True, they do have superior educational systems. I believe this is primarily due to the fact that they don't put up with the bullshit our teachers do. In our schools, if a teacher so much as yells at a student, they are suspended and warned that their job is at risk. Oddly, we did so much better back when our teachers could take a paddle to the kids. Nowadays there is no respect by the kids show for their educators or the educational system. Fix that, and you fix the problem.
Too bad brand recognition is becoming less and less important. To be sure, there are many people who will make choices based on brand names but research has shown that this is changing. People are willing to give no-name brands a shot. The more the economy keels, the more people are willing to try less expensive alternatives. Anyway, there was a large article about this in last month's issue. I believe it was called, "The Death of Brands".
If brands do become completely irrelevant, then what?
Who cares? All this stuff is worthless to me until I can record HDTV off my cable connection. Since there are no cards that make this possible, any software out there is useless to me. All these cute linux solutions are gonna go the way of the dodo bird once HD is the normal broadcast. The only way you'll be able to record this crap in fascist America is by buying/renting set tops from your cable or satelite company.
Fortunately, I hate almost every broadcast out there except for about three shows (and two of them are pay channels).
Their handwriting recognition system doesn't work for shit. It couldn't even correctly retrieve results from words that I know are in its scanned letters. The word "governor" appears as a result from one of their suggested queries (*cough* hard coded results *cough*), but if you do a separate search for governor it returns stuff that doesn't even contain the word.
No, we don't get unlimited on our cell phones except in the following circumstances: nights & weekends, holidays, and to others using the same carrier. For many people this amounts to unlimited useage, but certainly not all. Not all cell carriers have the rules I described but most do.
Conversely, I suppose it doesn't matter to you if someone in such a position is negligent and willfully does such things to increase profit? Seriously, this country is filled with nothing but corporate brainwashed fools.
If you are the Captain of the ship, you should go down with the ship.
"If a person is head of a multi-national company with 150,000 employees, is that person personally criminally liable for the actions of every single employee?"
If he's negligent in properly running the factory, yes. He is the boss. That's why he gets paid big dollars. If he's not doing his job then he should pay the price. If he can't handle the responsibility then he has no business being in that position. However, if the incident occurs due to the failure of a single workman, then sure he's off the hook. This disaster was due to gross negligence that took place undoubtedly at the behest of the senior executive staff of the company. They should pay. They should pay dearly.
Corporations and the people who work for those corporations need to be held responsible for their actions. This shit goes too damn far.
A) TiVo sucks. If you're not going to use something like mythTV, then get a Replay.
B) Free Network television is on its deathbed. Seriously, there's only two network shows I care to watch and that's Conan and Law & Order. Everything else is total crap. Cable TV is where its at. HBO has the best series' on television with stuff like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Entourage. Of course, stuff like Discovery and the History channel are also very cool.
C) If advertisers had a fucking clue, the would learn that the quality of the commercial determines how much it gets watched. Make the commercials funny or interesting like they do in Europe. Our commercials suck incredibly bad. It's amazing these companies make any money off of them. Don't these guys ever wonder why there's people who don't even care about football watching the Superbowl?
I don't think this is an issue. However, I do wonder how the lense would respond in cold weather. The 2/100th of a second is only going to be valid for certain temperature ranges.
I disagree completely. I have yet to be involved with an interview where the degree was a deciding factor for anyone and I've been in this business for 16 years. It ALWAYS comes down to experience and how well you do on the technical interview. People underestimate technical interviews. Here's how the decision is typically made in my experience:
60% Experience (this is what gets you in the door) 39% Interview (this is what gets you hired) 1% Piece of paper
Nobody puts weight on the paper because everyone knows that schools do not prepare programmers for the real world.
About the only exception I could see to the 1% rule is if you come from a particularly prestigious institution like MIT, CalTech, etc. That said, people who come from institutions like that usually do very well in the interview because they are ultra-geeks. In any event, since the percentage of the population coming from those places is extremely small, it's not really a factor.
"It's not as "gigantic" a risk as you state. No company will take a "gigantic" risk."
In general, I agree with your statement that companies won't take giant risks. However, with MMOs they are ALL huge risks. Star Wars Galaxies was expected to be a sure thing, however, it's considered a failure and they are trying desperately to revive it. The Sims Online was expected to have the largest MMO subscription base in the world and it was...you guessed it! a failure.
All MMOs are high risk, my friend.
As for $40 mil for half life 2...a) that's just an estimate by outsiders and b) nobody really knows what that number includes. Gimme some hard numbers and we can talk. Even if you can back it up, that would definitely be the exception to the rule.
Oh, and I've been a Blizzard fan forever and was looking forward to the day when I could buy WoW but I've decided not to because it's derivitive crapola.
So I guess I can play with my guildies so long as I don't give a shit about performance? Afterall, that was the reason they gave for setting it up that way.
Of course it doesn't cost 15 mil to operate, but the ONLY reason to make an MMO is big profits. The risks for creating an MMO are gigantic compared to other games. You're talking about companies spending 10 - 20 million dollars to develop the thing and they better pray they got it right or it's all down the drain. Building an FPS is much cheaper. MMOs are an entirely different business model for a game company and they're scared shitless whenever they do it.
Apparently you have no idea what kind of infrastructure is involved with a MMO. Paying $50 just covers the cost of making the game (which takes significantly longer than any other game type). The monthly fees go to very expensive bandwidth, many server farms (EQ has well over a thousand servers), huge maintenance costs, and the continual costs of constantly upgrading the game (which all MMO players expect). Sorry, but none of this shit is free.
I got the opportunity to play WoW in the open beta. I've played many MMOs at least to some degree so I know the genre well. In the case of EQ, I played for 3.5 years.
After playing several different race/class combinations in WoW, I came to the conclusion that it's a completely derivitive work in every way but the artistry of the graphics. There is nothing new in this game. Everything I did in EQ 5 years ago is pretty much replicated in some fashion in WoW. Sure, skills are handled differently but not in any new or interesting way that hasn't been done before. There's tons of quests but all the ones I've seen were fedex style or gofer style quests. The game plays well and it functioned pretty flawlessly for the limited amount of time the open beta ran. My only complaint was that it was a bit laggy.
Presuming I didn't care it was completely derivitive and bereft of any real creativity, it has one glaring flaw: at least for the time being, you can only join servers that are in the region you live in. Apparently this was done for performance reasons. I guess Blizzard doesn't care that guilds from other MMOs might be interested in switching to WoW and that those guilds might be composed of people from all over the country or even the world. Frankly, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of being done in an MMO. It immediately writes the game off for thousands of people.
Maybe I expected more of Blizzard than a well executed rehash of what's already been done many times before but I've always liked Blizzard games...until now. Apparently, the people who made Blizzard great are the ones who left the company or perhaps they lost their soul when they sold out to a large multinational conglomerate. Either way it's really sad.
I spent some time in Boston and found the people to be...intersting. On the surface they seem harsh, however, I found them to actually be quite nice when I looked beyond the outward appearance.
The moral of the story: don't judge a book by its cover.:P
Unfortunately I haven't spent any time in Cincinnati, so I have no comment on the people there.
"The numbers of H1's issued in recent years was unusual and we are unlikely to see any of that happening in the near future again."
Sorry, I left my tarot cards at home so I can't see the future right now. In any event, you were quoting numbers for the last 6 years -- NOT THE FUTURE.
"not every American wants to end up in IT, but at the same time work sectors other than IT also have immigrants coming here to fight for their jobs."
Please point to the spot in my post where I said everyone applying for an H1B visa wants to be in IT. I even used YOUR number for the percentage of visas going toward IT jobs.
"Futher, if an H1 visa holder loses his job he either has to leave the country or find another IT job."
True. However, they tend to get jobs easily because they will take significantly less pay than the equivalent American worker. Of course, the H1B visa law requires companies to pay prevailing wages to H1B visa people but in practice that's not the case.
"If an American loses his job he could get some non-IT job as a stopgap or go and study again."
Sure, working at Starbucks has great fringe benefits like free mocha frappucinos but it may make paying your bills rather difficult.
"Oh, and $500 for the visa renewal? Please refer me to your lawyer."
Go here and search for the word "extension": http://www.immigration-counselor.bui lderspot.com/p age/page/1004746.htm
This gives us a total of 895,000 total H1Bs over the last six years. I'll be generous and use your figure that only 60% were IT specific, which gives us: 537,000. Now, you idiotically compared your total figure to the number of people in this country to come to the conclusion that your 270k number (which I've already proven is completely wrong) is statistically insignificant. Your comparison is retarded. That 300 million includes people who don't even try to work, like INFANTS for example.
Why don't you compare it to the number of IT workers in the country? Here, let me do it for you: there are roughly 3.3 million IT workers and 537,000 H1Bs which gives us a percentage of (537k/3.3m * 100) 16.2%. Hmmm...16.2 percent doesn't seem insignificant to me. For example, if I told you not to go into a specific bar because you had a 16.2% chance of having your head blown off, would you? Didn't think so.
Oh, and before you tell me that these people are out in 3 years, think again. It costs them all of about $500 to have a lawyer get them a 3 year extension.
Anyway, just wanted to say STFU about shit you know nothing about. Oh, and the moderators should be ashamed for modding this idiot up.
This country has been completely bought out. It's only the "land of the free" for those who are wealthy. It's only the "land of opportunity" for the powerful. The "american dream" still exists but is pretty much on life support. We are on an express train to shittsville, and I hope nobody gets in the way of our getting there (for their sake).
I don't know where you are from, but you're probably better off staying there. I think this country will correct itself, but I have no idea when.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignore last post.
I don't even live there and I'm tired of hearing them.
True, they do have superior educational systems. I believe this is primarily due to the fact that they don't put up with the bullshit our teachers do. In our schools, if a teacher so much as yells at a student, they are suspended and warned that their job is at risk. Oddly, we did so much better back when our teachers could take a paddle to the kids. Nowadays there is no respect by the kids show for their educators or the educational system. Fix that, and you fix the problem.
Too bad brand recognition is becoming less and less important. To be sure, there are many people who will make choices based on brand names but research has shown that this is changing. People are willing to give no-name brands a shot. The more the economy keels, the more people are willing to try less expensive alternatives. Anyway, there was a large article about this in last month's issue. I believe it was called, "The Death of Brands".
If brands do become completely irrelevant, then what?
Who cares? All this stuff is worthless to me until I can record HDTV off my cable connection. Since there are no cards that make this possible, any software out there is useless to me. All these cute linux solutions are gonna go the way of the dodo bird once HD is the normal broadcast. The only way you'll be able to record this crap in fascist America is by buying/renting set tops from your cable or satelite company.
Fortunately, I hate almost every broadcast out there except for about three shows (and two of them are pay channels).
Hmmm...sounds a lot like America.
Their handwriting recognition system doesn't work for shit. It couldn't even correctly retrieve results from words that I know are in its scanned letters. The word "governor" appears as a result from one of their suggested queries (*cough* hard coded results *cough*), but if you do a separate search for governor it returns stuff that doesn't even contain the word.
No, we don't get unlimited on our cell phones except in the following circumstances: nights & weekends, holidays, and to others using the same carrier. For many people this amounts to unlimited useage, but certainly not all. Not all cell carriers have the rules I described but most do.
Well said. :)
Conversely, I suppose it doesn't matter to you if someone in such a position is negligent and willfully does such things to increase profit? Seriously, this country is filled with nothing but corporate brainwashed fools.
If you are the Captain of the ship, you should go down with the ship.
"If a person is head of a multi-national company with 150,000 employees, is that person personally criminally liable for the actions of every single employee?"
If he's negligent in properly running the factory, yes. He is the boss. That's why he gets paid big dollars. If he's not doing his job then he should pay the price. If he can't handle the responsibility then he has no business being in that position. However, if the incident occurs due to the failure of a single workman, then sure he's off the hook. This disaster was due to gross negligence that took place undoubtedly at the behest of the senior executive staff of the company. They should pay. They should pay dearly.
Corporations and the people who work for those corporations need to be held responsible for their actions. This shit goes too damn far.
A) TiVo sucks. If you're not going to use something like mythTV, then get a Replay.
B) Free Network television is on its deathbed. Seriously, there's only two network shows I care to watch and that's Conan and Law & Order. Everything else is total crap. Cable TV is where its at. HBO has the best series' on television with stuff like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Entourage. Of course, stuff like Discovery and the History channel are also very cool.
C) If advertisers had a fucking clue, the would learn that the quality of the commercial determines how much it gets watched. Make the commercials funny or interesting like they do in Europe. Our commercials suck incredibly bad. It's amazing these companies make any money off of them. Don't these guys ever wonder why there's people who don't even care about football watching the Superbowl?
I don't think this is an issue. However, I do wonder how the lense would respond in cold weather. The 2/100th of a second is only going to be valid for certain temperature ranges.
I disagree completely. I have yet to be involved with an interview where the degree was a deciding factor for anyone and I've been in this business for 16 years. It ALWAYS comes down to experience and how well you do on the technical interview. People underestimate technical interviews. Here's how the decision is typically made in my experience:
60% Experience (this is what gets you in the door)
39% Interview (this is what gets you hired)
1% Piece of paper
Nobody puts weight on the paper because everyone knows that schools do not prepare programmers for the real world.
About the only exception I could see to the 1% rule is if you come from a particularly prestigious institution like MIT, CalTech, etc. That said, people who come from institutions like that usually do very well in the interview because they are ultra-geeks. In any event, since the percentage of the population coming from those places is extremely small, it's not really a factor.
"It's not as "gigantic" a risk as you state. No company will take a "gigantic" risk."
In general, I agree with your statement that companies won't take giant risks. However, with MMOs they are ALL huge risks. Star Wars Galaxies was expected to be a sure thing, however, it's considered a failure and they are trying desperately to revive it. The Sims Online was expected to have the largest MMO subscription base in the world and it was...you guessed it! a failure.
All MMOs are high risk, my friend.
As for $40 mil for half life 2...a) that's just an estimate by outsiders and b) nobody really knows what that number includes. Gimme some hard numbers and we can talk. Even if you can back it up, that would definitely be the exception to the rule.
Oh, and I've been a Blizzard fan forever and was looking forward to the day when I could buy WoW but I've decided not to because it's derivitive crapola.
So I guess I can play with my guildies so long as I don't give a shit about performance? Afterall, that was the reason they gave for setting it up that way.
Of course it doesn't cost 15 mil to operate, but the ONLY reason to make an MMO is big profits. The risks for creating an MMO are gigantic compared to other games. You're talking about companies spending 10 - 20 million dollars to develop the thing and they better pray they got it right or it's all down the drain. Building an FPS is much cheaper. MMOs are an entirely different business model for a game company and they're scared shitless whenever they do it.
It's hard to take you seriously when you complain about using "U" as a pronoun, etc. when you use the term "asshat".
All MMOs invite obsessive gameplay. At least the successful ones do.
Apparently you have no idea what kind of infrastructure is involved with a MMO. Paying $50 just covers the cost of making the game (which takes significantly longer than any other game type). The monthly fees go to very expensive bandwidth, many server farms (EQ has well over a thousand servers), huge maintenance costs, and the continual costs of constantly upgrading the game (which all MMO players expect). Sorry, but none of this shit is free.
I got the opportunity to play WoW in the open beta. I've played many MMOs at least to some degree so I know the genre well. In the case of EQ, I played for 3.5 years.
After playing several different race/class combinations in WoW, I came to the conclusion that it's a completely derivitive work in every way but the artistry of the graphics. There is nothing new in this game. Everything I did in EQ 5 years ago is pretty much replicated in some fashion in WoW. Sure, skills are handled differently but not in any new or interesting way that hasn't been done before. There's tons of quests but all the ones I've seen were fedex style or gofer style quests. The game plays well and it functioned pretty flawlessly for the limited amount of time the open beta ran. My only complaint was that it was a bit laggy.
Presuming I didn't care it was completely derivitive and bereft of any real creativity, it has one glaring flaw: at least for the time being, you can only join servers that are in the region you live in. Apparently this was done for performance reasons. I guess Blizzard doesn't care that guilds from other MMOs might be interested in switching to WoW and that those guilds might be composed of people from all over the country or even the world. Frankly, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of being done in an MMO. It immediately writes the game off for thousands of people.
Maybe I expected more of Blizzard than a well executed rehash of what's already been done many times before but I've always liked Blizzard games...until now. Apparently, the people who made Blizzard great are the ones who left the company or perhaps they lost their soul when they sold out to a large multinational conglomerate. Either way it's really sad.
Maybe you should check the prices for other MMOs before you make such statements...
I spent some time in Boston and found the people to be...intersting. On the surface they seem harsh, however, I found them to actually be quite nice when I looked beyond the outward appearance.
:P
The moral of the story: don't judge a book by its cover.
Unfortunately I haven't spent any time in Cincinnati, so I have no comment on the people there.
"The numbers of H1's issued in recent years was unusual and we are unlikely to see any of that happening in the near future again."
i lderspot.com/p age/page/1004746.htm
Sorry, I left my tarot cards at home so I can't see the future right now. In any event, you were quoting numbers for the last 6 years -- NOT THE FUTURE.
"not every American wants to end up in IT, but at the same time work sectors other than IT also have immigrants coming here to fight for their jobs."
Please point to the spot in my post where I said everyone applying for an H1B visa wants to be in IT. I even used YOUR number for the percentage of visas going toward IT jobs.
"Futher, if an H1 visa holder loses his job he either has to leave the country or find another IT job."
True. However, they tend to get jobs easily because they will take significantly less pay than the equivalent American worker. Of course, the H1B visa law requires companies to pay prevailing wages to H1B visa people but in practice that's not the case.
"If an American loses his job he could get some non-IT job as a stopgap or go and study again."
Sure, working at Starbucks has great fringe benefits like free mocha frappucinos but it may make paying your bills rather difficult.
"Oh, and $500 for the visa renewal? Please refer me to your lawyer."
Go here and search for the word "extension":
http://www.immigration-counselor.bu
Dude, you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. How you got modded up to a 5 is beyond my imagination.
If you're gonna shoot out numbers at least endeaver to make them remotely accurate. The visa caps varied over the last six years:
1998 65000
1999 115000
2000 195000
2001 195000
2002 195000
2003 65000
2004 65000
This gives us a total of 895,000 total H1Bs over the last six years. I'll be generous and use your figure that only 60% were IT specific, which gives us: 537,000. Now, you idiotically compared your total figure to the number of people in this country to come to the conclusion that your 270k number (which I've already proven is completely wrong) is statistically insignificant. Your comparison is retarded. That 300 million includes people who don't even try to work, like INFANTS for example.
Why don't you compare it to the number of IT workers in the country? Here, let me do it for you: there are roughly 3.3 million IT workers and 537,000 H1Bs which gives us a percentage of (537k/3.3m * 100) 16.2%. Hmmm...16.2 percent doesn't seem insignificant to me. For example, if I told you not to go into a specific bar because you had a 16.2% chance of having your head blown off, would you? Didn't think so.
Oh, and before you tell me that these people are out in 3 years, think again. It costs them all of about $500 to have a lawyer get them a 3 year extension.
Anyway, just wanted to say STFU about shit you know nothing about. Oh, and the moderators should be ashamed for modding this idiot up.
This country has been completely bought out. It's only the "land of the free" for those who are wealthy. It's only the "land of opportunity" for the powerful. The "american dream" still exists but is pretty much on life support. We are on an express train to shittsville, and I hope nobody gets in the way of our getting there (for their sake).
I don't know where you are from, but you're probably better off staying there. I think this country will correct itself, but I have no idea when.