ayuvar
There was a strange obsession regarding looking official and academically legitimate, to the point where they would attempt to recruit professors to do the peer-reviewing, then override what they said in the final "edit" stage of the review and approve the submission anyway. Since it was anonymous, there was no way to tell if "Reviewer 3" was actually bumped or just that someone else got to that submission first.
That said, their business model was a bit different. They weren't open-access: they made their money selling conferences (which were mandatory to attend if you wanted your paper to actually get published in the journal).
Often, they would resell gifts from the venue such as comped hotel rooms and airport shuttles at above market prices to the attendees as well as part of a "package." As well, the venues usually also matched where-ever the founder wanted to go on vacation.
Out of paranoia as much as cost-cutting, they ran the offices very lean and centralized authority in the founder and his family. They probably would have had a more successful operation had they gotten good lieutenants who were better capable of maintaining the facade. My local university used to warn people off of publishing with them by name, which I thought was a remarkable step considering the precarious state of Canadian libel law.
Other staff was mostly early-stage "green card"-esque workers who they would hold the threat of dismissal over their heads (forcing those workers to rush to get a new job before they timed out and had to leave the country) and students like myself.
The year before I got there, they had a major publicity crisis in which they took substantial heat in academic circles for basically auto-publishing plagiarized articles from anybody with an email address. Part of my work was integrating one those "turn it in" style plagiarism detectors into their submission funnel.
By the end of the summer they were in deep with the tax authorities from a backlog of unpaid taxes; the founder bragged to me that he considered paying corporate income tax a kind of "game" in which the penalties for losing were insubstantial. I'm sure by now the penalties have grown in seriousness, though the last time I looked them up they still seem to be publishing journals and hosting conferences.
It was a good lesson for me about what to look out for in the future when trying to select a small business/team to work for.
Processing existing customer feedback has always been a problem even at large, established places I've worked for - chasing the new customer and adding features is always sexier than a general feeling of unease that requires a lot of prying to get to the root of.
Often in my experience most customers don't seem to know what the exact problem is, or can't put it into words, so having strategies to tease that out would also be appreciated.
I've written a few hacky exploratory tools for it but nothing of this quality.
I wonder if the Joy-Cons will be changed out on people's systems more than controllers usually are. They're almost a fashion accessory in the tablet/portable mode.
We should just go back to the 70s-era centre-mounted fillers behind the license plate holder. Those were great, until you got rear ended or it was frozen solid.
When Blizzard went to make the Mac (System 7) port of Warcraft 1, the guys that were interviewed about it mentioned that the port was relatively easy because the game code was relatively insulated from the OS and all they had to do was update the OS-side code and keep the game logic running in "a thread." (their words)
Probably this virtual machine model was continued at least to Warcraft 1, which makes a lot of sense for a shop that was used to doing console ports of their PC titles at the time.
They seem like a great addition to the toolkit and they're so quick to use that they don't get left behind like more complicated tools would.
Busy guy, very inspiring.
PIX is a great tool that has never gotten its time in the sun and I'm glad to see it is still being maintained, at least for now.
Doing it after the fact in a politics-heavy organization is confounded by not just the technical difficulty of the task, but the glad-handing and perception management that has to happen to keep your team from getting fired during the process.
The last one even spun off a dedicated team that built (hacked) prototype customs in order to secure sales, then threw away the prototype and, after collecting the commission, told the new customers that it would take several years to get what they just saw in production but in the meantime we can do our existing product with some mods.
I imagine the pressure to accept these deals is immense though. Why let an innocuous little feature request hold up such a great deal?
If there are changes in future numpy versions we want, it's up to us to backport them, which is nowhere near our core business.
There's a lot to be said for standardization and 'boring.'
So even though it makes no technical sense it bolsters a gap in the product offering, and they'll have to find consultants to limp it along every time they need something small done that would otherwise be very cheap. It's all about the balancing act.
You end up with a choice between sounding like it's broken and having to spend a good chunk of a weekend dismantling it.
I'm terrified to think what the next step will be once Sprocket chooses to escalate.
I think on the Nexus 4, Snapchat still ships with a warning that it doesn't work properly.
Mine would reboot about every second time I took a picture.
Even if they have a fancy tool, someone is using an Excel spreadsheet to figure out how to subvert it.
So cool.
As for the Element, it's seeing quite the resurgeance in interest as of late: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2016/08/no-fixed-abode-what...