The car of the future will look and act much like the car of today. In the last 50 years the basic premise of the car hasn't changed, 4 wheels powered by an engine controlled by pedals and a wheel.
There hasn't been a radical design change to the car because there's no need for one. By 2030 we wont have fully autonomous cars either. So all cars will still have a steering wheel, pedals and a gear selector (even if it's just D P and R in EV's).
This company is trying to pass off a futuristic looking kitchen table as a "future vision" car whilst ignoring that their glass box as an office workspace has the following problems:
- Not aerodynamic.
- Top heavy.
- Glass has no protection from penetration.
- Cars wont be without manual controls in our lifetime (if nothing else, there will be people who like to drive).
- Has no space for energy storage or engines.
- Has no rear or forward visibility.
- Offers no privacy.
- Ugly as sin.
You can tell the company doesn't have a single engineer as they haven't even put in room for the basics like an engine and fuel tank/battery and dont seem to get that people aren't exhibitionists who like driving around in glass booths let alone considered the effects of inertia on items you place on the table.
You'd think a 'future vision' company would know better than to provide some sort of brochure site that acts and works as poorly as this one does. Navigating through this was like trying to play a first person shooter using chopsticks to control the keyboard and mouse.
Hold on there.
These are "design and innovation professionals" not engineers. You cant expect them to have the web site working fluidly and intuitively. They've got to make sure the kerning is perfect and the corners are rounded just right.
It's not their fault you dont understand their future vision based communication sphere.
I can see you with a jewelers monocle going over the phone in the store. "This isn't going to do..." you declare as the Genius hands you another one to look at.
I am curious to how you determine a properly built phone.
First step is to leave the Apple store and go to a manufacturer that knows what "durable" is.
Seriously, I've had HTC, Samsung, Motorola and now an LG... All of them have been able to take a drop without cracking or warping.
BTW, I'm much more eloquent than that. I'd say "no, no, no good sir, this simply isn't going to suffice".
This is actually an argument for private ownership.
If they're cheap and ubiquitous to have one for everyone who wants to go to work at 8:00 (and there will be a lot of people going to work at that time) then they'll be cheap enough that they will be kept in most garages.
The problem you have is that everyone wants to go to work at the same time, but in order for a taxi-like system to be efficient it needs not to have hundreds of vehicles idle for most of the day. Depreciation, insurance costs, maintenance, cleaning and other costs on a fleet will eventually make sure that in order to cope with peak demand, prices will rise and in so doing make private ownership more attractive.
Above this, humans generally dont like to share. So Martin the middle manager can afford his own car, he would rather pay the premium for it than risk getting the same car that Danny the drunkard was vomited in last night.
Wrong. Apple are outdone on that front by Samsung, MS... You really should check your facts before showing the rest of/. how wrong you are. Some of us actually RTFA, read relevant info, and post knowingly. Hater.
Seems you need to take your own advice.
You should know that the $14 billion is for all Samsung Electronics products, everything from TV's to speakers to DVD players to car audio. It also covers things like sports team sponsorships (local and national). Of that $14 billion, only $401 Million was spent on phone advertising, Apple spent $333 Million in the same period whilst Samsung sells more phones, more models and across more segments. So on a phone to advertising dollar ratio, Apple spends a lot more.
Beyond all this, your article that you clearly didn't read demonstrated that this paid off for Samsung. Sure they tried to get an inflammatory "Apple pleasing" headline in but utterly failed as the content proved that Samsung's splurge on advertising worked. Also that article is 2 years old. The data is from 2012.
Besides, the GP was talking about hype, not advertising dollars. Apple whips the fanboys, like yourself into a huge frenzy over almost anything. The fact you need to cling onto little things like advertising spending shows how detached from reality you are.
So you really should check your own facts before showing/. how wrong you are.
Yeah, but every time you engage the manual mode, your insurance company will ding you 500 quatloos.
The insurance company wont know.
Either they wont be permitted to (in places where there are strong consumer protections) or you'll modify the car to always report it's in autonomous mode.
Besides this, fully autonomous cars are decades away from real use. Even the third or fourth gen autonomous cars will have the fully autonomous system restricted to specially modified limited access roads. Suburban streets will still have to be driven around manually.
The "self-driving car" is a pipe dream shared by people with no idea about the complexity of the task. It's going to become the "flying car" of the 2000's. In 2040 you'll be in your retirement village shouting "where's my self-driving car" and shaking your withered fist in the air.
I don't own a car in the present, nor do I especially want or need to.
I've always found the smugness in this statement interesting.
Vehicles and the "free" (as in freedom to move around) national highway transportation system are one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind. The places I am able to take myself everyday represent a massive freedom for me, and I don't want to live my entire life within a city radius unless I rent someone else's property. A wonderfully comfortable vehicle, with music streaming from a satellite, and traveling all over my country is exceedingly affordable where I live.. not sure where the downside is.
The GP is from the UK or Europe where there are significant artificial hurdles to car ownership. MOT inspections cut down on cheap used cars, insurance for a novice driver is stupidly expensive, living in the centre of London parking space is at a premium and there's a daily congestion charge.
The insurance alone in the UK is enough to kill it. It's not unusual for the insurance on someone's first car to be more than the cost of their first car.
I figure you could still drive on dedicated tracks, much like people can still ride horses.
Which doesn't help much if you need to tow things like boats, jetskis, trailers, etc.
The people who think that self-driving cars and not owning cars are a good idea tend to be people who live in dense urban areas and know little to nothing about the rest of the world. What they fail to understand are all of the circumstances where a generic rental and/or self-driving just will not cut it. Like it or not, any self-driving highway is going to have to make accommodations for human guided vehicles.
This.
There's nothing wrong with people who live in large cities with good public transport systems that already dont need cars... but what these people forget is their city is not the norm.
Above that, people want to own personal transport. Not everyone wants to sit on a bus or train with everyone else, certainly people wont want to wait 45 minutes for the next Johnny Cab to become available when they can own their own car. Private ownership of cars will not change significantly with autonomous cars (fully autonomous cars are still decades away) because the same motivation for owning private transport will not have changed.
Compared to a computer, a human is utterly incompetent to operate any heavy machinery. The reaction times and accuracy just aren't there, and never will be. That makes you comparatively dangerous, no matter how 'law abiding' you might be.
That is, if the human and computer are doing exactly the same pre-programmed job at the same time.
The problem with autonomous cars is that you cant pre-program every single scenario so it has to be capable of making decisions on the fly with limited information... that is where the human has a massive advantage over computers. When your laptop encounters an error it cant compensate for or even understand, it stops dead... this is not a feature you want in cars because stopping dead is often just as bad.
The thing is, a computer can put the brakes on faster than a human, but the human can determine why the brakes need to be on faster than a computer.
Exactly. In English, "Swap Foo for Bar" means you start with Foo and replace it with Bar.
Which English? When I see "Swap Foo for Bar" that means wherever I see Bar, I replace it with Foo.
When I see "Swap Foo with Bar" that means wherever I see Foo, I replace it with Bar.
Quite right, but so is the GP.
Most people will just read the key words and have their brain fill in the blanks. So we look at the title and see "swap... Foo... Bar..) and most people's brain will assume the operator is with and we're replacing Foo with Bar. I did the same, then realised the entire sentence, in context didn't make sense so I re-read it properly (a lot of people wont pick up on that and re-read it).
So you're right that the headline is technically correct... but the GP is right in that the headline is bad form and people will get confused (not that/. has particularly high journalistic standards to maintain).
The fines that UNSW are levying are for breaches in the terms (or rules) by which students access the institution's network services. What power would UNSW have to "[enforce] a commonwealth law?"
More over, which commonwealth law (that would be a federal law for the Americans playing along at home) are they enforcing?
As yet, there isn't a criminal code for copyright infringement, it's a civil matter.
As the parent said, universities have the ability to make their own legislation that is enforceable. Most universities use it for things like parking (which is at a premium), vandalism, plagiarism, smoking on campus and other acts that are too minor to get the police involved in. Although universities are legally permitted to chase people though the courts for this money, its much easier just to withhold their results until all fines are paid.
When I buy a new gen console I have to get all new games.
Nothing is stopping you from playing the old games on the old console. You buy the newer stuff for the newer console.
Or, if you had one of the nice CECHA/CECHB/CECHE PS3's, you just used all your PSOne/PS2 discs in it as well.
But really, how many older games do you actually play. Yeah you may say "I install LOOM on my Win8 machine" but do you actually play the older stuff, but only do that to brag about your library.
Can a new Nintendo play all my old Nintendo games. Say from my 64 or SNES (yes I have games that old). Yeah I do replay old games on a regular basis, some dating back to 1992 (hello Star Control II). If I want a console to play my old Nintendo games on, I need an old Nintendo console.
Even backwards compatibility for a PS1 or PS2 on a PS3 was shoddy at best. Unlike the PC, if your game stopped working due to an OS or HW change there was no way around it.
Also remember that Sony removed the PS2 emulator from the PS3 (ostensibly to save money).
Ah, I didn't realize. I assume they're still used for major transactions like buying a car or something?
I live in the USA, but aside from rent and occasionally paying a friend for something expensive I haven't used a check since graduation except to pay rent and buy my car.
Australia is pretty much the same.
Personal cheques are a thing of the past. No one even needs a "we dont accept cheques" sign any more as no-one uses them.
However we have bank cheques where the bank holds the money in escrow until the recipient cashes it. Basically its a cheque with it's value guaranteed up by a bank. If you buy a car in Oz, often you'll use a bank cheque as direct debit can take up to 3 days here (still).
Such "contracts" hold little to no water in the UK, which is why Trading Standards is involved - this hotel is going to get buttfucked from here to Singapore by quite a few government bodies over this, and quite probably lose their merchant status for accepting cards.
And this is why anyone in the UK or an understanding of the UK isn't worried.
No need to do a chargeback, just go to Trading Standards.
However having some understanding from the other side of the desk, hotels have a serious problem with fake reviews on sites like Trip Advisor (not helped by the fact Trip Advisor will put bad reviews at the top unless you pay them). In time this will devalue sites like Trip Advisor to the point where no-one even reads the reviews but there are still a lot of idiots who blindly trust it.
Not defending this mind you, I just understand why they're frustrated (also, it's in Blackpool... that may be half the problem).
The card charges 30 pounds fee to refund it, and the hotel loses the money and the fee.
Do that often enough and the hotel will lose the right to take credit cards, because the card companies don't want scams like this.
A hotel that can't take credit cards will lose most of their business very quickly.
Actually, the credit card company rings the hotel and says "Did Mr A Cowards stay there on the 3rd of November", the hotel will say "Yes, we have his signature and footage on the CCTV" then the credit card company will turn around and say "Righto, sorry for bothering you" and cancel your card.
It is actually quite hard to fool a bank.
Besides this, if enough people start playing funny buggers with credit cards, hotels will just add a 30 pound surcharge for accepting your card. You think you might avoid it by going elswhere, but it'll be everywhere soon enough.
Vastly superior gaming platform demonstrated to be vastly superior. Next up, water proven to be wet.
Seriously, is this a surprise to anyone. A PC with more modern and more powerful hardware is faster and more detailed than a gaming platform with older and less powerful hardware...
It's like someone who drives a VW Golf complaining that it's not as fast as a Nissan 370z.
Those aren't rock-star developers. As another poster said, you likely have never worked with a rock-star developer.
Nope, worked with them, dismissed several of them because their behaviour was detrimental to the team (one got sacked because he went and told the book keepers that he was more important than they were and should do what he said).
The ones who actually make the team better dont consider themselves to be rockstars. There is a correlation between humility and talent (otherwise known as the Dunning-Kruger effect)
They are rare, but it's awesome when you see somebody that inspires others around them by what they can do.
This is how they like to imagine they are, but not what they're like in reality. In reality they are childish and petulant. If their authority and awesomeness is not recognised they will make everyone else's life hell until it is.
You sound like you work in a big company, on big teams.
Wrong again.
Largest organisation I worked for in that capacity was 80 staff with 20 developers (most in a consulting capacity). In fact that's why I ended up managing the dev teams, we didn't have enough of them to justify their own manager so it fell under my jurisdiction as IT manager.
I had a pair of senior devs who could keep the team together and moving and were great at it, I considered it my job to keep things out of their way so they could do their jobs.
The "10x productivity" idea is somewhat silly anyhow - sure, some people are quite productive, but mostly if one guy is 10x another, the other guy just sucks.
I'm not valued because I can bang out more code than the next guy - I'm valued because I can lead a team of people and make them more productive: through design review, best practices, experience doing agile right, and so on. Sure, all those things make me more productive to, but it's much more valuable as a force multiplier for a large team.
That's what the job is, as a senior dev. That and doing all the horrible wrangling with project management systems, clarifying user requirements coming from PMs and translating them into sanity, and so on. The more senior I become, the less time I spend coding, because there's only so much value I add working by myself.
This, 1000x this.
I hate managing with "rockstar" developers because they're always too arrogant and full of themselves. They detract from the team, argue and refuse to listen to others. As soon as I see anything remotely "rockstar-ish" in an interview they immediately go to the bottom of the pile.
Senior devs are the antithesis. They help the junior devs and often their time is better spent doing this than banging out code even though their code is a lot better than the juniors. Someone who can manage a team is valued for more than just their coding skills, if they've got people skills they are definitely a force multiplier.
You need all the team to be involved in the development of the product, letting one "rockstar" do their own thing means when they leave you've got an codebase no-one has any knowledge on and it's always a matter of when (people win lotto, go on sabbaticals, change career or move to a nicer climate).
Rockstar devs dont need agents, the concept of rockstar devs needs to die.
The value of an agent to me is the difference between what I can get and what the agent can get, minus the amount the agent skims off the top. The worse I am at negotiating, the larger the difference is... but the greater the amount the agent skims off the top. Most likely outcome: the agent, whose entire compensation is based on separating me from as much cash as possible, manages to take more than that difference and I get screwed while thinking I got a good deal.
However the value of you to an agent is how much they can get out of the company for you.
This is how recruiting and head hunting currently works. The company puts out an ad or contacts a recruitment agency, basically they make their intentions known. Recruiters approach the companies on the behalf of the perspective employee and set terms that if the employee is hired they get money. If the employee lasts longer than X months they get a bonus.
All an "agent" will do is double dip. They'll still get the recruiting fee and bonus from the company and then they'll turn around and charge you for their services again.
In this scenario, the money they get from you is just icing on the cake, their working for the company, not you and because of this the recruiter has a vested interest in getting you in the door as cheaply as possible.
The market capitalization of Activision/Blizzard is $14 Billion. Take Two is $2 billion. Meanwhile someone is spending under $40K in Europe to do a study. How much impact can that possibly have?
Exactly, it's "shut up and go away" money.
If it were a serious study, it would be 3 or more times that given to a university with an ethics board and peer review would be done... But universities have better things to do.
So why the freakout?
Because people like to have a whinge about their favourite things. Any mention of the F word on/. brings the "woe is man" crowd out of the woodwork.
At the risk of flame-baiting, in Australia we'd call them a "big girls blouse".
See also NIS (WRT healthcare rationing), overburdening the taxpayer, the insane EU rules governing everything from gasoline to what constitutes an actual croissant, etc.
First off, I assume you mean the US NIS (National Inpatient Sample) and just because the US government cant get something like healthcare right, doesn't mean others cant. The UK's NHS is far from the worlds best universal health care system, but it the system in the US makes it look positively sublime. One of the major reasons the US cant do anything right in health is the fact private corporations are too far entrenched and the government is too limp wristed to tell them to naff off (that and a large section of your government and population want to see the abuse continue).
Secondly, what EU rules on gasoline and croissants are you on about. Do you mean the Euro standards that determine things like how much sulfur can be in different types of fuel? When you drive a car that is sensitive to that you're actually grateful that someone is making sure that someone isn't shoving too much ethanol in the mix and as someone who breathes air, I'm also grateful that a lot of toxic material is removed.
You might have a point about the rule stating that only fortified wine from the Porto region can be called port, but if that's the biggest complaint you've only demonstrated that the EU is harmless.
Slashdot Mirror
The car of the future will look and act much like the car of today. In the last 50 years the basic premise of the car hasn't changed, 4 wheels powered by an engine controlled by pedals and a wheel.
There hasn't been a radical design change to the car because there's no need for one. By 2030 we wont have fully autonomous cars either. So all cars will still have a steering wheel, pedals and a gear selector (even if it's just D P and R in EV's).
This company is trying to pass off a futuristic looking kitchen table as a "future vision" car whilst ignoring that their glass box as an office workspace has the following problems:
- Not aerodynamic.
- Top heavy.
- Glass has no protection from penetration.
- Cars wont be without manual controls in our lifetime (if nothing else, there will be people who like to drive).
- Has no space for energy storage or engines.
- Has no rear or forward visibility.
- Offers no privacy.
- Ugly as sin.
You can tell the company doesn't have a single engineer as they haven't even put in room for the basics like an engine and fuel tank/battery and dont seem to get that people aren't exhibitionists who like driving around in glass booths let alone considered the effects of inertia on items you place on the table.
You'd think a 'future vision' company would know better than to provide some sort of brochure site that acts and works as poorly as this one does. Navigating through this was like trying to play a first person shooter using chopsticks to control the keyboard and mouse.
Hold on there.
These are "design and innovation professionals" not engineers. You cant expect them to have the web site working fluidly and intuitively. They've got to make sure the kerning is perfect and the corners are rounded just right.
It's not their fault you dont understand their future vision based communication sphere.
then again I buy phones that are built properly
I can see you with a jewelers monocle going over the phone in the store. "This isn't going to do..." you declare as the Genius hands you another one to look at.
I am curious to how you determine a properly built phone.
First step is to leave the Apple store and go to a manufacturer that knows what "durable" is.
Seriously, I've had HTC, Samsung, Motorola and now an LG... All of them have been able to take a drop without cracking or warping.
BTW, I'm much more eloquent than that. I'd say "no, no, no good sir, this simply isn't going to suffice".
This is actually an argument for private ownership.
If they're cheap and ubiquitous to have one for everyone who wants to go to work at 8:00 (and there will be a lot of people going to work at that time) then they'll be cheap enough that they will be kept in most garages.
The problem you have is that everyone wants to go to work at the same time, but in order for a taxi-like system to be efficient it needs not to have hundreds of vehicles idle for most of the day. Depreciation, insurance costs, maintenance, cleaning and other costs on a fleet will eventually make sure that in order to cope with peak demand, prices will rise and in so doing make private ownership more attractive.
Above this, humans generally dont like to share. So Martin the middle manager can afford his own car, he would rather pay the premium for it than risk getting the same car that Danny the drunkard was vomited in last night.
If you have a naked phone, what do you expect?
I expect it to survive an accidental drop.
I've never had a phone cover, they've all survived trips to the floor without shattering... then again I buy phones that are built properly.
Also, I tend to be a little bit careful with my things. I'd be lucky if I drop my phone every six months.
Wrong. Apple are outdone on that front by Samsung, MS... You really should check your facts before showing the rest of /. how wrong you are. Some of us actually RTFA, read relevant info, and post knowingly. Hater.
Seems you need to take your own advice.
/. how wrong you are.
You should know that the $14 billion is for all Samsung Electronics products, everything from TV's to speakers to DVD players to car audio. It also covers things like sports team sponsorships (local and national). Of that $14 billion, only $401 Million was spent on phone advertising, Apple spent $333 Million in the same period whilst Samsung sells more phones, more models and across more segments. So on a phone to advertising dollar ratio, Apple spends a lot more.
Beyond all this, your article that you clearly didn't read demonstrated that this paid off for Samsung. Sure they tried to get an inflammatory "Apple pleasing" headline in but utterly failed as the content proved that Samsung's splurge on advertising worked. Also that article is 2 years old. The data is from 2012.
Besides, the GP was talking about hype, not advertising dollars. Apple whips the fanboys, like yourself into a huge frenzy over almost anything. The fact you need to cling onto little things like advertising spending shows how detached from reality you are.
So you really should check your own facts before showing
Hater.
See my sig.
For an older car, the Nissan Silvia (S13/14/15, 180sx, 200sx) is considered a modders car. Considerably cheaper than a WRX or EVO.
There's also the R32/33/34 Skylines... but they were never made in LHD.
Yeah, but every time you engage the manual mode, your insurance company will ding you 500 quatloos.
The insurance company wont know.
Either they wont be permitted to (in places where there are strong consumer protections) or you'll modify the car to always report it's in autonomous mode.
Besides this, fully autonomous cars are decades away from real use. Even the third or fourth gen autonomous cars will have the fully autonomous system restricted to specially modified limited access roads. Suburban streets will still have to be driven around manually.
The "self-driving car" is a pipe dream shared by people with no idea about the complexity of the task. It's going to become the "flying car" of the 2000's. In 2040 you'll be in your retirement village shouting "where's my self-driving car" and shaking your withered fist in the air.
I don't own a car in the present, nor do I especially want or need to.
I've always found the smugness in this statement interesting.
Vehicles and the "free" (as in freedom to move around) national highway transportation system are one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind. The places I am able to take myself everyday represent a massive freedom for me, and I don't want to live my entire life within a city radius unless I rent someone else's property. A wonderfully comfortable vehicle, with music streaming from a satellite, and traveling all over my country is exceedingly affordable where I live.. not sure where the downside is.
The GP is from the UK or Europe where there are significant artificial hurdles to car ownership. MOT inspections cut down on cheap used cars, insurance for a novice driver is stupidly expensive, living in the centre of London parking space is at a premium and there's a daily congestion charge.
The insurance alone in the UK is enough to kill it. It's not unusual for the insurance on someone's first car to be more than the cost of their first car.
I figure you could still drive on dedicated tracks, much like people can still ride horses.
Which doesn't help much if you need to tow things like boats, jetskis, trailers, etc.
The people who think that self-driving cars and not owning cars are a good idea tend to be people who live in dense urban areas and know little to nothing about the rest of the world. What they fail to understand are all of the circumstances where a generic rental and/or self-driving just will not cut it. Like it or not, any self-driving highway is going to have to make accommodations for human guided vehicles.
This.
There's nothing wrong with people who live in large cities with good public transport systems that already dont need cars... but what these people forget is their city is not the norm.
Above that, people want to own personal transport. Not everyone wants to sit on a bus or train with everyone else, certainly people wont want to wait 45 minutes for the next Johnny Cab to become available when they can own their own car. Private ownership of cars will not change significantly with autonomous cars (fully autonomous cars are still decades away) because the same motivation for owning private transport will not have changed.
Compared to a computer, a human is utterly incompetent to operate any heavy machinery. The reaction times and accuracy just aren't there, and never will be. That makes you comparatively dangerous, no matter how 'law abiding' you might be.
That is, if the human and computer are doing exactly the same pre-programmed job at the same time.
The problem with autonomous cars is that you cant pre-program every single scenario so it has to be capable of making decisions on the fly with limited information... that is where the human has a massive advantage over computers. When your laptop encounters an error it cant compensate for or even understand, it stops dead... this is not a feature you want in cars because stopping dead is often just as bad.
The thing is, a computer can put the brakes on faster than a human, but the human can determine why the brakes need to be on faster than a computer.
"How to dispose of the corpse of an annoying relative who I just murdered"
Driving directions to the nearest pig farm or rug store?
Exactly. In English, "Swap Foo for Bar" means you start with Foo and replace it with Bar.
Which English? When I see "Swap Foo for Bar" that means wherever I see Bar, I replace it with Foo.
When I see "Swap Foo with Bar" that means wherever I see Foo, I replace it with Bar.
Quite right, but so is the GP.
/. has particularly high journalistic standards to maintain).
Most people will just read the key words and have their brain fill in the blanks. So we look at the title and see "swap... Foo... Bar..) and most people's brain will assume the operator is with and we're replacing Foo with Bar. I did the same, then realised the entire sentence, in context didn't make sense so I re-read it properly (a lot of people wont pick up on that and re-read it).
So you're right that the headline is technically correct... but the GP is right in that the headline is bad form and people will get confused (not that
Huh? What's the confusion here?
The fines that UNSW are levying are for breaches in the terms (or rules) by which students access the institution's network services. What power would UNSW have to "[enforce] a commonwealth law?"
More over, which commonwealth law (that would be a federal law for the Americans playing along at home) are they enforcing?
As yet, there isn't a criminal code for copyright infringement, it's a civil matter.
As the parent said, universities have the ability to make their own legislation that is enforceable. Most universities use it for things like parking (which is at a premium), vandalism, plagiarism, smoking on campus and other acts that are too minor to get the police involved in. Although universities are legally permitted to chase people though the courts for this money, its much easier just to withhold their results until all fines are paid.
When I buy a new gen console I have to get all new games.
Nothing is stopping you from playing the old games on the old console. You buy the newer stuff for the newer console.
Or, if you had one of the nice CECHA/CECHB/CECHE PS3's, you just used all your PSOne/PS2 discs in it as well.
But really, how many older games do you actually play. Yeah you may say "I install LOOM on my Win8 machine" but do you actually play the older stuff, but only do that to brag about your library.
Can a new Nintendo play all my old Nintendo games. Say from my 64 or SNES (yes I have games that old). Yeah I do replay old games on a regular basis, some dating back to 1992 (hello Star Control II). If I want a console to play my old Nintendo games on, I need an old Nintendo console.
Even backwards compatibility for a PS1 or PS2 on a PS3 was shoddy at best. Unlike the PC, if your game stopped working due to an OS or HW change there was no way around it.
Also remember that Sony removed the PS2 emulator from the PS3 (ostensibly to save money).
Ah, I didn't realize. I assume they're still used for major transactions like buying a car or something?
I live in the USA, but aside from rent and occasionally paying a friend for something expensive I haven't used a check since graduation except to pay rent and buy my car.
Australia is pretty much the same.
Personal cheques are a thing of the past. No one even needs a "we dont accept cheques" sign any more as no-one uses them.
However we have bank cheques where the bank holds the money in escrow until the recipient cashes it. Basically its a cheque with it's value guaranteed up by a bank. If you buy a car in Oz, often you'll use a bank cheque as direct debit can take up to 3 days here (still).
Such "contracts" hold little to no water in the UK, which is why Trading Standards is involved - this hotel is going to get buttfucked from here to Singapore by quite a few government bodies over this, and quite probably lose their merchant status for accepting cards.
And this is why anyone in the UK or an understanding of the UK isn't worried.
No need to do a chargeback, just go to Trading Standards.
However having some understanding from the other side of the desk, hotels have a serious problem with fake reviews on sites like Trip Advisor (not helped by the fact Trip Advisor will put bad reviews at the top unless you pay them). In time this will devalue sites like Trip Advisor to the point where no-one even reads the reviews but there are still a lot of idiots who blindly trust it.
Not defending this mind you, I just understand why they're frustrated (also, it's in Blackpool... that may be half the problem).
The card charges 30 pounds fee to refund it, and the hotel loses the money and the fee.
Do that often enough and the hotel will lose the right to take credit cards, because the card companies don't want scams like this.
A hotel that can't take credit cards will lose most of their business very quickly.
Actually, the credit card company rings the hotel and says "Did Mr A Cowards stay there on the 3rd of November", the hotel will say "Yes, we have his signature and footage on the CCTV" then the credit card company will turn around and say "Righto, sorry for bothering you" and cancel your card.
It is actually quite hard to fool a bank.
Besides this, if enough people start playing funny buggers with credit cards, hotels will just add a 30 pound surcharge for accepting your card. You think you might avoid it by going elswhere, but it'll be everywhere soon enough.
Whenever I see a challenge like electric fences and moats I always take a note from Jeremey Clarkson's book and say "how hard could it be"?
It seems he's already answered, with the Toybota.
Vastly superior gaming platform demonstrated to be vastly superior. Next up, water proven to be wet.
Seriously, is this a surprise to anyone. A PC with more modern and more powerful hardware is faster and more detailed than a gaming platform with older and less powerful hardware...
It's like someone who drives a VW Golf complaining that it's not as fast as a Nissan 370z.
Nope, worked with them, dismissed several of them because their behaviour was detrimental to the team (one got sacked because he went and told the book keepers that he was more important than they were and should do what he said).
The ones who actually make the team better dont consider themselves to be rockstars. There is a correlation between humility and talent (otherwise known as the Dunning-Kruger effect)
This is how they like to imagine they are, but not what they're like in reality. In reality they are childish and petulant. If their authority and awesomeness is not recognised they will make everyone else's life hell until it is.
Wrong again.
Largest organisation I worked for in that capacity was 80 staff with 20 developers (most in a consulting capacity). In fact that's why I ended up managing the dev teams, we didn't have enough of them to justify their own manager so it fell under my jurisdiction as IT manager.
I had a pair of senior devs who could keep the team together and moving and were great at it, I considered it my job to keep things out of their way so they could do their jobs.
The "10x productivity" idea is somewhat silly anyhow - sure, some people are quite productive, but mostly if one guy is 10x another, the other guy just sucks.
I'm not valued because I can bang out more code than the next guy - I'm valued because I can lead a team of people and make them more productive: through design review, best practices, experience doing agile right, and so on. Sure, all those things make me more productive to, but it's much more valuable as a force multiplier for a large team.
That's what the job is, as a senior dev. That and doing all the horrible wrangling with project management systems, clarifying user requirements coming from PMs and translating them into sanity, and so on. The more senior I become, the less time I spend coding, because there's only so much value I add working by myself.
This, 1000x this.
I hate managing with "rockstar" developers because they're always too arrogant and full of themselves. They detract from the team, argue and refuse to listen to others. As soon as I see anything remotely "rockstar-ish" in an interview they immediately go to the bottom of the pile.
Senior devs are the antithesis. They help the junior devs and often their time is better spent doing this than banging out code even though their code is a lot better than the juniors. Someone who can manage a team is valued for more than just their coding skills, if they've got people skills they are definitely a force multiplier.
You need all the team to be involved in the development of the product, letting one "rockstar" do their own thing means when they leave you've got an codebase no-one has any knowledge on and it's always a matter of when (people win lotto, go on sabbaticals, change career or move to a nicer climate).
Rockstar devs dont need agents, the concept of rockstar devs needs to die.
The value of an agent to me is the difference between what I can get and what the agent can get, minus the amount the agent skims off the top. The worse I am at negotiating, the larger the difference is... but the greater the amount the agent skims off the top. Most likely outcome: the agent, whose entire compensation is based on separating me from as much cash as possible, manages to take more than that difference and I get screwed while thinking I got a good deal.
However the value of you to an agent is how much they can get out of the company for you.
This is how recruiting and head hunting currently works. The company puts out an ad or contacts a recruitment agency, basically they make their intentions known. Recruiters approach the companies on the behalf of the perspective employee and set terms that if the employee is hired they get money. If the employee lasts longer than X months they get a bonus.
All an "agent" will do is double dip. They'll still get the recruiting fee and bonus from the company and then they'll turn around and charge you for their services again.
In this scenario, the money they get from you is just icing on the cake, their working for the company, not you and because of this the recruiter has a vested interest in getting you in the door as cheaply as possible.
The market capitalization of Activision/Blizzard is $14 Billion. Take Two is $2 billion. Meanwhile someone is spending under $40K in Europe to do a study. How much impact can that possibly have?
Exactly, it's "shut up and go away" money.
If it were a serious study, it would be 3 or more times that given to a university with an ethics board and peer review would be done... But universities have better things to do.
So why the freakout?
Because people like to have a whinge about their favourite things. Any mention of the F word on /. brings the "woe is man" crowd out of the woodwork.
At the risk of flame-baiting, in Australia we'd call them a "big girls blouse".
And you'd be wrong.
First off, I assume you mean the US NIS (National Inpatient Sample) and just because the US government cant get something like healthcare right, doesn't mean others cant. The UK's NHS is far from the worlds best universal health care system, but it the system in the US makes it look positively sublime. One of the major reasons the US cant do anything right in health is the fact private corporations are too far entrenched and the government is too limp wristed to tell them to naff off (that and a large section of your government and population want to see the abuse continue).
Secondly, what EU rules on gasoline and croissants are you on about. Do you mean the Euro standards that determine things like how much sulfur can be in different types of fuel? When you drive a car that is sensitive to that you're actually grateful that someone is making sure that someone isn't shoving too much ethanol in the mix and as someone who breathes air, I'm also grateful that a lot of toxic material is removed.
You might have a point about the rule stating that only fortified wine from the Porto region can be called port, but if that's the biggest complaint you've only demonstrated that the EU is harmless.