If you can solve this problem for the gaming industry, make sure you write a book about it and hopefully the rest of the world can learn from it, because these basic problems are pervasive in just about every human endeavor ever.
People will die (and kill) for many reasons, at the end of the day it usually boils down to some sort of tribalism, or more simply "us versus them". Humans naturally tend towards segregating themselves into groups, and then those groups compete for resources/power/influence/money/etc. Religion is but one way that people can identify themselves as belonging to a particular group, but the list is endless. Christian vs. Muslim, Black vs. White, American vs. Chinese, North vs. South, Rich vs. Poor, Urban vs. Rural, etc...
Then there are a number of different undertones that can take effect at a more personal level, to help convince people that their side is worth dying for. We're the underdog, you'll be a hero/martyr, it's the only way to save your family, you can make a real difference, etc...
Religion can be one of the easier ways to manipulate people, because you can claim to be speaking with the authority of God, but eliminating religion wouldn't make it impossible for people to convince other people to do terrible things. It would, at best, make it only slightly harder, but the sort of people interested in manipulating others wouldn't have much trouble finding other ways to do so.
Enough websites have started offering their video content in other ways that the Flash "monopoly" over video content is pretty much broken, and that having been accomplished, Steve Jobs/Apple doesn't really care about flash anymore.
It's all a depressing look at the short-sightedness of America's current culture. We've got a huge set of financial problems that have resulted from a decade of bad decisions compounding and turning into a huge global mess, and then we pitch a fit when a couple hundred people can't turn it all around in a year and a half.
And then to show our displeasure, we give power back to the same bunch of idiots that caused many of the problems in the first place, even though they have offered no real plan to fix things any better than these other guys managed to.
Yeah, If you ignore the fact that the screen is only 3.5" and the entire device is basically the size of a really fat smartphone, yeah, it's a very similar size to an ipad.
Well, until you can show me a private consortium willing to spend $100 Billion on a space station, I guess we'll just have to settle for governments doing most of the space exploration and developing all of the technologies with uncertain financial returns.
Are you implying that our spaceflight technology would be ahead of where it is now if NASA didn't exist? Some of the private companies building rockets and such today are doing cool stuff, no doubt, but they haven't even put a person into orbit yet, even though they have access to large amounts of knowledge generated via government spaceflight projects.
I'm assuming that various technologies and engineering solutions were developed in order to build the station and get it assembled in orbit, so even if no science is done on the station from this day forward, much knowledge was undoubtedly gained already. Knowledge that would probably not have come about from non-space-station-related projects. 100 Billion dollars is a lot of money, but humanity has blown significantly larger sums of money on way less useful stuff on many occasions.
I like to say that these days I tend to play video games in "tourist mode", in that I'm mostly there to see the scenery, with just a little bit of excitement and action to keep me entertained.
About 12 years ago I spent 6 weeks backpacking in Alaska. It was an amazing experience. Part of the trip was spent in Prince William Sound, sea kayaking around, and it's an absolutely beautiful place. Anyways, one of the things that I saw there was a cruise ship full of people. On one hand, their experience seemed rather limited and almost lame. Sure, they can see the glaciers and the whales and the eagles, but I was really living it. I was sleeping on the ground, paddling through the ice, having wildlife swim right up to the side of my kayak and those tourist suckers were stuck up on the deck of that big boat. But now that I'm older and my free time is more limited, I can appreciate their point of view. If you've only got three or four vacation days to spend in Alaska, you can't really go backpacking. It takes that long just to get in the groove of things enough to really start enjoying yourself. It makes way more sense to go as a "tourist", see the sights, and go on your way.
Video games are the same thing for me. A single player game that takes 40 hours to go through is probably going to take me at least a month to work through, because it has to compete with a million other things for my time. There's a good probability that I might not get a chance to play the game at all for weeks at a time, and when I come back I've forgotten what tasks I was in the middle of, or my skills have faded to the point where I can't make any more progress. Or another game that is more interesting to me has popped up and I move on.
I don't have the time to camp-out in a game, I'm just there to see the sights and then get on with my life.
I think it's more like Apple asking, "Hey we've come up with all this new interface stuff that people have really loved, how can we take some of what we've learned and use it to make our other products more similar?"
The Mac is finally starting to make some inroads on Windows market share, Apple makes the vast majority of their revenue off of selling hardware, and they're selling record numbers of their computers, all with profit margins that any other computer manufacturer would kill for. Why would they be so eager to even risk stomping on all of that momentum in exchange for a 30% cut of a bunch of 99 cent apps?
It would destroy the platform that developers use to make apps for iOS, it would alienate all of the big software companies that make mac software, and it would turn the technical community entirely against them. I don't think they're that stupid.
Yes, except that it's not likely to be quite that simple, in that there will almost certainly be unpredictable wider consequences, and also it'd take a lot more than just smuggling in one nuke to destroy Israel.
I don't buy it. If those guys wanted a big war they would've started it by now. They're living the good life, they've got wealth and power. Once you've got that, you don't want to give it up.
If a nuke goes off in Israel, then Israel is going to bury Iran in a couple dozen nukes. It doesn't matter if they watch the rocket take off in Tehran or if it's smuggled in by some unknown terrorist group. 5 minutes after it went off, Israel would already be retaliating. They won't wait for proof, they will respond.
Iran's leaders know this. And no matter how much they hate Israel, they don't hate it as much as they hate the thought of losing their little kingdom. They will not do anything to try and pick a fight with Israel, unless they're attacked and feel that their government is at risk.
Also, after watching the video a few times, I think that the "normal" house was built in such a way to almost guarantee that it would fail catastrophically. There was no electrical wiring or plumbing, which while not being something that we rely on to be structural, would have held changed how the building collapsed. But most importantly, the interior of the house seems to have been completely devoid of gyp. board. Gyp. board serves as more than just a versatile wall covering, it also provides structural support, by creating diaphragms that help the structure against wracking. Often times, especially in hurricane areas, a structural engineer will take this further, by designating certain walls as shear walls, which have a layer of plywood under the gyp. board to provide an even stronger diaphragm.
Strapping is also a big deal, tying the building together vertically, although if the sheathing is laid out carefully and with the correct nailing pattern, it can do a lot of that work for you. I've seen some houses where there was giant threaded rods, maybe 3/4" diameter, and they ran the full height of the building, fastened at the bottom of the structure all the way up to the top plate of the second floor walls, one rod near each corner of the house. The contractors hated them, because they had to drill holes for it all the way down through the building, and inevitably there would be some plumbing or something in the way.
Well, yeah, once something is happening, the odds of it happening are pretty high. Anyways, I'm not try to belittle tornadoes, I actually find them far more scary than a hurricane, because with a hurricane we have ample warning to get out of the way.
But for your average home in kansas or some other tornado prone state, the overall chance of that house being hit by a tornado in its lifetime are less than the odds of a house in florida to be impacted by a hurricane in its lifetime. That combined with the fact that designing to protect against hurricane force winds is a good bit easier than designing against tornado force winds has led to our society in general to decide that for most of our buildings, the costs of tornado proofing are not worth it.
Better to send the people underground or wherever is safe, and just let the tornado have its way with the buildings. Mother Nature wins that fight by default, we don't even try to step into the ring.
It's not that much quicker. A good framing crew can put the whole house up in a few days. It's weird when you're monitoring a job. The sitework seems to take forever and it doesn't look like that much is going on. Then the framing starts and in a couple days there's this big wooden house that appeared out of nowhere. And you think damn, this thing is like 80% done, we'll be finished in no time. Then all of the interior build-out starts, and it takes months and feels like it'll never end.
Also framing tends to be very mistake tolerant. If the designer or the builder did something wrong, it's generally not a big deal to tear it out and rebuild it better. All of the framing works together to provide strength to the house, so temporarily removing any single stud/joist/section of wall/whatever usually won't result in collapse, as there's plenty of redundancy in the structure.
Yeah, generally you don't even try to build to withstand a direct hit from a tornado, it'd just be way too expensive. The odds of any particular building getting smacked by a tornado are fairly small, and even a big tornado affects a much smaller area than your average landfall hurricane.
Designing to survive hurricane force winds is much more feasible, and it's cool to watch some actual experimentation. Note from the video, that right before the house on the left collapses, the front door is pushed open. Once the wind gets into the house, it needs to go somewhere, and it basically lifts the house up allowing it to fall over. You have to bolt the whole house together vertically, from the foundation all the way up to the rafters.
This guy really could be a genius, and he could have a hundred other geniuses working for him, but still have his efforts stymied by one or two idiots who happen to be above him.
I don't have any first-hand knowledge of the situation, but from what I've read, there seems to be a general consensus that there is a culture within Microsoft that can make it really hard to get things done. That wouldn't be unusual within a large company, especially one that's already heavily entrenched in a particular market.
Dilbert is a conglomeration of the worsts of the corporate world, and then exaggerated a little bit. But only a little bit. The real world is full of people who will gladly take steps to trip up their coworkers if they feel that the success of others might threaten their own position. It takes good leadership at the very top to keep this from happening.
That being said, I don't work at MS, I don't know this guy, in reality he might just plain suck at actually making good software. We may never known.
He said good design, not perfect design. Design is always about trade-offs. Just because someone with different priorities made different trade-offs than what you would've done doesn't mean that it's wrong or bad.
Then we can look forwards to the desperation type thieves moving on to mugging us instead of just taking metal off of our buildings.
Get used to more and more crime, as our economy continues to unravel, more of the middle class is pushed into poverty, and much more of the population becomes desperate. And of course the people in charge will attempt to solve this problem by spending more on law enforcement and building new prisons while proudly claiming how tough they are on crime, when we'd get a better return on our tax dollars if we focused on helping these people rather than arresting them.
I guess if you're worried about getting a referral, then caution might make sense, but outside of that, you might as well let your bosses respectfully know why you're leaving. If they choose to ignore your information, then that's their problem, but at least you can leave knowing that you made an honest attempt to help. Give it a shot, even if you fully expect it to change nothing, and then get on with your life.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean publishing an anonymous rant where you publicly trash specific people and whine like a little baby.
In the experience that you described, do you think things would've turned out any differently if you just quietly shuffled out the door without explaining why you were leaving?
Yes, it's only a matter of time before Apple decides to lock out a bunch of their iOS developers by making the development platform prohibitively expensive. I'm sure they can't wait to do that.
I think it's more a defensive knee-jerk reaction against the apple bashing knee-jerk reaction that this story created.
And at the end of the day it all comes down to the fact that people are generally bad at understanding statistics, and that for just about any given situation, you can phrase factually true numerical results in ways that tend to introduce bias among many people. Saying that there's an 82% increase in screen damage reads to many people as if iPhones are just constantly shattering everywhere, so obviously it's a horribly designed product, so obviously Apple is a terrible company that hates its customers.
Then this guy comes along and tries to put the statistics in perspective, and when the numbers that he comes up with makes things look not so bad (47 per 1000 return rate doesn't sound particularly tragic), then he overreacts and accuses the people who did the study of picking data that makes the iPhone looks worse than it really is.
Well if they patented their actual working internal antenna design, then I can understand that. But if they're claiming to own the very concept of an internal antenna, then that's just silly.
I would imagine that espionage is a common occurrence within any organization doing something even mildly interesting. I doubt there is a government anywhere that isn't worrying about both sides of the espionage equation. You'd be foolish not to.
It'll eventually shake itself out, the industry will consolidate to just a couple big players, the barrier to entry will be too high for anyone new to enter the market, and us consumers will have fewer, crappier options. Booyah.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can solve this problem for the gaming industry, make sure you write a book about it and hopefully the rest of the world can learn from it, because these basic problems are pervasive in just about every human endeavor ever.
People will die (and kill) for many reasons, at the end of the day it usually boils down to some sort of tribalism, or more simply "us versus them". Humans naturally tend towards segregating themselves into groups, and then those groups compete for resources/power/influence/money/etc. Religion is but one way that people can identify themselves as belonging to a particular group, but the list is endless. Christian vs. Muslim, Black vs. White, American vs. Chinese, North vs. South, Rich vs. Poor, Urban vs. Rural, etc...
Then there are a number of different undertones that can take effect at a more personal level, to help convince people that their side is worth dying for. We're the underdog, you'll be a hero/martyr, it's the only way to save your family, you can make a real difference, etc...
Religion can be one of the easier ways to manipulate people, because you can claim to be speaking with the authority of God, but eliminating religion wouldn't make it impossible for people to convince other people to do terrible things. It would, at best, make it only slightly harder, but the sort of people interested in manipulating others wouldn't have much trouble finding other ways to do so.
Option 3:
Enough websites have started offering their video content in other ways that the Flash "monopoly" over video content is pretty much broken, and that having been accomplished, Steve Jobs/Apple doesn't really care about flash anymore.
It's all a depressing look at the short-sightedness of America's current culture. We've got a huge set of financial problems that have resulted from a decade of bad decisions compounding and turning into a huge global mess, and then we pitch a fit when a couple hundred people can't turn it all around in a year and a half.
And then to show our displeasure, we give power back to the same bunch of idiots that caused many of the problems in the first place, even though they have offered no real plan to fix things any better than these other guys managed to.
Yeah, If you ignore the fact that the screen is only 3.5" and the entire device is basically the size of a really fat smartphone, yeah, it's a very similar size to an ipad.
Well, until you can show me a private consortium willing to spend $100 Billion on a space station, I guess we'll just have to settle for governments doing most of the space exploration and developing all of the technologies with uncertain financial returns.
Are you implying that our spaceflight technology would be ahead of where it is now if NASA didn't exist? Some of the private companies building rockets and such today are doing cool stuff, no doubt, but they haven't even put a person into orbit yet, even though they have access to large amounts of knowledge generated via government spaceflight projects.
I'm assuming that various technologies and engineering solutions were developed in order to build the station and get it assembled in orbit, so even if no science is done on the station from this day forward, much knowledge was undoubtedly gained already. Knowledge that would probably not have come about from non-space-station-related projects. 100 Billion dollars is a lot of money, but humanity has blown significantly larger sums of money on way less useful stuff on many occasions.
I like to say that these days I tend to play video games in "tourist mode", in that I'm mostly there to see the scenery, with just a little bit of excitement and action to keep me entertained.
About 12 years ago I spent 6 weeks backpacking in Alaska. It was an amazing experience. Part of the trip was spent in Prince William Sound, sea kayaking around, and it's an absolutely beautiful place. Anyways, one of the things that I saw there was a cruise ship full of people. On one hand, their experience seemed rather limited and almost lame. Sure, they can see the glaciers and the whales and the eagles, but I was really living it. I was sleeping on the ground, paddling through the ice, having wildlife swim right up to the side of my kayak and those tourist suckers were stuck up on the deck of that big boat. But now that I'm older and my free time is more limited, I can appreciate their point of view. If you've only got three or four vacation days to spend in Alaska, you can't really go backpacking. It takes that long just to get in the groove of things enough to really start enjoying yourself. It makes way more sense to go as a "tourist", see the sights, and go on your way.
Video games are the same thing for me. A single player game that takes 40 hours to go through is probably going to take me at least a month to work through, because it has to compete with a million other things for my time. There's a good probability that I might not get a chance to play the game at all for weeks at a time, and when I come back I've forgotten what tasks I was in the middle of, or my skills have faded to the point where I can't make any more progress. Or another game that is more interesting to me has popped up and I move on.
I don't have the time to camp-out in a game, I'm just there to see the sights and then get on with my life.
I think it's more like Apple asking, "Hey we've come up with all this new interface stuff that people have really loved, how can we take some of what we've learned and use it to make our other products more similar?"
The Mac is finally starting to make some inroads on Windows market share, Apple makes the vast majority of their revenue off of selling hardware, and they're selling record numbers of their computers, all with profit margins that any other computer manufacturer would kill for. Why would they be so eager to even risk stomping on all of that momentum in exchange for a 30% cut of a bunch of 99 cent apps?
It would destroy the platform that developers use to make apps for iOS, it would alienate all of the big software companies that make mac software, and it would turn the technical community entirely against them. I don't think they're that stupid.
Yes, except that it's not likely to be quite that simple, in that there will almost certainly be unpredictable wider consequences, and also it'd take a lot more than just smuggling in one nuke to destroy Israel.
I don't buy it. If those guys wanted a big war they would've started it by now. They're living the good life, they've got wealth and power. Once you've got that, you don't want to give it up.
If a nuke goes off in Israel, then Israel is going to bury Iran in a couple dozen nukes. It doesn't matter if they watch the rocket take off in Tehran or if it's smuggled in by some unknown terrorist group. 5 minutes after it went off, Israel would already be retaliating. They won't wait for proof, they will respond.
Iran's leaders know this. And no matter how much they hate Israel, they don't hate it as much as they hate the thought of losing their little kingdom. They will not do anything to try and pick a fight with Israel, unless they're attacked and feel that their government is at risk.
Also, after watching the video a few times, I think that the "normal" house was built in such a way to almost guarantee that it would fail catastrophically. There was no electrical wiring or plumbing, which while not being something that we rely on to be structural, would have held changed how the building collapsed. But most importantly, the interior of the house seems to have been completely devoid of gyp. board. Gyp. board serves as more than just a versatile wall covering, it also provides structural support, by creating diaphragms that help the structure against wracking. Often times, especially in hurricane areas, a structural engineer will take this further, by designating certain walls as shear walls, which have a layer of plywood under the gyp. board to provide an even stronger diaphragm.
Strapping is also a big deal, tying the building together vertically, although if the sheathing is laid out carefully and with the correct nailing pattern, it can do a lot of that work for you. I've seen some houses where there was giant threaded rods, maybe 3/4" diameter, and they ran the full height of the building, fastened at the bottom of the structure all the way up to the top plate of the second floor walls, one rod near each corner of the house. The contractors hated them, because they had to drill holes for it all the way down through the building, and inevitably there would be some plumbing or something in the way.
Well, yeah, once something is happening, the odds of it happening are pretty high. Anyways, I'm not try to belittle tornadoes, I actually find them far more scary than a hurricane, because with a hurricane we have ample warning to get out of the way.
But for your average home in kansas or some other tornado prone state, the overall chance of that house being hit by a tornado in its lifetime are less than the odds of a house in florida to be impacted by a hurricane in its lifetime. That combined with the fact that designing to protect against hurricane force winds is a good bit easier than designing against tornado force winds has led to our society in general to decide that for most of our buildings, the costs of tornado proofing are not worth it.
Better to send the people underground or wherever is safe, and just let the tornado have its way with the buildings. Mother Nature wins that fight by default, we don't even try to step into the ring.
It's not that much quicker. A good framing crew can put the whole house up in a few days. It's weird when you're monitoring a job. The sitework seems to take forever and it doesn't look like that much is going on. Then the framing starts and in a couple days there's this big wooden house that appeared out of nowhere. And you think damn, this thing is like 80% done, we'll be finished in no time. Then all of the interior build-out starts, and it takes months and feels like it'll never end.
Also framing tends to be very mistake tolerant. If the designer or the builder did something wrong, it's generally not a big deal to tear it out and rebuild it better. All of the framing works together to provide strength to the house, so temporarily removing any single stud/joist/section of wall/whatever usually won't result in collapse, as there's plenty of redundancy in the structure.
Yeah, generally you don't even try to build to withstand a direct hit from a tornado, it'd just be way too expensive. The odds of any particular building getting smacked by a tornado are fairly small, and even a big tornado affects a much smaller area than your average landfall hurricane.
Designing to survive hurricane force winds is much more feasible, and it's cool to watch some actual experimentation. Note from the video, that right before the house on the left collapses, the front door is pushed open. Once the wind gets into the house, it needs to go somewhere, and it basically lifts the house up allowing it to fall over. You have to bolt the whole house together vertically, from the foundation all the way up to the rafters.
This guy really could be a genius, and he could have a hundred other geniuses working for him, but still have his efforts stymied by one or two idiots who happen to be above him.
I don't have any first-hand knowledge of the situation, but from what I've read, there seems to be a general consensus that there is a culture within Microsoft that can make it really hard to get things done. That wouldn't be unusual within a large company, especially one that's already heavily entrenched in a particular market.
Dilbert is a conglomeration of the worsts of the corporate world, and then exaggerated a little bit. But only a little bit. The real world is full of people who will gladly take steps to trip up their coworkers if they feel that the success of others might threaten their own position. It takes good leadership at the very top to keep this from happening.
That being said, I don't work at MS, I don't know this guy, in reality he might just plain suck at actually making good software. We may never known.
He said good design, not perfect design. Design is always about trade-offs. Just because someone with different priorities made different trade-offs than what you would've done doesn't mean that it's wrong or bad.
Then we can look forwards to the desperation type thieves moving on to mugging us instead of just taking metal off of our buildings.
Get used to more and more crime, as our economy continues to unravel, more of the middle class is pushed into poverty, and much more of the population becomes desperate. And of course the people in charge will attempt to solve this problem by spending more on law enforcement and building new prisons while proudly claiming how tough they are on crime, when we'd get a better return on our tax dollars if we focused on helping these people rather than arresting them.
I guess if you're worried about getting a referral, then caution might make sense, but outside of that, you might as well let your bosses respectfully know why you're leaving. If they choose to ignore your information, then that's their problem, but at least you can leave knowing that you made an honest attempt to help. Give it a shot, even if you fully expect it to change nothing, and then get on with your life.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean publishing an anonymous rant where you publicly trash specific people and whine like a little baby.
In the experience that you described, do you think things would've turned out any differently if you just quietly shuffled out the door without explaining why you were leaving?
Yes, it's only a matter of time before Apple decides to lock out a bunch of their iOS developers by making the development platform prohibitively expensive. I'm sure they can't wait to do that.
I think it's more a defensive knee-jerk reaction against the apple bashing knee-jerk reaction that this story created.
And at the end of the day it all comes down to the fact that people are generally bad at understanding statistics, and that for just about any given situation, you can phrase factually true numerical results in ways that tend to introduce bias among many people. Saying that there's an 82% increase in screen damage reads to many people as if iPhones are just constantly shattering everywhere, so obviously it's a horribly designed product, so obviously Apple is a terrible company that hates its customers.
Then this guy comes along and tries to put the statistics in perspective, and when the numbers that he comes up with makes things look not so bad (47 per 1000 return rate doesn't sound particularly tragic), then he overreacts and accuses the people who did the study of picking data that makes the iPhone looks worse than it really is.
Well if they patented their actual working internal antenna design, then I can understand that. But if they're claiming to own the very concept of an internal antenna, then that's just silly.
I would imagine that espionage is a common occurrence within any organization doing something even mildly interesting. I doubt there is a government anywhere that isn't worrying about both sides of the espionage equation. You'd be foolish not to.
It'll eventually shake itself out, the industry will consolidate to just a couple big players, the barrier to entry will be too high for anyone new to enter the market, and us consumers will have fewer, crappier options. Booyah.