If Sales and Marketing staff was all commission based then they'd actually do a lick of work to keep themselves relevant. At one IT company I worked at we'd replace our Sales/Marketing guy at least once per year (the latter part of the title gave him a decent salary and the former gives him commissions on top of a decent salary). They were tasked with selling our product as well as finding needs for customers so we could augment our product or build new for those with need. Lets just say we never found someone who was actually good at doing either, but they had a nice base salary while they were at it.
A buddy of mine was also a salesman in the health care field for years. He'd negotiate a nice living salary with commissions, work about 10 hours a week, and change jobs every 6 months because... well... each company has a level of tolerance for lack of sales somewhere between 3-12 months. He brings in his regular set of customers initially and when new sales quotas don't quite make it (primarily because of his work habits) he'd just move on and someone else was more than happy to make it.
I'm talking 6 figure pay in both cases, yes I was jealous, but I have higher ethics than allows me to take a job like that.
No one said Unity was cool, or was trying to be cool. It's a bare bones WM. It does what's needed. I don't even see what issues people are having.
You have an integrated launcher/active app bar so people can do their mousey-clicky thing. It has the gnome-do functionality that lets you find apps quicker than any mousey-clicky scheme (other than custom icons on the launcher). Docklets are coming along (i.e., check out indicator-multiload). It's very easy customize the launcher (drag/drop to re-order), right-click "Keep In Launcher" to make the app icon stay there, or do the opposite to remove it. Simple stuff.
There are very few real complaints I can find in here.
"I can't relocate the launcher." Considering most monitors today have 2x the horizontal resolution as vertical, the sides seem to be a more logical place to put a launcher so I can live with that. "I can't reset hot-keys" Yes you can, just go to "Keyboard->Shortcuts" and set it to what you want...(yes you can change the main meta key to something else). I've got my own set of complaints but this is pretty much what a WM needs to be (though I wouldn't mind having a menu to see a categorized inventory of apps).
- I really miss docklets. CPU load or Net load.. really really miss this.
- I used Windows 7 and OSX on the same 16:9 monitor, I still don't feel having a little more vertical space made a difference.
Considering most monitors sold maddeningly use proportions are nearly 2x as wide as long, it seems the best use of space is the left or right areas. Notebooks are especially prone to this when you only have 800 vertical pixels to deal with.
If so, Apple will just buy them for their patent so that they can sue for what is, effectively, a process, which is not patentable. And why not, the patent system is that broken
Sure, blame it on music... in the 50's it was the evil influence of Rock 'n' Roll, in the 60's it was hippie rock, in the 70's it was Disco, in the 80's it was rap and hair metal, In the 90's it was grunge, in the 2000's it was hip hop. At some point everyone has to realize music is a reflection of the times rather than the cause.
if they bring home a girlfriend instead of good grades their parents will beat them. Corporal punishment, threats of being left homeless on the streets of Pittsburg and not paying for toys but only books and food can work, but not if the student has already been listening to too much hip-hop music.
Maybe, but the "accurate" number could just as easily be a bank of 10,000 numbers in an autodial pool that never answer when called back and thus unidentifiable to a standard subscriber.
I had a telemarketer calling me for a year and a half. At first it was real people, and I would ask them to put me on the DNC list, which never worked, then they changed to a robocaller, spread to cell phones, and ALWAYS came through with a different number that when called back went to an unidentifiable phone bank. It could have even been a company that did robocalling for many other companies. I reported them each time to the do not call registry and they did not stop calling.
The best IT staff I have worked with is the government employees. The most mediocre and bad were private sector. I suspect it has to do with it being easier to get a private sector job.
I'm glad to hear that. My experience with government IT departments are that they are filled with a disproportionate amount of unhappy people jockeying for position on pet projects that they can ride into retirement with the least amount of work. They do this because they know they can't get fired and are guaranteed a nice pension, having to work 40 hours or less per week. There are some nice and talented people who work in government but it just seems really difficult to weed out the bad eggs.
In the private sector I've run across both talented and untalented people too... the untalented ones usually wind up getting let go and move on, many times eventually changing careers. Most of the most talented people I know are driven by using latest technology and creativity that is found mostly small private companies. It amounts to a tradeoff is excitement and hope for a bigger payoff.. or stability with a greater chance of long-term payoff. A personal choice. In terms of pay vs hours worked over ones' lifetime, goverment IT is a better deal than private sector, even though the pay appears lower
This is what's so disheartening about the contracting agencies who have a stranglehold on these contracts at a 100% markup for sub-par workers. It's a misguided trust given to contracting agencies without proper accountability in place. Things would be more efficient if run like small private sector companies.
Oddlabs created a Java based game called Tribal Trouble, which worked great, and was by virtue of Java cross platform, one of the first and best examples of a 100% java-based RTS from an independent. When they developed Tribal Trouble they gave the ability to play it directly from the browser w/o install (aside from a brief Java download). HTML 5 has promise, but this is a more complete 3D game experience than any Flash-based game I've seen, and it's been out for years. http://tribaltrouble2.gamesamba.com/
The problem with hardware acceleration chips is that they are typically single purpose. Maybe as an iPhone owner who only downloads iTunes videos using a single codec, that's great but once you step outside the box and want to view a video in one of the other dozen common formats then 4 cores become much more important for decoding on the fly.
Hear hear! This is the equivalent of turning pages in a book... plenty of prior art exists, including most e-readers, unless Apple also has the patents to books, including page binding, proper paper tension/thickness, gravity, etc. What a complete waste of time and money.
You're a bit off base with this analogy on a couple accounts. You can teach anyone off the street to work on an auto assembly line, but the success rate is much lower teaching the same set of people to "assemble" software. Also the focus of the article is also not in the mass production aspect of software (i.e., burning CD's and packinging the boxes), it is on the companies inventing and building the software to run industries.
When I saw the title I was obviously mislead.. I was thinking of analog-sh games like pinball. To me it boils down to time available and replay value. I can spend 5 minutes on a pinball machine.. or play 10 games and walk away a short time later feeling fulfilled. To get a high score or reach the wizard modes of pinball machines takes time, dedication and mad skills and it's worth the many, many hours of effort to do so.
The thing is this, this discussion seems to be all about how long a linear game takes to do a walk-through. I assert many of the best games are those where a player can be fulfilled messing with it for 20 minutes, but also entertain someone for 10's or 100's of hours. How many digital video games truly fit this mold?
I see more comments about lack of messages in G+ than I do complaints about over-zealous messaging in Facebook... but isn't that the point? Maybe most people like getting 10 pages of messages per day on Facebook just like they like receiving 100 pieces of spam per day.. makes them feel wanted. As for me I spend a lot of time adding inbox filters so that what lands in my inbox is the important stuff, and the rest is sifted into folders for when I get time. Circles=filters=good!
You're implying that everyone who buys a tablet falls into 2 categories: a) Pro-Apple b) Anti-Apple. What about other reasons:
c) Cheaper. Most people prefer cheaper products, especially those which are largely gadgets
d) Flash. Don't forget how many web sites, gaming sites, use Flash.
e) Hardware. Many Android pads have as good or better hardware.
I think Apple got it right this time... When they released the iPhone they pinned it to a single carrier, and thus lost out on many times more sales than they would have had otherwise... iPhone market would have been saturated and Android would have been harder to fit in, but instead everyone on a non-AT&T carrier wanted a touch-screen smart phone and Android was the only game in town. Fast forward and when the first Android tablets were release, they were all pinned to carriers with data plans, when in reality people actually prefer to use them at home on their couch, so the tablet novelty turns out to be very expensive. The pads that are successful going forward are those not pinned to carriers, but just WiFi enabled.
Android tablets combined have taken away 20% of the iPad market share this year, and so it goes that Apple is going after multiple Android tablet makers, not just one.
Maybe Apple is cautious with Motorola on mobile phones, but they are initiated a lawsuit over the Motorola Xoom because of countries bending over in the Samsung Galaxy Tab suits.... because no one can prove that apple Apple doesn't own the rectangular monitor design?
I suppose when your own product can't hold up to the market, turn to the courts to stifle competition.
Is it now ok to kill Clark Kent and give Superman over to a guy named Harry Muskin who may or may not be from Krypton? Don't a superhero's public and private identities go hand in hand? I'm a little shocked that it's ok for someone to usurp Spiderman's identity rather than creating a new one. His superpowers are a bit different, his personality is different so call him Arachnoman or something.
Absolutely incorrect. On Android if you have your processor pegged with a game, browsing the web, etc, and a call comes in, there's typically some lag time while the phone switches tasks to bring up the image of the caller and allow the answer. That and all the email/im/sms push/pull that goes on constantly, live wallpaper, multi-cores become a godsend. I can't tell you how many times I have to deal with this on my phone.
The iPhone gets away with more consistent response by limiting the multitasking and incorporates strict process prioritization, and that's also how they accomodate a slower processor (foreground process gets all the CPU) which helps increase battery life. It's ingenious, but limiting. They have no such thing as live wallpaper, and that's on purpose. Android is a full multi-tasking operating system, and that's why multiple cores benefit it more at this point. When iPhone goes multi-core they will start lifting the multitasking restrictions in iOS and catch-up to Android, and this will no longer be a differentiator between the two.
It *only* took 1 year and a huge public outcry to do this? I actually see this all the time on my phone... while I've never sent to the wrong person, I will click on a thread and a few seconds later it will mysteriously switch to another thread. Really disturbing, and most likely a very simple fix.. somewhere in the bowls of thousands of lines of code.
Every other Ubuntu upgrade kills half a day getting my PC working again. Vanilla installs are pretty good, but having forgot my last catastrophe, I decided to jump the gun and go 10.10 final beta on my primary PC. Mistake. Installer had an issue with fglrx, had no video, just a purple screen requiring what seems to now be a requirement: a second pc to ssh into the box to fix it. VirtualBox now has issues too, and compiz is broken because it refuses to activate my binary video driver. 3 strikes...
So I decide to try a true vanilla PC upgrade. I did not find 2 of those issues before doing this, but that one seems to go ok, so I have hope. Might as well go to the next box... upgrade my laptop... another fail. My Broadcom STA driver now just doesn't work at all, so my notebook without wireless is now considered a desktop with a tiny screen and a cramped keyboard.
After finding out that Ubuntu stopped including aptitude in the default install (while Debian recommends it over apt), "Hardware Drivers" is now known as "Additional Drivers" which is now missing the Broadcom OSS driver option on my laptop, and Software Sources is hidden by default, I'm wondering WTF is going on over at Canonical HQ... upgrades still as flaky as ever, especially with proprietary drivers, and power tools rapidly disappearing from default seems like a few steps backwards. If I want to deal with proprietery driver issues I may as well go back to Debian.
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If Sales and Marketing staff was all commission based then they'd actually do a lick of work to keep themselves relevant. At one IT company I worked at we'd replace our Sales/Marketing guy at least once per year (the latter part of the title gave him a decent salary and the former gives him commissions on top of a decent salary). They were tasked with selling our product as well as finding needs for customers so we could augment our product or build new for those with need. Lets just say we never found someone who was actually good at doing either, but they had a nice base salary while they were at it.
A buddy of mine was also a salesman in the health care field for years. He'd negotiate a nice living salary with commissions, work about 10 hours a week, and change jobs every 6 months because... well... each company has a level of tolerance for lack of sales somewhere between 3-12 months. He brings in his regular set of customers initially and when new sales quotas don't quite make it (primarily because of his work habits) he'd just move on and someone else was more than happy to make it.
I'm talking 6 figure pay in both cases, yes I was jealous, but I have higher ethics than allows me to take a job like that.
Good summary, mod parent up!
No one said Unity was cool, or was trying to be cool. It's a bare bones WM. It does what's needed. I don't even see what issues people are having.
You have an integrated launcher/active app bar so people can do their mousey-clicky thing. It has the gnome-do functionality that lets you find apps quicker than any mousey-clicky scheme (other than custom icons on the launcher). Docklets are coming along (i.e., check out indicator-multiload). It's very easy customize the launcher (drag/drop to re-order), right-click "Keep In Launcher" to make the app icon stay there, or do the opposite to remove it. Simple stuff.
There are very few real complaints I can find in here.
"I can't relocate the launcher." Considering most monitors today have 2x the horizontal resolution as vertical, the sides seem to be a more logical place to put a launcher so I can live with that. "I can't reset hot-keys" Yes you can, just go to "Keyboard->Shortcuts" and set it to what you want...(yes you can change the main meta key to something else). I've got my own set of complaints but this is pretty much what a WM needs to be (though I wouldn't mind having a menu to see a categorized inventory of apps).
- I really miss docklets. CPU load or Net load.. really really miss this. - I used Windows 7 and OSX on the same 16:9 monitor, I still don't feel having a little more vertical space made a difference.
Considering most monitors sold maddeningly use proportions are nearly 2x as wide as long, it seems the best use of space is the left or right areas. Notebooks are especially prone to this when you only have 800 vertical pixels to deal with.
If so, Apple will just buy them for their patent so that they can sue for what is, effectively, a process, which is not patentable. And why not, the patent system is that broken
if they bring home a girlfriend instead of good grades their parents will beat them. Corporal punishment, threats of being left homeless on the streets of Pittsburg and not paying for toys but only books and food can work, but not if the student has already been listening to too much hip-hop music.
Maybe, but the "accurate" number could just as easily be a bank of 10,000 numbers in an autodial pool that never answer when called back and thus unidentifiable to a standard subscriber.
I had a telemarketer calling me for a year and a half. At first it was real people, and I would ask them to put me on the DNC list, which never worked, then they changed to a robocaller, spread to cell phones, and ALWAYS came through with a different number that when called back went to an unidentifiable phone bank. It could have even been a company that did robocalling for many other companies. I reported them each time to the do not call registry and they did not stop calling.
The best IT staff I have worked with is the government employees. The most mediocre and bad were private sector. I suspect it has to do with it being easier to get a private sector job.
I'm glad to hear that. My experience with government IT departments are that they are filled with a disproportionate amount of unhappy people jockeying for position on pet projects that they can ride into retirement with the least amount of work. They do this because they know they can't get fired and are guaranteed a nice pension, having to work 40 hours or less per week. There are some nice and talented people who work in government but it just seems really difficult to weed out the bad eggs.
In the private sector I've run across both talented and untalented people too... the untalented ones usually wind up getting let go and move on, many times eventually changing careers. Most of the most talented people I know are driven by using latest technology and creativity that is found mostly small private companies. It amounts to a tradeoff is excitement and hope for a bigger payoff.. or stability with a greater chance of long-term payoff. A personal choice. In terms of pay vs hours worked over ones' lifetime, goverment IT is a better deal than private sector, even though the pay appears lower
This is what's so disheartening about the contracting agencies who have a stranglehold on these contracts at a 100% markup for sub-par workers. It's a misguided trust given to contracting agencies without proper accountability in place. Things would be more efficient if run like small private sector companies.
Oddlabs created a Java based game called Tribal Trouble, which worked great, and was by virtue of Java cross platform, one of the first and best examples of a 100% java-based RTS from an independent. When they developed Tribal Trouble they gave the ability to play it directly from the browser w/o install (aside from a brief Java download). HTML 5 has promise, but this is a more complete 3D game experience than any Flash-based game I've seen, and it's been out for years. http://tribaltrouble2.gamesamba.com/
The problem with hardware acceleration chips is that they are typically single purpose. Maybe as an iPhone owner who only downloads iTunes videos using a single codec, that's great but once you step outside the box and want to view a video in one of the other dozen common formats then 4 cores become much more important for decoding on the fly.
Hear hear! This is the equivalent of turning pages in a book... plenty of prior art exists, including most e-readers, unless Apple also has the patents to books, including page binding, proper paper tension/thickness, gravity, etc. What a complete waste of time and money.
You're a bit off base with this analogy on a couple accounts. You can teach anyone off the street to work on an auto assembly line, but the success rate is much lower teaching the same set of people to "assemble" software. Also the focus of the article is also not in the mass production aspect of software (i.e., burning CD's and packinging the boxes), it is on the companies inventing and building the software to run industries.
When I saw the title I was obviously mislead.. I was thinking of analog-sh games like pinball. To me it boils down to time available and replay value. I can spend 5 minutes on a pinball machine.. or play 10 games and walk away a short time later feeling fulfilled. To get a high score or reach the wizard modes of pinball machines takes time, dedication and mad skills and it's worth the many, many hours of effort to do so.
The thing is this, this discussion seems to be all about how long a linear game takes to do a walk-through. I assert many of the best games are those where a player can be fulfilled messing with it for 20 minutes, but also entertain someone for 10's or 100's of hours. How many digital video games truly fit this mold?
I see more comments about lack of messages in G+ than I do complaints about over-zealous messaging in Facebook... but isn't that the point? Maybe most people like getting 10 pages of messages per day on Facebook just like they like receiving 100 pieces of spam per day.. makes them feel wanted. As for me I spend a lot of time adding inbox filters so that what lands in my inbox is the important stuff, and the rest is sifted into folders for when I get time. Circles=filters=good!
You're implying that everyone who buys a tablet falls into 2 categories: a) Pro-Apple b) Anti-Apple. What about other reasons:
c) Cheaper. Most people prefer cheaper products, especially those which are largely gadgets
d) Flash. Don't forget how many web sites, gaming sites, use Flash.
e) Hardware. Many Android pads have as good or better hardware.
I think Apple got it right this time... When they released the iPhone they pinned it to a single carrier, and thus lost out on many times more sales than they would have had otherwise... iPhone market would have been saturated and Android would have been harder to fit in, but instead everyone on a non-AT&T carrier wanted a touch-screen smart phone and Android was the only game in town. Fast forward and when the first Android tablets were release, they were all pinned to carriers with data plans, when in reality people actually prefer to use them at home on their couch, so the tablet novelty turns out to be very expensive. The pads that are successful going forward are those not pinned to carriers, but just WiFi enabled.
Android tablets combined have taken away 20% of the iPad market share this year, and so it goes that Apple is going after multiple Android tablet makers, not just one.
Maybe Apple is cautious with Motorola on mobile phones, but they are initiated a lawsuit over the Motorola Xoom because of countries bending over in the Samsung Galaxy Tab suits.... because no one can prove that apple Apple doesn't own the rectangular monitor design?
I suppose when your own product can't hold up to the market, turn to the courts to stifle competition.
Is it now ok to kill Clark Kent and give Superman over to a guy named Harry Muskin who may or may not be from Krypton? Don't a superhero's public and private identities go hand in hand? I'm a little shocked that it's ok for someone to usurp Spiderman's identity rather than creating a new one. His superpowers are a bit different, his personality is different so call him Arachnoman or something.
We smashed the NAZIs
One would think that's the case then you run across this: Hitler's last bodyguard gives up on fan mail
The Search Network. Coming to to theaters 2012. ;)
Absolutely incorrect. On Android if you have your processor pegged with a game, browsing the web, etc, and a call comes in, there's typically some lag time while the phone switches tasks to bring up the image of the caller and allow the answer. That and all the email/im/sms push/pull that goes on constantly, live wallpaper, multi-cores become a godsend. I can't tell you how many times I have to deal with this on my phone.
The iPhone gets away with more consistent response by limiting the multitasking and incorporates strict process prioritization, and that's also how they accomodate a slower processor (foreground process gets all the CPU) which helps increase battery life. It's ingenious, but limiting. They have no such thing as live wallpaper, and that's on purpose. Android is a full multi-tasking operating system, and that's why multiple cores benefit it more at this point. When iPhone goes multi-core they will start lifting the multitasking restrictions in iOS and catch-up to Android, and this will no longer be a differentiator between the two.
It *only* took 1 year and a huge public outcry to do this? I actually see this all the time on my phone... while I've never sent to the wrong person, I will click on a thread and a few seconds later it will mysteriously switch to another thread. Really disturbing, and most likely a very simple fix.. somewhere in the bowls of thousands of lines of code.
+1 .. Android is Linux. Android app store is huge and as easy to use. Doest thou forget?
Excellent point. Mod parent up
Every other Ubuntu upgrade kills half a day getting my PC working again. Vanilla installs are pretty good, but having forgot my last catastrophe, I decided to jump the gun and go 10.10 final beta on my primary PC. Mistake. Installer had an issue with fglrx, had no video, just a purple screen requiring what seems to now be a requirement: a second pc to ssh into the box to fix it. VirtualBox now has issues too, and compiz is broken because it refuses to activate my binary video driver. 3 strikes...
So I decide to try a true vanilla PC upgrade. I did not find 2 of those issues before doing this, but that one seems to go ok, so I have hope. Might as well go to the next box... upgrade my laptop... another fail. My Broadcom STA driver now just doesn't work at all, so my notebook without wireless is now considered a desktop with a tiny screen and a cramped keyboard.
After finding out that Ubuntu stopped including aptitude in the default install (while Debian recommends it over apt), "Hardware Drivers" is now known as "Additional Drivers" which is now missing the Broadcom OSS driver option on my laptop, and Software Sources is hidden by default, I'm wondering WTF is going on over at Canonical HQ... upgrades still as flaky as ever, especially with proprietary drivers, and power tools rapidly disappearing from default seems like a few steps backwards. If I want to deal with proprietery driver issues I may as well go back to Debian.