First one point: - There are many people out there which will intentionally be rude, aggressive and obnoxious towards others as a way to obtain speedier service - they are usually in management and sales. This disrupts the normal work flow of the company, causing negative side-effects (which are mostly felt by other than the rude ones) which are larger in size than the positive outcomes they themselves get from this behavior. The overall count is that it's good for them but bad for the company. - Any discussion about how to counteract said behavior must take in account that you are trying to eliminate an individual behavior which has an overall negative effect on the company's efficiency and thus it's bottom line. As such, the range of actions your can take while still being "professional" is a lot larger than "if you're just doing it because you're pissed-off". - More generally, office politics ARE part of everybody's work spec (even if not a written part) so you better learn how to deal with it instead of cowering behind the "if I do not behave as a cold logical robot with no concern for my well being and future in this company then I'm being unprofessional" theory.
That said, arbitrary slowing down you work (as in: you're free now but you just throw it into your in-tray and wait 2h) would be unprofessional.
However, weighting in the behavior of the person having the problem when prioritizing your work is also professional, simply because the rude and aggressive types also tend to be the less cooperative when it comes to solving their problems - the exact same problem can be sorted out much faster when the other side cooperates.
It's the long term approach to making your job efficient: for any two problems which would otherwise have equal priority, you solve the faster to solve first then the other one - so you fix what is more important to fix and in overall your response is faster, which saves the company money. That it happens that the uncooperative people (which usually are the rude and obnoxious ones) also cause that, by nature of their own uncooperative behavior, their problems are slower to solve, it's only a problem of them, not you.
To remain utterly professional, you must do your best to distinguish between the truly uncooperative types and the cooperative but momentarily really stressed types: those with a long history of rudeness and obnoxious behavior can be safely tagged as uncooperative, for the other ones, it's actually a good idea to be extra calm and considerate - if a usually polite person is having so much problems that they're stressed out it's probably a good idea to pay extra attention to their problems.
Also keep in mind that, without being aware of it, you might have been giving a faster response to the rude-and-angry ones than to the polite ones.
That would be a likely scenario given the more common personality types to be found in IT.
Over the long run behaving like that just gives people an incentive to be rude and abrupt towards you when they want their problems solved, so you will have more and more instances of that happening.
With regards to the advice given by the parent poster, keep in mind that you need to, somehow, make it so that the people that are rude and aggressive are aware that they will get lower priority from it. Maybe something like demanding e-mails from the rude and aggressive ones but not the other ones, if your manager is willing to play along, have them fill in some kind of form "to justify my time" or "contact my manager to make sure my time is allocated to solve your problem" (e.g. add a visible barrier to provide service to them which is not there for "friendly" people), or maybe like another poster pointed out, tell them you find their behavior offensive and THEN delay service to them.
Think of it as Pavlovian response training: it works best when the subject being trained (the rude and aggressive people) directly associate the unpleasant effect (delayed response, extra hassle, etc) with the behavior you're trying to eliminate (rudeness).
Announcing "The Rise of Originality" because Blizzard basically said they're going to do an MMO which is not based on an existing story is like announcing the rise of a new city because you saw a building shaped cloud in the sky.
For one thing, it's all talk at this stage - I do believe that Duke Nukem Forever stands as a shinning example of what exactly "just talk" is worth.
For another thing, just because it's not a downright copy of an existing story, doesn't mean it's not something similar to an existing MMO or a merging of existing models (like a WoW-clone but in space).
Is the OP trying to "create some buzz" as part of a viral marketing campaign, drive potential clicks to the adverts on a website's pages or just being a Blizzard fanboy?
"Stunned users have discovered yet another feature of the iPhone - it can be used as a gravity detection device.
iPhone owner and fan John Smith from Los Angeles CA told us of his surprise at discovering this surprising feature on his iPhone: 'It was incredible, I just opened my hand and instantly my iPhone started accelerating in the same direction as the local gravitational field - I never noticed that my iPhone could do this before' - he told us while sipping a triple-shot Cafe Mocha.
From testimonies by other users, it seems that this feature in the iPhone shows itself whenever it is released at a distance from any surface.
Combine this with the new 3.0 iPhone OS and interesting things are certainly going to happen. Steve Jobs said that the iPhone will change the world when he presented it back in 2007, and that is exactly what it will do."
Actually if I remember my high-school classes on History right, what's practiced in the so called Communist countries is not actually communism (which is an idealistic utopia where everybody is equal) but instead the "dictatorship of the proletariat" when by force the proletariat (basically, the workers) take over the means of production as a step towards communism.
This was the way to achieve communism which was defended by Marx (and Lenin).
The other way (Socialism), which was defended by Engels involves using methods such as higher taxes for the rich to move toward a society where everybody is equal (e.g. communism).
All of the so called Communist countries were the product of revolutions by workers (the proletariat), with the stated (by the leaders) aim of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat and creating a communist state. Without exception they all became communist in name only, remained in the dictatorship stage and create a new elite (same shit, different flies) where the interests of the proletariat where replaced by the interests of the communist part as the main guideline.
Interestingly enough, things like progressive taxation and social protections (the so called "social net" such as unemployment benefits and free health-care) which come from the Socialist ideals live on in most of Western Europe (even though Socialist parties in Europe have long ditched the aim of going towards a communist state).
The things to keep in mind with this technology: - Cheaper manufacturing, partly because the print to roll technology is much more scalable that the processes used to manufacture traditional solar cells, but also because of high silicon prices (traditional solar-cells use a silicon substract just like integrated circuits and thus compete for the same raw materials: before the recession silicon production was insufficient for both needs, so silicon prices where making traditional solar cells more expensive). - Lower efficiency (around 9%) versus traditional solar cells (around 15%). Note that some recent advances are likely to increase the efficiency of traditional solar cells even further. - Better at generating energy under low light conditions (e.g. in the shadow) than traditional solar cells. - There are some questions about the long term viability of some thin-film solar cell technologies since they use rare elements: their price might go higher as production increases since that will also increase the demand for said rare raw materials.
All that's needed to kill the used games market is for all games to require online registration. Online distribution is just a convenient facade to obscure the fact that Steam (and other such schemes) are actually online registration platforms.
Go into any bricks-and-mortar games store and check the boxes of the top games in the PC section: - Four out of five are either pure multiplayer games or require a Steam account (or similar mechanisms from other publishers) to activate (even when they have no online component at all, such as "The Last Remnant" for the PC).
Dig a little further and you will find that it's pretty much impossible to transfer your registration of a game to somebody else: that's how they kill resale.
That said, the other point from the OP that Steam is killing the used games market (in the PC arena) still stands. I've bought games from a store, in a box, which require online registration via Steam (and then I proceeded to play the cracked version I had already downloaded).
Considering that if you have the requirement online connection to use Steam, you also have the necessary setup to easily get a cracked version, I would reason that the real purpose of requiring Steam in a store bought PC game is not to deter piracy, instead the aim is to make resale impossible.
Game publishers don't really want a slice of the use game market - what they want is to kill it on the expectation that at least some of the people that would buy the games used will instead buy them new.
Don't be surprised if console games also move more and more in the direction of requiring online registration.
I studied in a technical University in Portugal and both the Physics and the Mathematics degrees had as many women as they had men.
Computer Science had somewhat fewer women than men, Chemistry had more women than men and Electronics had almost no women (guess which one I was doing).
As far as I can tell, were I come from there as a many women in science as there are men.
(PS: From what I remembered, universities that taught social sciences did has a lot more women than men.)
Maybe the disparity being discussed here is a cultural characteristic specific to the US...?
My personal experience until now is that pretty much everybody (including myself) which has opinions and tries to convince others of their opinions is full of shit at some point or other.
Certainly in my line of work (IT) I've been confronted will plenty of end-users who have convinced themselves that in some technological things they know better than the experts: just go around any non-technology centric company where users spend most of their time in front of computers (doing things like e-mail and text editing) and you will find that a surprisingly high number of them believes that are knowledgeable enough to have firm opinions on things like system and network administration.
Even amongst IT professionals (which I suspect fall within your definition of producers) you will find people that don't know enough about a specific area (for example, cryptography) having firm opinions about how it works and how things should be done (which goes a long way to explain why every day somebody out there implements yet another weak encryption algorithm).
Keep your eye in the target: the ultimate objective is to increase our quality of life, both in the short term and in the long term.
This is why some "extreme" ecologists that defend a "back to our roots", technology-less approach are crackpots (although the underlying concept of realigning our measures of quality of life from money/goods to personal-satisfaction has a deeper wisdom than most people seem to realize).
This is also why the "extreme" reject all conservation measures just "because!" are crackpots: why reject something that does not decrease your short term quality of life while increasing your long term quality of life out of principle (like using energy efficient lamps instead of the more wasteful kind)?
There is quite a lot of room for logical, informed discussion in the middle ground: the situations where there is a balance between giving up quality of life on the short term for the possibility of increased/sustained quality of life in the long term (for example, the whole greenhouse gases discussion). On the other hand outright rejecting win-now and win-later or pushing loose-now and loose-later approaches is just ideological bias.
Some people say that the Market didn't work and market participants did not react rationally.
I say that the Market did work and market participants did react rationally: - The major investment decision makers were not the owners of the money, they were people which where paid to invest other people's money. - Their upside, due to the bonus structures in place meant that fat profit today => fat bonus. - Their downside was limited to at worst loosing their jobs (most did not). - A typical yearly bonus represented 5-10 times (or more) a yearly salary. In other words, getting a fat bonus once made up for at least 5 years out of a job.
Given these conditions, market participants acted rationally and maximized their own (personal) profit as expected. They acted to optimize their bonuses. The fact that on a longer term their personal profit did not match the banks/investors that paid their salaries/bonuses/commissions meant that on those timescales they made money while everybody else lost money.
As far as I am concerned, if every brief Obama's DOJ files is as fair minded and scholarly as this one was, I will not care if the conclusions drawn by the brief agree with, or disagree with, the conclusions I have drawn.
The biggest insult is not insulting ones ideas, it's insulting to ones intelligence.
As somebody that has imported and sold Chinese manufactured devices, I can tell you that if you buy it directly from China factory you have at least a 1 in 10 chance that it is dead on arrival, a 1 in 5 chance that it be dead withing 1 year and a 1 in 2 chance that it has some slight imperfection.
The more complex the device the worse it is.
As an importer, the only way to live with this is to do our own QA checks and that's because we have the products branded with our logo. Many importers (that don't use their own brand) don't really care that much.
The problem is that the Chinese manufacturers seem to follow the process of: design a device, then remove parts until it stops working and add the last part removed and finally downgrade whatever parts are left as far as possible while istill keeping the device working.
The kind of faults I've seen usually boil down to cheap parts and designs that sacrifice quality/reliability and are optimized to be able change the suppliers of the parts used.
Also, their QA sucks.
As much as I bitch and moan (as a consumer) about the "brand"-tax (an iPod's price is 90% brand), the truth is that, until the Chinese manufacturers changes their approach to production, non-Chinese-branded products just give you piece of mind.
Their acoustic meta-material uses resonant cavities. The problem with it is that resonance works perfectly for a specific frequency and not at all for different frequencies.
A sonar cloak made of this material would be the equivalent of an invisibility cloak for people that are only capable of seing in a very narrow spectrum of Red: worthless if your enemy can "see" in more than one frequency.
I work in Software Engineering and I've worked for both IT Consultancies and IT Products companies (and also many non-IT companies).
My experience in the industry is that there are very, very few people that are knowledgeable and capable in all of Requirements Gathering, Analysis and Software Engineering.
You need somebody that:
Can speak to non-technical oriented counterparts using their terminology.
Can detect and distinguish when the business client is presenting solution oriented requests and guide them to actually look at their needs instead.
Guide a business client through discovery and analysis of their business needs.
Have enough technical expertise to know what's feasible and not-feasible plus what's cheaper and what's more expensive (often, some business "needs" turn out to be "nice to haves" which will be dropped if too expensive).
Have enough project experience to actually know the typical "additional needs" that are often forgotten during the initial stage and usually pop-up once the software starts being used (things like usage reports, access control and others).
In a way, this is the same pattern as the approach that you describe above.
In this industry, the vast majority of the people that end up being send to do what in the end boils down to Requirements Gathering and Technical Analysis fall in one of the following groups:
Salesman: know nothing about technical things, will happily commit to having the impossible done yesterday and will say whatever it takes to get their sales commission.
Managers: often coming from a technical background, sometimes not. Most moved to management without ever have gone through the experience of doing Technical Analysis, which means that (if they're good managers) they know people, they know some low level out of date technical stuff (or very high level, if they're not from a technical background) but they don't know how to survey, decompose and evaluate a business process and design a technical solution that fits into it (e.g. analysis).
Developers: your typical techie. Knows all about the nitty-gritty details of developing applications but has trouble talking to a business counterpart in business terms. While they know all about the feasibility of implementing something or not, they have a lot of trouble understanding business processes and needs and creating technical solutions that actually fit into and complement existing business processes.
Consultants: basically a cross between a salesmen and a developer. They're usually all over the place with regards to their expertise, if you're lucky you might actually get one that knows all the necessary things (rare). They can usually talk business enough to do some requirements gathering and know technology enough to know what can and cannot be done, but have trouble in the analysis part of things. The problem with consultants is that many companies (especially IT consultancies) will put the label "consultant" in anybody and everybody, so you can't rely on a "consultant" actually having enough experience in the relevant areas to do a proper requirements gathering and analysis.
Business Analysts: Usually found in large non-IT companies, supposedly to bridge between the business and IT. Usually they are people promoted from a low-level business, secretarial or sales position. They don't usually have technical backgrounds, often know a lot about one kind of business but know almost nothing about analysis. They're not methodical and produce vaguely worded requirements documents which are incomplete, unclear, internally-inconsistent and often self-denying (e.g. requiring both A and not-A as items of functionality).
I've been to the US many years ago, before 9/11 - I still have a US Visa in my passport (not needed anymore).
Since then I've moved countries twice and went on vacations (and sometimes business) to countless countries.
Yet I've never again been to the US - I purposefully refuse to travel there because of things like this and I've even been offered a job in Silicon Valley a couple of years ago.
20 or 30 years ago the USA was a nation admired by the vast majority of people out there - a land of dreams for many, even in other rich nations and amongst well educated people. Nowadays it's just a majorly fucked-up place.
The USA looks a lot like a modern empire on it's twilight years - a bit like ancient Rome when the empire was unraveling.
Many of the greatest ancient empires collapsed due to internal corruption rather than fell to external enemies. What's with the USA now looks a lot like that.
If your theory about the need for socializing was the end all explanation for the success of Online games, then Second Life (as pure a socializing game as it could be) would be by far the most successful of them all.
The truth is that not all of us in our 30s are driven to play Online games for companionship (or are fat and live in our parent's basement;)).
Online games (like WoW or Unreal Tournament) have two really big differences from equivalent single player games, both little or not at all social: - MMORPGs contain HUGE universes, much bigger that the largest of single player RPGs and they periodically grow. A game like WoW can keep an "explorer" type busy for months, even years. - The current status of AI in games is such that playing against computer-controlled bots is less satisfying that playing against people. Part of the reason is technical: bots are incapable of complex strategical moves - and part is social: it is more satisfying to demonstrate superior skills against a fellow human than against a bot. This mostly satisfies the Achiever types.
It's happened already: most pure software development jobs moved to India.
The great "software development is a portable skill that can be practiced remotely from anywhere" discovery didn't end up in "rich nation nationals, living in far away, cheap and exotic locations, being paid rich nation salaries" instead it ended up as "nationals in far way, cheap and exotic locations, being paid local (cheap) salaries".
It's the good old navel-gazing which is the default in any culture and common amongst those that never lived in another culture: all that they know about, all that they care about and all their references are what they see and what happens in their cultural group (often a nation, but not always).
The US shows more of this than other countries because: a) It's big, reasonably wealthy and culturally very uniform (the cultural differences between most people in California and most people in Virginia are a lot fewer than those between most people in Norway and most people in Turkey - an equivalent distance) b) It produces and exports most of modern media, thus while other people are frequently exposed to US culture as encoded in movies and TV series, most Americans are rarely exposed to non-US culture. c) The US political system strongly pushes blind, uncritical patriotism as a form of mass manipulation. Typically this boils down to "we're great because we live in a great nation" with the implicit "anybody that criticizes our nation criticizes it's greatness and thus criticizes us all". The side effect of this is to make Americans (and similarly, those people raised in nations where patriotism is overemphasized) exceptionally blind to their own social and cultural issues and closed to accept other people's social and cultural views.
If you don't believe me, just ask any born and bred US citizen which has lived a year or more in any other country (exception being made for those that live in a-little-piece-of-the-US-in-another-land environments, such as military bases).
My personal experience in living in a culture where people are blunt and open is that it makes it easier to hide the deceitful and machiavellic under a "loud" apparently blunt and open exterior.
Some of the most devious people I know are also the most loud and insistent in their affirmations of friendship towards others.
... to see if an information controlling measure is intended to empower citizens or to manipulate the choices of citizens by controlling what they can know is as follows: a) Is it a mechanism where people are allowed to opt-in (for example, forcing ISPs to make available to their clients page blocking software which they can install on their home computers) or is it a default mechanism or worse, one from which the users cannot opt-out b) How is the list of blocked sites supervised? Is it open for all to check or at least supervised by a non-governmental independent entity (members are not selected by the government, the funding is not controlled by the government and they have no economical or political reasons to bow to the will of the government)?
Applying this test shows that what the Australian government now proposes is still a measure to "manipulate the choices of citizens by controlling what they can know": 1) Citizens will get their information censored by default if it's so "chosen" by entities which are sensitive to political pressure (ISPs will do it if only to have a chance to win government contracts and to "avoid trouble" getting licenses for things like accessing/building infrastructure) 2) The list is still secret and it's contents controlled by a non-independent entity.
All you have to do is look at the UK - "voluntary" ("but we will make it mandatory by law if you don't implement it") filtering by the ISPs using a list made up by an organization which is 100% controlled by the government (both in terms of appointing the management and providing funds) although disguised as "non-governmental organization". The leaks that have popped-out show arbitrary censorship, including of sites that criticize that system.
Slashdot Mirror
First one point:
- There are many people out there which will intentionally be rude, aggressive and obnoxious towards others as a way to obtain speedier service - they are usually in management and sales. This disrupts the normal work flow of the company, causing negative side-effects (which are mostly felt by other than the rude ones) which are larger in size than the positive outcomes they themselves get from this behavior. The overall count is that it's good for them but bad for the company.
- Any discussion about how to counteract said behavior must take in account that you are trying to eliminate an individual behavior which has an overall negative effect on the company's efficiency and thus it's bottom line. As such, the range of actions your can take while still being "professional" is a lot larger than "if you're just doing it because you're pissed-off".
- More generally, office politics ARE part of everybody's work spec (even if not a written part) so you better learn how to deal with it instead of cowering behind the "if I do not behave as a cold logical robot with no concern for my well being and future in this company then I'm being unprofessional" theory.
That said, arbitrary slowing down you work (as in: you're free now but you just throw it into your in-tray and wait 2h) would be unprofessional.
However, weighting in the behavior of the person having the problem when prioritizing your work is also professional, simply because the rude and aggressive types also tend to be the less cooperative when it comes to solving their problems - the exact same problem can be sorted out much faster when the other side cooperates.
It's the long term approach to making your job efficient: for any two problems which would otherwise have equal priority, you solve the faster to solve first then the other one - so you fix what is more important to fix and in overall your response is faster, which saves the company money. That it happens that the uncooperative people (which usually are the rude and obnoxious ones) also cause that, by nature of their own uncooperative behavior, their problems are slower to solve, it's only a problem of them, not you.
To remain utterly professional, you must do your best to distinguish between the truly uncooperative types and the cooperative but momentarily really stressed types: those with a long history of rudeness and obnoxious behavior can be safely tagged as uncooperative, for the other ones, it's actually a good idea to be extra calm and considerate - if a usually polite person is having so much problems that they're stressed out it's probably a good idea to pay extra attention to their problems.
Also keep in mind that, without being aware of it, you might have been giving a faster response to the rude-and-angry ones than to the polite ones.
That would be a likely scenario given the more common personality types to be found in IT.
Over the long run behaving like that just gives people an incentive to be rude and abrupt towards you when they want their problems solved, so you will have more and more instances of that happening.
With regards to the advice given by the parent poster, keep in mind that you need to, somehow, make it so that the people that are rude and aggressive are aware that they will get lower priority from it. Maybe something like demanding e-mails from the rude and aggressive ones but not the other ones, if your manager is willing to play along, have them fill in some kind of form "to justify my time" or "contact my manager to make sure my time is allocated to solve your problem" (e.g. add a visible barrier to provide service to them which is not there for "friendly" people), or maybe like another poster pointed out, tell them you find their behavior offensive and THEN delay service to them.
Think of it as Pavlovian response training: it works best when the subject being trained (the rude and aggressive people) directly associate the unpleasant effect (delayed response, extra hassle, etc) with the behavior you're trying to eliminate (rudeness).
Announcing "The Rise of Originality" because Blizzard basically said they're going to do an MMO which is not based on an existing story is like announcing the rise of a new city because you saw a building shaped cloud in the sky.
For one thing, it's all talk at this stage - I do believe that Duke Nukem Forever stands as a shinning example of what exactly "just talk" is worth.
For another thing, just because it's not a downright copy of an existing story, doesn't mean it's not something similar to an existing MMO or a merging of existing models (like a WoW-clone but in space).
Is the OP trying to "create some buzz" as part of a viral marketing campaign, drive potential clicks to the adverts on a website's pages or just being a Blizzard fanboy?
This just in:
"Stunned users have discovered yet another feature of the iPhone - it can be used as a gravity detection device.
iPhone owner and fan John Smith from Los Angeles CA told us of his surprise at discovering this surprising feature on his iPhone: 'It was incredible, I just opened my hand and instantly my iPhone started accelerating in the same direction as the local gravitational field - I never noticed that my iPhone could do this before' - he told us while sipping a triple-shot Cafe Mocha.
From testimonies by other users, it seems that this feature in the iPhone shows itself whenever it is released at a distance from any surface.
Combine this with the new 3.0 iPhone OS and interesting things are certainly going to happen. Steve Jobs said that the iPhone will change the world when he presented it back in 2007, and that is exactly what it will do."
Actually if I remember my high-school classes on History right, what's practiced in the so called Communist countries is not actually communism (which is an idealistic utopia where everybody is equal) but instead the "dictatorship of the proletariat" when by force the proletariat (basically, the workers) take over the means of production as a step towards communism.
This was the way to achieve communism which was defended by Marx (and Lenin).
The other way (Socialism), which was defended by Engels involves using methods such as higher taxes for the rich to move toward a society where everybody is equal (e.g. communism).
All of the so called Communist countries were the product of revolutions by workers (the proletariat), with the stated (by the leaders) aim of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat and creating a communist state. Without exception they all became communist in name only, remained in the dictatorship stage and create a new elite (same shit, different flies) where the interests of the proletariat where replaced by the interests of the communist part as the main guideline.
Interestingly enough, things like progressive taxation and social protections (the so called "social net" such as unemployment benefits and free health-care) which come from the Socialist ideals live on in most of Western Europe (even though Socialist parties in Europe have long ditched the aim of going towards a communist state).
Companies have been manufacturing and selling thin-film, flexible printed to roll solar panels since at least a year ago.
For example, check http://www.uni-solar.com/ and http://www.firstsolar.com/
The things to keep in mind with this technology:
- Cheaper manufacturing, partly because the print to roll technology is much more scalable that the processes used to manufacture traditional solar cells, but also because of high silicon prices (traditional solar-cells use a silicon substract just like integrated circuits and thus compete for the same raw materials: before the recession silicon production was insufficient for both needs, so silicon prices where making traditional solar cells more expensive).
- Lower efficiency (around 9%) versus traditional solar cells (around 15%). Note that some recent advances are likely to increase the efficiency of traditional solar cells even further.
- Better at generating energy under low light conditions (e.g. in the shadow) than traditional solar cells.
- There are some questions about the long term viability of some thin-film solar cell technologies since they use rare elements: their price might go higher as production increases since that will also increase the demand for said rare raw materials.
All that's needed to kill the used games market is for all games to require online registration. Online distribution is just a convenient facade to obscure the fact that Steam (and other such schemes) are actually online registration platforms.
Go into any bricks-and-mortar games store and check the boxes of the top games in the PC section:
- Four out of five are either pure multiplayer games or require a Steam account (or similar mechanisms from other publishers) to activate (even when they have no online component at all, such as "The Last Remnant" for the PC).
Dig a little further and you will find that it's pretty much impossible to transfer your registration of a game to somebody else: that's how they kill resale.
That said, the other point from the OP that Steam is killing the used games market (in the PC arena) still stands. I've bought games from a store, in a box, which require online registration via Steam (and then I proceeded to play the cracked version I had already downloaded).
Considering that if you have the requirement online connection to use Steam, you also have the necessary setup to easily get a cracked version, I would reason that the real purpose of requiring Steam in a store bought PC game is not to deter piracy, instead the aim is to make resale impossible.
Game publishers don't really want a slice of the use game market - what they want is to kill it on the expectation that at least some of the people that would buy the games used will instead buy them new.
Don't be surprised if console games also move more and more in the direction of requiring online registration.
I studied in a technical University in Portugal and both the Physics and the Mathematics degrees had as many women as they had men.
Computer Science had somewhat fewer women than men, Chemistry had more women than men and Electronics had almost no women (guess which one I was doing).
As far as I can tell, were I come from there as a many women in science as there are men.
(PS: From what I remembered, universities that taught social sciences did has a lot more women than men.)
Maybe the disparity being discussed here is a cultural characteristic specific to the US...?
My personal experience until now is that pretty much everybody (including myself) which has opinions and tries to convince others of their opinions is full of shit at some point or other.
Certainly in my line of work (IT) I've been confronted will plenty of end-users who have convinced themselves that in some technological things they know better than the experts: just go around any non-technology centric company where users spend most of their time in front of computers (doing things like e-mail and text editing) and you will find that a surprisingly high number of them believes that are knowledgeable enough to have firm opinions on things like system and network administration.
Even amongst IT professionals (which I suspect fall within your definition of producers) you will find people that don't know enough about a specific area (for example, cryptography) having firm opinions about how it works and how things should be done (which goes a long way to explain why every day somebody out there implements yet another weak encryption algorithm).
Here's something interesting:
Following a link from the first article we get:
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
which in turn leads us to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person)#The_psychology_of_cranks
which pretty much explains the logic behind at least 10% of the posts here in Slashdot.
Keep your eye in the target: the ultimate objective is to increase our quality of life, both in the short term and in the long term.
This is why some "extreme" ecologists that defend a "back to our roots", technology-less approach are crackpots (although the underlying concept of realigning our measures of quality of life from money/goods to personal-satisfaction has a deeper wisdom than most people seem to realize).
This is also why the "extreme" reject all conservation measures just "because!" are crackpots: why reject something that does not decrease your short term quality of life while increasing your long term quality of life out of principle (like using energy efficient lamps instead of the more wasteful kind)?
There is quite a lot of room for logical, informed discussion in the middle ground: the situations where there is a balance between giving up quality of life on the short term for the possibility of increased/sustained quality of life in the long term (for example, the whole greenhouse gases discussion). On the other hand outright rejecting win-now and win-later or pushing loose-now and loose-later approaches is just ideological bias.
Some people say that the Market didn't work and market participants did not react rationally.
I say that the Market did work and market participants did react rationally:
- The major investment decision makers were not the owners of the money, they were people which where paid to invest other people's money.
- Their upside, due to the bonus structures in place meant that fat profit today => fat bonus.
- Their downside was limited to at worst loosing their jobs (most did not).
- A typical yearly bonus represented 5-10 times (or more) a yearly salary. In other words, getting a fat bonus once made up for at least 5 years out of a job.
Given these conditions, market participants acted rationally and maximized their own (personal) profit as expected. They acted to optimize their bonuses. The fact that on a longer term their personal profit did not match the banks/investors that paid their salaries/bonuses/commissions meant that on those timescales they made money while everybody else lost money.
The biggest insult is not insulting ones ideas, it's insulting to ones intelligence.
As somebody that has imported and sold Chinese manufactured devices, I can tell you that if you buy it directly from China factory you have at least a 1 in 10 chance that it is dead on arrival, a 1 in 5 chance that it be dead withing 1 year and a 1 in 2 chance that it has some slight imperfection.
The more complex the device the worse it is.
As an importer, the only way to live with this is to do our own QA checks and that's because we have the products branded with our logo. Many importers (that don't use their own brand) don't really care that much.
The problem is that the Chinese manufacturers seem to follow the process of: design a device, then remove parts until it stops working and add the last part removed and finally downgrade whatever parts are left as far as possible while istill keeping the device working.
The kind of faults I've seen usually boil down to cheap parts and designs that sacrifice quality/reliability and are optimized to be able change the suppliers of the parts used.
Also, their QA sucks.
As much as I bitch and moan (as a consumer) about the "brand"-tax (an iPod's price is 90% brand), the truth is that, until the Chinese manufacturers changes their approach to production, non-Chinese-branded products just give you piece of mind.
Their acoustic meta-material uses resonant cavities. The problem with it is that resonance works perfectly for a specific frequency and not at all for different frequencies.
A sonar cloak made of this material would be the equivalent of an invisibility cloak for people that are only capable of seing in a very narrow spectrum of Red: worthless if your enemy can "see" in more than one frequency.
I work in Software Engineering and I've worked for both IT Consultancies and IT Products companies (and also many non-IT companies).
My experience in the industry is that there are very, very few people that are knowledgeable and capable in all of Requirements Gathering, Analysis and Software Engineering.
You need somebody that:
In a way, this is the same pattern as the approach that you describe above.
In this industry, the vast majority of the people that end up being send to do what in the end boils down to Requirements Gathering and Technical Analysis fall in one of the following groups:
I've been to the US many years ago, before 9/11 - I still have a US Visa in my passport (not needed anymore).
Since then I've moved countries twice and went on vacations (and sometimes business) to countless countries.
Yet I've never again been to the US - I purposefully refuse to travel there because of things like this and I've even been offered a job in Silicon Valley a couple of years ago.
20 or 30 years ago the USA was a nation admired by the vast majority of people out there - a land of dreams for many, even in other rich nations and amongst well educated people. Nowadays it's just a majorly fucked-up place.
The USA looks a lot like a modern empire on it's twilight years - a bit like ancient Rome when the empire was unraveling.
Many of the greatest ancient empires collapsed due to internal corruption rather than fell to external enemies. What's with the USA now looks a lot like that.
I really think there should be and equivalent to the Goodwin Law for when somebody posts a Linux versus Microsoft post in a discussing thread.
Maybe we could call it the Balmer Law and say that the thread has been Balmerized... ???
If your theory about the need for socializing was the end all explanation for the success of Online games, then Second Life (as pure a socializing game as it could be) would be by far the most successful of them all.
The truth is that not all of us in our 30s are driven to play Online games for companionship (or are fat and live in our parent's basement ;)).
There are multiple drivers to play online games (see the Bartle Food Groups: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_Test) only one of which is Socializing.
Online games (like WoW or Unreal Tournament) have two really big differences from equivalent single player games, both little or not at all social:
- MMORPGs contain HUGE universes, much bigger that the largest of single player RPGs and they periodically grow. A game like WoW can keep an "explorer" type busy for months, even years.
- The current status of AI in games is such that playing against computer-controlled bots is less satisfying that playing against people. Part of the reason is technical: bots are incapable of complex strategical moves - and part is social: it is more satisfying to demonstrate superior skills against a fellow human than against a bot. This mostly satisfies the Achiever types.
It's happened already: most pure software development jobs moved to India.
The great "software development is a portable skill that can be practiced remotely from anywhere" discovery didn't end up in "rich nation nationals, living in far away, cheap and exotic locations, being paid rich nation salaries" instead it ended up as "nationals in far way, cheap and exotic locations, being paid local (cheap) salaries".
With hindsight it's all a pretty obvious outcome.
It's the good old navel-gazing which is the default in any culture and common amongst those that never lived in another culture: all that they know about, all that they care about and all their references are what they see and what happens in their cultural group (often a nation, but not always).
The US shows more of this than other countries because:
a) It's big, reasonably wealthy and culturally very uniform (the cultural differences between most people in California and most people in Virginia are a lot fewer than those between most people in Norway and most people in Turkey - an equivalent distance)
b) It produces and exports most of modern media, thus while other people are frequently exposed to US culture as encoded in movies and TV series, most Americans are rarely exposed to non-US culture.
c) The US political system strongly pushes blind, uncritical patriotism as a form of mass manipulation. Typically this boils down to "we're great because we live in a great nation" with the implicit "anybody that criticizes our nation criticizes it's greatness and thus criticizes us all". The side effect of this is to make Americans (and similarly, those people raised in nations where patriotism is overemphasized) exceptionally blind to their own social and cultural issues and closed to accept other people's social and cultural views.
If you don't believe me, just ask any born and bred US citizen which has lived a year or more in any other country (exception being made for those that live in a-little-piece-of-the-US-in-another-land environments, such as military bases).
My personal experience in living in a culture where people are blunt and open is that it makes it easier to hide the deceitful and machiavellic under a "loud" apparently blunt and open exterior.
Some of the most devious people I know are also the most loud and insistent in their affirmations of friendship towards others.
... to see if an information controlling measure is intended to empower citizens or to manipulate the choices of citizens by controlling what they can know is as follows:
a) Is it a mechanism where people are allowed to opt-in (for example, forcing ISPs to make available to their clients page blocking software which they can install on their home computers) or is it a default mechanism or worse, one from which the users cannot opt-out
b) How is the list of blocked sites supervised? Is it open for all to check or at least supervised by a non-governmental independent entity (members are not selected by the government, the funding is not controlled by the government and they have no economical or political reasons to bow to the will of the government)?
Applying this test shows that what the Australian government now proposes is still a measure to "manipulate the choices of citizens by controlling what they can know":
1) Citizens will get their information censored by default if it's so "chosen" by entities which are sensitive to political pressure (ISPs will do it if only to have a chance to win government contracts and to "avoid trouble" getting licenses for things like accessing/building infrastructure)
2) The list is still secret and it's contents controlled by a non-independent entity.
All you have to do is look at the UK - "voluntary" ("but we will make it mandatory by law if you don't implement it") filtering by the ISPs using a list made up by an organization which is 100% controlled by the government (both in terms of appointing the management and providing funds) although disguised as "non-governmental organization". The leaks that have popped-out show arbitrary censorship, including of sites that criticize that system.
Probably got it from eBay as a "b-stock, factory refurbished: 1 bit disabled"