Abusive behavior is massively asymmetrical; there's no reason for you to know who did the abusing, so the "real name" isn't actually attached. Instead, all you know is that some kid somewhere has a grudge. You don't know which of the kids it is, so you can't look up the name. Similarly, I don't know how many WoW players could beat me up, but I'm sure at least some of them could find some way to harass me enough to cause me a serious amount of trouble.
For an example, I don't think some random support rep at MSI is likely to be able to beat me up, but he sure did manage to create a lot of hassle by filling out fake loan applications in my name. (This was retaliation for me not just letting them stiff me on a rebate.)
And I don't agree with your pessimism here. Part of adapting to a bad environment is learning to avoid it. It is not at all obvious that privacy is going to go away completely, and I suspect that after a few high-profile cases, it'll make something of a comeback.
When did I assume that personal anecdotes represent the majority? Hint: I didn't. I just provided an anecdote.
The change to using an email address as a login was years ago -- but back then, Blizzard's security people were still involved, so they told people to use a special address only for battle.net and not use that address anywhere else or give it to anyone. Now, it's Activision's security people, and they require you to give it to people to get access to the functionality.
I think you miss a couple of key points about the Real ID thing. See, the actual functionality is really a big deal -- the ability to track a single person across ten or twenty characters is huge, especially because WoW's friend lists are really tiny and most people play alts. So that's a hugely desireable piece of functionality even with people you don't want to trade real names with. Furthermore, even with people who know my real name, who says I want to use real names to talk to them? No one in real life calls me by my legal name. My friends all call me "seebs".
Also, what if I don't mind sharing my real name, but a friend of mine does for some reason? Then I can't use that system to keep in touch with them.
But... As CoH demonstrates, there's no fundamental technical reason for which "friend across multiple characters" needs to be tied to "real name". The real name thing is just there for marketing reasons, and is contrary to what the players want. Back before the merger, Blizzard's announced plans for this were full of privacy settings and choices about what to disclose and to whom you'd want it disclosed. Those all went away, though a few of them eventually came back. (Not before some kid's sister got harassing phone calls because someone who knew her brother saw her name in the "friends of friends" listing. Had no idea who she was, but saw an identifiable girl's name, did some searching and looking things up, and started spamming the in-game channels with her name and number.)
Your real name isn't a secret, but the connection between your real name and a particular online identity should be.
Yes, we all know you don't get perfect privacy. Here's the thing. I play City of Heroes now. I have a global handle. The people I meet in game have global handles. We friend each other through those, and we have all the functionality that "Real ID" supposedly offers -- but no one had to give out real names or login information. And that means that the shy people, and the people who are genuinely and legitimately afraid of being identified, can use the in-game tools to have friends.
I'm well aware that there are times when real names are needed, and that there are times when privacy gets broken.
Your approach is roughly equivalent to the assertion that, since people break into computers successfully at least some of the time, all server software should be configured to prompt the user to reset the password immediately on a third failed login attempt, on the grounds that the idea that you can be perfectly secure is ridiculous. That we can't have perfect security doesn't mean we should abandon every hint of security. That we can't have perfect privacy likewise doesn't mean we should abandon every hint of privacy.
The realities of the online world are what we choose to make them be. Me, I'm playing an MMO where I can be friends with people without us having to feel safe exchanging real names. They're getting my $30 a month now (I have two accounts).
I don't think so. I was a WoW player for about 5 years, and they were great about dealing with the community and addressing concerns until a couple of months after the merger. After that, they started doing stupid things about privacy and security on a pretty epic scale; see, for instance, the "Real ID" fiasco.
And before everyone jumps in with "they backed down!"...
1. They said in an interview shortly later that they weren't doing that "for the time being". In English, "won't X for the time being" means "will X, but not yet". 2. In fact, the new forums did display your real name on the screen when you logged in. Just your name, not anyone else's (yet), but... Plain text over the open internet? That's real smart. 3. They still (last I heard) haven't added any capacity for aliases or handles to the "Real ID" thing. 4. They still use your login name as your key for inviting people, making it much easier to crack accounts than it used to be. 5. All of this directly contradicts statements Blizzard had made about privacy or security prior to the merger.
Net result, I went ahead and wrote to privacy@ and told them to delete all my personal information, because I no longer feel I have justified confidence that they will not, at some unspecified future date, decide to show real names to anyone and everyone. Went from 3 active subscriptions to no chance of ever buying from them again. Very, very, slick relationship management, there.
I used to know at least a dozen people who played WoW. Now, no one I know who has any kind of security or law background, or even a basic IT background, plays.
No, not every job is like that. I don't know that I've ever had a job like that.
Where I work, people screw up sometimes. The senior people are consistent about stepping forward and pointing out where they fucked up, and because they do it, so does everyone else. We spend VERY little time trying to assign blame. In fact, none; I don't think I've seen "blame" as a part of the process. We figure out what happened as quickly as possible so we can fix it. Heck, I once managed to break the entire build six times in a row with one simple cosmetic change (it was to the naming convention for toolchain components...), and all that happened was it got brought up in the "weekly accomplishments" section of our group meeting. And now people list that as the gold standard they're shooting for when they make invasive changes.:)
And yes, we get recognized when we do well. There are attaboys galore, public compliments on work well done, deadlines made, and so on, and even sometimes bonuses.
Seriously, it's a matter of picking the culture you want, and having enough buy-in to create that culture. Our management want us to run a decent culture where engineering can happen with minimal bullshit, and that's what we do.
I remember back when Blizzard was an awesome company with great customer service. Well, that, and when the gamers buying their games were the "customers" they were so great to.
That Activision merger seems to have totally killed the company we used to know. Not that this is totally surprising, mind you, but it's sad. I would guess that this was a matter of the Blizzard company officials not being paranoid enough to check the fine print in their merger deal. Either that, or they were ready to cash out.
Longish, but if you've done 8+ imperative languages, including some OO and some not-OO and you have written a couple of DSLs, and so on... It won't be nearly as long as you might think it would be.
Depends a lot. I have the B&N nook application (because I have a nook), and that reads B&N nook books. I have Stanza, which reads any old epub, and I have the Apple book application, which I don't think I've even looked at yet.
There have been attempts to make "publication-reading software", but they tend to charge enough extra that publishers figure they'll make more selling their own app.
And yes, some books are sold as separate apps, specifically because that lets them get paid per reader without worrying about someone else's involvement.
People are still figuring out how to match this to business models.
Uh, yeah, "whole new programming paradigm". Done five or six of those. It took me a day or two to learn to write decently efficient vector code for AltiVec or the Cell SPU, and that's including figuring it out well enough to submit a detailed bug report, with fix, for a bug in IBM's math library for the Cell.
I don't think you're getting it. New programming paradigms have come along repeatedly. Even those are still of the same fundamental stuff that I was doing twenty and thirty years ago.
Here's the thing. Take someone who somehow managed to spend his entire senior year of college working with CUDA. Now take some guy who has never heard of it before, but who's been doing other kinds of programming for, say, twenty years. Now give them each two months to work on some new physics simulation thing, using CUDA.
The guy who's been doing other stuff for twenty years will win, hands down, because he only has to learn one thing (CUDA), the new kid has to learn hundreds of things (dozens of things to do with code modularity, designing interfaces, thinking about algorithms, when to use profiling tools, how and when to decide what to put your effort into for optimizations). The old guy will have something that meets the spec sooner, and his program will run faster and more reliably after any particular amount of time.
2M DVDs per day, ~300 shipping days per year (assume they don't ship on Sundays or holidays), that's about $600M.
But how on earth do we conclude that they spend "more" on shipping than they do on streaming? Do we have a number for how many movies they stream? I don't.
Honestly, given a week of dedicated effort in a language I've never previously used, I won't have "mastered" it, but I'll be as good as most fresh grads are in their best language. I have all the right mental constructs in place, I just need to attach things in the language to them. Have you seen code written by fairly fresh newbies?
Lemme give a concrete example. I'm a fairly decent programmer, and I feel comfortable saying I know C pretty well. If you look at C I wrote early in my career, and compare it to my very first programs in Objective-C, or Python, or Ruby, or PHP... Frankly, my first attempt at writing code in a new language now is better than I was at C after a couple of years of using it. A lot better.
Some day I'm gonna get around to posting the godawful code I was generating when I was just out of college. It was full of the kinds of stuff people do when they think they're learning to use a language better but are actually just learning to screw themselves over badly.
One of the reasons to get something with source code is that you need to customize it, because there is no off-the-shelf solution that does what you want. So instead of writing your own completely from scratch, you start with something at least reasonably close to what you want.
If you're using commercial software, it's because the commercial software did what you needed out of the box; if it didn't, you couldn't use it, because you can't make it do what you need it to do.
I don't agree. The good programmers I know are better in a new language after a week than a "fresh grad" who's studied the language for a full year. The bulk of what makes for quality software is not domain-specific. People who have learned five or ten programming languages already are usually fine in a new one on very short notice.
Age doesn't matter. Experience does, in terms of the actual quality of output you get.
Unless the package says "Now with A8 Processor!" or something similar, it's not flaunting the A8. Given Apple's general refusal to put any kind of hardware specs they can avoid on packaging for these devices, it seems very, very, unlikely that they will "flaunt" anything so meaningless to the average reader.
1. The text is much harder to read than regular ink on paper. 2. The text is much easier to read than regular ink on paper.
I'm glad the commentators of the world have been able to identify these two problems.
That said, yes, it's been observed in the past that harder to read text can produce stronger memories, but this is not necessarily a good tradeoff, depending on what you're reading and why.
It mattered anyway, in that N64 games were much, much prettier renders than PSX games.... But no one cared, because the PSX games were good enough. A lesson Sony has forgotten.
I can program for 10-11 hours a day. Now, I won't produce as much working code as I would if I called it a day after 6, but he didn't ask you whether it was sensical or effective.
Realistically? 90% of the time, past about 5-6 hours, additional time is gonna be antiproductive. I will be slow and worn out and making stupid mistakes that are hard to fix.
Now, there's exceptions. I once managed a sustained period of 10+ hour days for, oh, a few weeks. This was when I was on (legally prescribed, I might add) Schedule II controlled stimulants, and didn't have to do ANYTHING but code; people would take me out for food and order for me. And after, I think, five weeks of that, I spent the next entire WEEK recovering, and by the end of that week I could mostly process spoken language again.
But seriously, if the boss isn't thinking in terms of "and then after a couple of weeks, they all have to take a full week off doing NOTHING work related", the boss is a twit. It's not sustainable.
Consider that the PS2 is very close to lasting 10 years at this point -- not as the only console, or the flagship console, but still on the market because it's still worth buying. I don't think "10 years" implies "10 years as the fastest console we ship".
And yeah, I don't believe for a minute that the PSP2 is going to be as powerful as the PS3. No one's gonna go for a handheld that needs a 70 watt power supply.
I think Sony has finally figured out Nintendo's weakness. When Nintendo comes out with something that fundamentally changes the nature of interaction with the gaming device, Sony needs to hit them, hard, with something more powerful that doesn't try to change anything else. This has never been tried before and is sure to result in immense profits and market domination.
My day job got me a cell phone. It is cheaper than the landline I used to have, and it's much more useful, as it also lets me keep up on email and meetings.
No, I call for stuff like "one of our phones broke, we're switching to a replacement, can you kick the back end of the sidekick stuff so the new phone will work", or "we'd like to transfer this number to this other guy's account", or whatever. Whatever it is, they're usually pretty good to work with and they solve problems.
Sprint was unbelievably bad, AT&T's consistently annoying. Some people hate Verizon, but they also get some positive reviews. I looked at the list of carrier ratings in Consumer Reports.:)
Last time I looked at bill-paying online, it cost more than stamps did. I'm a bit of a luddite at times.
Anyway, checks getting lost has happened, uhm. Twice, maybe, in my entire adult life. Always with companies that I didn't trust to be telling me the truth about what happened in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox running faster and not crashing?
Quelle horreur!
Abusive behavior is massively asymmetrical; there's no reason for you to know who did the abusing, so the "real name" isn't actually attached. Instead, all you know is that some kid somewhere has a grudge. You don't know which of the kids it is, so you can't look up the name. Similarly, I don't know how many WoW players could beat me up, but I'm sure at least some of them could find some way to harass me enough to cause me a serious amount of trouble.
For an example, I don't think some random support rep at MSI is likely to be able to beat me up, but he sure did manage to create a lot of hassle by filling out fake loan applications in my name. (This was retaliation for me not just letting them stiff me on a rebate.)
And I don't agree with your pessimism here. Part of adapting to a bad environment is learning to avoid it. It is not at all obvious that privacy is going to go away completely, and I suspect that after a few high-profile cases, it'll make something of a comeback.
When did I assume that personal anecdotes represent the majority? Hint: I didn't. I just provided an anecdote.
The change to using an email address as a login was years ago -- but back then, Blizzard's security people were still involved, so they told people to use a special address only for battle.net and not use that address anywhere else or give it to anyone. Now, it's Activision's security people, and they require you to give it to people to get access to the functionality.
I think you miss a couple of key points about the Real ID thing. See, the actual functionality is really a big deal -- the ability to track a single person across ten or twenty characters is huge, especially because WoW's friend lists are really tiny and most people play alts. So that's a hugely desireable piece of functionality even with people you don't want to trade real names with. Furthermore, even with people who know my real name, who says I want to use real names to talk to them? No one in real life calls me by my legal name. My friends all call me "seebs".
Also, what if I don't mind sharing my real name, but a friend of mine does for some reason? Then I can't use that system to keep in touch with them.
But... As CoH demonstrates, there's no fundamental technical reason for which "friend across multiple characters" needs to be tied to "real name". The real name thing is just there for marketing reasons, and is contrary to what the players want. Back before the merger, Blizzard's announced plans for this were full of privacy settings and choices about what to disclose and to whom you'd want it disclosed. Those all went away, though a few of them eventually came back. (Not before some kid's sister got harassing phone calls because someone who knew her brother saw her name in the "friends of friends" listing. Had no idea who she was, but saw an identifiable girl's name, did some searching and looking things up, and started spamming the in-game channels with her name and number.)
No, you're just clueless.
Your real name isn't a secret, but the connection between your real name and a particular online identity should be.
Yes, we all know you don't get perfect privacy. Here's the thing. I play City of Heroes now. I have a global handle. The people I meet in game have global handles. We friend each other through those, and we have all the functionality that "Real ID" supposedly offers -- but no one had to give out real names or login information. And that means that the shy people, and the people who are genuinely and legitimately afraid of being identified, can use the in-game tools to have friends.
I'm well aware that there are times when real names are needed, and that there are times when privacy gets broken.
Your approach is roughly equivalent to the assertion that, since people break into computers successfully at least some of the time, all server software should be configured to prompt the user to reset the password immediately on a third failed login attempt, on the grounds that the idea that you can be perfectly secure is ridiculous. That we can't have perfect security doesn't mean we should abandon every hint of security. That we can't have perfect privacy likewise doesn't mean we should abandon every hint of privacy.
The realities of the online world are what we choose to make them be. Me, I'm playing an MMO where I can be friends with people without us having to feel safe exchanging real names. They're getting my $30 a month now (I have two accounts).
I don't think so. I was a WoW player for about 5 years, and they were great about dealing with the community and addressing concerns until a couple of months after the merger. After that, they started doing stupid things about privacy and security on a pretty epic scale; see, for instance, the "Real ID" fiasco.
And before everyone jumps in with "they backed down!"...
1. They said in an interview shortly later that they weren't doing that "for the time being". In English, "won't X for the time being" means "will X, but not yet".
2. In fact, the new forums did display your real name on the screen when you logged in. Just your name, not anyone else's (yet), but... Plain text over the open internet? That's real smart.
3. They still (last I heard) haven't added any capacity for aliases or handles to the "Real ID" thing.
4. They still use your login name as your key for inviting people, making it much easier to crack accounts than it used to be.
5. All of this directly contradicts statements Blizzard had made about privacy or security prior to the merger.
Net result, I went ahead and wrote to privacy@ and told them to delete all my personal information, because I no longer feel I have justified confidence that they will not, at some unspecified future date, decide to show real names to anyone and everyone. Went from 3 active subscriptions to no chance of ever buying from them again. Very, very, slick relationship management, there.
I used to know at least a dozen people who played WoW. Now, no one I know who has any kind of security or law background, or even a basic IT background, plays.
No, not every job is like that. I don't know that I've ever had a job like that.
Where I work, people screw up sometimes. The senior people are consistent about stepping forward and pointing out where they fucked up, and because they do it, so does everyone else. We spend VERY little time trying to assign blame. In fact, none; I don't think I've seen "blame" as a part of the process. We figure out what happened as quickly as possible so we can fix it. Heck, I once managed to break the entire build six times in a row with one simple cosmetic change (it was to the naming convention for toolchain components...), and all that happened was it got brought up in the "weekly accomplishments" section of our group meeting. And now people list that as the gold standard they're shooting for when they make invasive changes. :)
And yes, we get recognized when we do well. There are attaboys galore, public compliments on work well done, deadlines made, and so on, and even sometimes bonuses.
Seriously, it's a matter of picking the culture you want, and having enough buy-in to create that culture. Our management want us to run a decent culture where engineering can happen with minimal bullshit, and that's what we do.
I remember back when Blizzard was an awesome company with great customer service. Well, that, and when the gamers buying their games were the "customers" they were so great to.
That Activision merger seems to have totally killed the company we used to know. Not that this is totally surprising, mind you, but it's sad. I would guess that this was a matter of the Blizzard company officials not being paranoid enough to check the fine print in their merger deal. Either that, or they were ready to cash out.
Longish, but if you've done 8+ imperative languages, including some OO and some not-OO and you have written a couple of DSLs, and so on... It won't be nearly as long as you might think it would be.
Depends a lot. I have the B&N nook application (because I have a nook), and that reads B&N nook books. I have Stanza, which reads any old epub, and I have the Apple book application, which I don't think I've even looked at yet.
There have been attempts to make "publication-reading software", but they tend to charge enough extra that publishers figure they'll make more selling their own app.
And yes, some books are sold as separate apps, specifically because that lets them get paid per reader without worrying about someone else's involvement.
People are still figuring out how to match this to business models.
Uh, yeah, "whole new programming paradigm". Done five or six of those. It took me a day or two to learn to write decently efficient vector code for AltiVec or the Cell SPU, and that's including figuring it out well enough to submit a detailed bug report, with fix, for a bug in IBM's math library for the Cell.
I don't think you're getting it. New programming paradigms have come along repeatedly. Even those are still of the same fundamental stuff that I was doing twenty and thirty years ago.
Here's the thing. Take someone who somehow managed to spend his entire senior year of college working with CUDA. Now take some guy who has never heard of it before, but who's been doing other kinds of programming for, say, twenty years. Now give them each two months to work on some new physics simulation thing, using CUDA.
The guy who's been doing other stuff for twenty years will win, hands down, because he only has to learn one thing (CUDA), the new kid has to learn hundreds of things (dozens of things to do with code modularity, designing interfaces, thinking about algorithms, when to use profiling tools, how and when to decide what to put your effort into for optimizations). The old guy will have something that meets the spec sooner, and his program will run faster and more reliably after any particular amount of time.
2M DVDs per day, ~300 shipping days per year (assume they don't ship on Sundays or holidays), that's about $600M.
But how on earth do we conclude that they spend "more" on shipping than they do on streaming? Do we have a number for how many movies they stream? I don't.
If your project is over in a week, sure.
If your project will take a month, maybe.
If your project will take a year, hell no.
Honestly, given a week of dedicated effort in a language I've never previously used, I won't have "mastered" it, but I'll be as good as most fresh grads are in their best language. I have all the right mental constructs in place, I just need to attach things in the language to them. Have you seen code written by fairly fresh newbies?
Lemme give a concrete example. I'm a fairly decent programmer, and I feel comfortable saying I know C pretty well. If you look at C I wrote early in my career, and compare it to my very first programs in Objective-C, or Python, or Ruby, or PHP... Frankly, my first attempt at writing code in a new language now is better than I was at C after a couple of years of using it. A lot better.
Some day I'm gonna get around to posting the godawful code I was generating when I was just out of college. It was full of the kinds of stuff people do when they think they're learning to use a language better but are actually just learning to screw themselves over badly.
One of the reasons to get something with source code is that you need to customize it, because there is no off-the-shelf solution that does what you want. So instead of writing your own completely from scratch, you start with something at least reasonably close to what you want.
If you're using commercial software, it's because the commercial software did what you needed out of the box; if it didn't, you couldn't use it, because you can't make it do what you need it to do.
This is not surprising.
I don't agree. The good programmers I know are better in a new language after a week than a "fresh grad" who's studied the language for a full year. The bulk of what makes for quality software is not domain-specific. People who have learned five or ten programming languages already are usually fine in a new one on very short notice.
Age doesn't matter. Experience does, in terms of the actual quality of output you get.
Unless the package says "Now with A8 Processor!" or something similar, it's not flaunting the A8. Given Apple's general refusal to put any kind of hardware specs they can avoid on packaging for these devices, it seems very, very, unlikely that they will "flaunt" anything so meaningless to the average reader.
Interesting question. My guess is the PS2 would still be selling, because it's a LOT cheaper than a PS3.
Heck, I have a PS3 with all the backwards compatibility hardware sitting on a desk not plugged in, and a PS2 wired up to the TV.
1. The text is much harder to read than regular ink on paper.
2. The text is much easier to read than regular ink on paper.
I'm glad the commentators of the world have been able to identify these two problems.
That said, yes, it's been observed in the past that harder to read text can produce stronger memories, but this is not necessarily a good tradeoff, depending on what you're reading and why.
It mattered anyway, in that N64 games were much, much prettier renders than PSX games. ... But no one cared, because the PSX games were good enough. A lesson Sony has forgotten.
I can program for 10-11 hours a day. Now, I won't produce as much working code as I would if I called it a day after 6, but he didn't ask you whether it was sensical or effective.
Realistically? 90% of the time, past about 5-6 hours, additional time is gonna be antiproductive. I will be slow and worn out and making stupid mistakes that are hard to fix.
Now, there's exceptions. I once managed a sustained period of 10+ hour days for, oh, a few weeks. This was when I was on (legally prescribed, I might add) Schedule II controlled stimulants, and didn't have to do ANYTHING but code; people would take me out for food and order for me. And after, I think, five weeks of that, I spent the next entire WEEK recovering, and by the end of that week I could mostly process spoken language again.
But seriously, if the boss isn't thinking in terms of "and then after a couple of weeks, they all have to take a full week off doing NOTHING work related", the boss is a twit. It's not sustainable.
I have both. I have I think five games for my PSP and 50-some for my DS.
Consider that the PS2 is very close to lasting 10 years at this point -- not as the only console, or the flagship console, but still on the market because it's still worth buying. I don't think "10 years" implies "10 years as the fastest console we ship".
And yeah, I don't believe for a minute that the PSP2 is going to be as powerful as the PS3. No one's gonna go for a handheld that needs a 70 watt power supply.
I think Sony has finally figured out Nintendo's weakness. When Nintendo comes out with something that fundamentally changes the nature of interaction with the gaming device, Sony needs to hit them, hard, with something more powerful that doesn't try to change anything else. This has never been tried before and is sure to result in immense profits and market domination.
My day job got me a cell phone. It is cheaper than the landline I used to have, and it's much more useful, as it also lets me keep up on email and meetings.
No, I call for stuff like "one of our phones broke, we're switching to a replacement, can you kick the back end of the sidekick stuff so the new phone will work", or "we'd like to transfer this number to this other guy's account", or whatever. Whatever it is, they're usually pretty good to work with and they solve problems.
Sprint was unbelievably bad, AT&T's consistently annoying. Some people hate Verizon, but they also get some positive reviews. I looked at the list of carrier ratings in Consumer Reports. :)
Last time I looked at bill-paying online, it cost more than stamps did. I'm a bit of a luddite at times.
Anyway, checks getting lost has happened, uhm. Twice, maybe, in my entire adult life. Always with companies that I didn't trust to be telling me the truth about what happened in the first place.