2 or #3 will get the app tossed off the device and a one star review.
Same here, but I've also noticed that the designers are now hiding the grind during early gameplay, creating the appearance that you can actually play until you are (they hope) hooked and engaged strongly enough to make resisting to pay more difficult (Planetside 2, I'm looking at you...)
So they pick up a large number of people who won't ever pay a dime while disenchanting the existing base of people who are known to play video games. That's idiotic.
From a gamer perspective - yes.
From a business perspective - no. The demographic they target is far larger than the old gamer community.
Fortunately, there are also counter-movements. Small, but they exist. Indie developers often go the old pay model, partially thanks to things like Kickstarter or Steam which make it easier to handle the whole payment side. (shameless plug: my own game, see footer, also avoids the F2P plague.) And then there are some big names that go different ways, like Guild Wars 2 with its pay-once model that's rare in the MMORPG area, or EVE Online which does well with the old and true subscription model.
It's a sorry development and the various articles posted recently on the topic are all right on the money: It kills creativity. When your major design consideration is monetarization, actually making a good game becomes a secondary goal. Like the sequel-mania of Hollywood, it also reduces the willingness to take a risk with a new concept. The App Store may have 100,000 games you can download, but if you look behind the visuals and minor variations, it has probably about 100 actual games, each in 1,000 variations. And I'm pretty sure the 80/20 rule applies - 80,000 of those games are probably clones or versions of the same 20 basic game concepts.
But it's all the result of copyright infringement and downloading stuff. When developers can't live from sales, they need to find another way to earn money. The three ways that work are a) advertisement, b) subscriptions (early MMORPGs) and c) F2P.
Of these, F2P works best because it's a scam, one name bait-and-switch. Everyone knows that "free" doesn't really mean free, and that 90% of the game are designed intentionally as incentives to spend money. And more, often much more, than you would've paid for a comparable box-sale. It's a scam, designed to fight illegal downloads. Difficult to say which side one should be on.
I agree. Most people give up their personal information for next to nothing, which is proof of a) stupidity, b) disregard for privacy and c) no knowledge about the true value of it
Nevertheless, there is a sizeable minority of people who are different. Probably more than drug dealers.
While I agree in principle on the black market concept, you should also not forget about one small detail about the War on Drugs:
It's a failure
The target is right, but the method isn't. It's got all kinds of problems, but the most important one is that it has utterly and completely failed to reach its goal. Or even come close to it. It's like waging a war against terrorists hiding in Afghanistan and Pakistan by bombing Iraq... oh, wait...
Most people use cash because it's fast and convenient, not because it's anonymous. When people use cash specifically for it's anonymity, it's usually to buy drugs.
[citation needed]
You assume everyone thinks like you do. Many people don't. I'm not the only person who uses cash for almost all my regular shopping because anonymity. Not because I'm afraid of the police (unless they've outlawed strawberries and tooth paste), but because I don't want corporations to profile me for more targeted advertisement.
Look, if I were a shady character out to compromise a couple million (the best-case target audience size for a Silk Road replacement) home computers, there are easier ways to do it.
Write an Angry Birds clone. Send an email saying "free money in the attached file" to a spammers address list. Or just put it on a drive-by website.
You are attacking a particularily paranoid target audience. If I were a drug pusher, I wouldn't be afraid of other criminals, I'd be afraid that the whole thing is a government sting.
But then again, it looks like a normal app, so it won't be getting administrator access, you can sandbox it (OS X, no idea if windows has copied it yet) and if you are using it for serious amounts of money, you can review the source code or pay someone to do it for you.
Of all the things that you can be legitimately afraid of in this field of commercial activity, running the app is probably the least dangerous.
Right, because who needs firefighters, hospitals, schools, streets, garbage collection, sewers and all the other pointless things that government handles that just happen to cost money.
the wealthiest has resulted in a lot of them just flat out leaving that country.
Which is why tax laws need a lot more international corporations.
Right now, the rich and the mega-corporations are turning countries into enemies that fight each other over "competitive" tax rates, when they should be allies fighting the tax evaders with criminal prosecutions.
It's just another trick to make you and me pay indirect subsidies to the rich. Even if you're anti-government, you can't deny a simple truth: Every $ that some rich dude or corporations evades in tax payment has to be paid by the rest of us instead.
We've only very, very, very recently (in galactic time spans) discovered ways to destroy ourselves. Wake me if we're still here in a thousand years, until then it's all easily explained by beginner's luck.
Apple's entire business is based on breaking new ground with an innovative new product, exploiting that products uniqueness before the rest start copying them and flood the market with "me too" devices. Then Apple has to move on to something else.
Which is why they've stopped making iPhones now that the market is flooded with cheap Android devi... oh, wait, they didn't.
Apple continues to improve its products, and it also makes fairly high quality stuff. My next desktop computer will be a Mac in part because I happen to prefer OS X over the abomination that is windows and the amateurish copycat that is the Linux desktop (not talking about servers here, all my servers run Linux), but also because of all the desktop computers I've ever owned, only my old C64 was more reliable and lasted longer.
This "running to stand still" existence cannot go on indefinitely.
Why not? Whether or not its true, there are other companies and even entire industries that work the same way, for example the fashion industry, and plenty of people have had a lifetime of employment from that.
Whatever you say, cowboy. The simple fact is that the USA has about 10k gun-related deaths per year, while almost every other industrialised country has less than 100.
That is a two orders of magnitude difference. So yeah, maybe your rates are at the lowest right now, but that's like saying it's especially warm in Antarctica today. It doesn't change basic facts, such as that warm clothes would still be a pretty decent idea.
I've worked with lawyers quite a bit during my career, both as in against them and as in I hired them. As human beings, they aren't better or worse than any other profession - you have assholes, you have great people, and a lot inbetween.
And if we're talking about 21st century oppressive regimes, I'd go so far to say that any weapon that doesn't penetrate an APC or at least kevlar armour is pretty much pointless.
Never forget that the 2nd amendment was written in a time when tanks were a crazy idea that an italien painter had drafted a few schematics of.
Because that's not the only law on the book, and because just because it's written down doesn't mean its right.
There is no reason why the legal privileges that come from incorporation cannot be balanced with a set of legal responsibilities.
Which is exactly my point, yes.
Nor do I understand why people who incessantly complain about corporations don't work on reforming corporate law.
Because it's too late to do that the simple way. Corporations and the 0.1% who own them can easily outspend any and all groups of private citizens now that all limits are lifted.
Google can't be blamed for this: one of its jobs is to lobby for laws that benefit its shareholders
And it doesn't strike you that this is just completely fucked up? That corporations think it's their job to fuck over the very society that made them possible in the first place?
So if I'm the bad guy with the gun I just need to wait until my panicked, untrained victim with his low-precision gun has wasted its two bullets somewhere into the landscape and then put a bullet into his head?
The WW2 Liberator pistols were mostly designed to create fear. Germans at checkpoints could no longer largely assume the citizens were unarmed. It works in a war setting because you're already beyond the point where you are accepting friendly casualties as part of the plan.
In a peace setting, more guns == more gun deaths. Not just due to accidents, but also because people on either side (both criminals and law enforcement) are much more likely to shoot in uncertain situations because they have to assume the other guy is armed. In most european countries, when you get robbed you are likely to lose your wallet and highly unlikely to lose your life. In countries with lots of guns, the robbers shoot more often because when the guy makes a sudden move, it could be him drawing a gun, not just panic.
That's bullshit. Lawyers are just dogs biting at whatever we (as society) tell them to bite at. It's the laws that need changing. If we hadn't allowed these ridiculous lawsuits in the first place, they wouldn't exist.
Case in point: In many countries in the world you can tell a stupid kid that its stupid without fear of a lawsuit. Or you can run science projects. And you don't have to print "contents could be hot after heating" on the package of microwave food and "don't use to dry pets" on the microwave itself.
however there is considerable risk that the rush will cause new bugs
That's a risk you always have and thus not a valid counter-argument. And if anyone has experience in doing this kind of cleanup work in a way that doesn't, then it's the OpenBSD team, because they've done this before.
True, most of my experience is with companies 10k, but you're just being arrogant calling that "really small". Almost all of those companies are part of a larger corporation, and you don't manage IT operating activities in multinational corporations on the corporate level. The corporate level decides if you go with SAP or Oracle, but not which patch level of Apache is used on the website of one of 20 subsidiaries.
At least that's the way it was in my last two companies (one a subsidiary of a 65k employee corporation, one part of a 30k employee corporation). If you know of any multinational corporations where the CTO of the top-level holding has to sign off on patch deployment, let me know.
We're talking operative emergency response here, not rollout of new corporate IT infrastructures. I hope you see the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad managers (i.e. 80% of them): Yes.
Good managers, on the other hand, are worth their weight in gold. Especially if you're a geek and want to spend your working hours with fun tech stuff, someone who handles the office politics for you and maintains your work environment, secures you the resources you need and generally removes obstacles from your path is priceless.
If your company is such that you can aggregate that lost time across a bunch of workers, you could probably reduce the headcount significantly if everybody just stayed on task all the time.
Only if you're an idiot who doesn't understand that downtime is necessary for every job that involves even rudimentary cognitive skills, and doubly so if you want creativity, no matter if it is artistic or problem-solving.
The human brain is not designed to perform at 100% for extended periods of time. It evolved to run on a fairly lazy average level most of the time, and have reserves for bursts in times of need. Then it needs time to recover.
In simple terms for managers: If you condense workload to eliminate low-performance times, your top and average performances drop and you end up with the same or less total productivity.
#2 or #3 will get the app tossed off the device and a one star review.
Same here, but I've also noticed that the designers are now hiding the grind during early gameplay, creating the appearance that you can actually play until you are (they hope) hooked and engaged strongly enough to make resisting to pay more difficult (Planetside 2, I'm looking at you...)
So they pick up a large number of people who won't ever pay a dime while disenchanting the existing base of people who are known to play video games. That's idiotic.
From a gamer perspective - yes.
From a business perspective - no. The demographic they target is far larger than the old gamer community.
Fortunately, there are also counter-movements. Small, but they exist. Indie developers often go the old pay model, partially thanks to things like Kickstarter or Steam which make it easier to handle the whole payment side. (shameless plug: my own game, see footer, also avoids the F2P plague.) And then there are some big names that go different ways, like Guild Wars 2 with its pay-once model that's rare in the MMORPG area, or EVE Online which does well with the old and true subscription model.
It's a sorry development and the various articles posted recently on the topic are all right on the money: It kills creativity. When your major design consideration is monetarization, actually making a good game becomes a secondary goal. Like the sequel-mania of Hollywood, it also reduces the willingness to take a risk with a new concept. The App Store may have 100,000 games you can download, but if you look behind the visuals and minor variations, it has probably about 100 actual games, each in 1,000 variations. And I'm pretty sure the 80/20 rule applies - 80,000 of those games are probably clones or versions of the same 20 basic game concepts.
But it's all the result of copyright infringement and downloading stuff. When developers can't live from sales, they need to find another way to earn money. The three ways that work are a) advertisement, b) subscriptions (early MMORPGs) and c) F2P.
Of these, F2P works best because it's a scam, one name bait-and-switch. Everyone knows that "free" doesn't really mean free, and that 90% of the game are designed intentionally as incentives to spend money. And more, often much more, than you would've paid for a comparable box-sale. It's a scam, designed to fight illegal downloads. Difficult to say which side one should be on.
1. Park Webs:
For at least 5, more likely 10 years, this has been the major source of "marketshare" for the sorry excuse of a webserver that IIS is.
This. A hundred blogs and random websites don't matter, you'll affect maybe 3 people.
But if Google, Facebook and another 2-3 big players do it, it'll hurt.
I agree. Most people give up their personal information for next to nothing, which is proof of a) stupidity, b) disregard for privacy and c) no knowledge about the true value of it
Nevertheless, there is a sizeable minority of people who are different. Probably more than drug dealers.
While I agree in principle on the black market concept, you should also not forget about one small detail about the War on Drugs:
It's a failure
The target is right, but the method isn't. It's got all kinds of problems, but the most important one is that it has utterly and completely failed to reach its goal. Or even come close to it. It's like waging a war against terrorists hiding in Afghanistan and Pakistan by bombing Iraq... oh, wait...
Most people use cash because it's fast and convenient, not because it's anonymous. When people use cash specifically for it's anonymity, it's usually to buy drugs.
[citation needed]
You assume everyone thinks like you do. Many people don't. I'm not the only person who uses cash for almost all my regular shopping because anonymity. Not because I'm afraid of the police (unless they've outlawed strawberries and tooth paste), but because I don't want corporations to profile me for more targeted advertisement.
It's a python app, so there is no binary.
Really?
Look, if I were a shady character out to compromise a couple million (the best-case target audience size for a Silk Road replacement) home computers, there are easier ways to do it.
Write an Angry Birds clone. Send an email saying "free money in the attached file" to a spammers address list. Or just put it on a drive-by website.
You are attacking a particularily paranoid target audience. If I were a drug pusher, I wouldn't be afraid of other criminals, I'd be afraid that the whole thing is a government sting.
But then again, it looks like a normal app, so it won't be getting administrator access, you can sandbox it (OS X, no idea if windows has copied it yet) and if you are using it for serious amounts of money, you can review the source code or pay someone to do it for you.
Of all the things that you can be legitimately afraid of in this field of commercial activity, running the app is probably the least dangerous.
Right, because who needs firefighters, hospitals, schools, streets, garbage collection, sewers and all the other pointless things that government handles that just happen to cost money.
the wealthiest has resulted in a lot of them just flat out leaving that country.
Which is why tax laws need a lot more international corporations.
Right now, the rich and the mega-corporations are turning countries into enemies that fight each other over "competitive" tax rates, when they should be allies fighting the tax evaders with criminal prosecutions.
It's just another trick to make you and me pay indirect subsidies to the rich. Even if you're anti-government, you can't deny a simple truth: Every $ that some rich dude or corporations evades in tax payment has to be paid by the rest of us instead.
We've only very, very, very recently (in galactic time spans) discovered ways to destroy ourselves. Wake me if we're still here in a thousand years, until then it's all easily explained by beginner's luck.
Apple's entire business is based on breaking new ground with an innovative new product, exploiting that products uniqueness before the rest start copying them and flood the market with "me too" devices. Then Apple has to move on to something else.
Which is why they've stopped making iPhones now that the market is flooded with cheap Android devi... oh, wait, they didn't.
Apple continues to improve its products, and it also makes fairly high quality stuff. My next desktop computer will be a Mac in part because I happen to prefer OS X over the abomination that is windows and the amateurish copycat that is the Linux desktop (not talking about servers here, all my servers run Linux), but also because of all the desktop computers I've ever owned, only my old C64 was more reliable and lasted longer.
This "running to stand still" existence cannot go on indefinitely.
Why not? Whether or not its true, there are other companies and even entire industries that work the same way, for example the fashion industry, and plenty of people have had a lifetime of employment from that.
Whatever you say, cowboy. The simple fact is that the USA has about 10k gun-related deaths per year, while almost every other industrialised country has less than 100.
That is a two orders of magnitude difference. So yeah, maybe your rates are at the lowest right now, but that's like saying it's especially warm in Antarctica today. It doesn't change basic facts, such as that warm clothes would still be a pretty decent idea.
I've worked with lawyers quite a bit during my career, both as in against them and as in I hired them. As human beings, they aren't better or worse than any other profession - you have assholes, you have great people, and a lot inbetween.
Sorry to hear you only got the assholes.
And if we're talking about 21st century oppressive regimes, I'd go so far to say that any weapon that doesn't penetrate an APC or at least kevlar armour is pretty much pointless.
Never forget that the 2nd amendment was written in a time when tanks were a crazy idea that an italien painter had drafted a few schematics of.
Because that's not the only law on the book, and because just because it's written down doesn't mean its right.
There is no reason why the legal privileges that come from incorporation cannot be balanced with a set of legal responsibilities.
Which is exactly my point, yes.
Nor do I understand why people who incessantly complain about corporations don't work on reforming corporate law.
Because it's too late to do that the simple way. Corporations and the 0.1% who own them can easily outspend any and all groups of private citizens now that all limits are lifted.
Google can't be blamed for this: one of its jobs is to lobby for laws that benefit its shareholders
And it doesn't strike you that this is just completely fucked up? That corporations think it's their job to fuck over the very society that made them possible in the first place?
So if I'm the bad guy with the gun I just need to wait until my panicked, untrained victim with his low-precision gun has wasted its two bullets somewhere into the landscape and then put a bullet into his head?
The WW2 Liberator pistols were mostly designed to create fear. Germans at checkpoints could no longer largely assume the citizens were unarmed. It works in a war setting because you're already beyond the point where you are accepting friendly casualties as part of the plan.
In a peace setting, more guns == more gun deaths. Not just due to accidents, but also because people on either side (both criminals and law enforcement) are much more likely to shoot in uncertain situations because they have to assume the other guy is armed. In most european countries, when you get robbed you are likely to lose your wallet and highly unlikely to lose your life. In countries with lots of guns, the robbers shoot more often because when the guy makes a sudden move, it could be him drawing a gun, not just panic.
Lets burn the lawyers offices down.
That's bullshit. Lawyers are just dogs biting at whatever we (as society) tell them to bite at. It's the laws that need changing. If we hadn't allowed these ridiculous lawsuits in the first place, they wouldn't exist.
Case in point: In many countries in the world you can tell a stupid kid that its stupid without fear of a lawsuit. Or you can run science projects. And you don't have to print "contents could be hot after heating" on the package of microwave food and "don't use to dry pets" on the microwave itself.
however there is considerable risk that the rush will cause new bugs
That's a risk you always have and thus not a valid counter-argument. And if anyone has experience in doing this kind of cleanup work in a way that doesn't, then it's the OpenBSD team, because they've done this before.
True, most of my experience is with companies 10k, but you're just being arrogant calling that "really small". Almost all of those companies are part of a larger corporation, and you don't manage IT operating activities in multinational corporations on the corporate level. The corporate level decides if you go with SAP or Oracle, but not which patch level of Apache is used on the website of one of 20 subsidiaries.
At least that's the way it was in my last two companies (one a subsidiary of a 65k employee corporation, one part of a 30k employee corporation). If you know of any multinational corporations where the CTO of the top-level holding has to sign off on patch deployment, let me know.
We're talking operative emergency response here, not rollout of new corporate IT infrastructures. I hope you see the difference.