Make the labels feel guilty for making such a system possible by not upgrading their ways.
Labels, feel?
Pull the other one.
Right now in Australia there is an inquiry as to why the Australian prices are far higher than prices in other nations, Especially for digital goods. Publishers are still trying to claim tax, duties and wages. Most of which (especially tax and duties) is much lower than the UK yet prices are often twice (or more, some times as much as 4 times) what they are in the UK (Taxes get my goat, GST in AU is 10% whilst VAT in the UK is 20% how the fuck is that more?). Wages do not matter seeing as they don't have retail presences in Australia. Yet they continue to use these as an excuse, treating digital products as if they had the same cost as physical products and pretending the AUD is not as high as it is.
Publishers and labels do not feel guilt, they don't feel remorse or empathy or anything else. They aren't human so stop trying to apply human values and human characteristics to them. The only thing they care about is money, if you want to affect their decisions, you have affect their bottom line.
No one needs to figure out how many litres of petrol they'll get for $20.
I disagree with this part. One needs to be able to figure out it out. This sounds like you are not living in the U.S.
That part is obvious seeing as I call it Petrol and we have the option of pre-paying or post paying where I live.
But you're wrong. I have $20 to buy petrol this week, there are 4 petrol stations near me at varying distances, I want to determine which petrol station will give me the most petrol for my $20, it's a simple matter to take into account the price per litre but then I have to consider the cost to get there, so I also need to consider the litres of petrol consumed in getting to each petrol station. So the petrol station furthest away may be $0.04 cheaper per litre but if I use 1 extra litre getting there it's not worth it as $0.04 over $20 equates to less than 1 litre of petrol.
Therefore, the sentence of "no one needs to figure out..." is not always true
I take it your sarcasm metre is broken.
Of course people use algebra and not even know it. Same as with all the other things kids said "where are we going to use this in the real world" during high school.
If you play Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh, I think you would have a hard time making that claim. And that's not even comparing him to Mozart or Wagner.
Or compare Hendrix to the Foo Fighters, Both rock, both very different. Even with Hendrix, compare Little Wing to All Along the Watch Tower to Star Spangled Banner. Very different styles of music from the same artist. With the Foo Fighters, compare Aurora to Stacked Actors or Generator, very different songs and they're on the same album.
I'm yet to see that kind of variety from Beyonce, Jay Z or Katy Perry. Hell even the likes of Slipknot have more variety and I think Slipknots music sounds very similar (to be fair, they do live in a niche of metal).
Drivers already don't look where they're going when using a GPS, now they won't lookout for dangers or other users of the road because the car will tell them.
Ford is selling a car with "parking assist" and advertised as "almost self parking" yet people in a brand new Focus still cant park.
Eventually people will realise that employers Google these things, and that posting nasty stuff means you can't get work.
But this could take a generation to work through.
Real name accounts wont change this. Right now most people dont care that their Facebook is open to the entire world and getting a job is about getting the interviewer to like you more than anything else.
Even using your real name could be bad, there's a Tim "Sharky" Ward who's not a nice fellow (he's a loan shark and a roid junkie) and recently been arrested in Thailand for stabbing a Canadian. I'm certain you wouldn't want to be mistaken for him just for having the same name. If nothing else, real name policies will make such HR departments complacent, You might be Tim Ward from Washington (for example, I have no idea where you live or if Tim Ward is your real name), but HR flunkie #1 looks up Tim Ward from New Zealand who's currently in a Thai jail for stabbing someone and doesn't really give a toss that you're no him.
How many people use a substantial fraction of their high school education in their working life?
The purpose of a high school education is to enable a person to be able to be able to think and be able to have an intelligent conversation. It is not specialization nor is it designed to train someone how to perform a specific job. Math, arts, science, history, music, language, writing, civics, etc., all play a part. A person with a well rounded education is a person who can make useful judgements as a citizen.
High school doesn't prepare people to be salesmen, barbers, engineers, doctors, receptionists, or mechanics. Each of those fields will have specific training. High school only makes it possible that once you do enter one of those fields that you can do so as an intelligent citizen.
I use a shitload of science and maths in my daily job, most of it learned in high school. If it weren't for high school, I would not have the prerequisite knowledge necessary to become a network engineer. This may not be true in your country, but High School in Australia does allow one to become specialised, you have four core subjects everyone must take (English, Maths, Science and Social Studies) and in the final two years, Science and Social Studies become optional, you can choose to do history or biology but you aren't forced to.
As for algebra itself. Who uses that in real life eh,
No one needs to figure out how many litres of petrol they'll get for $20. Yep, we never use algebra in real life.
Your PDF reader is online?
Office (even though it's MS, it's still purchased separately under a partnership or OL agreement)?
ZIP/RAR management is online?
You get the idea. Just because it's become a trend to move something like a CRM system into the "cloud" dont think that there's no third party software on your PC.
Many of those people have started using a tablet around the house and seldom touch their PC any more in fact.
You must be walking around with blinkers on. Most people need to use their PC just to get their Tablet to work (about 60%). Then they find out their tablet doesn't do what they need it to because of the manufacturers draconian policies and end up going back to a PC.
Awaken from your dreamy state. Tablets are nice but they are little more than an accompaniment to the PC, not a replacement.
As for app downloads - the key number is revenue. On iOS at least games generate by far the most revenue of all apps.
Keep telling yourself that. Would you rather have $1 10,000 times or $0.10 1,000,000 times. that is the choice developers are faced when deciding to charge, except they cant guarantee the numbers regardless. The only one making money out of the App store is Apple and even they admit they aren't making much.
But the point was, there's no money in it for most developers. Most make a loss and eventually the app bubble with burst with all the wonderful fallout that comes with financial bubble bursting.
Here are some cruise speeds of jetliners vs. the later crop of comparable turbofan liners:
Boeing 707: 604 MPH
Douglas DC-8: 596 MPH
vs.
Boeing 767: 567 MPH
Airbus A330: 567 MPH
Here are some price comparisons between flights on jetliners vs. the later crop of modern turbofans.
Boeing 707 Melbourne to Perth = A$1000+ in 1970 dollars.
Boeing 737-800 Melbourne to Perth = A$200 (avg) in 2012 dollars.
It's great that our jets are more efficient, but there's zero allure about that when it comes to the passenger. Nobody brags about the efficient fuel usage on their flight.
The big allure to the average passenger is that they can now afford to fly on a regular basis. When my dad was my age in the 80's and wanted to go to another Australian city he'd spend 3-5 days driving it in an old Falcon or Commodore. Flying was such a luxury to the people of my parents generation that even today many of them have never flown. In this day and age I don't think twice about booking a flight to get to Melbourne, Hell I can fly to most of Asia for less than what it would have cost my dad to fly from Melbourne to Sydney in the 80's.
Passengers may not give a shit about fuel economy, but they sure as hell care about the cost of their fare and that good sir is affected by the fuel economy of the plane.
(BTW, in case you were interested, flights began to become affordable in Australia in the 1990's)
...sounds like something a B-movie villain would have. With seats covered in Baby Seal Leather.
Nonsense, your quintessential bond villain drives around in a stretch limo powered by the tears of starving children and is always decked out in a tasteful metallic fabric. The driver is a lackey in a yellow or silver jumpsuit and maybe has 1 or 2 lines followed by some serious over acting before he dies.
There have been repeated stories about how most Iphone devs lose money.
EA purchased Zynga and put a crapload of money into mobile gaming and had their worst year in their existence.
Secondly, paid applications dont get downloaded as much as free applications, in the play store the top paid application has not topped 500,000 downloads whilst the top 25 free applications all have over 50,000,000. A very big difference there.
Thirdly, that site doesn't even give DL numbers. Not even a rough guide like the Play Store (50,000,000 to 100,000,00 is a very big range) so I have good reason to doubt it's authenticity given it doesn't seem to even be run by Apple..
The thing is, however, that the newest generation will play games. While the older generation is in it for business. But if you manage to get the new generation to switch to mostly linux, that would be a good boost. Of course you gonna need the old generation to somehow agree to that switch.
I think you're generalising here, the younger generation (18-29) are now working, meaning that they dont have a lot of time to play games on their phones and more often use them for quick reference.
Oddly enough, the most avid mobile gamers in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience are middle age to older women. No longer working full time but still don't have enough time to play PC or console games. Chances are, the 18 yr old's mum spends more time on casual phone games than the 18 yr old.
Except he's not right. The vast majority of PC buyers do not play games beyond what comes preinstalled with Windows or what they find online. Even the entire user base of Steam represents maybe a couple of percent of all PC owners.
Except that you're ignoring the majority of "PC buyers" are in fact business and they put an absolute shitload of third party software on their PC so people can do their jobs.
If we only count consumer purchasers, gamers make up a sizable percentage. Not only do they make up a sizable percentage, gamers:
1. Upgrade more frequently than non gamers.
2. Buy more cutting edge components than non gamers.
3. Buy more components than non gamers.
So a gamer buys a new rig every 2 or 3 years and spends upwards of $1000 on it, a consumer buys a $5-600 laptop every 5 to 7 years.
Gamers are a large part of the PC market whether you want to admit it or not. Look at Dell, Dell develops the XPS and Alienware lines to target gamers, the XPS line they try to cross over into the much larger and more profitable business division. Cheap consumer PC's are thrid place to this.
Look no further than iOS and Android. No matter what the fanbois of each platform say, games invariably are among the top downloads.
Erm no,
Your top downloads on the Play store are things like Maps, Streetview, Facebook, Youtube, Viber, hell even Flash is still up there. Out of the free applications, the first game is at number 16 (Angry Birds), out of the top 25 there are 5 games.
This is because a lot of people who own smartphones don't play games. For the most part people own smart phones as mobile email/web. I'm a PC gamer and I've tried to play a few games on my Android phone but most of them have such clunky control schemes that its more annoying than entertaining. Add to this the fact that EA have been losing big on mobile games and it's pretty clearly not the way for a company to go if they want to make good games or make money.
As for Windows 8, Gabe Newell is dead on the money. It's a complete train wreck, the Windows 8 Express has already derailed somewhere between Poor Concept Central and South Retarded Design. What I disagree with Newell is that OEM's are going to be hit hard, they're going to do what they did when Vista was released and keep selling Windows 7 against Microsoft's objections. The big difference is, this time OEM's will be ready to tell MS to bugger off.
Still, might be a good time to get rid of MSFT stock, especially if Windows 9 is just as bad as 8.
Been there, done that, nothing good came of it at all!
Exit interviews are simply pointless for the exiting employee. They are simply another keep busy activity for the over payed HR tools. I have never seen any substantial changes come of the info gleaned from them and being critical of the company, management, and your fellow past employees can only result in trouble down the line. Remember that they can't speak ill of you but they can simply answer that they would not rehire you. The kiss of death for anyone looking for a job now days.
I love exit interviews, I've had 3 of them and 2 have been conducted at the pub (with the boss buying). A good boss wants you to be critical of the company and even of them, so long as you do so in a constructive manner (I.E. tell the boss he's a bit too brash and sometimes show more respect to the employees under his direction, rather than calling him an arrogant arsehole with his head up the Directors rectum) so he can improve the company, exit interviews are the only time an employee can be that candid with them. By the same token, a good boss will give you constructive criticism about your faults, what you should look to improve in your next role.
If you've got a bad boss, no help there. I personally don't believe in bad mouthing people until I'm well out of range of any fallout.
Exit interviews are good if you can get something out of it (including a free pint and steak sarnie) and give you a good indication of what that employer will tell other employers about you.
This is a fairly common scam usually received by e-mail. Lot of examples on www.419-eater.com where these types of scammers are known as hitlads.
The big difference in this case is that it came in by phone (SMS) and not email, therefore people will assume it's a tasteless prank and ignore it rather than take it seriously.
I'm not joking, people in Oz are a lot smarter about receiving unsolicited commercial messages via phone than email.
I'm with you mostly - but for one glaring exception: the god damned blister pack. Few people care about the packaging until it gets in the way of enjoying their purchase. If I need to get my tin snips out to get at my purchase, somebody (probably more than one somebody...) is doing something wrong.
Yep, I agree but companies know the blister pack is a royal pain in the arse, they're just cheap (although I'm buying mice for $10 in a cardboard box these days so someone's catching on).
I'm not talking about games that would be rated R18. I'm talking about games whose (smaller) publishers have not paid the Australian Classification Board to rate them, even if they would have ended up rated G or PG.
The article is also, not talking about these games.
Why does the latest Gears of Bore or Call of Halo cost 3 to 4 times as much in Australia, legally sold from Australian retail stores under Australian laws WITH AUSTRALIAN RATINGS than the exact same games in Europe or the United States (which it is 100% LEGAL TO IMPORT).
But nice try to dance around the point of price disparity for exactly the same product and grasp upon ideas that are not only horribly out of date but also incorrect (the laws do not prohibit importing of "non classified" or "have not paid the classification board", they only prohibit SPECIFIC banned items of which there is a clear, well published and well defined list, wikipedia can help you here).
As I said, nice try to get away from the point but what bearing does this bit of superfluous and wrong information have to do with the fact games for Australian customers ARE MANY TIMES THE PRICE OF OTHER COUNTRIES.
Do you get the piont, yes I know you're a bit slow on the uptake but I've put them in bold and CAPITAL LETTERS.
Every time I get a new Apple product, it's a cool experience. The briefcase style MacBook Pro box is very sleek, and everything inside of it has it's own special compartment, it's own special wrapping, etc.
You mean modern Macbook has the same packaging as a Dell I bought in 2005... Will wonders never cease.
Fsck, remove the word "macbook" and you've described every PC, monitor and Keyboard packaging on the planet. Hell even the cord on my $10 mouse had it's own special compartment and it's own special wrapping in side the box. Fsck me, the cord even had it's own special cable tie I had to undo.
Well, of all the things that qualify as first world problems...
This, the reason Google and other Android manufacturers don't "get" the importance of packaging is that there is no importance of packaging.
People rip off the plastic then tear open the box with no regard. They do this because they don't give a fat rats clacker about the packaging and just want the shiny thing inside. When a person cares more about flattening the foil than eating the sweet, sweet, chocolate inside we say they have a problem, the same is true for gadgets.
Few people, even iDevice chumps, Sorry, I mean buyers care about packaging. My housemate cant find the package for her Ipod, none of the drones in sales can find the box for their Iphone (nor an actual sale, but that's besides the point). They all just send it back in a generic box wrapped in bubble wrap (some even wrap the device before packaging) when it eventually needs to be sent back.
Packaging matters as much as the wrapping on a bag of chips, it's there to hold whatever is inside and protect your hand from oil burns.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't.
Make the labels feel guilty for making such a system possible by not upgrading their ways.
Labels, feel?
Pull the other one.
Right now in Australia there is an inquiry as to why the Australian prices are far higher than prices in other nations, Especially for digital goods. Publishers are still trying to claim tax, duties and wages. Most of which (especially tax and duties) is much lower than the UK yet prices are often twice (or more, some times as much as 4 times) what they are in the UK (Taxes get my goat, GST in AU is 10% whilst VAT in the UK is 20% how the fuck is that more?). Wages do not matter seeing as they don't have retail presences in Australia. Yet they continue to use these as an excuse, treating digital products as if they had the same cost as physical products and pretending the AUD is not as high as it is.
Publishers and labels do not feel guilt, they don't feel remorse or empathy or anything else. They aren't human so stop trying to apply human values and human characteristics to them. The only thing they care about is money, if you want to affect their decisions, you have affect their bottom line.
Cheating may be the terrorism of the online gaming world, it's the full-powers resolution of the offline single-player gaming world.
I think you mean modding, the ability to mod a game is a lot more powerful than any cheat.
But I see your point, cheating is not an issue in a single player game.
No one needs to figure out how many litres of petrol they'll get for $20.
I disagree with this part. One needs to be able to figure out it out. This sounds like you are not living in the U.S.
That part is obvious seeing as I call it Petrol and we have the option of pre-paying or post paying where I live.
But you're wrong. I have $20 to buy petrol this week, there are 4 petrol stations near me at varying distances, I want to determine which petrol station will give me the most petrol for my $20, it's a simple matter to take into account the price per litre but then I have to consider the cost to get there, so I also need to consider the litres of petrol consumed in getting to each petrol station. So the petrol station furthest away may be $0.04 cheaper per litre but if I use 1 extra litre getting there it's not worth it as $0.04 over $20 equates to less than 1 litre of petrol.
Therefore, the sentence of "no one needs to figure out..." is not always true
I take it your sarcasm metre is broken.
Of course people use algebra and not even know it. Same as with all the other things kids said "where are we going to use this in the real world" during high school.
If you play Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh, I think you would have a hard time making that claim. And that's not even comparing him to Mozart or Wagner.
Or compare Hendrix to the Foo Fighters, Both rock, both very different. Even with Hendrix, compare Little Wing to All Along the Watch Tower to Star Spangled Banner. Very different styles of music from the same artist. With the Foo Fighters, compare Aurora to Stacked Actors or Generator, very different songs and they're on the same album.
I'm yet to see that kind of variety from Beyonce, Jay Z or Katy Perry. Hell even the likes of Slipknot have more variety and I think Slipknots music sounds very similar (to be fair, they do live in a niche of metal).
So it isn't just me?
No, it's not just you but there is only so many combinations of "doof, doof, doof, doof, doof" you can have until you run out of combinations.
But . . . Can the car warn the pedestrian that they about to get hit ?
Forget pedestrians, warn the cyclists. We can call it the Jeremy Clarkson cyclist detection system.
Drivers already don't look where they're going when using a GPS, now they won't lookout for dangers or other users of the road because the car will tell them.
Ford is selling a car with "parking assist" and advertised as "almost self parking" yet people in a brand new Focus still cant park.
Eventually people will realise that employers Google these things, and that posting nasty stuff means you can't get work.
But this could take a generation to work through.
Real name accounts wont change this. Right now most people dont care that their Facebook is open to the entire world and getting a job is about getting the interviewer to like you more than anything else.
Even using your real name could be bad, there's a Tim "Sharky" Ward who's not a nice fellow (he's a loan shark and a roid junkie) and recently been arrested in Thailand for stabbing a Canadian. I'm certain you wouldn't want to be mistaken for him just for having the same name. If nothing else, real name policies will make such HR departments complacent, You might be Tim Ward from Washington (for example, I have no idea where you live or if Tim Ward is your real name), but HR flunkie #1 looks up Tim Ward from New Zealand who's currently in a Thai jail for stabbing someone and doesn't really give a toss that you're no him.
How many people use a substantial fraction of their high school education in their working life?
The purpose of a high school education is to enable a person to be able to be able to think and be able to have an intelligent conversation. It is not specialization nor is it designed to train someone how to perform a specific job. Math, arts, science, history, music, language, writing, civics, etc., all play a part. A person with a well rounded education is a person who can make useful judgements as a citizen.
High school doesn't prepare people to be salesmen, barbers, engineers, doctors, receptionists, or mechanics. Each of those fields will have specific training. High school only makes it possible that once you do enter one of those fields that you can do so as an intelligent citizen.
I use a shitload of science and maths in my daily job, most of it learned in high school. If it weren't for high school, I would not have the prerequisite knowledge necessary to become a network engineer. This may not be true in your country, but High School in Australia does allow one to become specialised, you have four core subjects everyone must take (English, Maths, Science and Social Studies) and in the final two years, Science and Social Studies become optional, you can choose to do history or biology but you aren't forced to.
As for algebra itself. Who uses that in real life eh,
No one needs to figure out how many litres of petrol they'll get for $20. Yep, we never use algebra in real life.
Your PDF reader is online?
Office (even though it's MS, it's still purchased separately under a partnership or OL agreement)?
ZIP/RAR management is online?
You get the idea. Just because it's become a trend to move something like a CRM system into the "cloud" dont think that there's no third party software on your PC.
You must be walking around with blinkers on. Most people need to use their PC just to get their Tablet to work (about 60%). Then they find out their tablet doesn't do what they need it to because of the manufacturers draconian policies and end up going back to a PC.
Awaken from your dreamy state. Tablets are nice but they are little more than an accompaniment to the PC, not a replacement.
What? EA didn't purchase Zynga. Zynga did an IPO last year.
Sorry, a wee bit of confusion on my part. EA have been buying up social/casual gaming companies to compete with Zynga. This has caused a huge drop in profit. http://allthingsd.com/20111201/electronic-arts-acquires-another-social-game-company-as-zyngas-ipo-nears/
As for app downloads - the key number is revenue. On iOS at least games generate by far the most revenue of all apps.
Keep telling yourself that. Would you rather have $1 10,000 times or $0.10 1,000,000 times. that is the choice developers are faced when deciding to charge, except they cant guarantee the numbers regardless. The only one making money out of the App store is Apple and even they admit they aren't making much.
But the point was, there's no money in it for most developers. Most make a loss and eventually the app bubble with burst with all the wonderful fallout that comes with financial bubble bursting.
Here are some cruise speeds of jetliners vs. the later crop of comparable turbofan liners:
Boeing 707: 604 MPH
Douglas DC-8: 596 MPH
vs.
Boeing 767: 567 MPH
Airbus A330: 567 MPH
Here are some price comparisons between flights on jetliners vs. the later crop of modern turbofans. Boeing 707 Melbourne to Perth = A$1000+ in 1970 dollars.
Boeing 737-800 Melbourne to Perth = A$200 (avg) in 2012 dollars.
It's great that our jets are more efficient, but there's zero allure about that when it comes to the passenger. Nobody brags about the efficient fuel usage on their flight.
The big allure to the average passenger is that they can now afford to fly on a regular basis. When my dad was my age in the 80's and wanted to go to another Australian city he'd spend 3-5 days driving it in an old Falcon or Commodore. Flying was such a luxury to the people of my parents generation that even today many of them have never flown. In this day and age I don't think twice about booking a flight to get to Melbourne, Hell I can fly to most of Asia for less than what it would have cost my dad to fly from Melbourne to Sydney in the 80's.
Passengers may not give a shit about fuel economy, but they sure as hell care about the cost of their fare and that good sir is affected by the fuel economy of the plane.
(BTW, in case you were interested, flights began to become affordable in Australia in the 1990's)
...sounds like something a B-movie villain would have. With seats covered in Baby Seal Leather.
Nonsense, your quintessential bond villain drives around in a stretch limo powered by the tears of starving children and is always decked out in a tasteful metallic fabric. The driver is a lackey in a yellow or silver jumpsuit and maybe has 1 or 2 lines followed by some serious over acting before he dies.
Guess where the money is?
Not in Apple,
There have been repeated stories about how most Iphone devs lose money.
EA purchased Zynga and put a crapload of money into mobile gaming and had their worst year in their existence.
Secondly, paid applications dont get downloaded as much as free applications, in the play store the top paid application has not topped 500,000 downloads whilst the top 25 free applications all have over 50,000,000. A very big difference there.
Thirdly, that site doesn't even give DL numbers. Not even a rough guide like the Play Store (50,000,000 to 100,000,00 is a very big range) so I have good reason to doubt it's authenticity given it doesn't seem to even be run by Apple..
The thing is, however, that the newest generation will play games. While the older generation is in it for business. But if you manage to get the new generation to switch to mostly linux, that would be a good boost. Of course you gonna need the old generation to somehow agree to that switch.
I think you're generalising here, the younger generation (18-29) are now working, meaning that they dont have a lot of time to play games on their phones and more often use them for quick reference.
Oddly enough, the most avid mobile gamers in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience are middle age to older women. No longer working full time but still don't have enough time to play PC or console games. Chances are, the 18 yr old's mum spends more time on casual phone games than the 18 yr old.
Except he's not right. The vast majority of PC buyers do not play games beyond what comes preinstalled with Windows or what they find online. Even the entire user base of Steam represents maybe a couple of percent of all PC owners.
Except that you're ignoring the majority of "PC buyers" are in fact business and they put an absolute shitload of third party software on their PC so people can do their jobs.
If we only count consumer purchasers, gamers make up a sizable percentage. Not only do they make up a sizable percentage, gamers:
1. Upgrade more frequently than non gamers.
2. Buy more cutting edge components than non gamers.
3. Buy more components than non gamers.
So a gamer buys a new rig every 2 or 3 years and spends upwards of $1000 on it, a consumer buys a $5-600 laptop every 5 to 7 years.
Gamers are a large part of the PC market whether you want to admit it or not. Look at Dell, Dell develops the XPS and Alienware lines to target gamers, the XPS line they try to cross over into the much larger and more profitable business division. Cheap consumer PC's are thrid place to this.
Look no further than iOS and Android. No matter what the fanbois of each platform say, games invariably are among the top downloads.
Erm no, Your top downloads on the Play store are things like Maps, Streetview, Facebook, Youtube, Viber, hell even Flash is still up there. Out of the free applications, the first game is at number 16 (Angry Birds), out of the top 25 there are 5 games.
This is because a lot of people who own smartphones don't play games. For the most part people own smart phones as mobile email/web. I'm a PC gamer and I've tried to play a few games on my Android phone but most of them have such clunky control schemes that its more annoying than entertaining. Add to this the fact that EA have been losing big on mobile games and it's pretty clearly not the way for a company to go if they want to make good games or make money.
As for Windows 8, Gabe Newell is dead on the money. It's a complete train wreck, the Windows 8 Express has already derailed somewhere between Poor Concept Central and South Retarded Design. What I disagree with Newell is that OEM's are going to be hit hard, they're going to do what they did when Vista was released and keep selling Windows 7 against Microsoft's objections. The big difference is, this time OEM's will be ready to tell MS to bugger off.
Still, might be a good time to get rid of MSFT stock, especially if Windows 9 is just as bad as 8.
Been there, done that, nothing good came of it at all!
Exit interviews are simply pointless for the exiting employee. They are simply another keep busy activity for the over payed HR tools. I have never seen any substantial changes come of the info gleaned from them and being critical of the company, management, and your fellow past employees can only result in trouble down the line. Remember that they can't speak ill of you but they can simply answer that they would not rehire you. The kiss of death for anyone looking for a job now days.
I love exit interviews, I've had 3 of them and 2 have been conducted at the pub (with the boss buying). A good boss wants you to be critical of the company and even of them, so long as you do so in a constructive manner (I.E. tell the boss he's a bit too brash and sometimes show more respect to the employees under his direction, rather than calling him an arrogant arsehole with his head up the Directors rectum) so he can improve the company, exit interviews are the only time an employee can be that candid with them. By the same token, a good boss will give you constructive criticism about your faults, what you should look to improve in your next role.
If you've got a bad boss, no help there. I personally don't believe in bad mouthing people until I'm well out of range of any fallout.
Exit interviews are good if you can get something out of it (including a free pint and steak sarnie) and give you a good indication of what that employer will tell other employers about you.
I'm sure they are in Oz, but that's because there are no phones or internet there. They only have to fear the witch.
And dingo's, they take babies you know.
This is a fairly common scam usually received by e-mail. Lot of examples on www.419-eater.com where these types of scammers are known as hitlads.
The big difference in this case is that it came in by phone (SMS) and not email, therefore people will assume it's a tasteless prank and ignore it rather than take it seriously.
I'm not joking, people in Oz are a lot smarter about receiving unsolicited commercial messages via phone than email.
I'm with you mostly - but for one glaring exception: the god damned blister pack. Few people care about the packaging until it gets in the way of enjoying their purchase. If I need to get my tin snips out to get at my purchase, somebody (probably more than one somebody...) is doing something wrong.
Yep, I agree but companies know the blister pack is a royal pain in the arse, they're just cheap (although I'm buying mice for $10 in a cardboard box these days so someone's catching on).
I'm not talking about games that would be rated R18. I'm talking about games whose (smaller) publishers have not paid the Australian Classification Board to rate them, even if they would have ended up rated G or PG.
The article is also, not talking about these games.
Why does the latest Gears of Bore or Call of Halo cost 3 to 4 times as much in Australia, legally sold from Australian retail stores under Australian laws WITH AUSTRALIAN RATINGS than the exact same games in Europe or the United States (which it is 100% LEGAL TO IMPORT).
But nice try to dance around the point of price disparity for exactly the same product and grasp upon ideas that are not only horribly out of date but also incorrect (the laws do not prohibit importing of "non classified" or "have not paid the classification board", they only prohibit SPECIFIC banned items of which there is a clear, well published and well defined list, wikipedia can help you here).
As I said, nice try to get away from the point but what bearing does this bit of superfluous and wrong information have to do with the fact games for Australian customers ARE MANY TIMES THE PRICE OF OTHER COUNTRIES.
Do you get the piont, yes I know you're a bit slow on the uptake but I've put them in bold and CAPITAL LETTERS.
Every time I get a new Apple product, it's a cool experience. The briefcase style MacBook Pro box is very sleek, and everything inside of it has it's own special compartment, it's own special wrapping, etc.
You mean modern Macbook has the same packaging as a Dell I bought in 2005... Will wonders never cease.
Fsck, remove the word "macbook" and you've described every PC, monitor and Keyboard packaging on the planet. Hell even the cord on my $10 mouse had it's own special compartment and it's own special wrapping in side the box. Fsck me, the cord even had it's own special cable tie I had to undo.
Well I don't see what's so weird about displaying them on a bookshelf or table. Maybe with a nice tablecloth on top, and some candles and incense.
It's also a good place for me to put my sacrifices and to focus my prayers
You have a box holding up the altar of darkness too.
Try using phone books. Not only are they free they are also more solid.
Well, of all the things that qualify as first world problems...
This, the reason Google and other Android manufacturers don't "get" the importance of packaging is that there is no importance of packaging.
People rip off the plastic then tear open the box with no regard. They do this because they don't give a fat rats clacker about the packaging and just want the shiny thing inside. When a person cares more about flattening the foil than eating the sweet, sweet, chocolate inside we say they have a problem, the same is true for gadgets.
Few people, even iDevice chumps, Sorry, I mean buyers care about packaging. My housemate cant find the package for her Ipod, none of the drones in sales can find the box for their Iphone (nor an actual sale, but that's besides the point). They all just send it back in a generic box wrapped in bubble wrap (some even wrap the device before packaging) when it eventually needs to be sent back.
Packaging matters as much as the wrapping on a bag of chips, it's there to hold whatever is inside and protect your hand from oil burns.