This is nothing new however a few others are able to do it well.
There... fixed that for you.
You're right - with the right discipline you can wear and switch between hats and deal with the conflicting requirements.
But by human nature most people are better at one hat than the other - and by education, software developers are trained to constantly wear the developer hat for years... and learn to wear the UI hat through professional experience - if ever.
It is very rare to find people who not only excel on both areas, but that are also disciplined enough to play both roles really well on the same project.
That's why Great Writers(TM) need to be checked by a really good editor to produce their best work - they'll edit their own work as much as they can, but in the end, you need someone else to *really* wear that other hat.
But that goes back to the "hackers are power users" argument - at the point we're talking of software developers instead of users, having the cleanest and less complex UI design is not their main concern - we want flexibility, features and power... which is actually the very weakness they're talking about.
It's not exclusive to open source either, there are plenty of closed source products that have decayed or lost completely to the competition because of featuritis. But historically, the best examples of products that avoided or reverted that tendency and have clean user design are also closed source shops.
This could be just because their customers and business models simply forced them to compete on that earlier - rather than an intrinsic advantage. But the article does build an interesting (if not new) argument that it is just easier to herd the proverbial cats into a consistent user-centered design in a 'cathedral' model than in the bazaar/scratch-your-own-itch models most often linked to open source.
Seriously, if you're getting a US$230+ electronic device for Christmas, getting US$ 0.99 of disposable income is not the problem. If the kid can't get 1 buck for a game, the problem is with getting the expensive electronic device in the first place.
I would hope that all desktop OS's are used by enthusiasts.... If people are running an OS for some other reason, then we have problems...
Er... Why is that a problem again?
Why can't billions of people use computers and technology to improve their lives *without* making their OS choice a matter of philosophy or identity? If they choose for more pragmatic reasons (requirements, price/value, simplicity), why is that a 'problem'?
Most people have only a few things in their life that really matter to them to the point you can call them 'enthusiasts'.
Most people use stamps without collecting them, drive cars without obsessing over engine models, drink wine without knowing merlot from cabernet, enjoy music without playing any instruments, use electricity without having the least idea about their house wiring... There are enthusiasts for everything, but as a matter of practicality (and probably mental health) humans have to pick the few things on which they invest their time and energy.
Fortunately, most enthusiast communities are not so arrogant that they assume everyone must share their interests and obsessions - as some kind of political or religious choice. They're the better for it.
Those who demand their pet interests to be *important* to everyone else demonstrate not just arrogance, but a selfishness that is most likely self-defeating.
Technology has continuously improved the standards of living of billions of people - but the greatest values of each advancement are only reached when they are so omnipresent and require so little training they're taken for granted. Billions of lives are saved/extended when electricity is in every building, when every child is vaccinated, etc. Computers are not different.
As a geek, I would like more people to become tech enthusiasts and share the same interests. But I'd also hope we recognize, considering the richness of the human experience, most people will (and should) care a lot less about the OS on their laptop than about most things in their daily life.
Murdoch does see the Internet as harmful to his news organization. That's why he wants to change News Corp's strategy and more to the point why he has to change News Corp's business strategy.
I can't help but notice you're still saying A == B here, without providing any sources.
Allow me to repeat the question:
Do you have any sources where Murdoch actually says something like "the Internet is harmful and provides no benefit"?
He also wants other news organizations to follow him into charging for content (and he wants to scare them into following him by implying the "malfunctioning" business model is harming their business). The fear theme of change in the media industry has been discussed a number of times in that industry. The media industry is uncertain of its future, as that Murdoch article highlights.
Well, yes, of course fear is in the picture. Newspapers *are* losing money, many are closing, people are losing jobs... others are 'saved' by being acquired for cheap. There are concrete manifestations of that uncertainty.
IFF the media business is uncertain of its economic future, *by definition* they have a malfunctioning business model.
Why the quotes? Are you implying that's wrong and their business model is just fine? That if they just stick to the same business model they'll wake up one day and find they're not on red ink anymore and no newspapers had to be closed? I seriously doubt that, but if that's really what you mean, please don't hesitate to drop by your local newspaper's building and letting them know the news.
Your comments show a narrow sighted thinking and then attempting to attack it on that basis. That's a straw man argument.
Funny - I'm not quite sure what you think I am attacking. Perhaps we're looking at two different bundles of straw?.
Let me clarify: my one argument here is you're saying A == B, even though *your source* for that argument says A != B.
A = "Sony CEO wants to regulate the Internet to save existing business models" B = "News Corp CEO wants to change the business models because they can't make money off the internet as it is"
There are *fundamentally* different strategies for the same business problem - Sony is asking for some kind of 'protection', the other guys at least recognize *their business model* is broken, and there it is *their business problem* to fix.
Now, as I said, it could be that you're somehow right and they're both pushing for government intervention - but that is the *opposite* of what your linked sources say!
Murdoch's arrogant, self centered, self serving, manipulative behavior provides very good warning signs of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder which is a common behavior in many high up business people. (...)
How is this ad hominem relevant to the facts, and the content and validity of their business arguments?
All these CEOs may have all the zillion personal failings you claim... they may have risen "to the top" for all the wrong reasons, etc, etc. Do you really think that makes a difference to the results of their specific strategy in the market?
In the end, most of their strategies will be wrong - and keep losing money - and *someone* will be right and find the right sustainable model... and everybody else will copy that success (or disappear).
As you eloquently describe, the person whose *job* is to execute that strategy may not be someone we personally like. What does it matter? We don't need to *like* them, we don't need to ever meet them... we just need them to do their jobs (or at least keep trying to) until someone figures it out.
You may not like Murdoch, and you may not like their solution, *and* you may just think it will not work - you may very well be right. Enjoy seeing them crash and burn in that case.
We still need that natural selection to happen and *disprove* some of the bad strategies, for the industry to 'evolve' into a sustainable model that makes sense for both consumers and content creators.
It is conceivable you're right and their strategy is clueless, but the articles you quote don't support your argument *at all*. How are these two cases "the same thinking"? Do you have any sources where Murdoch actually says something like "the Internet is harmful and provides no benefit"?
Murdoch claims he's fixing "a malfunctioning business model", and per the article it seems he's convinced they can make money from the internet (citing the WSJ) - just not from "free".
That seems an accurate and necessary assessment: "our business model doesn't make money - so (besides crying about the good old days) we need to change our business model".
Even if you don't like their choice, these attempts are needed for that "evolution" you're talking about. It's their content and their websites, so they can put a login/password if they want to. Readers will determine whether their non-free model works beyond the WSJ, and they'll have to adapt accordingly - or disappear in the end.
Support desk: Sure - the issue should be resolved in 5 minutes . Please try again later.
If the Support Desk has any password policy of this type *at all*, they'll know the problem resolves itself after X minutes and will be either smart enough, or (more likely) lazy enough, not to subvert the process.
That doesn't trained support would never unlock the account for you, but it would require wasting more time on the social engineering attack (i.e.: convince the CSR that the process failed - and that you really, really, really cannot wait).
If they're clueless about the password policy (e.g.: they just left a default) *and* they're naive enough to fall for this - then you have bigger problems. But then again, they'll probably take longer than 5 minutes to unlock that account too.
Either way, "might get lucky the first time" does not a 65-guesses-per-minute make.
If you try run a distributed social engineering attack on the same account people are going to notice something is wrong before the first 65/minute.
I keep hearing about the bright future of non-linear gameplay taking over...
And yet, practically all the successful forms of entertainment in human history have been about explicit excercises on linearity (I'm treating linear/non-linear as defined in the parent post, as 'scripted' vs 'non-scripted').
Books, theatre, music, radio - even (specially) the original storytelling around the tribal fire... they're mostly about linear communication. There are greater/lesser degrees of interactivity, but the common pattern is authorial control in order to maximize drama.
Frankly, even in videogames pure sandbox environments are rarely more compelling than the heavily scripted experiences of GTA and co. - and the more they compete with each other, the more the heavily scripted missions become a selling point for the GTAs.
There are good reasons making the pure sandbox as enjoyable is challenging - both technological and psychological. As geeks, it is easy for us to focus on the technological challenges, and find them both tractable and fascinating to solve... but that doesn't mean they're the bigger problem in the concept. There's a good chunk of research indicating enjoying linear narratives is hardwired into our brains and plays a role on how we develop language, identity, etc.
Historically, forms of entertainment have evolved into more sophisticated excercises on pushing the right psychological buttons in the audience (or even better, finding new ones). And most really good entertainment has been about carefully constructing the *appearance of emergent behavior* in a controlled form - not about emergence itself... about suspending disbelief, and yet making the fictional world *more* predictable (therefore, satisfying) than the real world.
It's not just a matter of medium limitations - live improv performances have been able to provide emergence since before there was any other form of entertainment. And they're often enjoyable, but hardly anyone would argue they're the future of entertainment. Even on TV (to pick a modern medium) most sporadic innovations for non-linear/emergent entertainment die out (candid-cameras?) or end up as low-quality linearity (the scripted melodramas of 'reality tv').
That doesn't mean non-linear games are not a big part of the future, or that there wouldn't be exceptional games among them. If anything, the great value of video games is they can navigate between the two extremes to find very interesting combinations: RPGs with webs of linear stories, MMOGs where the players provide the storylines...
But treating non-linearity itself as "The Future" for video games instead of just another element or style, ignores both the history of human entertainment and just common sense.
We already live in the ultimate non-linear environment / life simulator - we play a game to escape it, and we keep playing it because it is *compelling*, not just because it has a savegame.
Does that have much to do with achievements and scoring systems per se, or rather with just game houses using this (or any method) to compensate for Bad Game Design?
Like it or not, many people find a lot of the entertainment in the process of finishing every quest, scoring every point and finding every hidden level in a game. This predates 'achievements', and for that matter video games in general.
Quite frankly, the same principle persistence of being "compelled to try and compete against things to beat them, even on the face of failure", is considered a virtue on most other entertainment activities (sports, chess, music, etc) - and most people recognize the hard-won victory as both highly enjoyable and a sign of some merit. Why would we expect differently of electronic games? Should we even want any differently?
Of course, what you may actually be complaining about is just the general prevalence of Lazy Design - where the intended actual game is lazily padded with mediocre assets to meet whatever is the Entertainment Value Metric of the season: hours of gameplay, # of levels, guns, characters, multiplayer maps... or, I guess, 'achievements'.
None of which is a new problem - or even a 'gaming problem' per se. It happens with every new element of enjoyment that gets added to a medium, and only time will tell if the usual cycle of obsession ends up enriching it, or the trend just dies by itself.
I grew up with ye olde Sierra games with their trillion ways to die and (later) "success => click-every-pixel" moments... and loved them *despite* those frustrations, because they had enough actual challenges, and typically even the death scenes were funny - it kept the whole experience entertaining.
Unfortunately, their style led to a lot of other adventure games which confused their failures with their success, and happily copied the wrong elements. Games where "challenging" was measured by obscurity of the puzzles, and "hours of entertainment" often meant higher count of dead ends and collecting irrelevant bonus items. And consequently to quite a few people thinking that's what 'adventure games' were about.
That had little to do with adventure games being frustrating excercises in surreal thinking, and a lot more to do with developers being unable to build an interactive narrative with coherent puzzles and enough meat for >20 hours of entertainment... and too willing to throw a few puzzles of the "this-should-keep-the-player-busy-restarting" variety at the problem (memories of "Darkseed" come to mind).
These days, adventure games have a challenging enough time in the market. But dead ends are well recognized as critical design defects on games of any genre - and it's hard to find an A-title padding its "hours of gameplay" with difficulty to complete-the-game... if anything, they'll provide as many 'alternative solutions' as possible to keep any player unblocked, lest they be massacred in the reviews.
I'd fully expect any misuse of achievements to see a similar correction.
Per the info in both articles (the post, and your link), and the relevant text of the Charter, there doesn't seem to be any "official quebec french" designation - standard french will do.
Yet from the info available the legislation makes no such distinction, and it seems the OLFC itself makes no attempt to establish Quebecois as a distinct dialect that needs its own localization/translation.
When modern french addresses a market that is 10X bigger in France alone in raw population, and it covers the other francophone countries (and this legislation!)- the reality is forfeiting that market for the sake of Quebec is not going to be the priority for most game studios that have *any* international plans.
And where that may not be the case and Quebec is the top target market on that language (e.g.: a local software shop) - then they'd already had good reasons to *not drop fr-CA* since that 7-million market is so important.
I can see many bad decisions forced by this, but it is hard to see a shop *simply stop producing French-language versions* for the sake of releasing a bit earlier in Quebec - although I'd can see some shops stop producing *fr-CA* versions, which is probably not what was intended.
If treating fr-CA as a first-release language changes their plans, companies that actually had fr-CA versions planned really have 3 choices:
- Operate and release as normal, and distribute the games to Quebec a bit later - just like it happens for a *lot* of bigger markets than that for most games and software releases. - Stop making a fr-CA version, and concentrate resources on an 'fr' version that meets this requirement AND can be released to a bigger market at the same time as the english version. - Delay the release of your game to the market.
This choice only makes any business sense if Quebec's 7 mil is your primary market - and any shop in this situation would have to look hard at the other two options and wonder if it is time to change that.
This is a ridiculous rule, as game companies can simply stop creating French versions of games to bypass the restriction.
Perhaps it is ridiculous, but not for that reason.
Which game company would stop creating *French* localizations of their games and lose the market in *France* (and any other French-speaking language) in order to get their english version into the Quebec market?
*That* would be ridiculous.
The populations are off by an order of magnitude. The whole point is that a game company may not think it is worth localizing to French *just for Quebec* - but if they localize for French-speaking market, this forces the two versions to play on level fields.
But if they're already localizing in French, why on earth would they kill their other markets just to prioritize this one? If Quebec per se had ever been a priority, they'd have been treating the French version on par with English from the beginning - which is what this rule tries (futilely) to force.
There are a thousand reasons why this legislation may be wrong-headed and is unlikely to have any positive effect - but this is argument is, indeed, ridiculous.
Treat teenagers like adults they act like adults. Don't and they will always act like little children.
This sounds like eminently wise advice - but as an adult, I don't think you can be arrested for lying to school employees and wasting their time.
Or, for the adult equivalent, to your co-workers / employers / wherever-you-spend-your-most-productive time. You can be fired, or ostracized from whichever community applies - at the very worst, you might even be billed or sued in some context for significant loss / harm.
But unless your random authority figure has a the habit of making you sign notarized affidavits for everything you say, an arrest is not a consequence any adult would expect from the actions you describe.
While I have little doubt that children growing on the web will be able to read very well in the most literal sense, I'm not so sure they will be 'literate' as we know that term.
The web provides invaluable access to information - it is accessible, global, searchable and 'to the point'. It may encourage a type of learning that is less narrative than we've historically used, and more... staccato, for lack of a better term. You can jump from fact to fact without necessarily going through a lot of research in the process, because the accumulated data of humanity is, well, searchable.
There is less need to develop the comprehension skills needed to reach new conclusions from existing data, because all the conclusions already reached are more easily accessible already. There is less need to develop the curiosity or habit of erudition, because the cost of researching answers for any question on-demand has become much lower than the equivalent cost of acquiring a broad/general education in advance.
In that sense, I have no doubt new generations will be reading something. But I'm not sure they will be 'reading' in the same sense we typically use the word now, as a shorthand for literacy.
I'm not sure that is entirely accurate - books in general are not that expensive, but some (arguably necessary) books ARE somewhat expensive. As any professional or college student, or many precocious high school students, can attest.
It really all depends on many factors: areas of knowledge, level of education we're talking about, geographical location, and availability of used books sales.
Some of this is balanced out now by easy access to public libraries and to basic information online (in my opinion, the true value of the internet). But this doesn't apply to every branch of knowledge, or every location, in the same way - e.g.: I still get requests to bring a medical book or two when I visit family out of the US.
I do agree with you on two things:
- General non-specialized books are a MUCH better value in the US than anything else you could buy for your family at that price range.
Both for direct benefits (~1-3 bucks per hour, divided by the # of readers), and indirect benefits (literacy, ability to focus, and general education).
- The 'wealth difference' levels out pretty quickly (assuming access to a good public library system), and is not terribly relevant for any middle-class family.
It's not a matter of accumulating books as if they were jewelry - I doubt the wealthier family with 50000 books is that much better than the family with 5000, if those 5K are good books (and why would you keep any other?).
It's really a matter of inculcating a reading habit, and the skills that come with that - and in that sense, 'book flow', as in easy/ongoing access to unread books, is more important than 'book wealth' (very large collections).
Like those free bicycles that liberal, well-intentioned municipalities release into the wild from time to time, hoping to get drivers out of their cars, fast-boot Linux is probably doing more to harm than help the cause.
Uh? Can we moderate the story itself as Off-Topic?
Why does it have to be someone 'from outside of the US'?
- Most good (or hyped) international movies are shown in film festivals and preview screenings well before they are officially released in the US.
That's actually how most people in the US find out they exist - and how most of them get even the opportunity to be released in the US in the first place.
- People in the US are not exactly forbidden from going to the theater when abroad, you know?
There are plenty of people who travel with some frequency, and actually a lot of people who travel around the holidays - when this movie was released.
At least for me (not a frequent traveler), it is not uncommon to catch a movie or two in other countries if I'm visiting family.
They are also encouraging these shenanigans by even linking to critic's external reviews, which are often posted BEFORE the movie can be seen by their customers. Sometimes even before it gets to the theaters!
That sort of irresponsability should stop: Netflix is a DVD rental company. It obviously should not link to reviews / opinions from people who have not seen the movie on an officially released DVD.
For that matter, how dare they NOT block user reviews altogether for pending DVD releases? Who could possibly give an honest opinion about the Dexter: Season 3 DVDs when they have not been released, queued and shipped by Netflix?
That's obviously a FRAUD, and Netflix should block voting from anyone who has even seen a movie or a TV show from any media source that is not Netflix.
Netflix does not own movie theaters either. Yet that doesn't stop people from watching movies there and reviewing DVD movies (often before the DVD release) based on the theater experience.
Between advance screenings, festivals, and people who may have watched it in other countries at some point... a few hundred viewers doesn't sound that implausible.
If anything, the over-eager fan phenomenon (the "books are great, movie is going to rock" review the poster mentions) is the most likely distortion. But that's hardly surprising or suspicious - popular book-sequels tend to demonstrate something like this in Amazon weeks/months before it was released (sometimes positive hype, sometimes negative).
Why would it be different in Netflix? Most likely it is just less obvious in their user interface.
while being classified as a non-profit doesn't guarantee impartiality, it does eliminate the primary source of media bias. after all, even the non-profits that are extremely biased are generally so because they are backed by commercial industries--a prime example of this is the Global Climate Coalition [wikipedia.org].
No it doesn't. On the contrary, it would *guarantee* that such a bias exists, because the newspapers' NPO would *have* to be supported by either the government or a commercial interest.
If that were not the case - if enough individual readers were so willing to donate to keep them running - then there would be no need to go the NPO route and we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place.
You seem to be missing a significant point: The primary source of media bias is the demands from the biased audience. - otherwise the problem would be self-corrected by a business/power model that depends on pandering to the audience.
There's a reason Fox News' ratings are so successful - and it is the same reason other networks followed suit - and it is because a lot of people like it that way. The reason they like it that way is because it ratifies their own bias, which they find more 'fair'. Other media, they see as obviously corrupted by "the primary source of media bias, which is powerful-impersonal-interest-group-X".
The reality is more mundane, and more depressing. As a society, we seem to have become unable to understand that *other reasonable people may strongly disagree with us* - much less to consider their viewpoint. So we must mentally castrate these people and say they're controlled by some abstract entity we can demonize. It's like we're in a medieval/tribal society blaming every cultural dissonance with our peers on witches.
as for Google, yes, i would say that their integrity as a company is a large reason for their success. but you have to realize how rare this is in the business world.
Not really. My point is that Google's business model enforces said integrity (and it is a very specific area of integrity) - it is part of what they sell - AND that the same principle applies to newspapers, far more strongly in fact.
The difference is that for Google everybody is aware of the exact meaning of that 'integrity value' and how it fits their business model - trust on said integrity is the main / only resistance for users to switch to the competition. Google acknowledged and even embraced that low-resistance to competition.
For newspapers, their 'integrity value' was a broader concept, but it was incidentally subsidized by their historically successful business model (selling a piece of paper with the news), which had more traditional sources of resistance to competition. Switching newspapers IS a hassle, and you used to need to read at least one physical paper to be informed. Now people *think* they are getting the same value for free from more convenient places (online) - even though most of our real news at the source come from, and are paid by, newspapers. But the idea that new generations don't *have* to read the paper in the morning to be informed does not seem to be fully digested in some circles, so they have neither optimized their business model, nor switched to a new one.
however, the commercial success of a media corporation depends, not on the accuracy of their reporting nor their journalistic integrity, but instead how big of an audience they attract, which unlike web search does not correlate with quality or accuracy.
I don't see where you're drawing any difference in your own paragraph.
Web searches' economic success *absolutely* depends on attracting as big an audience as possible. That's the whole point of the business, to sell eyes!
On *both* cases, the correlation of quality / accuracy depends on the audience: everyone wants accurate information, but 'quality' is defined by the audie
personally, i'd prefer if newspapers became non-profits. by selling ads (usually about 50% of each edition) newspaper publishers become beholden to advertisers.
It sends chills down my spine whenever people talk about non-profits as if they're the magical solution to impartiality and objectivity. It works for a certain type of work, but it would be a dangerous model for newspapers to adopt.
With very few exceptions, non-profits are just not economically independent enough, as they are by far much more at the mercy of their supporters. Since most exceptions are NPOs under the benevolent umbrella of a government or very large organization's budget (e.g.: U.N.), I'd be seriously concerned with a model where newspapers NPOs supported by one government or another.
By becoming non-profits, newspapers would *definitely* be beholden to their donors list. They will literally receive money for the type and angle of their reporting - after all, why would you economically support a newspaper you don't like?
As long as they are economically independent (or attempt to be), newspapers are a lot more likely to have an independent voice and be somewhat objective.
In the current model, if newspapers are selling advertising, that means they're selling *something else* that commercial interests want. Yes, they may expose themselves to potential conflicts of interests - but at least in principle they do not have to pacify their advertisers - and in practice they are beholden to different masters: - They don't need to establish a patronage relationship with their advertisers - Can walk away from advertisers making unethical demands (assuming a large enough pool of other advertisers) - Need to balance the cost of selling out against the loss of their *real product*. i.e.: losing their reputation => losing their audience => losing ALL their advertisers.
The reality is that audience is still king. If there is bias in news media, it is to satisfy the expectations of the audience, which wants its own biases confirmed (not the advertisers'). E.g.: the economic success of certain over-'balanced' media outlets was a matter of ratings increasing along with the 'balance'.
This is really no different from Google's position as a search engine: yes, they sell links. Yes, they *could* seriously twist information for their advertiser's interests. But they lure their audience with the best search results - the moment they compromise that, people move on to the next search engine with better results.
The difference is that Google is well attuned to what the audiences does want, and found a spot where this is a positive feedback that encourages objectivity. Newspapers do not seem to have that level of self-awareness, and are stuck in a business model that is not very profitable. Without some serious soul-searching, they may not find an economic place for their true value (objective, primary source news) soon enough.
The $hardware$ $programmer-time$ equation is always based on the assumption that the programmer is always worth their qualifications.
You are correct that this is an unrealistic assumption but, like the "rational self-interest" assumption in economics, it is a very useful one.
Given a set of uniformly competent programmers, you quickly reach the point of diminishing returns on optimizing performance over hardware - but that's because a competent programmer should implement code with reasonable performance in the first place. Sadly, some people think they can compensate one with the other (competence vs hardware), when that is an entirely different problem, entirely different variable (e.g.: an incompetent programmer with more time is not always a good thing).
First you have to reach the point of competence where you can talk about performance optimizations in the first place. What you describe is not 'unoptimized code', it is not a naive but reasonable implementation - its gross incompetence (assuming SQL qualifications were claimed in the first place).
As you said, you can't pay for enough hardware to compensate for that. But in the same vein, you really, *really* do not want to pay for more of that programmer time either.
Maybe because it is not a good way to fix the problem, and it would only demotivate good people by making management seem petty?
If they're watching movies all day instead of working, they wouldn't stop wasting time just because the monitor is not horizontal... it's not like network-enabled computers are not great sources of time-wasting opportunities. The interweb is vast and infinite, after all. If that's the case you have a personnel problem that has little to do with monitors.
On the other hand, if they are NOT wasting your company's time all day, I don't know how they wouldn't find such a micro-management "mandate" insulting, straight out of a Dilbert cartoon.
You're saying management knows best exactly how they should read/write their own code? What's next? Enforcing syntax color schemes? IDE layout? Will their manager drop by their office to adjust their desk and chair to the 'mandated ergonomic position', and patrol around to keep an eye on their back posture?
Companies need to be able to trust their engineers to have enough control of their working environment to optimize their own comfort and effectiveness. If you cannot trust them to set their own monitor for what they do day-to-day, how on earth can you trust their code?
The vertical orientation is a helpful tip, but it may surprise you to know that sometimes developers need to do more than look at a single window with a single piece of code. In my experience, having more windows / files / tools open is almost always more valuable than the extra vertical space during debugging code... I do tend to find the vertical orientation extremely useful when working in sequential documents (specs, white papers, etc), so any developer should at least try it out.
But such things depend too much on personal preferences, habits and even eyesight. Mandating them is a great way to get your developers looking for another team / job where they are not treated like 5-year-olds.
Trollish ad-hominem apart, the parent AC comment does bring up a valid point.
Web application development does have some characteristics that makes it more natural to do gradual, measured updates that do not 'require significant overtime'.
Part of it may be their current limitations (some things just cannot be done in html+js, and many things should not be done in html+js), but mostly it is just the way the tech is supposed to work by design.
A lot of the time, the 'required significant overtime' in traditional apps is a consequence of the features being tightly coupled - even if not in the code itself, ultimately they tend to be tightly coupled at application delivery. This makes death marches almost unavoidable without very conservative planning, because "it's all or nothing": by the time you 'require' that overtime, removing a feature that is not ready will often look as risky / expensive as trying to complete it. A 'late cut' normally brings in at least binary changes, installer changes, etc that also need to be tested before the whole app is released - and the horrible feeling of waste for everybody involved, because after investing so much the feature missed the boat and now may never even get shipped.
In general, web development doesn't make the app easier to implement in time (sometimes, very much not so) - but it forces a loosely coupled interface for your features:
- Gradual updates are easy to prop to web servers and generally transparent to the users. - REST architectures help to keep features self-contained (essentially you're updating / publishing a new resource at a url - much of the time you can isolate any code update to just the component that serves that specific url). - Proper use of CSS and html/code separation mean that fit&finish UI changes, which are often a good share of that overtime, can be updated more dynamically than the application logic.
By design, the web makes it easier for people to 'cut late', and release the 'cut' features a bit later, transparently to the users. Once the penalty for missing the release boat is not fatal to the feature, people are a lot more willing to acknowledge schedule risks, and less willing to try heroics to get their pet feature done in time. Features go back to requiring time, not overtime.
Granted, that doesn't mean there are no death marches in web development shops, there are plenty. Or that traditional apps cannot be architected to use very granular, automatic updates, to deal with the same thing. I'm just saying that the web, by nature, is already architected this way, so it is easier to break away from the implications of a release model that was created when software shipped in little boxes full of floppy disks.
Slashdot Mirror
There... fixed that for you.
You're right - with the right discipline you can wear and switch between hats and deal with the conflicting requirements.
But by human nature most people are better at one hat than the other - and by education, software developers are trained to constantly wear the developer hat for years... and learn to wear the UI hat through professional experience - if ever.
It is very rare to find people who not only excel on both areas, but that are also disciplined enough to play both roles really well on the same project.
That's why Great Writers(TM) need to be checked by a really good editor to produce their best work - they'll edit their own work as much as they can, but in the end, you need someone else to *really* wear that other hat.
But that goes back to the "hackers are power users" argument - at the point we're talking of software developers instead of users, having the cleanest and less complex UI design is not their main concern - we want flexibility, features and power... which is actually the very weakness they're talking about.
It's not exclusive to open source either, there are plenty of closed source products that have decayed or lost completely to the competition because of featuritis. But historically, the best examples of products that avoided or reverted that tendency and have clean user design are also closed source shops.
This could be just because their customers and business models simply forced them to compete on that earlier - rather than an intrinsic advantage. But the article does build an interesting (if not new) argument that it is just easier to herd the proverbial cats into a consistent user-centered design in a 'cathedral' model than in the bazaar/scratch-your-own-itch models most often linked to open source.
Same thing applies.
Seriously, if you're getting a US$230+ electronic device for Christmas, getting US$ 0.99 of disposable income is not the problem. If the kid can't get 1 buck for a game, the problem is with getting the expensive electronic device in the first place.
Er... Why is that a problem again?
Why can't billions of people use computers and technology to improve their lives *without* making their OS choice a matter of philosophy or identity? If they choose for more pragmatic reasons (requirements, price/value, simplicity), why is that a 'problem'?
Most people have only a few things in their life that really matter to them to the point you can call them 'enthusiasts'.
Most people use stamps without collecting them, drive cars without obsessing over engine models, drink wine without knowing merlot from cabernet, enjoy music without playing any instruments, use electricity without having the least idea about their house wiring... There are enthusiasts for everything, but as a matter of practicality (and probably mental health) humans have to pick the few things on which they invest their time and energy.
Fortunately, most enthusiast communities are not so arrogant that they assume everyone must share their interests and obsessions - as some kind of political or religious choice. They're the better for it.
Those who demand their pet interests to be *important* to everyone else demonstrate not just arrogance, but a selfishness that is most likely self-defeating.
Technology has continuously improved the standards of living of billions of people - but the greatest values of each advancement are only reached when they are so omnipresent and require so little training they're taken for granted. Billions of lives are saved/extended when electricity is in every building, when every child is vaccinated, etc. Computers are not different.
As a geek, I would like more people to become tech enthusiasts and share the same interests. But I'd also hope we recognize, considering the richness of the human experience, most people will (and should) care a lot less about the OS on their laptop than about most things in their daily life.
If the kid you're talking of has an iPhone, I honestly don't think finding $0.99 of disposable income is a problem here.
I can't help but notice you're still saying A == B here, without providing any sources.
Allow me to repeat the question:
Do you have any sources where Murdoch actually says something like "the Internet is harmful and provides no benefit"?
Well, yes, of course fear is in the picture. Newspapers *are* losing money, many are closing, people are losing jobs... others are 'saved' by being acquired for cheap. There are concrete manifestations of that uncertainty.
IFF the media business is uncertain of its economic future, *by definition* they have a malfunctioning business model.
Why the quotes? Are you implying that's wrong and their business model is just fine? That if they just stick to the same business model they'll wake up one day and find they're not on red ink anymore and no newspapers had to be closed? I seriously doubt that, but if that's really what you mean, please don't hesitate to drop by your local newspaper's building and letting them know the news.
Funny - I'm not quite sure what you think I am attacking. Perhaps we're looking at two different bundles of straw?.
Let me clarify: my one argument here is you're saying A == B, even though *your source* for that argument says A != B.
A = "Sony CEO wants to regulate the Internet to save existing business models"
B = "News Corp CEO wants to change the business models because they can't make money off the internet as it is"
There are *fundamentally* different strategies for the same business problem - Sony is asking for some kind of 'protection', the other guys at least recognize *their business model* is broken, and there it is *their business problem* to fix.
Now, as I said, it could be that you're somehow right and they're both pushing for government intervention - but that is the *opposite* of what your linked sources say!
How is this ad hominem relevant to the facts, and the content and validity of their business arguments?
All these CEOs may have all the zillion personal failings you claim... they may have risen "to the top" for all the wrong reasons, etc, etc. Do you really think that makes a difference to the results of their specific strategy in the market?
In the end, most of their strategies will be wrong - and keep losing money - and *someone* will be right and find the right sustainable model... and everybody else will copy that success (or disappear).
As you eloquently describe, the person whose *job* is to execute that strategy may not be someone we personally like. What does it matter? We don't need to *like* them, we don't need to ever meet them... we just need them to do their jobs (or at least keep trying to) until someone figures it out.
You may not like Murdoch, and you may not like their solution, *and* you may just think it will not work - you may very well be right. Enjoy seeing them crash and burn in that case.
We still need that natural selection to happen and *disprove* some of the bad strategies, for the industry to 'evolve' into a sustainable model that makes sense for both consumers and content creators.
It is conceivable you're right and their strategy is clueless, but the articles you quote don't support your argument *at all*.
How are these two cases "the same thinking"?
Do you have any sources where Murdoch actually says something like "the Internet is harmful and provides no benefit"?
Murdoch claims he's fixing "a malfunctioning business model", and per the article it seems he's convinced they can make money from the internet (citing the WSJ) - just not from "free".
That seems an accurate and necessary assessment: "our business model doesn't make money - so (besides crying about the good old days) we need to change our business model".
Even if you don't like their choice, these attempts are needed for that "evolution" you're talking about. It's their content and their websites, so they can put a login/password if they want to. Readers will determine whether their non-free model works beyond the WSJ, and they'll have to adapt accordingly - or disappear in the end.
Support desk: Sure - the issue should be resolved in 5 minutes . Please try again later.
If the Support Desk has any password policy of this type *at all*, they'll know the problem resolves itself after X minutes and will be either smart enough, or (more likely) lazy enough, not to subvert the process.
That doesn't trained support would never unlock the account for you, but it would require wasting more time on the social engineering attack (i.e.: convince the CSR that the process failed - and that you really, really, really cannot wait).
If they're clueless about the password policy (e.g.: they just left a default) *and* they're naive enough to fall for this - then you have bigger problems. But then again, they'll probably take longer than 5 minutes to unlock that account too.
Either way, "might get lucky the first time" does not a 65-guesses-per-minute make.
If you try run a distributed social engineering attack on the same account people are going to notice something is wrong before the first 65/minute.
I keep hearing about the bright future of non-linear gameplay taking over...
And yet, practically all the successful forms of entertainment in human history have been about explicit excercises on linearity (I'm treating linear/non-linear as defined in the parent post, as 'scripted' vs 'non-scripted').
Books, theatre, music, radio - even (specially) the original storytelling around the tribal fire... they're mostly about linear communication. There are greater/lesser degrees of interactivity, but the common pattern is authorial control in order to maximize drama.
Frankly, even in videogames pure sandbox environments are rarely more compelling than the heavily scripted experiences of GTA and co. - and the more they compete with each other, the more the heavily scripted missions become a selling point for the GTAs.
There are good reasons making the pure sandbox as enjoyable is challenging - both technological and psychological. As geeks, it is easy for us to focus on the technological challenges, and find them both tractable and fascinating to solve... but that doesn't mean they're the bigger problem in the concept. There's a good chunk of research indicating enjoying linear narratives is hardwired into our brains and plays a role on how we develop language, identity, etc.
Historically, forms of entertainment have evolved into more sophisticated excercises on pushing the right psychological buttons in the audience (or even better, finding new ones). And most really good entertainment has been about carefully constructing the *appearance of emergent behavior* in a controlled form - not about emergence itself... about suspending disbelief, and yet making the fictional world *more* predictable (therefore, satisfying) than the real world.
It's not just a matter of medium limitations - live improv performances have been able to provide emergence since before there was any other form of entertainment. And they're often enjoyable, but hardly anyone would argue they're the future of entertainment. Even on TV (to pick a modern medium) most sporadic innovations for non-linear/emergent entertainment die out (candid-cameras?) or end up as low-quality linearity (the scripted melodramas of 'reality tv').
That doesn't mean non-linear games are not a big part of the future, or that there wouldn't be exceptional games among them. If anything, the great value of video games is they can navigate between the two extremes to find very interesting combinations: RPGs with webs of linear stories, MMOGs where the players provide the storylines...
But treating non-linearity itself as "The Future" for video games instead of just another element or style, ignores both the history of human entertainment and just common sense.
We already live in the ultimate non-linear environment / life simulator - we play a game to escape it, and we keep playing it because it is *compelling*, not just because it has a savegame.
Does that have much to do with achievements and scoring systems per se, or rather with just game houses using this (or any method) to compensate for Bad Game Design?
Like it or not, many people find a lot of the entertainment in the process of finishing every quest, scoring every point and finding every hidden level in a game. This predates 'achievements', and for that matter video games in general.
Quite frankly, the same principle persistence of being "compelled to try and compete against things to beat them, even on the face of failure", is considered a virtue on most other entertainment activities (sports, chess, music, etc) - and most people recognize the hard-won victory as both highly enjoyable and a sign of some merit. Why would we expect differently of electronic games? Should we even want any differently?
Of course, what you may actually be complaining about is just the general prevalence of Lazy Design - where the intended actual game is lazily padded with mediocre assets to meet whatever is the Entertainment Value Metric of the season: hours of gameplay, # of levels, guns, characters, multiplayer maps... or, I guess, 'achievements'.
None of which is a new problem - or even a 'gaming problem' per se. It happens with every new element of enjoyment that gets added to a medium, and only time will tell if the usual cycle of obsession ends up enriching it, or the trend just dies by itself.
I grew up with ye olde Sierra games with their trillion ways to die and (later) "success => click-every-pixel" moments... and loved them *despite* those frustrations, because they had enough actual challenges, and typically even the death scenes were funny - it kept the whole experience entertaining.
Unfortunately, their style led to a lot of other adventure games which confused their failures with their success, and happily copied the wrong elements. Games where "challenging" was measured by obscurity of the puzzles, and "hours of entertainment" often meant higher count of dead ends and collecting irrelevant bonus items. And consequently to quite a few people thinking that's what 'adventure games' were about.
That had little to do with adventure games being frustrating excercises in surreal thinking, and a lot more to do with developers being unable to build an interactive narrative with coherent puzzles and enough meat for >20 hours of entertainment... and too willing to throw a few puzzles of the "this-should-keep-the-player-busy-restarting" variety at the problem (memories of "Darkseed" come to mind).
These days, adventure games have a challenging enough time in the market. But dead ends are well recognized as critical design defects on games of any genre - and it's hard to find an A-title padding its "hours of gameplay" with difficulty to complete-the-game... if anything, they'll provide as many 'alternative solutions' as possible to keep any player unblocked, lest they be massacred in the reviews.
I'd fully expect any misuse of achievements to see a similar correction.
Per the info in both articles (the post, and your link), and the relevant text of the Charter, there doesn't seem to be any "official quebec french" designation - standard french will do.
http://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/english/charter/title1chapter7.html
It seems that is on purpose - but wiki-facts should be taken with a grain of salt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_de_la_langue_fran%C3%A7aise
Yet from the info available the legislation makes no such distinction, and it seems the OLFC itself makes no attempt to establish Quebecois as a distinct dialect that needs its own localization/translation.
When modern french addresses a market that is 10X bigger in France alone in raw population, and it covers the other francophone countries (and this legislation!)- the reality is forfeiting that market for the sake of Quebec is not going to be the priority for most game studios that have *any* international plans.
And where that may not be the case and Quebec is the top target market on that language (e.g.: a local software shop) - then they'd already had good reasons to *not drop fr-CA* since that 7-million market is so important.
I can see many bad decisions forced by this, but it is hard to see a shop *simply stop producing French-language versions* for the sake of releasing a bit earlier in Quebec - although I'd can see some shops stop producing *fr-CA* versions, which is probably not what was intended.
If treating fr-CA as a first-release language changes their plans, companies that actually had fr-CA versions planned really have 3 choices:
- Operate and release as normal, and distribute the games to Quebec a bit later - just like it happens for a *lot* of bigger markets than that for most games and software releases.
- Stop making a fr-CA version, and concentrate resources on an 'fr' version that meets this requirement AND can be released to a bigger market at the same time as the english version.
- Delay the release of your game to the market.
This choice only makes any business sense if Quebec's 7 mil is your primary market - and any shop in this situation would have to look hard at the other two options and wonder if it is time to change that.
Perhaps it is ridiculous, but not for that reason.
Which game company would stop creating *French* localizations of their games and lose the market in *France* (and any other French-speaking language) in order to get their english version into the Quebec market?
*That* would be ridiculous.
The populations are off by an order of magnitude. The whole point is that a game company may not think it is worth localizing to French *just for Quebec* - but if they localize for French-speaking market, this forces the two versions to play on level fields.
But if they're already localizing in French, why on earth would they kill their other markets just to prioritize this one? If Quebec per se had ever been a priority, they'd have been treating the French version on par with English from the beginning - which is what this rule tries (futilely) to force.
There are a thousand reasons why this legislation may be wrong-headed and is unlikely to have any positive effect - but this is argument is, indeed, ridiculous.
This sounds like eminently wise advice - but as an adult, I don't think you can be arrested for lying to school employees and wasting their time.
Or, for the adult equivalent, to your co-workers / employers / wherever-you-spend-your-most-productive time.
You can be fired, or ostracized from whichever community applies - at the very worst, you might even be billed or sued in some context for significant loss / harm.
But unless your random authority figure has a the habit of making you sign notarized affidavits for everything you say, an arrest is not a consequence any adult would expect from the actions you describe.
I'm not so sure.
While I have little doubt that children growing on the web will be able to read very well in the most literal sense, I'm not so sure they will be 'literate' as we know that term.
The web provides invaluable access to information - it is accessible, global, searchable and 'to the point'. It may encourage a type of learning that is less narrative than we've historically used, and more... staccato, for lack of a better term. You can jump from fact to fact without necessarily going through a lot of research in the process, because the accumulated data of humanity is, well, searchable.
There is less need to develop the comprehension skills needed to reach new conclusions from existing data, because all the conclusions already reached are more easily accessible already. There is less need to develop the curiosity or habit of erudition, because the cost of researching answers for any question on-demand has become much lower than the equivalent cost of acquiring a broad/general education in advance.
In that sense, I have no doubt new generations will be reading something. But I'm not sure they will be 'reading' in the same sense we typically use the word now, as a shorthand for literacy.
I'm not sure that is entirely accurate - books in general are not that expensive, but some (arguably necessary) books ARE somewhat expensive. As any professional or college student, or many precocious high school students, can attest.
It really all depends on many factors: areas of knowledge, level of education we're talking about, geographical location, and availability of used books sales.
Some of this is balanced out now by easy access to public libraries and to basic information online (in my opinion, the true value of the internet). But this doesn't apply to every branch of knowledge, or every location, in the same way - e.g.: I still get requests to bring a medical book or two when I visit family out of the US.
I do agree with you on two things:
- General non-specialized books are a MUCH better value in the US than anything else you could buy for your family at that price range.
Both for direct benefits (~1-3 bucks per hour, divided by the # of readers), and indirect benefits (literacy, ability to focus, and general education).
- The 'wealth difference' levels out pretty quickly (assuming access to a good public library system), and is not terribly relevant for any middle-class family.
It's not a matter of accumulating books as if they were jewelry - I doubt the wealthier family with 50000 books is that much better than the family with 5000, if those 5K are good books (and why would you keep any other?).
It's really a matter of inculcating a reading habit, and the skills that come with that - and in that sense, 'book flow', as in easy/ongoing access to unread books, is more important than 'book wealth' (very large collections).
Uh? Can we moderate the story itself as Off-Topic?
Why does it have to be someone 'from outside of the US'?
- Most good (or hyped) international movies are shown in film festivals and preview screenings well before they are officially released in the US.
That's actually how most people in the US find out they exist - and how most of them get even the opportunity to be released in the US in the first place.
- People in the US are not exactly forbidden from going to the theater when abroad, you know?
There are plenty of people who travel with some frequency, and actually a lot of people who travel around the holidays - when this movie was released.
At least for me (not a frequent traveler), it is not uncommon to catch a movie or two in other countries if I'm visiting family.
<sarcasm>
I agree - but clearly that is not sufficient.
They are also encouraging these shenanigans by even linking to critic's external reviews, which are often posted BEFORE the movie can be seen by their customers. Sometimes even before it gets to the theaters!
That sort of irresponsability should stop: Netflix is a DVD rental company. It obviously should not link to reviews / opinions from people who have not seen the movie on an officially released DVD.
For that matter, how dare they NOT block user reviews altogether for pending DVD releases? Who could possibly give an honest opinion about the Dexter: Season 3 DVDs when they have not been released, queued and shipped by Netflix?
That's obviously a FRAUD, and Netflix should block voting from anyone who has even seen a movie or a TV show from any media source that is not Netflix.
</sarcasm>
Should that make a significant difference?
Netflix does not own movie theaters either. Yet that doesn't stop people from watching movies there and reviewing DVD movies (often before the DVD release) based on the theater experience.
Between advance screenings, festivals, and people who may have watched it in other countries at some point... a few hundred viewers doesn't sound that implausible.
If anything, the over-eager fan phenomenon (the "books are great, movie is going to rock" review the poster mentions) is the most likely distortion. But that's hardly surprising or suspicious - popular book-sequels tend to demonstrate something like this in Amazon weeks/months before it was released (sometimes positive hype, sometimes negative).
Why would it be different in Netflix? Most likely it is just less obvious in their user interface.
No it doesn't. On the contrary, it would *guarantee* that such a bias exists, because the newspapers' NPO would *have* to be supported by either the government or a commercial interest.
If that were not the case - if enough individual readers were so willing to donate to keep them running - then there would be no need to go the NPO route and we wouldn't be having this conversation in the first place.
You seem to be missing a significant point:
The primary source of media bias is the demands from the biased audience. - otherwise the problem would be self-corrected by a business/power model that depends on pandering to the audience.
There's a reason Fox News' ratings are so successful - and it is the same reason other networks followed suit - and it is because a lot of people like it that way. The reason they like it that way is because it ratifies their own bias, which they find more 'fair'. Other media, they see as obviously corrupted by "the primary source of media bias, which is powerful-impersonal-interest-group-X".
The reality is more mundane, and more depressing. As a society, we seem to have become unable to understand that *other reasonable people may strongly disagree with us* - much less to consider their viewpoint. So we must mentally castrate these people and say they're controlled by some abstract entity we can demonize. It's like we're in a medieval/tribal society blaming every cultural dissonance with our peers on witches.
Not really. My point is that Google's business model enforces said integrity (and it is a very specific area of integrity) - it is part of what they sell - AND that the same principle applies to newspapers, far more strongly in fact.
The difference is that for Google everybody is aware of the exact meaning of that 'integrity value' and how it fits their business model - trust on said integrity is the main / only resistance for users to switch to the competition. Google acknowledged and even embraced that low-resistance to competition.
For newspapers, their 'integrity value' was a broader concept, but it was incidentally subsidized by their historically successful business model (selling a piece of paper with the news), which had more traditional sources of resistance to competition. Switching newspapers IS a hassle, and you used to need to read at least one physical paper to be informed. Now people *think* they are getting the same value for free from more convenient places (online) - even though most of our real news at the source come from, and are paid by, newspapers. But the idea that new generations don't *have* to read the paper in the morning to be informed does not seem to be fully digested in some circles, so they have neither optimized their business model, nor switched to a new one.
I don't see where you're drawing any difference in your own paragraph.
Web searches' economic success *absolutely* depends on attracting as big an audience as possible. That's the whole point of the business, to sell eyes!
On *both* cases, the correlation of quality / accuracy depends on the audience: everyone wants accurate information, but 'quality' is defined by the audie
personally, i'd prefer if newspapers became non-profits. by selling ads (usually about 50% of each edition) newspaper publishers become beholden to advertisers.
It sends chills down my spine whenever people talk about non-profits as if they're the magical solution to impartiality and objectivity. It works for a certain type of work, but it would be a dangerous model for newspapers to adopt.
With very few exceptions, non-profits are just not economically independent enough, as they are by far much more at the mercy of their supporters. Since most exceptions are NPOs under the benevolent umbrella of a government or very large organization's budget (e.g.: U.N.), I'd be seriously concerned with a model where newspapers NPOs supported by one government or another.
By becoming non-profits, newspapers would *definitely* be beholden to their donors list. They will literally receive money for the type and angle of their reporting - after all, why would you economically support a newspaper you don't like?
As long as they are economically independent (or attempt to be), newspapers are a lot more likely to have an independent voice and be somewhat objective.
In the current model, if newspapers are selling advertising, that means they're selling *something else* that commercial interests want. Yes, they may expose themselves to potential conflicts of interests - but at least in principle they do not have to pacify their advertisers - and in practice they are beholden to different masters:
- They don't need to establish a patronage relationship with their advertisers
- Can walk away from advertisers making unethical demands (assuming a large enough pool of other advertisers)
- Need to balance the cost of selling out against the loss of their *real product*. i.e.: losing their reputation => losing their audience => losing ALL their advertisers.
The reality is that audience is still king. If there is bias in news media, it is to satisfy the expectations of the audience, which wants its own biases confirmed (not the advertisers'). E.g.: the economic success of certain over-'balanced' media outlets was a matter of ratings increasing along with the 'balance'.
This is really no different from Google's position as a search engine: yes, they sell links. Yes, they *could* seriously twist information for their advertiser's interests. But they lure their audience with the best search results - the moment they compromise that, people move on to the next search engine with better results.
The difference is that Google is well attuned to what the audiences does want, and found a spot where this is a positive feedback that encourages objectivity. Newspapers do not seem to have that level of self-awareness, and are stuck in a business model that is not very profitable. Without some serious soul-searching, they may not find an economic place for their true value (objective, primary source news) soon enough.
The $hardware$ $programmer-time$ equation is always based on the assumption that the programmer is always worth their qualifications.
You are correct that this is an unrealistic assumption but, like the "rational self-interest" assumption in economics, it is a very useful one.
Given a set of uniformly competent programmers, you quickly reach the point of diminishing returns on optimizing performance over hardware - but that's because a competent programmer should implement code with reasonable performance in the first place. Sadly, some people think they can compensate one with the other (competence vs hardware), when that is an entirely different problem, entirely different variable (e.g.: an incompetent programmer with more time is not always a good thing).
First you have to reach the point of competence where you can talk about performance optimizations in the first place. What you describe is not 'unoptimized code', it is not a naive but reasonable implementation - its gross incompetence (assuming SQL qualifications were claimed in the first place).
As you said, you can't pay for enough hardware to compensate for that. But in the same vein, you really, *really* do not want to pay for more of that programmer time either.
Maybe because it is not a good way to fix the problem, and it would only demotivate good people by making management seem petty?
If they're watching movies all day instead of working, they wouldn't stop wasting time just because the monitor is not horizontal... it's not like network-enabled computers are not great sources of time-wasting opportunities. The interweb is vast and infinite, after all. If that's the case you have a personnel problem that has little to do with monitors.
On the other hand, if they are NOT wasting your company's time all day, I don't know how they wouldn't find such a micro-management "mandate" insulting, straight out of a Dilbert cartoon.
You're saying management knows best exactly how they should read/write their own code? What's next? Enforcing syntax color schemes? IDE layout? Will their manager drop by their office to adjust their desk and chair to the 'mandated ergonomic position', and patrol around to keep an eye on their back posture?
Companies need to be able to trust their engineers to have enough control of their working environment to optimize their own comfort and effectiveness. If you cannot trust them to set their own monitor for what they do day-to-day, how on earth can you trust their code?
The vertical orientation is a helpful tip, but it may surprise you to know that sometimes developers need to do more than look at a single window with a single piece of code. In my experience, having more windows / files / tools open is almost always more valuable than the extra vertical space during debugging code... I do tend to find the vertical orientation extremely useful when working in sequential documents (specs, white papers, etc), so any developer should at least try it out.
But such things depend too much on personal preferences, habits and even eyesight. Mandating them is a great way to get your developers looking for another team / job where they are not treated like 5-year-olds.
Trollish ad-hominem apart, the parent AC comment does bring up a valid point.
Web application development does have some characteristics that makes it more natural to do gradual, measured updates that do not 'require significant overtime'.
Part of it may be their current limitations (some things just cannot be done in html+js, and many things should not be done in html+js), but mostly it is just the way the tech is supposed to work by design.
A lot of the time, the 'required significant overtime' in traditional apps is a consequence of the features being tightly coupled - even if not in the code itself, ultimately they tend to be tightly coupled at application delivery. This makes death marches almost unavoidable without very conservative planning, because "it's all or nothing": by the time you 'require' that overtime, removing a feature that is not ready will often look as risky / expensive as trying to complete it. A 'late cut' normally brings in at least binary changes, installer changes, etc that also need to be tested before the whole app is released - and the horrible feeling of waste for everybody involved, because after investing so much the feature missed the boat and now may never even get shipped.
In general, web development doesn't make the app easier to implement in time (sometimes, very much not so) - but it forces a loosely coupled interface for your features:
- Gradual updates are easy to prop to web servers and generally transparent to the users.
- REST architectures help to keep features self-contained (essentially you're updating / publishing a new resource at a url - much of the time you can isolate any code update to just the component that serves that specific url).
- Proper use of CSS and html/code separation mean that fit&finish UI changes, which are often a good share of that overtime, can be updated more dynamically than the application logic.
By design, the web makes it easier for people to 'cut late', and release the 'cut' features a bit later, transparently to the users. Once the penalty for missing the release boat is not fatal to the feature, people are a lot more willing to acknowledge schedule risks, and less willing to try heroics to get their pet feature done in time. Features go back to requiring time, not overtime.
Granted, that doesn't mean there are no death marches in web development shops, there are plenty. Or that traditional apps cannot be architected to use very granular, automatic updates, to deal with the same thing. I'm just saying that the web, by nature, is already architected this way, so it is easier to break away from the implications of a release model that was created when software shipped in little boxes full of floppy disks.