Times are changing. 20 years from now not placing video calls may be seen as hopelessly old fashioned.... and I'll be right there with you, with a piece of tape over the camera on all my phones.
Since you're a unixy Kindle guy, can you tell me... Is there a good way to get txt, rtf, html onto a Kindle? It's a device I am interested in, but before it would be at all useful to me I'd need it to digest open formats too, and without the *online* conversion process mentioned in TFA.
Photographers have been calling themselves photogs for a lot longer than Web 2.0 has been around. It's not in the same league as other hated words like... blogosphere.
The concept of the work for hire should be abolished.
Speaking as a person who has both bought and sold work for hire, I disagree. People should be free to make that arrangement if they wish.
I am at work right now and I am supposed to be designing something for my employer instead of reading Slashdot. There are 100 people here in the same boat, though hopefully not all of them are on Slashdot too. If the company could not own our work under a mutually-agreeable relationship, how would this place work? The ownership of each line of text, each piece or art, etc etc in the whole product would have to be tracked. It would be impractical for one and an unfair restraint of trade too, I think.
If we have freedom, we also have some freedom to make bad decisions, like giving the record company all the rights to our music. That's life, though.
No faceless corporation has ever written a song or come up with a new idea.
Once I was part-owner of a small company. I wrote books and published them and eventually I sold my stake in all of it to my partners so I could do other things.
If only people and not companies could own copyrights, and if work for hire was not legal, that transaction--which seems very reasonable to me--would have been impossible, and to get a similar end result we'd have a bunch of additional legal hoops to jump through.
Let's start copyright reform (which I agree is BADLY needed) by simply shortening the term and establishing some better rules for the use of abandoned works.
Let's ask for ponies too, because the government is more likely to legalize drugs than fix copyright.
But remember, you have to pay a premium for the excellent customer serv--
Oh, forget it, I can't even make that joke.
When your business model is, "we're the store to visit when you are desperate or ignorant" you've got problems. That can be a great niche I guess, but in a pure price war online sure seems to have an unbeatable advantage. Retail will have to figure out something else to compete because consumers will only get more educated about their options over time.
I have seen that 'something else' in small stores, stores that have expert staff and excellent service. That can make a small price premium tolerable.
Can a whale like Best Buy play on that level? Somehow, I doubt it.
It looks like you're trying to sink an enemy warship. Would you like help?
* Verify range to target with one ping only * Sound battle stations * Turn on the red lights * Just launch the torpedo * Click the monkey and win an iPod!
Or maybe we need Clippy's help with a vertical launch scenario. "It looks like you are trying to start Armageddon. Would you like help?"
Yes, I meant to say "within a sprint" several times, I didn't mean to say that requirements can't change at all.
You are right in that we are clearly not doing pure "agile" development. What I was trying to get across, albeit poorly, is the problems that you can see in agile when you don't stick to the rules, which often happens in my office.
I think this is partially because our product may be ill-suited to agile, and partially due to cultural issues. There's still very much a waterfall mentality lingering on, in that we have a ship date and other must-hit targets.
Even then though, the agile process (malformed though it may be) seems to provide transparency, accountability, and flexibility that we didn't have before.
I prefer "agile" over waterfall, but it has its problems too.
One of the main commandments in agile development is that the requirements cannot change. Also, you are supposed to plan and code for a feature to be shippable when it is done.
On paper, it looks great. Your requirements are fixed, you break development into short sprints and at the end of a sprint a feature is done and shippable, or at least one of that feature's components is in that state.
But in the office, requirements keep changing as much as they did with waterfall because no one will say no to the boss. This messes up the schedule. And features only get to the "done enough for now" stage which means that they are good enough to sort of work and build on, but they are not complete or shippable. (Then you need a bug-fixing and polishing sprint to clean up the messes.)
Agile's way of solving these problems is simply sticking to the method's rules, which is not really a solution at all because in the end, not everyone is going to say no to the boss, or do something the right way instead of the quick way.
The seminar example was a web app, which is easily broken into features that can almost stand alone, like authentication. In my office, the software is much more complex, with loads of interdependencies. It is very hard to make one of our features shippable-quality, all by itself.
Still, it's better than waterfall, IMHO. I like it. It is vulnerable to the same human weaknesses but the frequent iteration method makes mistakes easier to see and recover from.
Imagine the city you live in, where 15% of the cars parked on the curbs have the keys in the ignition. And there's a growing problem in the city of kids going on joy rides and trashing cars and property and even killing people.
Instead of a car analogy... imagine that the city's vehicles are magic carpets, and the keys aren't even visible to the users, because everything is magical and who understands magic? Hey, it flies, that's all we need to know!
The owners of the carpets don't know much about them besides how to fly to the porn shop and the book store. They can barely fly upright, and most of them don't know how to secure their carpets when they park them since they keys are, as mentioned, invisible. Therefore, when they are in the porn shop, someone's likely to steal their carpet and use it for a while. It may be returned sticky or running poorly, but no one notices.
Almost no one understands how the magic carpets actually work aside from the guys who go joyriding, and a small percentage of the population that seem to be wizards. The typical magic carpet owner thinks that THEY are a wizard, until their sticky, sluggish carpet fails and pitches them out of the sky.
Many of these overly confident flyers find it entertaining to pick up hitchhikers who may carry cute animated signs. The hitchhikers often barf on the carpet, but the owners rarely notice, just like they never notice that someone's taken their carpet joyriding and returned it with bloodstains and bullet holes.
I think that this picture of a sky full of wobbly, sluggish, stained, tattered and barf-encrusted magical flying carpets helmed by ignorant clods is... a terrible analogy.
But the idea I am trying to get to, in my own way, is that computers are awfully complicated. They are the most complicated thing that most people deal with on a regular basis. They barely know how to use them, and few know how to use them safely.
I can't think of another product in history that is as difficult to use, but still so useful as to be common, and that has such far-reaching consequences for being used poorly. (Cars come close, I guess. Damn, always back to a car analogy...)
I think that botnets and other malware will be with us for a long time. It will take a fundamental change in how software is made to reduce the number of possible exploits on a typical user's computer.
But even then, someone's going to click the damn monkey.
I've been worried that the US would begin looking at similar policies for a long time. I haven't caught a whiff of it yet though.
After the anthrax hoo-hah I was sure that we'd begin to see TSA-like procedures for the mail. Aside from mail to government offices being delayed for X-rays, though, nothing seemed to materialize. I can still put a package in the mail anonymously, which somehow surprises me.
There are no overhead telephone wires in my area, and I know that they have trenched some nearby streets. I don't think it's in yet, but I guess I can't be sure. I figured I'd get some junk mail announcing it, but I am on a Comcast contract for a while yet anyway.
BTW Comcast business-class internet has a steep cancellation fee. You owe them 75% of the fees for the remaining contract period! Ouch. Now here's hoping it doesn't get flaky.
I never thought it would be possible, but I am really happy with my Comcast business-class cable connection. It's advertised as 16Mbps/2Mbps. In reality, it is usually faster. Obviously, YMMV...
NATURALLY, the week after I got Comcast, Verizon flyered my street announcing FIOS was coming. But that was 6 months ago and they haven't even started trenching.
There was an episode of the X-Files where people started seeing messages in digital displays--microwave ovens, watches, radios, etc. I forget the story of that episode, but the messages always urged violence, and something about them made people snap and go berserk.
If I had one of those displays, I'd have it displaying something mundane and useful like news, but periodically it would flash KILL HIM and YES YOU and KILL THEM ALL and KILL THEM BEFORE THEY KILL YOU.
Artists and animators are the biggest group of employees in my game studio, and we spend a ton of money on outsourcing things that we don't have the time to do ourselves.
I promise you, a crappy game with great graphics is usually not cheaper to make than a great game with crappy graphics.
Gameplay often takes a back seat to graphics not because graphics are a cheap fix, but because graphics make an immediate impact that every PHB, visiting executive, E3 attendee, and reporter can appreciate. Nuanced elder game balance and replayability is not something that comes across in the 15 minute demos that most games are build around.
Actually, wait, I'm sorry--you said "profitable" not "cheaper to make" and those are different things. I don't know about profit, that has to factor in sales and that isn't my department. I just know that art, generally speaking, does cost more to produce than the design and developer time that creates gameplay.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming I'm not too terribly odd in this regard, the market for video is probably limited.
That's what I would have thought about breakfastcasting.
Times are changing. 20 years from now not placing video calls may be seen as hopelessly old fashioned. ... and I'll be right there with you, with a piece of tape over the camera on all my phones.
This story has to have hit some kind of record for "issue worth discussing ruined with hipster hyperbole."
Now I hate every monkey that I see--from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z.
Drupal et al make life a whole lot easier when it comes to updating a website and adding content. But what about the design?
Just install a Drupal module that generates new designs.
What?
Since you're a unixy Kindle guy, can you tell me... Is there a good way to get txt, rtf, html onto a Kindle? It's a device I am interested in, but before it would be at all useful to me I'd need it to digest open formats too, and without the *online* conversion process mentioned in TFA.
The internet as we know it has been on borrowed time since we first got it.
Our culture's scientific illiteracy isn't just a fun joke any more... It's almost literally putting a gun to our heads.
History will recognize this--if they haven't become scared of books by then.
Photographers have been calling themselves photogs for a lot longer than Web 2.0 has been around. It's not in the same league as other hated words like... blogosphere.
The concept of the work for hire should be abolished.
Speaking as a person who has both bought and sold work for hire, I disagree. People should be free to make that arrangement if they wish.
I am at work right now and I am supposed to be designing something for my employer instead of reading Slashdot. There are 100 people here in the same boat, though hopefully not all of them are on Slashdot too. If the company could not own our work under a mutually-agreeable relationship, how would this place work? The ownership of each line of text, each piece or art, etc etc in the whole product would have to be tracked. It would be impractical for one and an unfair restraint of trade too, I think.
If we have freedom, we also have some freedom to make bad decisions, like giving the record company all the rights to our music. That's life, though.
No faceless corporation has ever written a song or come up with a new idea.
Once I was part-owner of a small company. I wrote books and published them and eventually I sold my stake in all of it to my partners so I could do other things.
If only people and not companies could own copyrights, and if work for hire was not legal, that transaction--which seems very reasonable to me--would have been impossible, and to get a similar end result we'd have a bunch of additional legal hoops to jump through.
Let's start copyright reform (which I agree is BADLY needed) by simply shortening the term and establishing some better rules for the use of abandoned works.
Let's ask for ponies too, because the government is more likely to legalize drugs than fix copyright.
WORLD WAR (C)
But remember, you have to pay a premium for the excellent customer serv--
Oh, forget it, I can't even make that joke.
When your business model is, "we're the store to visit when you are desperate or ignorant" you've got problems. That can be a great niche I guess, but in a pure price war online sure seems to have an unbeatable advantage. Retail will have to figure out something else to compete because consumers will only get more educated about their options over time.
I have seen that 'something else' in small stores, stores that have expert staff and excellent service. That can make a small price premium tolerable.
Can a whale like Best Buy play on that level? Somehow, I doubt it.
It looks like you're trying to sink an enemy warship. Would you like help?
* Verify range to target with one ping only
* Sound battle stations
* Turn on the red lights
* Just launch the torpedo
* Click the monkey and win an iPod!
Or maybe we need Clippy's help with a vertical launch scenario. "It looks like you are trying to start Armageddon. Would you like help?"
Yes, I meant to say "within a sprint" several times, I didn't mean to say that requirements can't change at all.
You are right in that we are clearly not doing pure "agile" development. What I was trying to get across, albeit poorly, is the problems that you can see in agile when you don't stick to the rules, which often happens in my office.
I think this is partially because our product may be ill-suited to agile, and partially due to cultural issues. There's still very much a waterfall mentality lingering on, in that we have a ship date and other must-hit targets.
Even then though, the agile process (malformed though it may be) seems to provide transparency, accountability, and flexibility that we didn't have before.
I prefer "agile" over waterfall, but it has its problems too.
One of the main commandments in agile development is that the requirements cannot change. Also, you are supposed to plan and code for a feature to be shippable when it is done.
On paper, it looks great. Your requirements are fixed, you break development into short sprints and at the end of a sprint a feature is done and shippable, or at least one of that feature's components is in that state.
But in the office, requirements keep changing as much as they did with waterfall because no one will say no to the boss. This messes up the schedule. And features only get to the "done enough for now" stage which means that they are good enough to sort of work and build on, but they are not complete or shippable. (Then you need a bug-fixing and polishing sprint to clean up the messes.)
Agile's way of solving these problems is simply sticking to the method's rules, which is not really a solution at all because in the end, not everyone is going to say no to the boss, or do something the right way instead of the quick way.
The seminar example was a web app, which is easily broken into features that can almost stand alone, like authentication. In my office, the software is much more complex, with loads of interdependencies. It is very hard to make one of our features shippable-quality, all by itself.
Still, it's better than waterfall, IMHO. I like it. It is vulnerable to the same human weaknesses but the frequent iteration method makes mistakes easier to see and recover from.
Imagine the city you live in, where 15% of the cars parked on the curbs have the keys in the ignition. And there's a growing problem in the city of kids going on joy rides and trashing cars and property and even killing people.
Instead of a car analogy... imagine that the city's vehicles are magic carpets, and the keys aren't even visible to the users, because everything is magical and who understands magic? Hey, it flies, that's all we need to know!
The owners of the carpets don't know much about them besides how to fly to the porn shop and the book store. They can barely fly upright, and most of them don't know how to secure their carpets when they park them since they keys are, as mentioned, invisible. Therefore, when they are in the porn shop, someone's likely to steal their carpet and use it for a while. It may be returned sticky or running poorly, but no one notices.
Almost no one understands how the magic carpets actually work aside from the guys who go joyriding, and a small percentage of the population that seem to be wizards. The typical magic carpet owner thinks that THEY are a wizard, until their sticky, sluggish carpet fails and pitches them out of the sky.
Many of these overly confident flyers find it entertaining to pick up hitchhikers who may carry cute animated signs. The hitchhikers often barf on the carpet, but the owners rarely notice, just like they never notice that someone's taken their carpet joyriding and returned it with bloodstains and bullet holes.
I think that this picture of a sky full of wobbly, sluggish, stained, tattered and barf-encrusted magical flying carpets helmed by ignorant clods is ... a terrible analogy.
But the idea I am trying to get to, in my own way, is that computers are awfully complicated. They are the most complicated thing that most people deal with on a regular basis. They barely know how to use them, and few know how to use them safely.
I can't think of another product in history that is as difficult to use, but still so useful as to be common, and that has such far-reaching consequences for being used poorly. (Cars come close, I guess. Damn, always back to a car analogy...)
I think that botnets and other malware will be with us for a long time. It will take a fundamental change in how software is made to reduce the number of possible exploits on a typical user's computer.
But even then, someone's going to click the damn monkey.
Here's hoping it goes better than the FBI's "virtual case file" upgrade.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html
I've been worried that the US would begin looking at similar policies for a long time. I haven't caught a whiff of it yet though.
After the anthrax hoo-hah I was sure that we'd begin to see TSA-like procedures for the mail. Aside from mail to government offices being delayed for X-rays, though, nothing seemed to materialize. I can still put a package in the mail anonymously, which somehow surprises me.
Maybe we're not as dumb as I am afraid of.
Oops, I bet I just jinxed myself!
I just LOL'd a little.
And I can't believe that I got one flamebait mod on that comment... Lighten up, Francis!
There are no overhead telephone wires in my area, and I know that they have trenched some nearby streets. I don't think it's in yet, but I guess I can't be sure. I figured I'd get some junk mail announcing it, but I am on a Comcast contract for a while yet anyway.
BTW Comcast business-class internet has a steep cancellation fee. You owe them 75% of the fees for the remaining contract period! Ouch. Now here's hoping it doesn't get flaky.
I never thought it would be possible, but I am really happy with my Comcast business-class cable connection. It's advertised as 16Mbps/2Mbps. In reality, it is usually faster. Obviously, YMMV...
NATURALLY, the week after I got Comcast, Verizon flyered my street announcing FIOS was coming. But that was 6 months ago and they haven't even started trenching.
Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Somehow it is disturbing that the President-Elect is lumped in with Britney as a celebrity.
What is the level of discourse on Mr. Obama's twitter thing, anyway? I could look, I suppose, but it is more fun to imagine.
---
im in ur white house
secret service bitches following me everywhere. about 3 minutes ago from web
these pancakes are righteous! about 2 hours ago from airforce1r
are ufoz real? I am going to find out! about 4 hours ago from web
I think Hillary just cut the cheese LOLz about 8 hours ago from twitterrific
There was an episode of the X-Files where people started seeing messages in digital displays--microwave ovens, watches, radios, etc. I forget the story of that episode, but the messages always urged violence, and something about them made people snap and go berserk.
If I had one of those displays, I'd have it displaying something mundane and useful like news, but periodically it would flash KILL HIM and YES YOU and KILL THEM ALL and KILL THEM BEFORE THEY KILL YOU.
But then, I am a sicko.
Artists and animators are the biggest group of employees in my game studio, and we spend a ton of money on outsourcing things that we don't have the time to do ourselves.
I promise you, a crappy game with great graphics is usually not cheaper to make than a great game with crappy graphics.
Gameplay often takes a back seat to graphics not because graphics are a cheap fix, but because graphics make an immediate impact that every PHB, visiting executive, E3 attendee, and reporter can appreciate. Nuanced elder game balance and replayability is not something that comes across in the 15 minute demos that most games are build around.
Actually, wait, I'm sorry--you said "profitable" not "cheaper to make" and those are different things. I don't know about profit, that has to factor in sales and that isn't my department. I just know that art, generally speaking, does cost more to produce than the design and developer time that creates gameplay.
(And let's not talk about the marketing budget!)
Holy crap, did a game designer kill your dad?
The legal system needs to employ a few game designers to help them avoid such obvious griefing opportunities.