I think you're getting what the submitter said completely backwards.
When he wrote "The lessons are that...", he clearly intended to say that this was the conclusion that people would draw based upon the facts of the case should Parexel fail to be held accountable. Given the tenor of some of the responses here ("What about "testing" do these people not understand?") I'd say he was completely right.
In other words, he wasn't saying that the test subjects were ignorant and foolish: he meant that if this kind of thing can happen, than only the ignorant and foolish would sign up to be test subjects. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one.
I would guess that the actual statement from Parexel was "There should be no serious side effects" to say otherwise is outright lying as the purpose of the TEST is to see what's going to happen. Promises to the contrary were probably not made, but people seem to not understand the english language these days. 6-8 weeks does not mean call us up in 6 weeks demanding to know where your stuff is.
That's correct. However, it does mean that you can call them up in 8 weeks demanding to know where your stuff is.
If a drug company says, "we believe there will be no serious side effects connected with the use of this drug," it's certainly true that the person being paid to test it should do so advisedly. However, he also has a reasonable expectation that the "serious" side effects should, at least, be able to be mitigated. Sudden excruciating pain is bad, but chronic excruciating pain, loss of extremities to gangrene, and eventual death is beyond "serious."
IANAL, but I'd suggest that that's your cause of action there.
I'm with the GP poster. There are a lot of sites which do Cthulu only knows what to good markup, all in the name of making it look just-so in IE.
Take a look at an old book on web design, Creating Killer Web Sites. This book was in its second edition almost ten years ago, which should give you some notion of how dated the advice now seems.
Siegal (the author) goes on a lengthy rant in the book about how web design "used to be" (read: in 1993) the exclusive domain of geeks and nerds, until brave graphic designers seized it and bravely said, "Hey! We're going to use tables and bad markup and whatever bizarre quirk of page rendering we can find in order to make our pages look the way we want them to!" It's an impassioned cry praising standards non-compliance. Every guy who has ever had to pore over some hacked-together layout that rendered correctly two browser versions ago, but seems impossible to do now, has some disciple of Siegal to thank for it.
I think that future incarnations of Photoshop will be geared more toward retouching photos that have already been post-processed elsewhere. This is the one area where Photoshop has no competition, and it genuine excels in. Hopefully the rest of the 'cruft' will be taken out, and in the place of one giagantic monolithic application, we'll have several small applications tweaked and tuned for doing more specific tasks. By virtue of the fact that it will be easier for competetiors to compete with adobe on these small applications, I have a feeling that we're going to see some very polished software being released for the graphic arts industry in the next few years, as adobe becomes less and less relevant.
I use Photoshop for all of my post-process stuff except for organization. (Adobe Bridge is crap. I haven't tried Lightroom yet. I paid money for iView Media Pro a few months before they got bought by Microsoft. Aperture is a rip-off. Woe is me.)
I agree that Photoshop has gotten way too unwieldy. My wife, who is an illustrator, often complains about this: Illustrator doesn't offer all the functionality she needs by itself, but trying to work in Illustrator and Photoshop simultaneously is a trying experience. But I don't know how Adobe could start to pull Photoshop apart without seriously alienating some sizeable portion of their customers.
Anyway, if Aperture continues to improve, I may have to make the switch to it eventually. But I'm with you - I can't see the coming features/usability war between the graphics software vendors as anything other than a good thing.
And don't forget Pros using Apple apps - they're UB already.
I don't have any numbers of any kind to back this up, so take this with several large dollops of salt, but: I suspect that the number of creative pros who rely on Adobe tools is much, much higher than the number of those who rely on the Apple in-house tools.
And don't underestimate the capacity of design pros to drag their feet. For years, I knew graphic artists who refused to upgrade to OS X because Quark wouldn't run natively in it. Of course, when the new version of Quark finally was release, Adobe's answer was arguably much better.
Well... yeah, except for the fact that I have. The demo, that is. I don't play, online or otherwise, as much as I used to since becoming a father, but I downloaded the demo for Prey to give it a shot. I found the dialogue to be incredibly obnoxious - I actually took extra care not to let my wife (who was an anthropolgy major in college) hear any of the audio, not just because the squishy flesh-rending sounds would bother her, but because the script is so lame. At least in HL2, the characters who do talk don't sound like they were scripted by a high schooler who is reading Casteneda for the first time.
Online play was about as frenetic as I remember Quake 2 and UT as being. The effect of the portals and rearranged gravity isn't as much as you'd think in a busy multiplayer game. In the end, you see someone move, you shoot them, and the fact that he's running up the wall at the time didn't really effect my perception of the gameplay too much.
IT's only available as a part of solaris so I guess it's useless to me.
If Solaris isn't an option for you, I guess so. At least, right now. From the Wikipedia entry on ZFS:
Sun has said it is investigating the porting of ZFS to Linux, but there are no plans to port it to HP-UX or AIX.[4] Since the code for ZFS is open source, a port to other platforms can be produced without Sun's involvement. Matt Dillon from the DragonFly BSD project started porting ZFS to DragonFly BSD as a plan for their 1.5 release.[5]
It also appears that Apple is interested in porting ZFS to their Mac OS X operating system, according to a post by a Sun employee on the opensolaris.org zfs-discuss mailing list.[6]
It's really doubtful anything new involving weapons and combat can be invented anymore.
What about Half Life's gravity gun? What about Black's art style? What about Prey's... EVERYTHING?
It's funny you should mention Prey... I'm not sure that anything about the game really qualifies as "new" anymore. The original game was proposed over ten years ago, and the "Native American guy gets abducted and must kick ass" angle has been intact since 1996.
There were non-interactive demos at E3 in 1997 which showed off the nifty-neato portal technology. Since then, the whole thing has been torn down and built up again once or twice, but when I first heard that there was a playable demo, my reaction was... well, it's not quite the gold master of Duke Nukem Forever, but it's close.
How much more integrated can it get, shy of running in kernel space? There's already an Oracle-specific file system which is used in RAC installs. It's the only filesystem of its kind which is in the main Linux kernel.
I'm not really sure how much deeper it's likely to get.
Side note - government agencies also hire contractors for tech jobs when they're convinced they can't get the appropriate talent themselves. I'll never forget the lecture I attended where an FBI "cybercrime" specialist told a bunch of CIOs and CEOs about the dangers posed by hackers intent on "trading Juarez."
It actually took me a few minutes to realize that he meant "warez."
Talk about losing sight of the forest due to the trees...
Colon claimed that he did this because he was tired of having to seek bureaucratic authorization for every last task, including adding printers. Having worked with government agencies before, I can say I understand his frustration. But his later justification was priceless:
Colon's lawyer said in a court filing that his client was hired to work on the FBI's "Trilogy" computer system but became frustrated over "bureaucratic" obstacles, such as obtaining a written authorization from the FBI's Washington headquarters for "routine" matters such as adding a printer or moving a new computer onto the system. He said Colon used the hacked user names and passwords to bypass the authorization process and speed up the work.
Colon's lawyers said FBI officials in the Springfield office approved of what he was doing, and that one agent even gave Colon his own password, enabling him to get to the encrypted database in March 2004. Because FBI employees are required to change their passwords every 90 days, Colon hacked into the system on three later occasions to update his password list.
Okay, so: getting authorization was onerous, so he asked for permission from agents in the Springfield office to forge their superiors' credentials in order to speed up the process. And they gave it to him.
Did you get that? I was originally gonna boldface the best parts, but I couldn't decide where to start.
1. The contractor, fed up with an onerous and ridiculous authorization process, 2. asked for permission from FBI officials to crack their superiors' passwords, 3. and the FBI officials in question said yes.
Okay, so, Colon is in court. What happened to the FBI staffers who gave him the go-ahead?
I used to do support for a small IT group at a University. In addition to the general sysadmin stuff and the odd bit of web/db foo, I also did basic tech support for our building.
One person in particular kept asking me questions about how to do various things in Excel or Word - nothing that was too obvious, but nothing too difficult either. What I realized after a while was that even though these people spent literally hours a day working in these applications, whereas I used them (at most) an hour or two out of every week, they considered me an expert.
Eventually, I started responding to every question with, "I'm not sure - I need to look that up in the help" before every question. I usually needed to do that anyway, but once they realized that's what I was actually doing, I think it emboldened them to try it themselves.
1. You start with an extremely barebones (read: you'd never release this into the wild) program that actually runs, passes all its unit tests, and implements maybe one important feature. (eg: a shopping cart program which will show you the contents of a catalog.) 2. With each iteration, you add a new feature, refactoring older code as necessary. Start with critical functionality and work your way down the requirements. 3. Continue until the product is releaseable.
The "vertical" bit means that rather than taking the "let's implement all the methods we'll need in the CatalogItem class first" approach (horizontal), you're trying to make it actually do something useful (eg, show a list of products) with each iteration.
Congratulations, Slashdot! The FBI will be along shortly to raid your offices on suspicion of violating the DMCA, the Patriot Act, and probably some other bullshit piece of legislation we don't even know about.
Oh, yeah - it's a no-knock warrant, so put your pants on now.
MySQL isn't a member either. On the other hand, Red Hat and Novell are, despite the fact that they're clearly competitors. So what does MySQL have to do with it?
... slightly less elegant than the traditional neural implant...
Wow.
I mean, I knew I was having trouble keeping up with all the latest in gadgetry these days, but I must really be slipping if neural implants went mainstream and I missed it.
I'd disagree. Premium DVDs float around the $20-$25 mark (or very premium in the $30-$40 realm) and on a personal level I think Valve is worth it.
Agreed. Also, I have to say that the gameplay in Ep. 1 was extremely tight. I enjoyed HL2, but there were long periods that felt a lot like filler (eg, "get out of the buggy, cross the bridge, disable the forcefield, cross back, get back in the buggy..."). Not so with episode 1. I'm playing through it again now for the third time.
ALYX got to use the smegging sniper rifle and I'm still stuck with the cheezy crossbow. *sigh*...guess it's back to CS or DoD for my sniper fix.
Heh. Yeah. You'd think we'd at least get some tripmines to play with or something.
Please, no! After the incredible sticker shock of the XBox 360, followed by the news that the PS3 wasn't going to be any better, I was poised to snag the Wii just to stick it in the eye of the other console manufacturers. "See? Half the cost of your previous systems! Nyah!"
If Apple were to by Nintendo, the Wii will double in price overnight, and likely catch fire if left on a carpet. Woe betide me!
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're getting what the submitter said completely backwards.
When he wrote "The lessons are that...", he clearly intended to say that this was the conclusion that people would draw based upon the facts of the case should Parexel fail to be held accountable. Given the tenor of some of the responses here ("What about "testing" do these people not understand?") I'd say he was completely right.
In other words, he wasn't saying that the test subjects were ignorant and foolish: he meant that if this kind of thing can happen, than only the ignorant and foolish would sign up to be test subjects. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one.
That's correct. However, it does mean that you can call them up in 8 weeks demanding to know where your stuff is.
If a drug company says, "we believe there will be no serious side effects connected with the use of this drug," it's certainly true that the person being paid to test it should do so advisedly. However, he also has a reasonable expectation that the "serious" side effects should, at least, be able to be mitigated. Sudden excruciating pain is bad, but chronic excruciating pain, loss of extremities to gangrene, and eventual death is beyond "serious."
IANAL, but I'd suggest that that's your cause of action there.
Conversely, if you find someone else's unsecured wireless network, why would you complain if they decided to flip all the images?
I'm with the GP poster. There are a lot of sites which do Cthulu only knows what to good markup, all in the name of making it look just-so in IE.
Take a look at an old book on web design, Creating Killer Web Sites. This book was in its second edition almost ten years ago, which should give you some notion of how dated the advice now seems.
Siegal (the author) goes on a lengthy rant in the book about how web design "used to be" (read: in 1993) the exclusive domain of geeks and nerds, until brave graphic designers seized it and bravely said, "Hey! We're going to use tables and bad markup and whatever bizarre quirk of page rendering we can find in order to make our pages look the way we want them to!" It's an impassioned cry praising standards non-compliance. Every guy who has ever had to pore over some hacked-together layout that rendered correctly two browser versions ago, but seems impossible to do now, has some disciple of Siegal to thank for it.
I use Photoshop for all of my post-process stuff except for organization. (Adobe Bridge is crap. I haven't tried Lightroom yet. I paid money for iView Media Pro a few months before they got bought by Microsoft. Aperture is a rip-off. Woe is me.)
I agree that Photoshop has gotten way too unwieldy. My wife, who is an illustrator, often complains about this: Illustrator doesn't offer all the functionality she needs by itself, but trying to work in Illustrator and Photoshop simultaneously is a trying experience. But I don't know how Adobe could start to pull Photoshop apart without seriously alienating some sizeable portion of their customers.
Anyway, if Aperture continues to improve, I may have to make the switch to it eventually. But I'm with you - I can't see the coming features/usability war between the graphics software vendors as anything other than a good thing.
I don't have any numbers of any kind to back this up, so take this with several large dollops of salt, but: I suspect that the number of creative pros who rely on Adobe tools is much, much higher than the number of those who rely on the Apple in-house tools.
And don't underestimate the capacity of design pros to drag their feet. For years, I knew graphic artists who refused to upgrade to OS X because Quark wouldn't run natively in it. Of course, when the new version of Quark finally was release, Adobe's answer was arguably much better.
Great! So now you can watch scads of porn without actually seeing any of it!
Wait. How is this better than when I used to sneak down into the living room as a kid to watch still-scrambled skin flicks on cable?
Well... yeah, except for the fact that I have. The demo, that is. I don't play, online or otherwise, as much as I used to since becoming a father, but I downloaded the demo for Prey to give it a shot. I found the dialogue to be incredibly obnoxious - I actually took extra care not to let my wife (who was an anthropolgy major in college) hear any of the audio, not just because the squishy flesh-rending sounds would bother her, but because the script is so lame. At least in HL2, the characters who do talk don't sound like they were scripted by a high schooler who is reading Casteneda for the first time.
Online play was about as frenetic as I remember Quake 2 and UT as being. The effect of the portals and rearranged gravity isn't as much as you'd think in a busy multiplayer game. In the end, you see someone move, you shoot them, and the fact that he's running up the wall at the time didn't really effect my perception of the gameplay too much.
If Solaris isn't an option for you, I guess so. At least, right now. From the Wikipedia entry on ZFS:
It's funny you should mention Prey... I'm not sure that anything about the game really qualifies as "new" anymore. The original game was proposed over ten years ago, and the "Native American guy gets abducted and must kick ass" angle has been intact since 1996.
There were non-interactive demos at E3 in 1997 which showed off the nifty-neato portal technology. Since then, the whole thing has been torn down and built up again once or twice, but when I first heard that there was a playable demo, my reaction was... well, it's not quite the gold master of Duke Nukem Forever, but it's close.
How much more integrated can it get, shy of running in kernel space? There's already an Oracle-specific file system which is used in RAC installs. It's the only filesystem of its kind which is in the main Linux kernel.
I'm not really sure how much deeper it's likely to get.
Yeah, you're probably right.
Side note - government agencies also hire contractors for tech jobs when they're convinced they can't get the appropriate talent themselves. I'll never forget the lecture I attended where an FBI "cybercrime" specialist told a bunch of CIOs and CEOs about the dangers posed by hackers intent on "trading Juarez."
It actually took me a few minutes to realize that he meant "warez."
Colon claimed that he did this because he was tired of having to seek bureaucratic authorization for every last task, including adding printers. Having worked with government agencies before, I can say I understand his frustration. But his later justification was priceless:
Okay, so: getting authorization was onerous, so he asked for permission from agents in the Springfield office to forge their superiors' credentials in order to speed up the process. And they gave it to him.
Did you get that? I was originally gonna boldface the best parts, but I couldn't decide where to start.
1. The contractor, fed up with an onerous and ridiculous authorization process,
2. asked for permission from FBI officials to crack their superiors' passwords,
3. and the FBI officials in question said yes.
Okay, so, Colon is in court. What happened to the FBI staffers who gave him the go-ahead?
I used to do support for a small IT group at a University. In addition to the general sysadmin stuff and the odd bit of web/db foo, I also did basic tech support for our building.
One person in particular kept asking me questions about how to do various things in Excel or Word - nothing that was too obvious, but nothing too difficult either. What I realized after a while was that even though these people spent literally hours a day working in these applications, whereas I used them (at most) an hour or two out of every week, they considered me an expert.
Eventually, I started responding to every question with, "I'm not sure - I need to look that up in the help" before every question. I usually needed to do that anyway, but once they realized that's what I was actually doing, I think it emboldened them to try it themselves.
Heh. Yeah, and an RJ-45 jack will also accept an RJ-11 cable pretty easily.
I've been doing this for god only knows how long, and I still am making that mistake.
D1: Yes. Sometimes I shit on them first. But mostly I just burn them.
You nearly owed me a new laptop, sir.
Bravo.
The commentary for Enterprise must have been great.
"We really liked the way the "spreading the goo" scene... uh... brought out the... um..."
"Characters?"
"Yeah! The characters, and their, um... personalities."
"Yeah. It really heightened the dramatic..."
"Drama."
"Or something."
That was a fancy way of saying:
1. You start with an extremely barebones (read: you'd never release this into the wild) program that actually runs, passes all its unit tests, and implements maybe one important feature. (eg: a shopping cart program which will show you the contents of a catalog.)
2. With each iteration, you add a new feature, refactoring older code as necessary. Start with critical functionality and work your way down the requirements.
3. Continue until the product is releaseable.
The "vertical" bit means that rather than taking the "let's implement all the methods we'll need in the CatalogItem class first" approach (horizontal), you're trying to make it actually do something useful (eg, show a list of products) with each iteration.
There aren't a lot of convenience fees that I wholeheartedly support, but 30 cents to not have to run out to my parking meter sounds like a winner.
Congratulations, Slashdot! The FBI will be along shortly to raid your offices on suspicion of violating the DMCA, the Patriot Act, and probably some other bullshit piece of legislation we don't even know about.
Oh, yeah - it's a no-knock warrant, so put your pants on now.
So?
MySQL isn't a member either. On the other hand, Red Hat and Novell are, despite the fact that they're clearly competitors. So what does MySQL have to do with it?
Wow.
I mean, I knew I was having trouble keeping up with all the latest in gadgetry these days, but I must really be slipping if neural implants went mainstream and I missed it.
Agreed. Also, I have to say that the gameplay in Ep. 1 was extremely tight. I enjoyed HL2, but there were long periods that felt a lot like filler (eg, "get out of the buggy, cross the bridge, disable the forcefield, cross back, get back in the buggy..."). Not so with episode 1. I'm playing through it again now for the third time.
Heh. Yeah. You'd think we'd at least get some tripmines to play with or something.
The one I can't believe they skipped is "mouselook."
Seriously, a whole genere of game (FPS) depends on this mechanic. How could it have gone unremarked?
Please, no! After the incredible sticker shock of the XBox 360, followed by the news that the PS3 wasn't going to be any better, I was poised to snag the Wii just to stick it in the eye of the other console manufacturers. "See? Half the cost of your previous systems! Nyah!"
If Apple were to by Nintendo, the Wii will double in price overnight, and likely catch fire if left on a carpet. Woe betide me!
(Joking. Mostly.)