You realise that The Orange Box was distributed retail by EA too right?
I agree The Orange Box too was a brilliant bargain for the amount of content in it, but it doesn't make BF3 overpriced, nor did The Orange Box stop profits going to EA's exec's pockets.
I don't really want to pay more for a product, no one does, but I'd be one of those people who'd pay more for BF4. Why?
Because I've had more hours out of it than just about any game I paid $60 for by quite a margin. The cost relative to the amount of entertainment I'd get out of it would still be better than most $60 titles - to me, $70 for 120hrs of entertainment is still far better than than the average $60 for maybe 10 - 20hrs of entertainment I get out of most games.
In contrast I don't pay $70 for CoD anymore, because it just got ever shitter since World at War culminating in the abysmal fuckup of a game that was Black Ops. If it started to get better again I might, but the franchise has just dropped to the level of a A shooter rather than an AAA shooter, and I can pick up any number of A rated shooters released over the years for fuck all - they're 10 a penny.
I don't have a problem paying a bit more for something that's actually worth it, what I wont pay more for is shit.
If you've started frequenting the forums, you've already lost.
Honestly, if you expect any kind of sensible or worthwhile debate on forums for a game like Battlefield or CoD then you need to get a better understanding of the world of gaming. It's best to just keep away, there's nothing of value there.
I'm not sure what platform you're playing on, but there are a number of servers that genuinely do just have no rules, and there are official DICE servers on the XBox 360. Stick to these rather than some child-run server and you'll have no problem.
Personally I still find it to have the best multiplayer out there, but again, maybe that's because I don't waste my time with the "community", nor do I give a fuck about arbitrary stats - I just pick it up and play it when I feel like it, then put it down again afterwards.
Claranet stopped being relevant as an ISP about 10 - 15 years ago, this idea of theirs wont change anything, they'll still be a completely meaningless and irrelevant ISP.
Because Compaq (then later on HP) never invented PDAs (this is what they were called before smartphone became the prominent term) with phone capability called the iPaq, nor was this name used even before the iPod. Palm pilots with phone functionality is basically exactly what newer model iPaqs were.
Apple didn't "figure out" this concept, far from it, it was already well established in the marketplace. What Apple did succeed in doing however was to bring it to consumers - RIM, HP, and even Dell's devices were business oriented, and whilst some consumers liked business features enough to embrace these devices as a consumer oriented tool, they were never going to compete with devices that were targetted purely at consumers, rather than business.
It's the same reason that the likes of Netbooks sold hundreds of millions of units and took the market by storm in just a year or two - because to that point, most laptops out there were focussed either towards businesses, or the expensive high end power user like gamers, and again, whilst plenty of people bought laptops, finding value in them as a personal tool regardless, the consumerisation of them as netbooks really made the whole market explode. Tablets are again no different - the iPad was nothing new, tablets had been done in a way similar to the iPad since at least 2002 with Windows XP Tablet Edition's introduction (of course there were precursors to even that, but this is the point at which they became viable in the way they are now), but they were never consumer oriented, and so never really took off.
"Since I never get mod points despite a solid posting records and metamodding"
I think the system is fucked, has been for years, and has never been fixed, about 2 years ago I too had had none in about a year or more, then all of a sudden the system started shitting 15 mod points at me multiple times a day for a good week or two, I was granted more mod points than I ever knew what to do with in this period, but have never had mod points in the 2 years since.
Thought I don't even bother meta-moderating now, the whole moderation system here is so broken it's not even worth paying any attention to it. Just use the site as you prefer to use it and ignore the whole moderation system, it's basically a big fat trollfest used to silence legitimate speech far more than it's used to moderate up good comments (and plenty of good comments get modded up, so that should kinda hit how many good comments get modded down).
There's an absolute wealth of information available here if you're willing to browse at -1, or 0 and just scroll past the actual troll posts and spam. It's just a shame the moderation system no longer works to reasonably consistently bring it above the rest anymore.
It depends what you mean by legitimate problem, if by this you mean poorer nations creating cheaper alternatives of drugs to keep their population from dying because they can't afford to fund major multi-national pharmaceutical industries multi-billion dollar profits then I'm not sure it is terribly legitimate.
As with piracy, there are varying levels of legitimacy. Motorola having slide to unlock is hardly a big deal, selling pirated movies to fund terrorism on street corners is a bit more of a problem. There's really no difference in this respect, each problem has opposing ends of the spectrum where some concerns are more legitimate than others.
It's nothing new, the US and it's supporters have been trying to shovel stricter IP policy globally since the creation of the WTO. In fact, that's the whole reason they created the WTO, the difference back then is it was more about the pharmaceutical industry, now it's about the content industries too, but pharmaceutical firms are still very much part of the contingent of lobbyists on this sort of issue.
I think this highlights why it was probably about drivers more than anything.
I too had no problems with Vista, I ran it on a quad core 2.83ghz Intel CPU with 4gb RAM, and a decent graphics card. Switching to Windows 7, performance improvements weren't something I noticed, Vista certainly didn't crawl on my system.
I was a bit late to the party and only installed it when SP1 came out, so perhaps that was part of it, but if I'm honest I wasn't overly chuffed with 7, I actually liked the sidebar for example so was rather annoyed they got rid of it rather than simply made it an option.
I agree 7 felt a bit more polished, and do like some of the changes, but for the most part Vista was really the biggest jump for me, 7 only added fluff.
This isn't to say I'm not aware there were problems, god only knows I had the misfortune of sorting out a neighbours PC that had it on where it was so slow I wanted to jump out the window for example, but I was one of the lucky ones whose hardware seemed to work just fine with Vista, and again, most certainly wasn't sluggish in terms of performance in any way.
If anything this makes patents worse, because it means companies can pick and choose they litigate against, and can genuinely use it to manipulate the market.
In contrast, if such a rule was in place as it was for patents, then it'd mean companies would have to go after the first person that breached the patent and at least bring clarity to the market the second that alleged infringement happens by way of a validity/invalidity ruling. As it stands it's like walking through a minefield - you have to keep going, but you new know when you're going to step on someone else's patent and/or when they're going to sue you for it. They could do it the second you do it, or they could wait years until you've produced a multi-billion dollar product, then try and sue you for far more.
Real Englishmen like me are stood outside right now having a BBQ in my shorts and t-shirt.
Sure it may be raining, sure we may even be currently having a months worth of rain in a day here quite literally.
But it's 18C out for crying out loud, that makes it summer in England, it's fucking BBQ weather. It's not that we don't get summer, it's just that they're rather wet.
Get your wellies on and get the barbie out because there's only one other type of weather we get in the UK than this not-quite-cold and rainy weather, and that's cold and rainy weather, so enjoy the not-quite-cold and rainy weather whilst it lasts!
A consumer affordable head mounter display catering to the things they do in their daily lives strikes me as being far more innovative than the relatively minor jump between the likes of the iPaq to the iPhone, and existing tablets that existed at least 8 years prior and the iPad at least. Siri is just Google Voice with a slightly nicer interface and integration. Even Facebook wasn't really anything of a jump from Friend's Reunited and MySpace either, and Twitter was a small step from blogging.
You can argue most things aren't innovative by finding similar examples, be they in military gear, sci-fi books, or past products, but if you look at it from a more objective point of view by considering innovation relatively, as most people do when they say someone is innovating, then as innovation goes, Google Goggles are certainly at the more innovative end of the scale, along with things like Kinect.
If you think Google Glass isn't innovative, I'd be intrigued to hear what you think is, as I can't think of anything else that's really anything of a comparatively sized jump right now except like I say, perhaps Kinect.
Yes, even with shit that's made in China you can claim the oil required for the plastics came from Iran or wherever the fuck.
Normally "Made in" refers to the final assembled products, not necessarily every constituent component. America may not even have the facilities to produce every single last component but fundamentally even bringing assembly to the US is a step more than most other companies are doing.
This story is just another desperate clutching at straws troll.
I'm not sure where you live, but in the UK, you'd be putting yourself at risk by not challenging it.
Here in the UK, if you get stellar appraisals but get sacked anyway because of an inept/threatened/jealous manager then you can challenge it in an industrial tribunal, and good appraisals would make sure you win your case. There have been a number of scenarios whereby people have been able to hold up good appraisals as evidence that they are not the problem.
If you allow an unfair appraisal to go against you and choose to just ignore it, then you're putting yourself at risk of unfair dismissal with absolutely no recourse for compensation.
If I've learn anything it's that what goes around comes around. When I worked in public sector some years back I suffered the same kind of thing, I was young and naive and even let them lead me into thinking that maybe I was the problem. I eventually left and my career has absolutely flown along in the time since to the point I'm far more senior, far better paid, and far more respected that my bosses were in public sector. I understand their department is currently facing the axe also and I don't expect their job prospects are good having just sat lazily vegitating spending their time attacking anyone competent enough to make them look bad for about 20 years of their careers.
It sounds like the best thing you can do is get out and move on. A change of scenery is a good thing if things get to that point.
One example that comes to mind is when I've been lead developer on projects before I've had headaches where the project manager would keep getting in my way because he was under the assumption that as he had manager in my title it gave him permission to try and tell my team what bugs to prioritise etc. when he had absolutely no clue what they even meant.
Really, project managers for example should be called project facilitators. That's what they're really there for, otherwise they get ideas above their station and just cause problems. I'd led a project perfectly, getting it to a position where it would've been ready 2 weeks before launch, but ended up shooting over for absolutely no reason than the project manager actually added cost to the project unnecessarily, for example, by demanding we add in features which none of our requirements gathering had shown a need for, no one would ever use, and ultimately, no one ever did end up using.
Thinking about it, the term "facilitator" would go a long way to solving a lot of said problems if you replaced manager with facilitator in these people's job titles. When they understand they're there in a support role, and not a management role, things run far more smoothly.
But on the flip side, if it's purely a tax dodge, why does Gates invest so much of his personal time visiting poor parts of the world, and speaking publicly about the issues his foundation is attempting to deal with?
He'd have no reason to do this if it was a tax dodge, he could just keep to himself and let it do it's thing, but he doesn't, he gets actively involved.
Maybe they buy research facilities in the US and not Africa because their key focus is on solving the problems they've set as their priorities - like dealing with Malaria. Giving Africa the resources to deal with the problem isn't just a case of building a research centre there - you need a strong talent pool to go with it, which means also building up an education system in the region of the research centre that is on par with Western areas, and then further waiting until the required staff pass through that education system with the skills needed.
His foundation does fund educational initiatives also, but how does that help them deal with the problems in Africa right now? Funding better education and research centres on the continent is a long term investment - you can't just stick a research centre there and assume it to magically fill up with MIT and Cambridge quality grads - it takes time.
So what do you suggest as an alternative? set the groundwork and just wait 20 years until that groundwork has flourished to the point it can deal with the problem? or do both- which is precisely what they are doing. Using American talent now, to deal with immediate problems, whilst sowing the seeds for an Africa that can better help itself with these problems through it's funding and investment in education.
The fact is there are far better tax dodges around, ones that require far less personal effort and involvement if that was the only aim. It may well be that Gates uses his foundation to further the financial fortunes of friends and so forth as a side thing, I'm not denying that, but he clearly has a lot of actual personal interest in solving problems too, and that's far better than merely being a tax dodge, or simply hoarding fortunes for the sake of hoarding which just about every other billionaire does.
"Your GF should have been promoted to a trainer of other managers, given a raise and been told that she now only meets expectations and is competing with other top retail management trainers. Now she's responsible for creating more copies of herself."
Which is exactly what she ended up doing. But how does that help the problem? someone simply fills her place and you still have the exact same problem again with the person who filled the space left by her exit.
"They also need to break that group up. Make it a regional challenge so there are no more than 10 peers in a group at least. 5 is ideal. Then set the bar for top performance at or just above the best in the group the prior year."
So what happens when you have a region where there happens to be 3 extremely talented managers? You've still got the exact same problem.
It's a broken system, you can't fix it by changing the parameters, the fundamental problems all still exist. The only solution is to use a more rational and forward thinking method of grading people that does away with these fundamental flaws altogether. What if someone has had the odds stacked against them because there's been a flood in their area but they still managed to break even? do you punish them for not achieving growth? The point is this - everyone's circumstances are going to be unique, so lumping them all into the same system is a recipe for failure - someone is always going to get treated unfairly and that has completely the opposite of the desired effect, it demotivates them. You can't escape the fact you need competent managers that can judge people based on their, and their store's unique circumstances.
I can give you a real world example. My partner was a retail manager for a well known denim retailer, and was consistently the top in the country each year in terms of year on year growth no matter which store she was assigned to. The problem is only one manager was allowed to be graded 1 on a scale of 1 to 5 or whatever it was. She obviously deserved it as she was the one consistently performing the best, but this had issues.
If it was given to her year on year, the other managers felt they had no chance and just had no motivation to excel themselves because they were only going to get a 2 anyway - they could try really hard and almost do as well as her, but not quite, so why try when they'd get a 2 regardless? The worst part being these grades were linked to your annual rise, so no matter how hard you tried you'd only get a smaller rise against her.
So the management figured well hey, we need to motivate the other folks, so we'll give it to them for how hard they tried, rather than actual results, and so then it's my girlfriend who despite her stellar performance instead suffers and gets a lower payrise. Then she has no motivation to really continue to outshine, because she's not gaining anything for it, in fact, someone that performed worse than her is getting a better reward than she did.
Of course, the solution may then be to increase the number of people who get a 1, but then at that 1/2 boundary you have the EXACT same problem. Those who try real hard can never quite catch the top performers so are not motivated to do so. Really, the only solution is to instead rank people based on a sensible balance of effort and performance without any cap on how many can be deemed to be top performers. If you extend it to say 5 out of 30 people can have the top grade, then what happens when your survival of the fittest type management system gets the 6 best managers in the country in? well, the 6th one will fuck off elsewhere because they'll be getting shit on relative to the others. It'd be far better if all 6, or all 7, 8, 9, or 10 could get equal reward so that you retain the 10 best managers in the country, rather than stick yourself permanently with only the 5 best, letting the other 5 fuck off to your competitors.
The problem with your theory is that yeah, it works great for the top person, but what the fuck is the use in a system that means that 29 of your 30 staff just have no reason to be motivated? That's a complete failure of management.
I've personally not had a problem being in the top percentile myself, but I'd absolutely fucking hate to work under this system because it'd mean everyone around me was unmotivated meaning I'd be carrying the team - I want my coworkers to be motivated, I want them to do well, to be praised, to be given reason to care about their job, because that makes my life easier regardless of whether I'm a top performer, or a bottom performer.
At the end of the day these braindead systems exist because of inept managers who are either hiring the completely wrong people, or don't have the balls to tell someone truly inept, lazy, or incompetent that they're fired. These managers either can't actually figure out how well their staff are performing, or how competent they are, or they can, but just don't have any spine to do what's required to deal with them, and so they give them this absolutely failure of a crutch to try and automate the process for them but it merely serves to destroy motivation of those who can perform by giving them reason not to.
If you hire good managers you don't need this kind of crutch, the good managers will know who deserves what praise and reward, and who needs to be fired.
The Nexus is Google's flagship device that always gets the latest version of Android, that's why Apple have targetted it.
It's not about whether it's more, or less infringing than the others, it's about destroying competition through legal means, rather than actually competing with them through innovation.
Can anyone clarify how Apple's patent on that is even valid?
Searching multiple sources has been around for years, in so many ways, on so much hardware, in so many programs.
Is it because of some obscure legal definition of a "source"? Windows explorer has quite happily search multiple media sources for me for years. Google search has quite happily returned results from a number of sources. Searching multiple sources from one interface has been a cornerstone of search for decades now.
Why was Apple's patent on it even granted? how was it not ruled obvious, or invalidated trivially by the plethora of examples of prior art? Or is Lucy Koh just the most inept judge in the history of judges?
I actually even sympathise with some of Apple's patents, some of them as much as I detest the way they're using them it's hard to say anything other than fair play I guess. But this one? one that has been used for such a colossaly dangerous ban in terms of absolutely destroying competitiveness in the cell phone market? I just don't get why this one, of all of the ones that could have possibly been chosen, is the one that's been allowed to cause such a brutal ruling.
The problem is that your argument seems to hinge on the fact that Objective-C is better, because it removes things that you can use incorrectly, forcing you to write better code.
That's a fair assesment, but then you may as well argue, why even use Objective-C when Java or C# also do exactly this better than Objective-C does?
The major selling point, the main reason you'd use C++ nowadays is because it's flexible, because it does provide you a wealth of tools to do what you want to do in the way you want to do it. Similarly, flexibility is also why you'd use Objective-C over Java or C# - because those languages may have some limitation as a result of their VMs that prevents you executing on the platform you want to execute on, speaking to the hardware you want to speak to, or, getting the performance you need to get.
You can't write off Java and C# as being for different purposes then argue for Objective-C over C++ whilst ignoring the fact that C++ allows you to attain performance gains that Objective-C simply does not, or that C++ allows you to write code in a style that Objective-C does not. Even in C# I've seen some fantasticly readable code thanks to operator overloading that even Java would've made look fucking awful - i.e. a currency library that for example, if you added a USD currency to a EUR currency would convert the USD currency to EUR then add it on. In C# you might have something like:
It's fucking awful. If you do anything with math it gets very hard very quickly to follow the math without operator overloading, but with operator overloading you can see, understand, and verify the mathematical algorithm in play quite easily.
If you're talking about scenarios where C++'s advantages are not going to be born out over Objective-C then sure, Objective-C may be a better choice, but that's such an arbitrary talking point that you then can't rule out someone arguing the same about Java/C# over Objective-C based on a similarly arbitrary set of circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
You realise that The Orange Box was distributed retail by EA too right?
I agree The Orange Box too was a brilliant bargain for the amount of content in it, but it doesn't make BF3 overpriced, nor did The Orange Box stop profits going to EA's exec's pockets.
I'm intrigued, which other shooters are you referring to?
I don't really want to pay more for a product, no one does, but I'd be one of those people who'd pay more for BF4. Why?
Because I've had more hours out of it than just about any game I paid $60 for by quite a margin. The cost relative to the amount of entertainment I'd get out of it would still be better than most $60 titles - to me, $70 for 120hrs of entertainment is still far better than than the average $60 for maybe 10 - 20hrs of entertainment I get out of most games.
In contrast I don't pay $70 for CoD anymore, because it just got ever shitter since World at War culminating in the abysmal fuckup of a game that was Black Ops. If it started to get better again I might, but the franchise has just dropped to the level of a A shooter rather than an AAA shooter, and I can pick up any number of A rated shooters released over the years for fuck all - they're 10 a penny.
I don't have a problem paying a bit more for something that's actually worth it, what I wont pay more for is shit.
If you've started frequenting the forums, you've already lost.
Honestly, if you expect any kind of sensible or worthwhile debate on forums for a game like Battlefield or CoD then you need to get a better understanding of the world of gaming. It's best to just keep away, there's nothing of value there.
I'm not sure what platform you're playing on, but there are a number of servers that genuinely do just have no rules, and there are official DICE servers on the XBox 360. Stick to these rather than some child-run server and you'll have no problem.
Personally I still find it to have the best multiplayer out there, but again, maybe that's because I don't waste my time with the "community", nor do I give a fuck about arbitrary stats - I just pick it up and play it when I feel like it, then put it down again afterwards.
It's a shit ISP too.
Claranet stopped being relevant as an ISP about 10 - 15 years ago, this idea of theirs wont change anything, they'll still be a completely meaningless and irrelevant ISP.
Because Compaq (then later on HP) never invented PDAs (this is what they were called before smartphone became the prominent term) with phone capability called the iPaq, nor was this name used even before the iPod. Palm pilots with phone functionality is basically exactly what newer model iPaqs were.
Apple didn't "figure out" this concept, far from it, it was already well established in the marketplace. What Apple did succeed in doing however was to bring it to consumers - RIM, HP, and even Dell's devices were business oriented, and whilst some consumers liked business features enough to embrace these devices as a consumer oriented tool, they were never going to compete with devices that were targetted purely at consumers, rather than business.
It's the same reason that the likes of Netbooks sold hundreds of millions of units and took the market by storm in just a year or two - because to that point, most laptops out there were focussed either towards businesses, or the expensive high end power user like gamers, and again, whilst plenty of people bought laptops, finding value in them as a personal tool regardless, the consumerisation of them as netbooks really made the whole market explode. Tablets are again no different - the iPad was nothing new, tablets had been done in a way similar to the iPad since at least 2002 with Windows XP Tablet Edition's introduction (of course there were precursors to even that, but this is the point at which they became viable in the way they are now), but they were never consumer oriented, and so never really took off.
"Since I never get mod points despite a solid posting records and metamodding"
I think the system is fucked, has been for years, and has never been fixed, about 2 years ago I too had had none in about a year or more, then all of a sudden the system started shitting 15 mod points at me multiple times a day for a good week or two, I was granted more mod points than I ever knew what to do with in this period, but have never had mod points in the 2 years since.
Thought I don't even bother meta-moderating now, the whole moderation system here is so broken it's not even worth paying any attention to it. Just use the site as you prefer to use it and ignore the whole moderation system, it's basically a big fat trollfest used to silence legitimate speech far more than it's used to moderate up good comments (and plenty of good comments get modded up, so that should kinda hit how many good comments get modded down).
There's an absolute wealth of information available here if you're willing to browse at -1, or 0 and just scroll past the actual troll posts and spam. It's just a shame the moderation system no longer works to reasonably consistently bring it above the rest anymore.
"I don't know he it jibes with the law and withold comment except to say HAHA FUCK HIM. Because he's a douche."
Oh dear, did he kick your ass on Call of Duty or something?
It depends what you mean by legitimate problem, if by this you mean poorer nations creating cheaper alternatives of drugs to keep their population from dying because they can't afford to fund major multi-national pharmaceutical industries multi-billion dollar profits then I'm not sure it is terribly legitimate.
As with piracy, there are varying levels of legitimacy. Motorola having slide to unlock is hardly a big deal, selling pirated movies to fund terrorism on street corners is a bit more of a problem. There's really no difference in this respect, each problem has opposing ends of the spectrum where some concerns are more legitimate than others.
It's nothing new, the US and it's supporters have been trying to shovel stricter IP policy globally since the creation of the WTO. In fact, that's the whole reason they created the WTO, the difference back then is it was more about the pharmaceutical industry, now it's about the content industries too, but pharmaceutical firms are still very much part of the contingent of lobbyists on this sort of issue.
I think this highlights why it was probably about drivers more than anything.
I too had no problems with Vista, I ran it on a quad core 2.83ghz Intel CPU with 4gb RAM, and a decent graphics card. Switching to Windows 7, performance improvements weren't something I noticed, Vista certainly didn't crawl on my system.
I was a bit late to the party and only installed it when SP1 came out, so perhaps that was part of it, but if I'm honest I wasn't overly chuffed with 7, I actually liked the sidebar for example so was rather annoyed they got rid of it rather than simply made it an option.
I agree 7 felt a bit more polished, and do like some of the changes, but for the most part Vista was really the biggest jump for me, 7 only added fluff.
This isn't to say I'm not aware there were problems, god only knows I had the misfortune of sorting out a neighbours PC that had it on where it was so slow I wanted to jump out the window for example, but I was one of the lucky ones whose hardware seemed to work just fine with Vista, and again, most certainly wasn't sluggish in terms of performance in any way.
Not with patents no.
If anything this makes patents worse, because it means companies can pick and choose they litigate against, and can genuinely use it to manipulate the market.
In contrast, if such a rule was in place as it was for patents, then it'd mean companies would have to go after the first person that breached the patent and at least bring clarity to the market the second that alleged infringement happens by way of a validity/invalidity ruling. As it stands it's like walking through a minefield - you have to keep going, but you new know when you're going to step on someone else's patent and/or when they're going to sue you for it. They could do it the second you do it, or they could wait years until you've produced a multi-billion dollar product, then try and sue you for far more.
I left an employer once because it was shit and was disgruntled with it as my previous company.
But just because I was disgruntled with it, doesn't mean it wasn't shit.
It's bankrupt now.
Sometimes ex-employees are exactly the people you should be listening to, sometimes, they're ex-employees by their own choosing and for good reason.
To be fair we do have places like that in the UK, but we have to pay for the privalage and call them saunas.
Pfft, this is summer.
Real Englishmen like me are stood outside right now having a BBQ in my shorts and t-shirt.
Sure it may be raining, sure we may even be currently having a months worth of rain in a day here quite literally.
But it's 18C out for crying out loud, that makes it summer in England, it's fucking BBQ weather. It's not that we don't get summer, it's just that they're rather wet.
Get your wellies on and get the barbie out because there's only one other type of weather we get in the UK than this not-quite-cold and rainy weather, and that's cold and rainy weather, so enjoy the not-quite-cold and rainy weather whilst it lasts!
A consumer affordable head mounter display catering to the things they do in their daily lives strikes me as being far more innovative than the relatively minor jump between the likes of the iPaq to the iPhone, and existing tablets that existed at least 8 years prior and the iPad at least. Siri is just Google Voice with a slightly nicer interface and integration. Even Facebook wasn't really anything of a jump from Friend's Reunited and MySpace either, and Twitter was a small step from blogging.
You can argue most things aren't innovative by finding similar examples, be they in military gear, sci-fi books, or past products, but if you look at it from a more objective point of view by considering innovation relatively, as most people do when they say someone is innovating, then as innovation goes, Google Goggles are certainly at the more innovative end of the scale, along with things like Kinect.
If you think Google Glass isn't innovative, I'd be intrigued to hear what you think is, as I can't think of anything else that's really anything of a comparatively sized jump right now except like I say, perhaps Kinect.
Yes, even with shit that's made in China you can claim the oil required for the plastics came from Iran or wherever the fuck.
Normally "Made in" refers to the final assembled products, not necessarily every constituent component. America may not even have the facilities to produce every single last component but fundamentally even bringing assembly to the US is a step more than most other companies are doing.
This story is just another desperate clutching at straws troll.
It's theirs, and you did the right thing.
I'm not sure where you live, but in the UK, you'd be putting yourself at risk by not challenging it.
Here in the UK, if you get stellar appraisals but get sacked anyway because of an inept/threatened/jealous manager then you can challenge it in an industrial tribunal, and good appraisals would make sure you win your case. There have been a number of scenarios whereby people have been able to hold up good appraisals as evidence that they are not the problem.
If you allow an unfair appraisal to go against you and choose to just ignore it, then you're putting yourself at risk of unfair dismissal with absolutely no recourse for compensation.
If I've learn anything it's that what goes around comes around. When I worked in public sector some years back I suffered the same kind of thing, I was young and naive and even let them lead me into thinking that maybe I was the problem. I eventually left and my career has absolutely flown along in the time since to the point I'm far more senior, far better paid, and far more respected that my bosses were in public sector. I understand their department is currently facing the axe also and I don't expect their job prospects are good having just sat lazily vegitating spending their time attacking anyone competent enough to make them look bad for about 20 years of their careers.
It sounds like the best thing you can do is get out and move on. A change of scenery is a good thing if things get to that point.
I think you're absolutely right.
One example that comes to mind is when I've been lead developer on projects before I've had headaches where the project manager would keep getting in my way because he was under the assumption that as he had manager in my title it gave him permission to try and tell my team what bugs to prioritise etc. when he had absolutely no clue what they even meant.
Really, project managers for example should be called project facilitators. That's what they're really there for, otherwise they get ideas above their station and just cause problems. I'd led a project perfectly, getting it to a position where it would've been ready 2 weeks before launch, but ended up shooting over for absolutely no reason than the project manager actually added cost to the project unnecessarily, for example, by demanding we add in features which none of our requirements gathering had shown a need for, no one would ever use, and ultimately, no one ever did end up using.
Thinking about it, the term "facilitator" would go a long way to solving a lot of said problems if you replaced manager with facilitator in these people's job titles. When they understand they're there in a support role, and not a management role, things run far more smoothly.
But on the flip side, if it's purely a tax dodge, why does Gates invest so much of his personal time visiting poor parts of the world, and speaking publicly about the issues his foundation is attempting to deal with?
He'd have no reason to do this if it was a tax dodge, he could just keep to himself and let it do it's thing, but he doesn't, he gets actively involved.
Maybe they buy research facilities in the US and not Africa because their key focus is on solving the problems they've set as their priorities - like dealing with Malaria. Giving Africa the resources to deal with the problem isn't just a case of building a research centre there - you need a strong talent pool to go with it, which means also building up an education system in the region of the research centre that is on par with Western areas, and then further waiting until the required staff pass through that education system with the skills needed.
His foundation does fund educational initiatives also, but how does that help them deal with the problems in Africa right now? Funding better education and research centres on the continent is a long term investment - you can't just stick a research centre there and assume it to magically fill up with MIT and Cambridge quality grads - it takes time.
So what do you suggest as an alternative? set the groundwork and just wait 20 years until that groundwork has flourished to the point it can deal with the problem? or do both- which is precisely what they are doing. Using American talent now, to deal with immediate problems, whilst sowing the seeds for an Africa that can better help itself with these problems through it's funding and investment in education.
The fact is there are far better tax dodges around, ones that require far less personal effort and involvement if that was the only aim. It may well be that Gates uses his foundation to further the financial fortunes of friends and so forth as a side thing, I'm not denying that, but he clearly has a lot of actual personal interest in solving problems too, and that's far better than merely being a tax dodge, or simply hoarding fortunes for the sake of hoarding which just about every other billionaire does.
"Your GF should have been promoted to a trainer of other managers, given a raise and been told that she now only meets expectations and is competing with other top retail management trainers. Now she's responsible for creating more copies of herself."
Which is exactly what she ended up doing. But how does that help the problem? someone simply fills her place and you still have the exact same problem again with the person who filled the space left by her exit.
"They also need to break that group up. Make it a regional challenge so there are no more than 10 peers in a group at least. 5 is ideal. Then set the bar for top performance at or just above the best in the group the prior year."
So what happens when you have a region where there happens to be 3 extremely talented managers? You've still got the exact same problem.
It's a broken system, you can't fix it by changing the parameters, the fundamental problems all still exist. The only solution is to use a more rational and forward thinking method of grading people that does away with these fundamental flaws altogether. What if someone has had the odds stacked against them because there's been a flood in their area but they still managed to break even? do you punish them for not achieving growth? The point is this - everyone's circumstances are going to be unique, so lumping them all into the same system is a recipe for failure - someone is always going to get treated unfairly and that has completely the opposite of the desired effect, it demotivates them. You can't escape the fact you need competent managers that can judge people based on their, and their store's unique circumstances.
This doesn't work though.
I can give you a real world example. My partner was a retail manager for a well known denim retailer, and was consistently the top in the country each year in terms of year on year growth no matter which store she was assigned to. The problem is only one manager was allowed to be graded 1 on a scale of 1 to 5 or whatever it was. She obviously deserved it as she was the one consistently performing the best, but this had issues.
If it was given to her year on year, the other managers felt they had no chance and just had no motivation to excel themselves because they were only going to get a 2 anyway - they could try really hard and almost do as well as her, but not quite, so why try when they'd get a 2 regardless? The worst part being these grades were linked to your annual rise, so no matter how hard you tried you'd only get a smaller rise against her.
So the management figured well hey, we need to motivate the other folks, so we'll give it to them for how hard they tried, rather than actual results, and so then it's my girlfriend who despite her stellar performance instead suffers and gets a lower payrise. Then she has no motivation to really continue to outshine, because she's not gaining anything for it, in fact, someone that performed worse than her is getting a better reward than she did.
Of course, the solution may then be to increase the number of people who get a 1, but then at that 1/2 boundary you have the EXACT same problem. Those who try real hard can never quite catch the top performers so are not motivated to do so. Really, the only solution is to instead rank people based on a sensible balance of effort and performance without any cap on how many can be deemed to be top performers. If you extend it to say 5 out of 30 people can have the top grade, then what happens when your survival of the fittest type management system gets the 6 best managers in the country in? well, the 6th one will fuck off elsewhere because they'll be getting shit on relative to the others. It'd be far better if all 6, or all 7, 8, 9, or 10 could get equal reward so that you retain the 10 best managers in the country, rather than stick yourself permanently with only the 5 best, letting the other 5 fuck off to your competitors.
The problem with your theory is that yeah, it works great for the top person, but what the fuck is the use in a system that means that 29 of your 30 staff just have no reason to be motivated? That's a complete failure of management.
I've personally not had a problem being in the top percentile myself, but I'd absolutely fucking hate to work under this system because it'd mean everyone around me was unmotivated meaning I'd be carrying the team - I want my coworkers to be motivated, I want them to do well, to be praised, to be given reason to care about their job, because that makes my life easier regardless of whether I'm a top performer, or a bottom performer.
At the end of the day these braindead systems exist because of inept managers who are either hiring the completely wrong people, or don't have the balls to tell someone truly inept, lazy, or incompetent that they're fired. These managers either can't actually figure out how well their staff are performing, or how competent they are, or they can, but just don't have any spine to do what's required to deal with them, and so they give them this absolutely failure of a crutch to try and automate the process for them but it merely serves to destroy motivation of those who can perform by giving them reason not to.
If you hire good managers you don't need this kind of crutch, the good managers will know who deserves what praise and reward, and who needs to be fired.
The Nexus is Google's flagship device that always gets the latest version of Android, that's why Apple have targetted it.
It's not about whether it's more, or less infringing than the others, it's about destroying competition through legal means, rather than actually competing with them through innovation.
Can anyone clarify how Apple's patent on that is even valid?
Searching multiple sources has been around for years, in so many ways, on so much hardware, in so many programs.
Is it because of some obscure legal definition of a "source"? Windows explorer has quite happily search multiple media sources for me for years. Google search has quite happily returned results from a number of sources. Searching multiple sources from one interface has been a cornerstone of search for decades now.
Why was Apple's patent on it even granted? how was it not ruled obvious, or invalidated trivially by the plethora of examples of prior art? Or is Lucy Koh just the most inept judge in the history of judges?
I actually even sympathise with some of Apple's patents, some of them as much as I detest the way they're using them it's hard to say anything other than fair play I guess. But this one? one that has been used for such a colossaly dangerous ban in terms of absolutely destroying competitiveness in the cell phone market? I just don't get why this one, of all of the ones that could have possibly been chosen, is the one that's been allowed to cause such a brutal ruling.
The problem is that your argument seems to hinge on the fact that Objective-C is better, because it removes things that you can use incorrectly, forcing you to write better code.
That's a fair assesment, but then you may as well argue, why even use Objective-C when Java or C# also do exactly this better than Objective-C does?
The major selling point, the main reason you'd use C++ nowadays is because it's flexible, because it does provide you a wealth of tools to do what you want to do in the way you want to do it. Similarly, flexibility is also why you'd use Objective-C over Java or C# - because those languages may have some limitation as a result of their VMs that prevents you executing on the platform you want to execute on, speaking to the hardware you want to speak to, or, getting the performance you need to get.
You can't write off Java and C# as being for different purposes then argue for Objective-C over C++ whilst ignoring the fact that C++ allows you to attain performance gains that Objective-C simply does not, or that C++ allows you to write code in a style that Objective-C does not. Even in C# I've seen some fantasticly readable code thanks to operator overloading that even Java would've made look fucking awful - i.e. a currency library that for example, if you added a USD currency to a EUR currency would convert the USD currency to EUR then add it on. In C# you might have something like:
newFigure = ((currencyValue1 + currencyValue2) / 100) * (currencyValue3 + currencyValue4);
Pretty readable, but in Java? -
newFigure = (currencyValue1.add(currencyValue2) / 100).multiply(currencyValue3.add(currencyValue4);
It's fucking awful. If you do anything with math it gets very hard very quickly to follow the math without operator overloading, but with operator overloading you can see, understand, and verify the mathematical algorithm in play quite easily.
If you're talking about scenarios where C++'s advantages are not going to be born out over Objective-C then sure, Objective-C may be a better choice, but that's such an arbitrary talking point that you then can't rule out someone arguing the same about Java/C# over Objective-C based on a similarly arbitrary set of circumstances.