What gives you the idea that people who are effective in working on a team aren't effective at getting their jobs done? The people I've seen who have been the best have consistently been great to collaborate or work with. They leave ego out of it, they focus on getting things done rather than arguing over credit, and they're quick to identify their strengths and weaknesses so that they can work most effectively.
Yeah, I've seen people who liked collaboration but sucked at their jobs, or who were good at their jobs but sucked at collaboration -- but they've never been the best at either. The best at either are usually at least decent at the other.
I'm sorta with you. One of my few frustrations about working with APress was that their template has paragraph types like "code first", "code", "code last", and "code single" to handle the spacing around code fragments. I loathed that. I want the word processor to do that automatically. But I am absolutely in favor of style tags, well-used.
My preference for writing is FrameMaker or DocBook. Well, it's DocBook. I hate Frame. But I hate Word more.
This is a seriously excellent book on C. How excellent? Excellent enough that I actually recommend it before I recommend K&R. Seriously, it's that good.
My favorite feature is the way that, if enough people buy it, I get about a buck per copy!
Seriously, though, it's a book that exists in no small part to be the book I wished someone had written about shell programming. While I'm the only listed author, the tech reviewer (Gary V. Vaughan) made a HUGE difference, and caught a ton of stuff. What interests me is that we both ended up learning a huge amount about shell programming that we didn't previously know -- even though he was certainly an expert in the field before we started, and I had done enough shell programming to at least think myself competent.
I don't think it's just as much a church or religion as anything else. Do some research; they explicitly stated that they were not a religion in any way, until they ran into tax problems. Hubbard was on the record as saying that the religion angle was just a cover story.
I'm not saying they're "not a religion" because of the slavery, torture, or other things; religions have done those. I'm saying they're "not a religion" because the people running it went out of their way to make it clear that they weren't, until they discovered that they needed a cover story to avoid being shut down for, as an example, making false medical claims.
There's no evidence that any of the people running this believe any of the stuff. So far as anyone can tell, they're in it for the money.
I had to use MS Word for a project because it was selected as a "standard" because everyone has it, and it has features like change tracking, and so on. I'd guess it increased the amount of work I had to do by about 30% compared to, say, writing in DocBook.
Save copies of everything, because it's very easy for multiple "standard" and "compatible" editors for MS Word files to garble things horribly.
For reviews, PDFs plus markup seem to be pretty usable. I've not found an editor that everyone can live with. I am personally quite fond of DocBook, and it's my first choice by far. If you have to use a more common application, FrameMaker is horrible and sucky... But *anything* beats MS Word.
That's what people said about the DS -- and it turned out to be wrong, because the market leader attracts a ton of games.
The Wii won't get the traditional "big" cross-platform games -- but then, the PS360 won't get the big-name Wii games, and the Wii games will sell better. All it takes is a couple of cases, like GH World Tour selling much better on Wii than on 360, and a few more franchises deciding that they'd rather spend $5M to develop for Wii and make a fortune, than spend $15M to develop for PS3+360 and lose a fortune.
But... "Most" of the games are shallow? Maybe so. But what about the couple dozen solid, well-made games which are a ton of fun?
The Wii's got no shortage of great games. It has a ton of junk, but who cares? Don't buy that. There's plenty left to keep you interested, if you look around, keep an eye on reviews, and look for experiences that aren't the same stuff we've been doing ever since the N64.
Have you benchmarked this? On my systems, there's a ton of data which could page in once a week -- but while it's out, I can use the space for disk cache which gets reused several times a day. I'd assume that more stuff in memory that actually gets used is better.
In our quest for balance between people who want to punch you in the face, and you not wanting to get hit in the face, we've reached a solution: After you've been hit in the face, we're working on coming up with a way to put something up on our web page about how you can use band-aids.
They sent me a nasty note because a mirror of the Interactive Fiction archive contained a file named "doom3.zip". (It was a many-year old text adventure hosted with the permission of the author.) They felt it was most likely a "retail copy of Doom 3".
According to them:
1. They review every message they send carefully. 2. They send hundreds of thousands of messages a month.
That latter estimate is from 2004 -- I can't imagine it's gone down.
I have no idea what they'd do in the unlikely event that their complaint wasn't stupid on its face; in my case, they backed down while telling me how important the work they do is. I consider them subhuman scum who are working actively to completely destroy the PC gaming industry as best they can. Given a choice between their crazy harassment and unauthorized use of my network, and Brad Wardell's high-quality software with no copy protection and good attitude, I think I can safely say I speak for anyone who has ever worked with, for, or on a video game, or who has ever played a video game and might want to again some day, when I say that I sincerely hope the ESA completely ceases to exist and is not replaced. I think they do a great deal of harm and waste a lot of money that could have been put into something with some kind of benefit.
I don't think people buy from us because of our huge library of amazing code -- I think they buy from us because we can support it.
I work at a Linux vendor these days (Wind River), and the primary value I see isn't the code itself, but the engineering team that developed it. People hire us to do stuff to this code base because we can do it better and cheaper than they could -- because we already know the code very well.
This in turn lets us write new code -- which, of course, tends to end up as open source. But if we have the guy who wrote it, and several people who have studied the code and know it well, we still have a large advantage in working with it.
Obviously, it's way more complicated than that, and I don't follow the rest -- I'm an engineer, not a manager.:)
I used to think I had a horrible memory. Then I saw doctors and found out I had fairly severe ADHD ("primarily-inattentive" variety). So as an experiment, they tried methylphenidate on me (aka Ritalin). Suddenly I could remember things, I could sit still without constantly jittering, and I could hear people talking even in crowded rooms.
It is quite possible to simply not realize anything's wrong until someone says something that makes you reevaluate things.
(BTW, the crap about Ritalin making people into "zombies" is part of the usual run of anti-psychiatry lies served up by Scientology. If you don't have ADHD, methylphenidate just makes you jittery.)
If I have to tell a user to bring up a CLI and type something, I have lost -- I have no longer presented a seamless experience.
On the other hand, if I can't, this often means that the thing I want to do CANNOT BE DONE AT ALL. And then not only have I lost at providing a seamless experience, I have lost at providing any experience at all.
The users I support would be a lot happier with "open a CLI and type fix_it_please" than they are with "well, maybe if we remove the driver, reload it, and then reconfigure the firewall, it'll start working again."
I haven't got 20 years of experience, but I've never been in charge of other developers. I don't think it's a question of trust, but of scope; the work I do is something that really doesn't require additional people.
Since when do developers care about virtual memory performance?
If you care about performance, get enough memory.
(And while I would have been joking if I'd posted this in 1996, today, my laptop's got 4GB of memory, and I don't really even consider less than that in a development system.)
It's not greed. It's avoidance of cognitive dissonance. Once people have some involvement in something, they tend to filter data which would make it untrue. It's the same thing that happens with militantly religious (or anti-religious) people; they gradually develop filters that allow them to preemptively exclude any data which might make them les comfortable with their amazing qualities and superiority.
It's hard to get someone to bite for a few hundred dollars on a scam -- but once you have that first part, it's very easy to keep getting more, because admitting that they were scammed would make them feel awful.
I tried to follow the instructions to cancel my PSN account (I will not accept that EULA), and it took two weeks just to get the email people to give me correct instructions -- which involve calling in.
Followup: RTFM, there is indeed a command-line applet, and I can even just use ~/cxgames/bin/wine as a replacement for/usr/local/bin/wine, and all is well.
I used to run Cedega. I also had WINE. I found that WINE was more responsive under some particular circumstance (I think this turned out to be the GL_vertex_buffer_arb extension or whatever it is). So I've been running free WINE ever since.
I actually did manage to download the Codeweavers Linux build, and put in for a serial. In the mean time, I tried it for WoW. (What, you think there are other Windows games?) It's noticably more responsive than my native WINE build, although I couldn't say why. My WINE build tends to stutter a couple of frames every few seconds; Codeweavers was pretty smooth.
I'm gonna keep messing with it, and when they're less loaded, I'll ask if there's a command line app corresponding to "wine WoW.exe". But right now, it seems to me that this is overall a better gaming experience for me than WINE, by enough to justify cost. I think the next time I think about buying a Windows license, I'll send the money to Codeweavers instead.
I bought GalCiv II on the release day. I also bought Oblivion on release when I heard it had no copy protection.
I want Spore enough that, if it had no copy protection, I would be willing to buy an upgraded computer to play it. I'm not willing to buy SecuROM.
A couple patches into NWN2, suddenly many AMD64 users couldn't play the game. Atari researched it and confirmed that it was a SecuROM bug -- and other games using SecuROM had the same problem that week. Atari couldn't do anything to make the game playable again, because they had no control over the code.
I've had SecuROM "fail to authenticate" games many times, I've had drives fail mysteriously... It's over.
Brad Wardell is the guy who has a viable plan for making me willing to buy PC games again. If he loses, I will just stick with the Wii. I would rather play fewer games than be treated like crap by companies I'm supposedly paying.
I'm not about to run a Sony rootkit on my machine.
Please explain how I can legally play Spore without the rootkit. (And no, I will not take anyone's word for it that there is not a rootkit in SecuROM. And no, the Mac port doesn't omit SecuROM.)
If you could post an explanation of how I could safely play this game without buying a dedicated machine which will never do anything but play this one game, that'd be great.
Not just usually. In this case, too. The CoS's policy of attempting to obtain absolute control is, in fact, a threat to the state's integrity, or the state itself.
As L. Ron Hubbard put it:
"Some day, people will say this is illegal. Make sure that by then, the orgs decide what is legal."
(Paraphrased from memory. "Orgs" is their jargon for Scientology institutions, especially individual "missions".)
If you use the term "cult" that broadly, there's no reason to complain about anyone using it.
In modern usage, the word "cult" connotes, not merely a religious belief system, or one that it is now fashionable to claim is "harmful", but a belief system which manifests very specific kinds of harm.
While I won't dispute that some Christian groups are cults, most don't seem to be. They don't insist on complete separation from non-members, they don't engage in brainwashing (not just persuasion, but actual modern brainwashing techniques), they don't put people in forced labor camps...
Scientology kidnaps peoples' children and puts them in labor camps to make their parents behave. That's if you get away with having kids; pregnant women in the Sea Org are subjected to harassment and threatened with expulsion -- with no job, no place to live, and no contacts, far from home -- if they do not abort.
Christians can be jerks sometimes. It's not the same.
These accusations of murder are ridiculous. I can point to THOUSANDS of people who are clearly still alive, proving that my client has virtually never murdered anyone!
Slashdot Mirror
What gives you the idea that people who are effective in working on a team aren't effective at getting their jobs done? The people I've seen who have been the best have consistently been great to collaborate or work with. They leave ego out of it, they focus on getting things done rather than arguing over credit, and they're quick to identify their strengths and weaknesses so that they can work most effectively.
Yeah, I've seen people who liked collaboration but sucked at their jobs, or who were good at their jobs but sucked at collaboration -- but they've never been the best at either. The best at either are usually at least decent at the other.
I'm sorta with you. One of my few frustrations about working with APress was that their template has paragraph types like "code first", "code", "code last", and "code single" to handle the spacing around code fragments. I loathed that. I want the word processor to do that automatically. But I am absolutely in favor of style tags, well-used.
My preference for writing is FrameMaker or DocBook. Well, it's DocBook. I hate Frame. But I hate Word more.
C Programming: A Modern Approach
This is a seriously excellent book on C. How excellent? Excellent enough that I actually recommend it before I recommend K&R. Seriously, it's that good.
I like this one a lot:
Beginning Portable Shell Scripting: From Novice to Professional
My favorite feature is the way that, if enough people buy it, I get about a buck per copy!
Seriously, though, it's a book that exists in no small part to be the book I wished someone had written about shell programming. While I'm the only listed author, the tech reviewer (Gary V. Vaughan) made a HUGE difference, and caught a ton of stuff. What interests me is that we both ended up learning a huge amount about shell programming that we didn't previously know -- even though he was certainly an expert in the field before we started, and I had done enough shell programming to at least think myself competent.
I don't think it's just as much a church or religion as anything else. Do some research; they explicitly stated that they were not a religion in any way, until they ran into tax problems. Hubbard was on the record as saying that the religion angle was just a cover story.
I'm not saying they're "not a religion" because of the slavery, torture, or other things; religions have done those. I'm saying they're "not a religion" because the people running it went out of their way to make it clear that they weren't, until they discovered that they needed a cover story to avoid being shut down for, as an example, making false medical claims.
There's no evidence that any of the people running this believe any of the stuff. So far as anyone can tell, they're in it for the money.
I had to use MS Word for a project because it was selected as a "standard" because everyone has it, and it has features like change tracking, and so on. I'd guess it increased the amount of work I had to do by about 30% compared to, say, writing in DocBook.
Save copies of everything, because it's very easy for multiple "standard" and "compatible" editors for MS Word files to garble things horribly.
For reviews, PDFs plus markup seem to be pretty usable. I've not found an editor that everyone can live with. I am personally quite fond of DocBook, and it's my first choice by far. If you have to use a more common application, FrameMaker is horrible and sucky... But *anything* beats MS Word.
That's what people said about the DS -- and it turned out to be wrong, because the market leader attracts a ton of games.
The Wii won't get the traditional "big" cross-platform games -- but then, the PS360 won't get the big-name Wii games, and the Wii games will sell better. All it takes is a couple of cases, like GH World Tour selling much better on Wii than on 360, and a few more franchises deciding that they'd rather spend $5M to develop for Wii and make a fortune, than spend $15M to develop for PS3+360 and lose a fortune.
You're not the only one.
But... "Most" of the games are shallow? Maybe so. But what about the couple dozen solid, well-made games which are a ton of fun?
The Wii's got no shortage of great games. It has a ton of junk, but who cares? Don't buy that. There's plenty left to keep you interested, if you look around, keep an eye on reviews, and look for experiences that aren't the same stuff we've been doing ever since the N64.
Have you benchmarked this? On my systems, there's a ton of data which could page in once a week -- but while it's out, I can use the space for disk cache which gets reused several times a day. I'd assume that more stuff in memory that actually gets used is better.
In our quest for balance between people who want to punch you in the face, and you not wanting to get hit in the face, we've reached a solution: After you've been hit in the face, we're working on coming up with a way to put something up on our web page about how you can use band-aids.
http://www.seebs.net/log/archives/000195.html
They sent me a nasty note because a mirror of the Interactive Fiction archive contained a file named "doom3.zip". (It was a many-year old text adventure hosted with the permission of the author.) They felt it was most likely a "retail copy of Doom 3".
According to them:
1. They review every message they send carefully.
2. They send hundreds of thousands of messages a month.
That latter estimate is from 2004 -- I can't imagine it's gone down.
I have no idea what they'd do in the unlikely event that their complaint wasn't stupid on its face; in my case, they backed down while telling me how important the work they do is. I consider them subhuman scum who are working actively to completely destroy the PC gaming industry as best they can. Given a choice between their crazy harassment and unauthorized use of my network, and Brad Wardell's high-quality software with no copy protection and good attitude, I think I can safely say I speak for anyone who has ever worked with, for, or on a video game, or who has ever played a video game and might want to again some day, when I say that I sincerely hope the ESA completely ceases to exist and is not replaced. I think they do a great deal of harm and waste a lot of money that could have been put into something with some kind of benefit.
I don't think people buy from us because of our huge library of amazing code -- I think they buy from us because we can support it.
I work at a Linux vendor these days (Wind River), and the primary value I see isn't the code itself, but the engineering team that developed it. People hire us to do stuff to this code base because we can do it better and cheaper than they could -- because we already know the code very well.
This in turn lets us write new code -- which, of course, tends to end up as open source. But if we have the guy who wrote it, and several people who have studied the code and know it well, we still have a large advantage in working with it.
Obviously, it's way more complicated than that, and I don't follow the rest -- I'm an engineer, not a manager. :)
I used to think I had a horrible memory. Then I saw doctors and found out I had fairly severe ADHD ("primarily-inattentive" variety). So as an experiment, they tried methylphenidate on me (aka Ritalin). Suddenly I could remember things, I could sit still without constantly jittering, and I could hear people talking even in crowded rooms.
It is quite possible to simply not realize anything's wrong until someone says something that makes you reevaluate things.
(BTW, the crap about Ritalin making people into "zombies" is part of the usual run of anti-psychiatry lies served up by Scientology. If you don't have ADHD, methylphenidate just makes you jittery.)
The difference is this:
If I have to tell a user to bring up a CLI and type something, I have lost -- I have no longer presented a seamless experience.
On the other hand, if I can't, this often means that the thing I want to do CANNOT BE DONE AT ALL. And then not only have I lost at providing a seamless experience, I have lost at providing any experience at all.
The users I support would be a lot happier with "open a CLI and type fix_it_please" than they are with "well, maybe if we remove the driver, reload it, and then reconfigure the firewall, it'll start working again."
I haven't got 20 years of experience, but I've never been in charge of other developers. I don't think it's a question of trust, but of scope; the work I do is something that really doesn't require additional people.
Since when do developers care about virtual memory performance?
If you care about performance, get enough memory.
(And while I would have been joking if I'd posted this in 1996, today, my laptop's got 4GB of memory, and I don't really even consider less than that in a development system.)
It's not greed. It's avoidance of cognitive dissonance. Once people have some involvement in something, they tend to filter data which would make it untrue. It's the same thing that happens with militantly religious (or anti-religious) people; they gradually develop filters that allow them to preemptively exclude any data which might make them les comfortable with their amazing qualities and superiority.
It's hard to get someone to bite for a few hundred dollars on a scam -- but once you have that first part, it's very easy to keep getting more, because admitting that they were scammed would make them feel awful.
I tried to follow the instructions to cancel my PSN account (I will not accept that EULA), and it took two weeks just to get the email people to give me correct instructions -- which involve calling in.
Followup: RTFM, there is indeed a command-line applet, and I can even just use ~/cxgames/bin/wine as a replacement for /usr/local/bin/wine, and all is well.
Pretty happy with that.
I used to run Cedega. I also had WINE. I found that WINE was more responsive under some particular circumstance (I think this turned out to be the GL_vertex_buffer_arb extension or whatever it is). So I've been running free WINE ever since.
I actually did manage to download the Codeweavers Linux build, and put in for a serial. In the mean time, I tried it for WoW. (What, you think there are other Windows games?) It's noticably more responsive than my native WINE build, although I couldn't say why. My WINE build tends to stutter a couple of frames every few seconds; Codeweavers was pretty smooth.
I'm gonna keep messing with it, and when they're less loaded, I'll ask if there's a command line app corresponding to "wine WoW.exe". But right now, it seems to me that this is overall a better gaming experience for me than WINE, by enough to justify cost. I think the next time I think about buying a Windows license, I'll send the money to Codeweavers instead.
I bought GalCiv II on the release day. I also bought Oblivion on release when I heard it had no copy protection.
I want Spore enough that, if it had no copy protection, I would be willing to buy an upgraded computer to play it. I'm not willing to buy SecuROM.
A couple patches into NWN2, suddenly many AMD64 users couldn't play the game. Atari researched it and confirmed that it was a SecuROM bug -- and other games using SecuROM had the same problem that week. Atari couldn't do anything to make the game playable again, because they had no control over the code.
I've had SecuROM "fail to authenticate" games many times, I've had drives fail mysteriously... It's over.
Brad Wardell is the guy who has a viable plan for making me willing to buy PC games again. If he loses, I will just stick with the Wii. I would rather play fewer games than be treated like crap by companies I'm supposedly paying.
How do I pick it up?
I'm not about to run a Sony rootkit on my machine.
Please explain how I can legally play Spore without the rootkit. (And no, I will not take anyone's word for it that there is not a rootkit in SecuROM. And no, the Mac port doesn't omit SecuROM.)
If you could post an explanation of how I could safely play this game without buying a dedicated machine which will never do anything but play this one game, that'd be great.
Not just usually. In this case, too. The CoS's policy of attempting to obtain absolute control is, in fact, a threat to the state's integrity, or the state itself.
As L. Ron Hubbard put it:
"Some day, people will say this is illegal. Make sure that by then, the orgs decide what is legal."
(Paraphrased from memory. "Orgs" is their jargon for Scientology institutions, especially individual "missions".)
If you use the term "cult" that broadly, there's no reason to complain about anyone using it.
In modern usage, the word "cult" connotes, not merely a religious belief system, or one that it is now fashionable to claim is "harmful", but a belief system which manifests very specific kinds of harm.
While I won't dispute that some Christian groups are cults, most don't seem to be. They don't insist on complete separation from non-members, they don't engage in brainwashing (not just persuasion, but actual modern brainwashing techniques), they don't put people in forced labor camps...
Scientology kidnaps peoples' children and puts them in labor camps to make their parents behave. That's if you get away with having kids; pregnant women in the Sea Org are subjected to harassment and threatened with expulsion -- with no job, no place to live, and no contacts, far from home -- if they do not abort.
Christians can be jerks sometimes. It's not the same.
These accusations of murder are ridiculous. I can point to THOUSANDS of people who are clearly still alive, proving that my client has virtually never murdered anyone!