Posts by Charles Calthrop 293 posts • joined 27 Jun 2007
A world which is not 1996
I remember stripping spaces out of my xhtml so they would load faster, and fretting about image sizes for days
That world has long gone. You may argue for better or worse, but it's irrlevant. It's gone and it is not coming back. Neither is the world where we use floppys, or worry about 200mb install files.
Voluntary redundancy, no
Forced reduncancy is not necessarily a bad thing but you only figure that out afterards.
I've been made redundant twice and the second time was the most stressful time of my life, by an absolute country mile. I got a better job 50% more salary etc but if I could I would still go back to that job and not go through it. It's mentally scarred me for life.
It's an odd statement without more context. A bit like saying "companies that give employees free biscuits are outperforming those that don't."
I bet companies which give free biscuits DO outperform
-care about their staff more which is probably reciprocated
-care about small details
-willing to spend money on things beancounters may say are unnecessary
why someone would let these huge tech companies into their homes is totally beyond me.
sadly my teenage children see absolutely no issue with this or have any care about privacy
will we just accept privacy died on, say, Feb 4 2004? My fear is the generations younger than me are lost to the rights so hard won, but my hope is their children will try to regain the rights we once took for granted
i heard an awesome story about a guy in the dell factory at limerick. He was working on the production line when he pressed the emergency stop button by accident, and caused the entire line to shut down. It caused a huge rumpus as it cost $$$, so much so that someone from Dell HQ flew over to see what had happened, to try to see if there were workarounds they could implement. So this big shot was talking to the operative
'Walk me through exactly what you did' the big shot guy said
'I accidentally pressed the emergency stop button, like this', the guy said. Pressing it again to show him
Aside from lengthening the product cycle, I can see two engineering fixes:
1) Make phones exciting again. Make week long battery. Make as huge gains as (say) between the 3 and 4 and make world class industrial design.
however, that sounds quite hard so:
2) Make obsolecence great again!
If my 3 year phone works so well I can't see the point of an upgrade, well, they can change that quite easily.
Hope they don't go for step 2. would be a lot easier though, no?
Big difference between mortgage brokers and travel agents, though.
People often book flghts / hotels now, so are confident in doing so. Plus, if you screw up, you've screwed up 2 weeks maximum.
When it comes to things with huge financial risk, and which are not done frequently, like mortgages, people are happy to pay 200 quid for peace of mind. Same as why I think estate agents still exist. What do they do? Take worse photos than you or i, with their iphone, apply no artistc thought to them, stick a listing on rightmove and get someone else to show you around? Yet I will probably use them if I ever move again, because, wankers that they are, I would rather use their expertise than mine
I used to love Apple, Macs, specifically. Having to work with terrible Dells, with tiny trackpads, crummy software loaded on XP, cheap build quality and just an overall air of 'eh, this will do', it was a pleasure using a Mac instead. The ascthetic of the mac pleased me every time I noticed it.
Not so much nowadays. I am totally indifferent to them. I am typing this on a MacBook pro, but only because it is closer to hand than my thinkpad. The build quality is excellent, and I don't care about the price anyway, as work pays for them, but my thinkpad is also excellent, and while the touchpad isn't as good, the keyboard is better
I keep watching youtube videos about how you can use the iPad pro as your main daily driver. But they all focus on editing video. What about software development? I would love to run Apache / Sublime etc on an iPad. I can't see what Apple is doing which will impress developers. Maybe we don't matter anymore?
I disagree.
My wife uses Internet explorer. If that wasn't bad enough, to open gmail, she types in google.com, then searches for 'gmail'. Just typing that out infurirates me, but what can you do? Anyway, the point is she is most definitely not an IT user, does not care about tech news etc. But she doesn't use FB anymore because of 'this privacy stuff c4 news keep going on aboout'
I know, of course, this is anecdotal evidence. But nonetheless I do think it is having a huge effect. A final straw when you think it's full of ads and sponsored content anyway.
I think the bigger problem is neither of my teenage kids have any intention whatsoever of using it; it's for old people.
the sooner fb dies, the better. An absolute stain on humanity. Happy Christmas Mark.
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