"1. You cannot touch or search a kid without getting sued by the parents or the ACLU."
A middle school in my home county once strip-searched an entire class of girls, just because one girl claimed she had five dollars stolen. I was outraged when I read about this in the news. How in the hell is that reasonable? How could you possibly have probable cause to strip-search an entire class of girls, just because $5 was missing? I don't know if they were sued for this, but they damn well should have been.
After brazen operations like that, honestly, I'd prefer that the schools were skittish about searching students. School isn't a damn prison, and they have no right stripping kids naked for any reason, let alone $5.
If they're going to tax us for it, they better damn well provide better electronics recycling services than most of us in the US currently have, at the moment. Right now, it's a patchwork of poorly advertised local services that in many cases either don't actually exist, or are too much of a hassle for most folks to bother using. I usually end up with this heap of dead or outmoded electronics in a corner somewhere in my house waiting for the magical Brigadoon electronics recycling day to come around again. Having just moved to a new area, I have no idea when or where or how or if electronics recycling is done here. It's a nightmare if you actually give a damn about these things.
Yeah, seriously. If there are at least 8 million people playing this game on PC and Macs, why do people keep insisting that PC is dead, and whinging about the lack of a "leading platform"? Whatever. I swear, some people have such a bizarrely myopic obsession with consoles that it's like they're wandering around with bags over their heads.
I am disturbed by how often people with high-functioning Asperger's Syndrome try to speak for people with more severe autism. I understand that the nature of Asperger's Syndrome, itself, may make it difficult for you to assess the difficulties and frustrations of others. But you should understand that while it is easy for you to live with the difficulties that Asperger's Syndrome presents to you, there are others on the autistic spectrum who are far less functional than you are. There are people who can't hold down jobs. There are people who can't even speak.
I don't believe that this latest news from New Jersey is a cure. I think it's being over-hyped for what it is. It may be a beneficial treatment for some cases, however. There are those who are already employing nutritional modifications to treat people with autism.
That said, I would never venture to suggest that anyone who is happy with their neurology, and is functioning just fine, should do anything to adjust it. Abnormal psychology is measured primarily by how one adapts and functions. There are plenty of people who are different, but not abnormal.
However, there are people with autism who do have problems functioning. There are those who cannot function at all without the support of others. It is not wrong for their caregivers to want to give them treatments which may improve their well-being. Their experience is not like yours, and you should respect that.
They are doing everyone a big favor. Vista's upgrade process is absolutely not robust enough yet for the average consumer.
Last weekend, I spent two days upgrading to Vista on a machine that was just purchased in October. I did succeed in the end, but it was not without a considerable amount of hair-pulling.
The essential problem is that if ANYTHING goes wrong, the upgrade suddenly becomes a non-consumer-friendly train wreck. The most painful thing is that there are any number of small hardware problems that can cause the boot to blue screen. If the boot blue screens, Vista tries to boot again. That is, you end up in a boot-loop. The blue screen does not stay up long enough to read it. So, anyone debugging the problem needs to learn about the F8 menu, where they can request that the machine not reboot on boot failure. THIS time. Then, you have to look at the blue screen, and hope that it's something that'll give you SOME clue as to what's wrong. After all...
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL...could mean, oh, your audio hardware is having some issue, or it could just mean you have 4GB of RAM (See KB929777), or any number of other things.
Vista WILL NOT FINISH INSTALLING until you have done at least one clean non-Safe-Mode boot. However, it WILL NOT allow you to use Safe Mode until it has finished installing. So, there is no way to remedy any problems (short of yanking hardware out of your machine) unless you boot off of the install DVD, and go into the command line tool there. However, you cannot get to the command line tool directly. You have to ask for it to do a Repair first. However, Repair hangs on some machines. (Man, I wish I was making this up.) So, you may have to cancel out of Repair, just to get to the command line.
None of the three distinct problems that were preventing my upgrade were detected at all by the tool that was supposed to determine if my machine was Vista compatible. Not a single one of them. So, I had no idea where to start looking for problems.
Okay, now imagine your typical first-level tech trying to guide a consumer through this swamp.
They can't. This is not something that can be realistically handled by first-level customer support. Moreover, the "just do a clean install" line that Microsoft has been feeding to anyone who contacts tech support REALLY isn't going to fly with people who were told their machines would be ready for a Vista upgrade when it became available. They have already been using their machines, and they expect a smooth upgrade -- not a clean install.
These companies have a vested interest in making sure that the Vista upgrade process is not going to blow up in the faces of their customers. Because their equipment is very consistent, they face a situation where it's either going to be a disaster for everyone, or it's going to run smoothly for almost everyone. The stakes are very high for them to get this one right. The cost of botching it up will be phenomenal. So, give them some time. Let them get this one right. Or, their poor customers are going to find yourself with your machine torn apart all over the floor, gnashing and wailing, like I was. Upgrades should never be this hard.
Oh no! Set your disdain knobs to 36, kids. It's the nouveau open source! They aren't part of our community. They're trying to make money. They're using Microsoft technology. They just started doing open source. What if they have women working for them? YE GODS, THEY'RE WEARING POLO SHIRTS! They might play golf or something. They MUST be Evil! Stop them before they make more open source! They might tarnish our image as a bunch of underpaid bearded sysadmins and nerdy college students! People might start expecting us to take showers, or something. Somebody think of the children!
I don't quite understand why this was newsworthy at all. The entire premise of this piece seems to be, "Online multi-player games are over-rated, because they just don't work for me." I don't like sports games, but I don't go around saying they're over-rated, due to some fine-grained analysis of my own personal feelings towards them. Some people like them, some people don't. That doesn't mean they're over-rated. It just means we all like different things.
I was uninsured for part of my stay, and insured (out of pocket) for another part of my stay. (Though, in practice, I had to pre-pay and get reimbursed by the insurance, so on the doctor's end, there wasn't much of a difference.)
I always found the lack of ambulance coverage rather odd, myself. Yeah, it's expensive, but that's exactly why you need to cover it. The last thing you want is somebody dying, because they're worried about the cost of the trip to the hospital -- or worse, people trying to drive themselves to the hospital when they really shouldn't.
You can get ambulance/dental/extras/gap insurance in Australia, at fairly reasonable rates, but the folks who most need it are the ones who aren't going to have the extra money to pay for it.
What does having friends in Canada tell you about the Australian medical system? Absolutely nothing.
I am an American. I have lived in Australia.
I was never on a waiting list. Heck, usually when I walked to my doctor's office to ask for an appointment for something minor, they told me I could see a doctor straight away. I'm usually lucky if I can see a doctor within three weeks in the US, unless I'm eight shades of green and about to fall over.
My doctors had more modern equipment than I've even seen in any of my US GP's offices. Nobody was in a rush to get me out of the office. The prices were all fairly reasonable. To be honest, I had no complaints.
Believe it or not, as of 2007 you are paying 1.45% of your wages in Medicare tax. In addition, your employer has to pay 1.45%, so the government is ultimately getting a total of 2.9% of your wages for this purpose. And you probably don't actually get to benefit from any of this, because you don't qualify for Medicare. This is all before you (and/or your employer) even start paying for insurance and other medical expenses.
What's important to understand is that there is room in programming for both big ticket senior programmers, and low cost junior programmers. A company that tries to staff up with only one or the other does so at their own peril. Senior programmers are needed to architect things, to understand the whole system, and to solve the big, nasty, mind-bending problems. Junior programmers are needed to do the less intensive tasks that would be a waste of a senior programmer. Going without senior programmers could result in a lower quality product, more time spent, or possibly worse. Going without junior programmers will both increase your costs, and wreck your programmer morale.
So, he should price himself according his skills and experience. Just being cheap isn't inherently bad, unless he's trying to get senior-level work.
Now, he did mention possibly contracting, and that's a bit different. If he wants to try to undercut the entire population of Bangalore, then more power to him. At this point, undercutting will only take jobs from undercutters.
Man, if we could ONLY get rid of drunken Electric Slide dancing, due to the grave peril that someone might accidentally record it. Please tell me this guy invented the Macarena, too.
I'm with the previous poster about this. Don't freak out until you call Microsoft and explain your problem. You are not trying to do anything dishonest, so there's no reason to hide anything. Believe it or not, they're usually pretty helpful in getting licensing issues sorted out, and in my experience, they've been very fair about it. I've never had them deny any of my requests, regardless of what upgrades and/or transfers I was doing.
In the unlikely event that they give you a hard time about it (which I have never seen happen), then pitch a fit and demand that they escalate the issue. If they insist on having this kind of protection system, they have to suffer the consequences of when it goes wrong, including unhappy customers. So, dish some consequences, man.
Vellmont pretty much nailed it. The "line" is a red herring. The problem here is a double-standard with other media. Why is it okay to have controversial movies at these festivals, but not controversial games?
I have no mixed feelings about this at all. The double-standard isn't acceptable.
I wake up instantly, in full fight-or-flight mode, if I hear foraging noises anywhere near where I'm sleeping. I've been awaken by things as small as large insects foraging in my vicinity. I suspect that this is an old, throwback survival trait. While we may be vulnerable to other humans, I don't think we were ever that vulnerable to foraging animals at all. I think our ancestors probably woke up instantly if there were animals sniffing around.
SQLGuru is absolutely right. If you want to do graphics, or want to be a game programmer in general, you should absolutely study linear algebra.
I would also like to emphasize that as much as university programs tend to be focused on theory, it would be beneficial for the students to have some inkling of what the applications of these various branches of math are. I studied linear algebra in college, but I was forced to do an aggressive review of it, later in my career, because I had retained very little of it. Had I understood how important linear algebra was to 3D graphics, back when I was studying it, I'd have been much more excited about the topic, and would have retained the information better. Unfortunately, our program provided no context, whatsoever, for what we were learning, so we never really knew why we were studying it in the first place.
This goes back to the whole identity crisis of computer science education at Universities. Programming is just a small part of computer science, and software engineering is really an entire field of study unto its own. The trouble is that A.) people study computer science to learn to be programmers, and B.) most universities don't have "software engineering" programs at the undergraduate level. So, on the one hand, while universities want to teach you theoretical academic computer science, they also understand the horrible truth -- that most people aren't really there to learn that. So, you end up with this mishmosh hybrid thing going on, where you're learning some theoretical stuff, and some programming stuff, and if you're REALLY LUCKY, some software engineering, but you're not learning any of them in much depth.
I think would be better if they broke out software engineering as its own major, that had heavy overlap with computer science (just as computer engineering does), but which focused primarily on the creation and architecture of good software. Alternatively, computer science programs could have a specialization track for software development, with more material than these programs currently cover.
My advice to people right now is: Get a job or internship. I had a programming job while I was studying computer science, and it was a great complement to my education.
I am likewise a programmer in the industry, and I buy new, as well. I have, on rare occasion, had to buy a game used, because it simply wasn't available new. However, when given the option, I always buy new. I furthermore get pissed off at empty pre-order boxes taking up precious shelf space that could have a real game on it.
Agree with parent. To say that human artists are making work of "equal or lesser quality" is to miss the point of art, entirely. In fact, I highly suggest that the original poster go play Okami for a couple of hours. Then, he can gain some insight into why true artists are in no way threatened by technologies like this.
"After reading the list a little more carefully I am hard pressed to find even a dozen who have more than a typical career in the video game industry."
I understand your concern. To be honest, when I saw that Fiona put up 100 names, I read through the list with a critical eye. I'm a female senior programmer in the industry, and I've even been a lead before. I'm pretty well known, have spoken at conferences and universities, and have been consulted for books and articles on a number of occasions. So, you have to understand, I was bound asking myself, as I read the list: "Do I have more of a right to be on the list than this person?" Yes, I DID see a few people I could probably pull rank on. But many of the ones that were the most iffy have published books, or done something else to buoy them up a bit on the influence meter. I can't really say I've published a book, yet.
"I stand by my original statement that this article is mostly a favor piece that does nothing more than circulate names."
She went to the developer community for these names. I saw the discussion. So I don't really understand how it would be a favor piece. Now, your complaint that she should have stuck with 50 names may be valid, depending on how you want to define "influential," but I believe, nonetheless, that her intentions were good.
I have a little bit of knowledge about how this list was compiled. Fiona was originally going to publish only 50 names, but received so many recommendations that she expanded the list to 100. These women were almost entirely recommended by people outside of their companies. Many of the people who made recommendations were people (of both sexes) on the IGDA's women_dev list. There were many recommendations who didn't even make it onto the list (I recommended Evelyn Richardson, head of the Game Developer's Assocation of Australia, for example).
You missed Rima Brek. She is a programmer. Also, there just plain aren't a lot of female lead game programmers in the industry. As far as I know, I was the only one in Australia, when I was there.
Slashdot Mirror
"1. You cannot touch or search a kid without getting sued by the parents or the ACLU."
A middle school in my home county once strip-searched an entire class of girls, just because one girl claimed she had five dollars stolen. I was outraged when I read about this in the news. How in the hell is that reasonable? How could you possibly have probable cause to strip-search an entire class of girls, just because $5 was missing? I don't know if they were sued for this, but they damn well should have been.
After brazen operations like that, honestly, I'd prefer that the schools were skittish about searching students. School isn't a damn prison, and they have no right stripping kids naked for any reason, let alone $5.
If they're going to tax us for it, they better damn well provide better electronics recycling services than most of us in the US currently have, at the moment. Right now, it's a patchwork of poorly advertised local services that in many cases either don't actually exist, or are too much of a hassle for most folks to bother using. I usually end up with this heap of dead or outmoded electronics in a corner somewhere in my house waiting for the magical Brigadoon electronics recycling day to come around again. Having just moved to a new area, I have no idea when or where or how or if electronics recycling is done here. It's a nightmare if you actually give a damn about these things.
Yeah, seriously. If there are at least 8 million people playing this game on PC and Macs, why do people keep insisting that PC is dead, and whinging about the lack of a "leading platform"? Whatever. I swear, some people have such a bizarrely myopic obsession with consoles that it's like they're wandering around with bags over their heads.
I am disturbed by how often people with high-functioning Asperger's Syndrome try to speak for people with more severe autism. I understand that the nature of Asperger's Syndrome, itself, may make it difficult for you to assess the difficulties and frustrations of others. But you should understand that while it is easy for you to live with the difficulties that Asperger's Syndrome presents to you, there are others on the autistic spectrum who are far less functional than you are. There are people who can't hold down jobs. There are people who can't even speak.
I don't believe that this latest news from New Jersey is a cure. I think it's being over-hyped for what it is. It may be a beneficial treatment for some cases, however. There are those who are already employing nutritional modifications to treat people with autism.
That said, I would never venture to suggest that anyone who is happy with their neurology, and is functioning just fine, should do anything to adjust it. Abnormal psychology is measured primarily by how one adapts and functions. There are plenty of people who are different, but not abnormal.
However, there are people with autism who do have problems functioning. There are those who cannot function at all without the support of others. It is not wrong for their caregivers to want to give them treatments which may improve their well-being. Their experience is not like yours, and you should respect that.
They are doing everyone a big favor. Vista's upgrade process is absolutely not robust enough yet for the average consumer.
...could mean, oh, your audio hardware is having some issue, or it could just mean you have 4GB of RAM (See KB929777), or any number of other things.
Last weekend, I spent two days upgrading to Vista on a machine that was just purchased in October. I did succeed in the end, but it was not without a considerable amount of hair-pulling.
The essential problem is that if ANYTHING goes wrong, the upgrade suddenly becomes a non-consumer-friendly train wreck. The most painful thing is that there are any number of small hardware problems that can cause the boot to blue screen. If the boot blue screens, Vista tries to boot again. That is, you end up in a boot-loop. The blue screen does not stay up long enough to read it. So, anyone debugging the problem needs to learn about the F8 menu, where they can request that the machine not reboot on boot failure. THIS time. Then, you have to look at the blue screen, and hope that it's something that'll give you SOME clue as to what's wrong. After all...
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Vista WILL NOT FINISH INSTALLING until you have done at least one clean non-Safe-Mode boot. However, it WILL NOT allow you to use Safe Mode until it has finished installing. So, there is no way to remedy any problems (short of yanking hardware out of your machine) unless you boot off of the install DVD, and go into the command line tool there. However, you cannot get to the command line tool directly. You have to ask for it to do a Repair first. However, Repair hangs on some machines. (Man, I wish I was making this up.) So, you may have to cancel out of Repair, just to get to the command line.
None of the three distinct problems that were preventing my upgrade were detected at all by the tool that was supposed to determine if my machine was Vista compatible. Not a single one of them. So, I had no idea where to start looking for problems.
Okay, now imagine your typical first-level tech trying to guide a consumer through this swamp.
They can't. This is not something that can be realistically handled by first-level customer support. Moreover, the "just do a clean install" line that Microsoft has been feeding to anyone who contacts tech support REALLY isn't going to fly with people who were told their machines would be ready for a Vista upgrade when it became available. They have already been using their machines, and they expect a smooth upgrade -- not a clean install.
These companies have a vested interest in making sure that the Vista upgrade process is not going to blow up in the faces of their customers. Because their equipment is very consistent, they face a situation where it's either going to be a disaster for everyone, or it's going to run smoothly for almost everyone. The stakes are very high for them to get this one right. The cost of botching it up will be phenomenal. So, give them some time. Let them get this one right. Or, their poor customers are going to find yourself with your machine torn apart all over the floor, gnashing and wailing, like I was. Upgrades should never be this hard.
Oh no! Set your disdain knobs to 36, kids. It's the nouveau open source! They aren't part of our community. They're trying to make money. They're using Microsoft technology. They just started doing open source. What if they have women working for them? YE GODS, THEY'RE WEARING POLO SHIRTS! They might play golf or something. They MUST be Evil! Stop them before they make more open source! They might tarnish our image as a bunch of underpaid bearded sysadmins and nerdy college students! People might start expecting us to take showers, or something. Somebody think of the children!
I don't quite understand why this was newsworthy at all. The entire premise of this piece seems to be, "Online multi-player games are over-rated, because they just don't work for me." I don't like sports games, but I don't go around saying they're over-rated, due to some fine-grained analysis of my own personal feelings towards them. Some people like them, some people don't. That doesn't mean they're over-rated. It just means we all like different things.
This would be the appropriate time to make an off-colour English joke, but I'll behave. ;)
Why should I play Oblivion on a console which "approaches" PC quality, when have the real thing? I'm feeling a tad underwhelmed, here.
I was uninsured for part of my stay, and insured (out of pocket) for another part of my stay. (Though, in practice, I had to pre-pay and get reimbursed by the insurance, so on the doctor's end, there wasn't much of a difference.)
I always found the lack of ambulance coverage rather odd, myself. Yeah, it's expensive, but that's exactly why you need to cover it. The last thing you want is somebody dying, because they're worried about the cost of the trip to the hospital -- or worse, people trying to drive themselves to the hospital when they really shouldn't.
You can get ambulance/dental/extras/gap insurance in Australia, at fairly reasonable rates, but the folks who most need it are the ones who aren't going to have the extra money to pay for it.
What does having friends in Canada tell you about the Australian medical system? Absolutely nothing.
I am an American. I have lived in Australia.
I was never on a waiting list. Heck, usually when I walked to my doctor's office to ask for an appointment for something minor, they told me I could see a doctor straight away. I'm usually lucky if I can see a doctor within three weeks in the US, unless I'm eight shades of green and about to fall over.
My doctors had more modern equipment than I've even seen in any of my US GP's offices. Nobody was in a rush to get me out of the office. The prices were all fairly reasonable. To be honest, I had no complaints.
Actually, fotbr, your accounting is a bit flawed.
Believe it or not, as of 2007 you are paying 1.45% of your wages in Medicare tax. In addition, your employer has to pay 1.45%, so the government is ultimately getting a total of 2.9% of your wages for this purpose. And you probably don't actually get to benefit from any of this, because you don't qualify for Medicare. This is all before you (and/or your employer) even start paying for insurance and other medical expenses.
In light of all that, 1.5% would be a bargain!
What's important to understand is that there is room in programming for both big ticket senior programmers, and low cost junior programmers. A company that tries to staff up with only one or the other does so at their own peril. Senior programmers are needed to architect things, to understand the whole system, and to solve the big, nasty, mind-bending problems. Junior programmers are needed to do the less intensive tasks that would be a waste of a senior programmer. Going without senior programmers could result in a lower quality product, more time spent, or possibly worse. Going without junior programmers will both increase your costs, and wreck your programmer morale.
So, he should price himself according his skills and experience. Just being cheap isn't inherently bad, unless he's trying to get senior-level work.
Now, he did mention possibly contracting, and that's a bit different. If he wants to try to undercut the entire population of Bangalore, then more power to him. At this point, undercutting will only take jobs from undercutters.
Man, if we could ONLY get rid of drunken Electric Slide dancing, due to the grave peril that someone might accidentally record it. Please tell me this guy invented the Macarena, too.
I'm with the previous poster about this. Don't freak out until you call Microsoft and explain your problem. You are not trying to do anything dishonest, so there's no reason to hide anything. Believe it or not, they're usually pretty helpful in getting licensing issues sorted out, and in my experience, they've been very fair about it. I've never had them deny any of my requests, regardless of what upgrades and/or transfers I was doing.
In the unlikely event that they give you a hard time about it (which I have never seen happen), then pitch a fit and demand that they escalate the issue. If they insist on having this kind of protection system, they have to suffer the consequences of when it goes wrong, including unhappy customers. So, dish some consequences, man.
Vellmont pretty much nailed it. The "line" is a red herring. The problem here is a double-standard with other media. Why is it okay to have controversial movies at these festivals, but not controversial games?
I have no mixed feelings about this at all. The double-standard isn't acceptable.
In theory, they're trying to fix it before they ship it, so you don't have to deal with that kind of half-baked shit. :)
I wake up instantly, in full fight-or-flight mode, if I hear foraging noises anywhere near where I'm sleeping. I've been awaken by things as small as large insects foraging in my vicinity. I suspect that this is an old, throwback survival trait. While we may be vulnerable to other humans, I don't think we were ever that vulnerable to foraging animals at all. I think our ancestors probably woke up instantly if there were animals sniffing around.
SQLGuru is absolutely right. If you want to do graphics, or want to be a game programmer in general, you should absolutely study linear algebra.
I would also like to emphasize that as much as university programs tend to be focused on theory, it would be beneficial for the students to have some inkling of what the applications of these various branches of math are. I studied linear algebra in college, but I was forced to do an aggressive review of it, later in my career, because I had retained very little of it. Had I understood how important linear algebra was to 3D graphics, back when I was studying it, I'd have been much more excited about the topic, and would have retained the information better. Unfortunately, our program provided no context, whatsoever, for what we were learning, so we never really knew why we were studying it in the first place.
This goes back to the whole identity crisis of computer science education at Universities. Programming is just a small part of computer science, and software engineering is really an entire field of study unto its own. The trouble is that A.) people study computer science to learn to be programmers, and B.) most universities don't have "software engineering" programs at the undergraduate level. So, on the one hand, while universities want to teach you theoretical academic computer science, they also understand the horrible truth -- that most people aren't really there to learn that. So, you end up with this mishmosh hybrid thing going on, where you're learning some theoretical stuff, and some programming stuff, and if you're REALLY LUCKY, some software engineering, but you're not learning any of them in much depth.
I think would be better if they broke out software engineering as its own major, that had heavy overlap with computer science (just as computer engineering does), but which focused primarily on the creation and architecture of good software. Alternatively, computer science programs could have a specialization track for software development, with more material than these programs currently cover.
My advice to people right now is: Get a job or internship. I had a programming job while I was studying computer science, and it was a great complement to my education.
I am likewise a programmer in the industry, and I buy new, as well. I have, on rare occasion, had to buy a game used, because it simply wasn't available new. However, when given the option, I always buy new. I furthermore get pissed off at empty pre-order boxes taking up precious shelf space that could have a real game on it.
Agree with parent. To say that human artists are making work of "equal or lesser quality" is to miss the point of art, entirely. In fact, I highly suggest that the original poster go play Okami for a couple of hours. Then, he can gain some insight into why true artists are in no way threatened by technologies like this.
"After reading the list a little more carefully I am hard pressed to find even a dozen who have more than a typical career in the video game industry."
I understand your concern. To be honest, when I saw that Fiona put up 100 names, I read through the list with a critical eye. I'm a female senior programmer in the industry, and I've even been a lead before. I'm pretty well known, have spoken at conferences and universities, and have been consulted for books and articles on a number of occasions. So, you have to understand, I was bound asking myself, as I read the list: "Do I have more of a right to be on the list than this person?" Yes, I DID see a few people I could probably pull rank on. But many of the ones that were the most iffy have published books, or done something else to buoy them up a bit on the influence meter. I can't really say I've published a book, yet.
"I stand by my original statement that this article is mostly a favor piece that does nothing more than circulate names."
She went to the developer community for these names. I saw the discussion. So I don't really understand how it would be a favor piece. Now, your complaint that she should have stuck with 50 names may be valid, depending on how you want to define "influential," but I believe, nonetheless, that her intentions were good.
I have a little bit of knowledge about how this list was compiled. Fiona was originally going to publish only 50 names, but received so many recommendations that she expanded the list to 100. These women were almost entirely recommended by people outside of their companies. Many of the people who made recommendations were people (of both sexes) on the IGDA's women_dev list. There were many recommendations who didn't even make it onto the list (I recommended Evelyn Richardson, head of the Game Developer's Assocation of Australia, for example).
You missed Rima Brek. She is a programmer. Also, there just plain aren't a lot of female lead game programmers in the industry. As far as I know, I was the only one in Australia, when I was there.