I attended SIGGRAPH 2005, and there was a group in the booths that had some headset you would put on that would alter your balance to make you walk in different directions. They had a video playing if someone walking with this device and blind folds on, and someone with a joystick could turn them left and right.
Looked it up and it appears to be a similar type of technology: Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation:
> If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing?
The problem is that, at review time at Google, you have to be able to "quantify" the impact. Many types of impact are quantifiable (e.g. "Made server request scale from 100 query-per-second to 1,300 qps", "reduced code size by 30%", etc.).
It's much harder to measure, say, the impact of a refactor where you made the code easier to reason about and more maintainable, so that future work can be done on it more easily.
I witnessed the same thing at Google; I worked on a project that everyone joked only existed because the person who wrote it wanted promo, and the best way to get it was to design a very complex system, and convince others to adopt it. (He did get it, and promptly switched teams.)
Some things have been made better, though. I've heard that going from L4 → L5 now involves much more influence from your manager, since they would know and, without quantifying something like a refactor, can speak to the positive impact you had in a project.
In the context of sales, you can have a conversation about perseverance and not taking no for an answer. However:
> At the end of that example, Brandon laughed and said, “I was about to say something.” He paused, and then went on to say, “No doesn’t necessarily mean no.”
Brandon _changed_ the context into something offensive and then made the joke. This was an attempt at rape joke. He even prepped the audience for it by laughing and saying, "I wasn't going to say this, but..."
Glad it's here, so I no longer have to Airplay from an iOS device. But can we talk about the UI? It seems Amazon's dumped an entire web renderer into the app (https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/93857361817446400...), and loading their "smart" TV UI.
I get that, to Amazon, the Prime Video app on Apple TV is probably not worth spending any time and effort on. But it's unfortunate for those of us that are paying the strategy tax and getting a "smart" tv app designed for low-powered CPUs.
AIM did go mobile. It was in the iPhone App Store on day 1. Push notifications didn’t even exist back then. When push notifications were announced by Apple in June 2009 as part of iPhone OS 3.0, AIM was the “partner” they used to load-test it during WWDC.
Source: I worked on AIM for iPhone.
IMO AIM struggled because:
- it was a highly tuned, specialized C backend, and it never migrated to something that could be improved easily.
- backend technical challenges (as well as legal issues) made storing chat history very difficult
- Hardly any info was collected about AIM screennames, so it was hard to build a social graph from it
- AIM registration was the same as AOL signup, and that registration process was very cumbersome, imo.
- Most AIM accounts had no email address associated with them, so it was impossible to do password resets, for all the locked up AIM screennames.
As a client developer on AIM, it was hard to make a material improvement to AIM, though we certainly did try
Looked it up and it appears to be a similar type of technology: Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation:
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1187315