>>It's sad, but the thing to do about it is to make philosophy relevant again.
Philosophy can be relevant without it being a *career*.
It is really one of the most "relevant" things to our lives, as, ultimately, we must choose which philosophy/religion we will live our lives by. We can punt on the decision, and allow popular culture to pick for us, but that just means we have even less control over our own lives, on the most fundamental questions.
I love philosophy, and think that anything mind-expanding should be promoted in our schools, but I do agree there's not exactly a large job market for it.
>>While the greek word philosophia literally means "friend of wisdom",
Philosophia actually means "love of wisdom", which is a wonderful way of describing it. People who love the big, interesting Questions in life.
>>the common-day philosopher tends to stare at their naval and wonder if they even exist more than they use anything which might resemble wisdom
Well. Descartes isn't a common-day philosopher, and modern Wittgenstein-ish philosophers are more worried about serving as a linguistic janitorial service than thinking about the big Questions. But your point is mostly accurate. There's a big difference between what Socrates/Plato considered philosophy and a lot of the modern nonsense (my metaphysics teacher tried to convince us that blind guys could 'feel' color).
This shouldn't paint all philosophers of science with a bad brush though - I took several courses on the subject in grad school, and I don't think I ever once had one claim that the scientific method didn't exist, and that we're all lucky plasma screen TVs work or whatever. It was more a question of how the process of science works, especially in regards to 'fringe science' and how it gets accepted by the mainstream (cf Kuhnian Paradigm Shifts and all that). I think there's a lot of interesting Questions there, because the elementary school "scientific method" isn't how science works in a lot of 'scientific' fields, so discussing what, exactly, makes something valid 'science' vs 'non-science' vs 'pseudo-science' is an open and interesting thing to think about. Even the Popperian notion of falsification isn't true in a lot of 'scientific' fields.
>>While many people on slashdot are of many different political views and seem to be able to discuss issues civilly
You must be new here.;)
>>How does anyone expect to solve any of the issues in the US or world, when there isn't even enough respect of the human person to allow for differing opinions?
Given that Fox has been lionizing her all day, I wouldn't be surprised if she recovers and becomes a very popular voice in modern politics.
>>Fox is actively deleting comments on that story, so who knows what anyone is really saying?
And on the other side, Krugman is deleting comments on his idiotic thread blaming Republicans on the shooting. Without any facts, as is par for the course for him.
Could we adopt a new law that makes illegal accusing a group of inciting murder without any evidence other than "They give me negative vibes, dude"?
What do you need 200 hp for in a small economic car? Drag racing? My old car (Opel Astra built in 1993) had only 60 hp. That was enough for 160 kph on the Autobahn. My new one (incidently a Civic Hybrid) allows 170 kph and accelerates much faster, despite of being 30% heavier.
I've test driven the Civic Hybrid. It's one of those "0-to-60... eventually" models. Even my wife thought it was slow, and she has the driving habits of a gunshy octogenarian. The civic is not exactly a fast car, but the hybrid weighs more, and has 30% less horsepower. We ended up getting a normal civic, because it was substantially cheaper, and still gets great gas mileage.
I couldn't imagine driving a car with 60hp. A motorcycle, maybe. But the GP was talking about supercharged station wagons having less horsepower than today's econoboxes, and given that 200+, and even 300+ hp models were available on sport wagons from the 60s on, I was just disagreeing with that - those big V8s could produce some pretty good numbers.
Yeah, I test drove the new 'stang, and they're pretty sick, but having a 4-door was one of my prerequisites, so I was basically only looking at sport sedans.
Very nearly bought the Sonata Turbo, which had all the right numbers - 274hp, 0-to-60 in 6.5, 34mpg highway, and costs around $24k... but I didn't fit in it.:p
We recently bought a new car. It's considered a small economy car and has the smallest, least powerful engine of the cars we looked at, but it's more powerful than my supercharged stationwagon from the 1980s, and a third more powerful than the two-seat sports car I used to drive... however it weighs about 20% more than the stationwagon and 50% more than the sports car.
The problem is not so much lack of power, but massive bloat.
Bloat is a problem... cars are definitely getting heavier.
But I don't think your horsepower argument is as true... an economy car these days has ~140hp, or less if you're going green. The Civic Hybrid has an asthmatic 110hp engine, for example. My 13 year old naturally aspirated Regal has 195hp. Supercharged cars from the 80s would start around 200hp, and they even had 300+ hp sport station wagons back in the mid-60s.
Small economy cars don't generally break 200hp these days, though cars like the Civic Si come in the neighborhood. Usually you have to choose to drop a V6 (and an extra 10k) into your Accord or Camry if you want to substantially break 200hp with a family car.
>>Manufacturer automotive electronics are a ripoff. For example, look at an OEM GPS unit. On a new car, it will cost you $1000 - $3000 vs. $200 for a top-end Garmin aftermarket (external) unit. Even the in-dash aftermarket units are substantially less.
Eh, in-dash units aren't that cheap. They range from $530-$1200, plus installation.
By comparison, the "Technology Package" on the Altima Hybrid includes: in-dash GPS, XM Radio, DVD playback, Steering Wheel nav controls, 9.3GB hard drive, and a special mode that monitors energy usage of the hybrid.
Damn...between this, and all the fscking "green" concern out there...going to get harder and hard for those of us who like to drive cars that are fun to drive to find such cars.
Yeah. The new, hyped (it's on the cover of the Consumer Reports 2011 book), Buick Regal CXL is the perfect example of this. The 2011 Regal has 20 less horsepower and 50 less lbft of torque than the previous generation. And the new one weighs more, too.
Why? To get +1 MPG with its utterly underpowered Ecotec engine. Trying to merge onto an interstate uphill in it felt only marginally faster than the Civic Hybrid, which is the slowest accelerating car I've ever driven.
But because they've packed a lot of electronic crap into it, people (I guess) are liking it. Maybe they just never test drove one.
Case in point: the turbocharged "sport" version of the Regal has a 7.6s 0-to-60 time, IIRC, the same as the Altima Hybrid I ended up buying, while the Regal costs $7k more and has 10 less MPG.
>>we used laptop screens that ran at 60 Hz, but the demo works even if you keep the dots motionless and lift up the screen and rock it back and forth.
You know this doesn't change anything, right?
Think about it from the point of view from the retinal afterimages left on an observer - if the laptop is moving a dot 1 inch/second on its screen, it will leave 60 afterimages, each spaced 1/60th of an inch apart. If you move the laptop instead, the observer will also have 60 afterimages in the second, also 1/60th of an inch apart. Identical input. The 120Hz CRT used, though, is a better control for that variable, though not perfect. The problem is that if the radius of the dot is smaller than the amount the dot moves in one frame, it will break apart and not appear to be an object in continuous motion but rather a series of discrete dots. This doesn't look to be a problem in your study, though, as the dots all move relatively slowly.
Very interesting illusion, though if you know what you're looking for and set the point of your attention away from the focal point of your eye, you can occasionally notice objects popping. So I'm guessing that the gate-keeping mechanism protecting attention prefers motion over color and shape change, which kind of makes sense, eh?
>>The trick is, if you are going to have forums, and you want them to be of value to you as a creator (as well as to your customers), you have to manage them.
Yep. I wrote the CustomTF mod for Quake, and we had a very active and very vocal community around it. Ten years after I wrote it and moved on to other things, I found people still hotly debating certain things in the game, cheap tactics, etc. So I came back, fixed a lot of bugs, introduced some new things. Instant uproar.
The thing is, some of the feedback was good, some was bad, just like you said, but there's a lot of good ideas there, and your players honestly know the implications of changes in game mechanics better than you. So I'd calm the people down, and modified it and modified it until everyone was happy. Though some people were still unhappy, forked the code... and then people realized how broken and buggy the old code was, and went back (mostly) to the new version.
So on and so forth. Game forums are invaluable, and you HAVE to spend time on them as a developer. Plus, players like to know the developers are paying attention and making insightful posts.
ast year I joined (and left) a major manufacturer of slot machines. I was hired as R&D manager and I was absolutely terrified when I saw how things were done. No good software development practices, their concept of version management was dumping source on a network share, the previous manager was the only one using a VCS and was for his private use, and the code was absolutely disappointing to say the least. The bad practices were so deeply marked on them that things were taken to a new facility, with an entire new team that I personally interviewed and trained them from the start, people that still didn't have any of the bad habits the old team had. Eventually I left because whoever was above me was far worse and I soon realized the company was off to die, because top level management were the ones that messed up in the first place and were about to destroy the company by killing all R&D and training and having the new team do sustained engineering on the bad code produced by the old team. This is the state of the gambling industry.
I was once hired to write a VR casino game. Pretty cool actually, shame it was never commercially released.
Anyway, the point is that they wanted it guaranteed rigged so even things which appeared to have a certain percentage chance of happening (say 25%) would be indeed 25% until the last piece would cause a win, in which case it wouldn't win except on an exceedingly diminutive chance.
I found a bug in it that would essentially let you 'spin the slots' as fast as the frame rate of the world, and seriously debated not fixing it in case the game ever was released. Damn morals - I fixed it. =)
What the real problem in these games trying to follow World of Warcraft is that they usually take aim at the previous generation of WOW. As in, Blizzard keeps moving WOW forward. The change the mechanics, the reinvent classes at times, they even change their world completely. They haven't stood still.
Right. If anything, they've moved backwards. I just started playing WoW again, to see what they did in Cata (I wasn't going to buy it, but then ended up getting it as a present for Xmas:p) and have been profoundly unimpressed. The graphics, the story, the new, horrible, talent system. Everything is half-assed, and unworth the month of service I had to buy to play it.
And the players are the worst of any MMORPG in existence.
What is happening at BIOWARE/EA is that I see "we have this great IP, hence any expense is justified" mentality which usually goes hand in hand with feature creep and never finishing a system to completely but having far too many incomplete ones.
It's a really weird thing. Bioware usually does an amazingly solid job on their games, that even when they have a crap design (Mass Effect 2 is a corridor simulator) they're still entertaining. But from what the inside reports from the dev team say, they really don't have much clue what they're doing. Which makes them identical to WoW's dev team, but with 12 million less users, and no content.
>>Can we realize that the Chinese are on a nice technology curve that is bound to intersect with ours within our lifetime?
Well, their strategy in this regard is quite smart. They are sitting on a long pile of dollars, which, you know, some companies would like to get. So they will buy stuff from western companies with the following deal: we'll buy the first few outright, the next few we'll buy from you but assemble in China, and the next few you'll turn the plans over to us, and we'll build it ourselves but pay you a royalty. They've done this with high speed trains, nuclear reactors, and so forth. Very very cheap way of bypassing the need for doing the R&D themselves.
And the West loves it, though it's essentially shooting itself in the foot.
>>pretty much everything you mention can be done in win 7, easier. >>One example, point 7. Simple click on the bread crumb and you're there. Not sure why this is hard for you.
Lol, moron. Open a folder on your desktop. Look for the breadcrumb for the desktop. You'll be looking for a long time because it isn't there.
Microsoft, I don't want transparent glass aero crap. I want an OS shell that lets me get my work done with the minimal amount of interference from the UI. After you got that down, *then* you can go ahead and add the worthless eye candy in.
Anyhow, long rant short - looking at some common tasks. I'm not comparing stock XP against stock Win7, but my tweaked versions of both, because I'm a bit OCD about reducing the number of keystrokes to do things to the minimum possible.
1) Launching very common apps via the taskbar. XP - quick launch toolbar to launch, taskbar to switch. Win7 - One taskbar to both launch and switch. Victor: XP. The user knows better than Windows when he wants to launch something, and when he wants to switch. It *is* possible to get the quick launch toolbar back in Win7, but requires a hack to do so.
2) Launching common apps via the start menu. XP - I have a folder off the start menu containing all my common locations and tasks, reachable with two keypresses (Win, I). A third keystroke takes me to the directory or task I want to get into. I've got 10 items in the base directory, and more from the hierarchical directories inside of it. Win7 - can pin a (small) number of things to the start menu directly before it gets too ugly for words. Keystrokes don't work all the time, since they're sitting on the root start menu, so it's usually a matter of hitting Win, and then scrolling to or (ugh) clicking on our commonly used task or directory. Victor: XP. Looks much cleaner, and doesn't require using the mouse at all to navigate the UI quickly. Switching to mouse = loss.
3) Switching tasks via alt-tabbing. XP - hit alt-tab. Win7 - hit alt-tab or Win-tab. Win7 allows previewing the windows before switching to them, instead of relying only on name. Victor: Win7
4) Switching tasks via toolbar. XP - click on the toolbar. Win7 - click on the toolbar, look at the popup that appears, scroll through the live task previews, and with the mouse (ugh) click on the one you want. Victor: 1 click vs. 2 clicks and a scan? XP. (Note: Win7 can disable this via options, unlike the start menu, which is fixed in it's broken state).
5) Launching uncommon apps. XP - Win, P. By default, this just shows you the last few apps you've run. Expanding it out (down arrow) shows you your hierarchical organization of tasks. Recently installed apps near the end, otherwise they've been sorted (by me) and easy to find. Win7 - type the name of the task. If it's working properly, and you know the name (pop quiz - what's the name of that HDR photo editing suite you bought three years ago?) and you only have one copy of the name, it works well. Unfortunately, those three things break all too easily. I was giving a workshop, and half the laptops couldn't launch sound recorder from their start menu. The other half could. So I had to take very valuable time walking a classroom of teachers into the Windows directory to launch it directly, since their start menus were not indexing correctly. When you have to hit "all programs" on Win7, that's just an epic loss compared with the hierarchical organization of XP. Victor: XP, by a clear margin. Faster, more reliable, more organized.
6) Saving a file to the desktop. XP - hit the giant bloody "Desktop" button right there. Win7 - made the link tiny, and buried it within a nest of worthless crap. On small screens, it tends to collapse the nest down to things that you don't actually need. Watching teachers spend 5 minutes trying to figure out how to save to the fucking desktop because Microsoft buried it within mountains of pointless (for them) crap makes me want to put staples through my fucking eyes. Again, they optimized the uncommon case at the expense of the common. Your average user saves to the desktop a lot more than they save to a workgroup file server. If they don't even have a file server, or even a workgroup, why is this shit eating up all of their valuable 9" screen space? Victor: XP
7) Navigate up to the desktop from a folder on the desktop. XP - hit the giant bloody "up arrow", or the backspace key. Done. Now you can operate with the files on your directory easily. Win7 - open a folder on the desktop. Look hopelessly at the breadcrumbs. Pound your head i
>>The start/all-programs menu for Win7 is vastly superior to XP, as is Windows Explorer. Have you actually sat down and tried to use them as they're meant to be used? Or have you tried to use them as if you were still using XP?
Amazingly enough, yeah - I use Win7 all the time. I have a Win7 laptop I use on the road and an XP machine at my house, and a Vista machine at my "office". Not to mention as any tech guy worth his salt, I've spent considerable time playing around with all three of them.
In short: Win7's start menu is inferior. Actually, the whole UI is inferior - it unoptimizes the common case to optimize the uncommon case. As anyone in software knows, this is a Bad Thing. For example, switching windows with >I'm not sure what you even mean by the XP start menu working more "cleanly" than Win7's... the exact opposite is the case. The Win7 start menu is just vastly superior. Of course, you have to take the time to actually learn this fact.
Yes, yes. Naturally the only reason people would hate the new start menu is because they haven't used it./snort
Fucking nonsense. Their file browser and taskbars are likewise crippled, optimizing the uncommon case at the expense of the common.
>>good question? i mean some stuff drivers and flash etc is not supported but dosent mean it could not be made companies simply build it for the new OS
Contrawise, there's also a lot of devices not supported (or supported well) by Win7.
If you have a building full of XP machines, then you know your hardware is supported by XP, but you don't know if it's supported by Win7. The upgrade advisor helps with this, but is not perfect by any means. My gym upgraded, for example, and their receipt printer stopped working. So we got 8x11 receipts for a while until they'd bought some piece of hardware that they could retrofit the receipt printer with to make it compatible.
In other words, it's really not worth the bother to upgrade, for people or for businesses. I've often said that I'd upgrade from XP to Win7 once they get a file browser and start menu that works as cleanly as XP's, but in reality I'm sticking with XP on my home machine (built in Dec 2004) until it dies. Win7 won't do an upgrade on a XP system with RAID, it seems.
Yeah. It's a good book as well as a Twainism. Talks about all the different ways to fudge data in stats - was recommended reading for my undergraduate stats class.
>>Or "cannot" and then a clause about maintaining validity and stuff like that.
The unfortunate reality is that a lot of people talk about validity (both internal and external), but the actual methods used have very little. I've seen evaluators speak at federal conferences talking about how they showed very high test results when they let the people taking the test MAKE the test.:p He furthermore recommended it to everyone that was having trouble showing performance on their test results. A fed was at the talk, and watched it very uncritically.
>>so you cannot hunt for a statistical significance just somewhere in the data and then re-formulate your hypothesis
Cannot? Or should not?
I work as an external evaluator on federal projects, and have been told by one group I worked with, after I delivered a negative result on their data, that "we know that the stats can say anything - why don't you take another look at the stats and find something that makes us look better?" I refused, saying it would be dishonest to change the analysis. They fired me, saying "most evaluators make us look better than the data, but you're making us look worse."
The entire point of an external evaluator is to have a third party looking at your data, so as to prevent this kind of analysis fudging, but when I reported it to the federal case officer overseeing the grant, they just shrugged and didn't care. They don't want any drama to crop up in the grants they oversee. Makes them look bad to *their* bosses.
Slashdot Mirror
>>It's sad, but the thing to do about it is to make philosophy relevant again.
Philosophy can be relevant without it being a *career*.
It is really one of the most "relevant" things to our lives, as, ultimately, we must choose which philosophy/religion we will live our lives by. We can punt on the decision, and allow popular culture to pick for us, but that just means we have even less control over our own lives, on the most fundamental questions.
I love philosophy, and think that anything mind-expanding should be promoted in our schools, but I do agree there's not exactly a large job market for it.
>>While the greek word philosophia literally means "friend of wisdom",
Philosophia actually means "love of wisdom", which is a wonderful way of describing it. People who love the big, interesting Questions in life.
>>the common-day philosopher tends to stare at their naval and wonder if they even exist more than they use anything which might resemble wisdom
Well. Descartes isn't a common-day philosopher, and modern Wittgenstein-ish philosophers are more worried about serving as a linguistic janitorial service than thinking about the big Questions. But your point is mostly accurate. There's a big difference between what Socrates/Plato considered philosophy and a lot of the modern nonsense (my metaphysics teacher tried to convince us that blind guys could 'feel' color).
This shouldn't paint all philosophers of science with a bad brush though - I took several courses on the subject in grad school, and I don't think I ever once had one claim that the scientific method didn't exist, and that we're all lucky plasma screen TVs work or whatever. It was more a question of how the process of science works, especially in regards to 'fringe science' and how it gets accepted by the mainstream (cf Kuhnian Paradigm Shifts and all that). I think there's a lot of interesting Questions there, because the elementary school "scientific method" isn't how science works in a lot of 'scientific' fields, so discussing what, exactly, makes something valid 'science' vs 'non-science' vs 'pseudo-science' is an open and interesting thing to think about. Even the Popperian notion of falsification isn't true in a lot of 'scientific' fields.
>>While many people on slashdot are of many different political views and seem to be able to discuss issues civilly
You must be new here. ;)
>>How does anyone expect to solve any of the issues in the US or world, when there isn't even enough respect of the human person to allow for differing opinions?
Given that Fox has been lionizing her all day, I wouldn't be surprised if she recovers and becomes a very popular voice in modern politics.
>>Fox is actively deleting comments on that story, so who knows what anyone is really saying?
And on the other side, Krugman is deleting comments on his idiotic thread blaming Republicans on the shooting. Without any facts, as is par for the course for him.
Could we adopt a new law that makes illegal accusing a group of inciting murder without any evidence other than "They give me negative vibes, dude"?
I've test driven the Civic Hybrid. It's one of those "0-to-60... eventually" models. Even my wife thought it was slow, and she has the driving habits of a gunshy octogenarian. The civic is not exactly a fast car, but the hybrid weighs more, and has 30% less horsepower. We ended up getting a normal civic, because it was substantially cheaper, and still gets great gas mileage.
I couldn't imagine driving a car with 60hp. A motorcycle, maybe. But the GP was talking about supercharged station wagons having less horsepower than today's econoboxes, and given that 200+, and even 300+ hp models were available on sport wagons from the 60s on, I was just disagreeing with that - those big V8s could produce some pretty good numbers.
Nice!
Yeah, I test drove the new 'stang, and they're pretty sick, but having a 4-door was one of my prerequisites, so I was basically only looking at sport sedans.
Very nearly bought the Sonata Turbo, which had all the right numbers - 274hp, 0-to-60 in 6.5, 34mpg highway, and costs around $24k... but I didn't fit in it. :p
Bloat is a problem... cars are definitely getting heavier.
But I don't think your horsepower argument is as true... an economy car these days has ~140hp, or less if you're going green. The Civic Hybrid has an asthmatic 110hp engine, for example. My 13 year old naturally aspirated Regal has 195hp. Supercharged cars from the 80s would start around 200hp, and they even had 300+ hp sport station wagons back in the mid-60s.
Small economy cars don't generally break 200hp these days, though cars like the Civic Si come in the neighborhood. Usually you have to choose to drop a V6 (and an extra 10k) into your Accord or Camry if you want to substantially break 200hp with a family car.
Sorry, didn't post references:
Best Buy:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/GPS-Navigation/In-Dash-GPS/abcat0301002.c?id=abcat0301002
Nissan:
http://www.nissanusa.com/configurator/app?service=external/SelectOptions&mo=2011:alt&bs=alh&tr=_TE_25HYB&ec=KH3&ic=_alt_hyb_GC&us=13|20|27&se=10|13|20|27|3|5&pv=10|13|17|18|19|20|21|22|23|25|26|27|28&pc=13|20&psel=10|13|20|27|3|5&ps=_alt_hyb_GC|1&zp=90210
And the technology package is "$1780", which means something in practice closer to $1400.
>>Manufacturer automotive electronics are a ripoff. For example, look at an OEM GPS unit. On a new car, it will cost you $1000 - $3000 vs. $200 for a top-end Garmin aftermarket (external) unit. Even the in-dash aftermarket units are substantially less.
Eh, in-dash units aren't that cheap. They range from $530-$1200, plus installation.
By comparison, the "Technology Package" on the Altima Hybrid includes: in-dash GPS, XM Radio, DVD playback, Steering Wheel nav controls, 9.3GB hard drive, and a special mode that monitors energy usage of the hybrid.
Not that I bought it. I just use my Droid X. =)
Yeah. The new, hyped (it's on the cover of the Consumer Reports 2011 book), Buick Regal CXL is the perfect example of this. The 2011 Regal has 20 less horsepower and 50 less lbft of torque than the previous generation. And the new one weighs more, too.
Why? To get +1 MPG with its utterly underpowered Ecotec engine. Trying to merge onto an interstate uphill in it felt only marginally faster than the Civic Hybrid, which is the slowest accelerating car I've ever driven.
But because they've packed a lot of electronic crap into it, people (I guess) are liking it. Maybe they just never test drove one.
Case in point: the turbocharged "sport" version of the Regal has a 7.6s 0-to-60 time, IIRC, the same as the Altima Hybrid I ended up buying, while the Regal costs $7k more and has 10 less MPG.
>>I think, maybe, we should just ask, if we can figure out how.
I already asked famed goat surgeon Dr. Cornwallis, and he said not to worry about the rights for now. They don't want them.
>>we used laptop screens that ran at 60 Hz, but the demo works even if you keep the dots motionless and lift up the screen and rock it back and forth.
You know this doesn't change anything, right?
Think about it from the point of view from the retinal afterimages left on an observer - if the laptop is moving a dot 1 inch/second on its screen, it will leave 60 afterimages, each spaced 1/60th of an inch apart. If you move the laptop instead, the observer will also have 60 afterimages in the second, also 1/60th of an inch apart. Identical input. The 120Hz CRT used, though, is a better control for that variable, though not perfect. The problem is that if the radius of the dot is smaller than the amount the dot moves in one frame, it will break apart and not appear to be an object in continuous motion but rather a series of discrete dots. This doesn't look to be a problem in your study, though, as the dots all move relatively slowly.
Very interesting illusion, though if you know what you're looking for and set the point of your attention away from the focal point of your eye, you can occasionally notice objects popping. So I'm guessing that the gate-keeping mechanism protecting attention prefers motion over color and shape change, which kind of makes sense, eh?
>>The trick is, if you are going to have forums, and you want them to be of value to you as a creator (as well as to your customers), you have to manage them.
Yep. I wrote the CustomTF mod for Quake, and we had a very active and very vocal community around it. Ten years after I wrote it and moved on to other things, I found people still hotly debating certain things in the game, cheap tactics, etc. So I came back, fixed a lot of bugs, introduced some new things. Instant uproar.
The thing is, some of the feedback was good, some was bad, just like you said, but there's a lot of good ideas there, and your players honestly know the implications of changes in game mechanics better than you. So I'd calm the people down, and modified it and modified it until everyone was happy. Though some people were still unhappy, forked the code... and then people realized how broken and buggy the old code was, and went back (mostly) to the new version.
So on and so forth. Game forums are invaluable, and you HAVE to spend time on them as a developer. Plus, players like to know the developers are paying attention and making insightful posts.
I was once hired to write a VR casino game. Pretty cool actually, shame it was never commercially released.
Anyway, the point is that they wanted it guaranteed rigged so even things which appeared to have a certain percentage chance of happening (say 25%) would be indeed 25% until the last piece would cause a win, in which case it wouldn't win except on an exceedingly diminutive chance.
I found a bug in it that would essentially let you 'spin the slots' as fast as the frame rate of the world, and seriously debated not fixing it in case the game ever was released. Damn morals - I fixed it. =)
Right. If anything, they've moved backwards. I just started playing WoW again, to see what they did in Cata (I wasn't going to buy it, but then ended up getting it as a present for Xmas :p) and have been profoundly unimpressed. The graphics, the story, the new, horrible, talent system. Everything is half-assed, and unworth the month of service I had to buy to play it.
And the players are the worst of any MMORPG in existence.
It's a really weird thing. Bioware usually does an amazingly solid job on their games, that even when they have a crap design (Mass Effect 2 is a corridor simulator) they're still entertaining. But from what the inside reports from the dev team say, they really don't have much clue what they're doing. Which makes them identical to WoW's dev team, but with 12 million less users, and no content.
>>Can we realize that the Chinese are on a nice technology curve that is bound to intersect with ours within our lifetime?
Well, their strategy in this regard is quite smart. They are sitting on a long pile of dollars, which, you know, some companies would like to get. So they will buy stuff from western companies with the following deal: we'll buy the first few outright, the next few we'll buy from you but assemble in China, and the next few you'll turn the plans over to us, and we'll build it ourselves but pay you a royalty. They've done this with high speed trains, nuclear reactors, and so forth. Very very cheap way of bypassing the need for doing the R&D themselves.
And the West loves it, though it's essentially shooting itself in the foot.
>>pretty much everything you mention can be done in win 7, easier.
>>One example, point 7. Simple click on the bread crumb and you're there. Not sure why this is hard for you.
Lol, moron. Open a folder on your desktop. Look for the breadcrumb for the desktop. You'll be looking for a long time because it isn't there.
Amen, brother. I want the same keypresses to do the same thing every time. Especially for something as simple as the things we're talking about here.
There is a registry setting to have Win7 switch to the MRU window instead of an arbitrary one (
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16334/make-the-taskbar-buttons-switch-to-the-last-active-window-in-windows-7/ ) which means that the geniuses at Microsoft actually considered doing it the right way and rejected it for their bling and flash or whatever justification they had.
Microsoft, I don't want transparent glass aero crap. I want an OS shell that lets me get my work done with the minimal amount of interference from the UI. After you got that down, *then* you can go ahead and add the worthless eye candy in.
Grr, slashcode ate a paragraph.
Anyhow, long rant short - looking at some common tasks. I'm not comparing stock XP against stock Win7, but my tweaked versions of both, because I'm a bit OCD about reducing the number of keystrokes to do things to the minimum possible.
1) Launching very common apps via the taskbar. XP - quick launch toolbar to launch, taskbar to switch. Win7 - One taskbar to both launch and switch. Victor: XP. The user knows better than Windows when he wants to launch something, and when he wants to switch. It *is* possible to get the quick launch toolbar back in Win7, but requires a hack to do so.
2) Launching common apps via the start menu. XP - I have a folder off the start menu containing all my common locations and tasks, reachable with two keypresses (Win, I). A third keystroke takes me to the directory or task I want to get into. I've got 10 items in the base directory, and more from the hierarchical directories inside of it. Win7 - can pin a (small) number of things to the start menu directly before it gets too ugly for words. Keystrokes don't work all the time, since they're sitting on the root start menu, so it's usually a matter of hitting Win, and then scrolling to or (ugh) clicking on our commonly used task or directory. Victor: XP. Looks much cleaner, and doesn't require using the mouse at all to navigate the UI quickly. Switching to mouse = loss.
3) Switching tasks via alt-tabbing. XP - hit alt-tab. Win7 - hit alt-tab or Win-tab. Win7 allows previewing the windows before switching to them, instead of relying only on name. Victor: Win7
4) Switching tasks via toolbar. XP - click on the toolbar. Win7 - click on the toolbar, look at the popup that appears, scroll through the live task previews, and with the mouse (ugh) click on the one you want. Victor: 1 click vs. 2 clicks and a scan? XP. (Note: Win7 can disable this via options, unlike the start menu, which is fixed in it's broken state).
5) Launching uncommon apps. XP - Win, P. By default, this just shows you the last few apps you've run. Expanding it out (down arrow) shows you your hierarchical organization of tasks. Recently installed apps near the end, otherwise they've been sorted (by me) and easy to find. Win7 - type the name of the task. If it's working properly, and you know the name (pop quiz - what's the name of that HDR photo editing suite you bought three years ago?) and you only have one copy of the name, it works well. Unfortunately, those three things break all too easily. I was giving a workshop, and half the laptops couldn't launch sound recorder from their start menu. The other half could. So I had to take very valuable time walking a classroom of teachers into the Windows directory to launch it directly, since their start menus were not indexing correctly. When you have to hit "all programs" on Win7, that's just an epic loss compared with the hierarchical organization of XP. Victor: XP, by a clear margin. Faster, more reliable, more organized.
6) Saving a file to the desktop. XP - hit the giant bloody "Desktop" button right there. Win7 - made the link tiny, and buried it within a nest of worthless crap. On small screens, it tends to collapse the nest down to things that you don't actually need. Watching teachers spend 5 minutes trying to figure out how to save to the fucking desktop because Microsoft buried it within mountains of pointless (for them) crap makes me want to put staples through my fucking eyes. Again, they optimized the uncommon case at the expense of the common. Your average user saves to the desktop a lot more than they save to a workgroup file server. If they don't even have a file server, or even a workgroup, why is this shit eating up all of their valuable 9" screen space? Victor: XP
7) Navigate up to the desktop from a folder on the desktop. XP - hit the giant bloody "up arrow", or the backspace key. Done. Now you can operate with the files on your directory easily. Win7 - open a folder on the desktop. Look hopelessly at the breadcrumbs. Pound your head i
>>The start/all-programs menu for Win7 is vastly superior to XP, as is Windows Explorer. Have you actually sat down and tried to use them as they're meant to be used? Or have you tried to use them as if you were still using XP?
Amazingly enough, yeah - I use Win7 all the time. I have a Win7 laptop I use on the road and an XP machine at my house, and a Vista machine at my "office". Not to mention as any tech guy worth his salt, I've spent considerable time playing around with all three of them.
In short: Win7's start menu is inferior. Actually, the whole UI is inferior - it unoptimizes the common case to optimize the uncommon case. As anyone in software knows, this is a Bad Thing. For example, switching windows with >I'm not sure what you even mean by the XP start menu working more "cleanly" than Win7's... the exact opposite is the case. The Win7 start menu is just vastly superior. Of course, you have to take the time to actually learn this fact.
Yes, yes. Naturally the only reason people would hate the new start menu is because they haven't used it. /snort
Fucking nonsense. Their file browser and taskbars are likewise crippled, optimizing the uncommon case at the expense of the common.
>>good question? i mean some stuff drivers and flash etc is not supported but dosent mean it could not be made companies simply build it for the new OS
Contrawise, there's also a lot of devices not supported (or supported well) by Win7.
If you have a building full of XP machines, then you know your hardware is supported by XP, but you don't know if it's supported by Win7. The upgrade advisor helps with this, but is not perfect by any means. My gym upgraded, for example, and their receipt printer stopped working. So we got 8x11 receipts for a while until they'd bought some piece of hardware that they could retrofit the receipt printer with to make it compatible.
In other words, it's really not worth the bother to upgrade, for people or for businesses. I've often said that I'd upgrade from XP to Win7 once they get a file browser and start menu that works as cleanly as XP's, but in reality I'm sticking with XP on my home machine (built in Dec 2004) until it dies. Win7 won't do an upgrade on a XP system with RAID, it seems.
>>If you're the one setting up these utilities for yourself, then you are managing your own desires.
Eh, a lot of GPS enabled devices will bitch at you if you operate them while moving.
It's kind of annoying, especially when you're the passenger.
Geiger counters can detect all forms of ionizing radiation. They're over 100 years old, too.
>>lies, damn lies, and statistics, eh?
Yeah. It's a good book as well as a Twainism. Talks about all the different ways to fudge data in stats - was recommended reading for my undergraduate stats class.
>>Or "cannot" and then a clause about maintaining validity and stuff like that.
The unfortunate reality is that a lot of people talk about validity (both internal and external), but the actual methods used have very little. I've seen evaluators speak at federal conferences talking about how they showed very high test results when they let the people taking the test MAKE the test. :p He furthermore recommended it to everyone that was having trouble showing performance on their test results. A fed was at the talk, and watched it very uncritically.
>>so you cannot hunt for a statistical significance just somewhere in the data and then re-formulate your hypothesis
Cannot? Or should not?
I work as an external evaluator on federal projects, and have been told by one group I worked with, after I delivered a negative result on their data, that "we know that the stats can say anything - why don't you take another look at the stats and find something that makes us look better?" I refused, saying it would be dishonest to change the analysis. They fired me, saying "most evaluators make us look better than the data, but you're making us look worse."
The entire point of an external evaluator is to have a third party looking at your data, so as to prevent this kind of analysis fudging, but when I reported it to the federal case officer overseeing the grant, they just shrugged and didn't care. They don't want any drama to crop up in the grants they oversee. Makes them look bad to *their* bosses.