All but the largest interactive multimedia companies get their artwork done by external graphic arts companies on a contractual basis. Granted, someone at UbiSoft is probably responsible for reviewing those assets, but even then it isn't too surprising -- I've been in that environment and I know how things can slip through when the deadline is looming.
You have to get it right the first time, or else it'll be a Really Bad Thing(TM), and you can't issue patches later to fix the games like you can on the PC
Actually, they *can* issue updates through XBOX Live...
Whether someone in Malaysia can buy "a mighty Adidas" is completely beside the point. The point is that industrial workers in those nations lack the capability to consume *significant* amounts of goods produced by Western countries, meaning the money they make will never return to these countries. Judging from your grammar I'll guess you're not from a Western nation, so this point doesn't matter to you, but trust me, it matters a great deal to those of us watching our economy being shipped away permanently.
Quality is down, there is no question about it. Business Week ran an article on the topic only a few months ago. Forbes had one recently, too. The point is not quality, that is rhetoric used to justify what they're doing. The sole point is to drive down cost. It's a slash-and-burn tactic being used by corporate executives who only hang around long enough to take a juicy salary while the stock is still high.
Frankly, I also don't give a damn when my own country's companies exploit third world nations, and I don't mind a fight. That's fine, as long as their actions benefit us. Take your "free global citizens" crap and stick it where the sun doesn't rise. I truly do not care. We didn't get to be a superpower by kissing ass, but that sure as hell is dragging us back into European-grade medocrity.
Finally -- investment is not synonymous with reciprocal trade. I want them buying products we make here. There is a major difference, and if you don't understand it, we have reached an impasse.
That would be fine and dandy, except that the quality is rarely better, and there is no reciprocated trade. Improved quality is a claim made by management to justify their actions. It has yet to be proven, and for those of us in a position to have direct experience with the output of these bargain-basement replacements, the anecdotal evidence has so far been negative.
There is no such thing as "economic integration" because the foreign workers in question are not buying anything we produce, and in most cases they simply would not be able to buy anything we produce. A Malaysian worker in a Nike factory pulling down a whopping $180 annual salary isn't going to be buying many General Motors products.
You brought India into this, not me. My comments apply equally, whether the contractors are from India, China, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the UK, or Mexico. It has nothing to do with liking or not liking people from India. Which makes the third time you've totally missed the point. At least you're consistent.
Again, you miss the point. The question is whether your COMPANY has shipped off critical systems knowledge to another country. Forget it. Don't bother replying. Arguing sentence fragments with an AC who can't track a discussion beyond a single message isn't my idea of a good time.
One may choose to see it that way.. I just look at it as more of the same.. try to add a feature, don't bother to make sure it works right. This is indicative of the state of quality of way too many software companies these days.
It's a HUGE leap to go from shipping with a known problem to "not bothering to make sure it works right".
However, I will cheerfully agree (in general) that far too many apps are shipped with inadequate testing. I honestly think people (damn whippersnappers) don't know how to debug any more. Call it the "It compiles, ship it!" syndrome.
"truly major continent-spanning wars to remind them of WHY it's valuable to show a little enthusiasm for the strip if dirt you live on."
It is not valuable to behave like Nazis and discriminate against workers who can do the job better just because the workers are foreign.
I didn't say anything about behaving like Nazis, nor did I suggest there was anything good or desirable about wars of that nature. But the fact is, when all of your brainpower is offshore, world events can quickly leave you high and dry. The thinking is all short-term: cut jobs to pump up profits, ride a higher stock price to a couple years of good bonuses, then jump ship.
They knew about it, and they didn't do shit about it.
Alternately:
-- They knew about it, and management wouldn't let them do shit about it.
-- They knew about it, but addressing it would take significant time and effort, so they opted to defer that to a later release. After all, a million people running a mediocre firewall is better than a million people running no firewall at all.
-- They didn't actually realize it until later on. Are you psychic, or do you just happen to have a buddy who was on the ICF dev team?
But I suppose those angles would just mess up a good troll.
There's nothing wrong with hiring a worker who can do the job better, even if they are a "Dang dirty furriner'"
You forgot to preface your sentence with, "In theory".
In reality, you are sending money (personal wealth and tax revenue) out-of-country PERMANENTLY, as well as creating unemployment in this country. Offshoring is perhaps one of the most short-sighted things big business has dreamed up in the past fifty years or so, and I believe it's largely due to the fact that most people running companies these days haven't suffered through any truly major continent-spanning wars to remind them of WHY it's valuable to show a little enthusiasm for the strip if dirt you live on.
The MPAA will provide region-free DVDs to large renters like BlockBuster, and the rest of us will still have to deal with it. No, BlockBuster isn't on *your* side.
It was an enormous external Phillips (I think) SCSI unit. It took up about as much desk space as a 500-watt home theater receiver. It burned CDs at 1x and consumed all of the resources of the 150mhz Pentium II that it was attached to. Don't remember what software I was using to burn the CDs, though...
Heh, we had a whole room full of those. We used Adaptec's EZ-CD. The nice thing about those units (compared to what came out during the following couple of years) was that they NEVER burned a bad disc. Ever. And back then, blanks cost as much as $2.50 each, so that was a real concern when you were doing a run of a couple hundred every few days...
With the newer Bemani's, though, they gave a score penalty to any note struck besides the ones on screen, meaning each player played the exact same song.
It sounds like a metaphor for the entire Japanese culture...
Political novels are about situations involving people who happen to be politicians. They aren't about politics themselves because that's boring. There isn't any "political fiction" category, where somebody writes a story about an entire made-up campaign just for the sake of doing it -- because that would be boring.
So... *sigh*... do YOU play games? The few games that exist which about *people* simply aren't very good. RPG's come about as close to that as you'll get (excluding the usually awful "choose a path" story-novel things), and you need only look as far as this site during the past 60 days to find multiple discussions about that genre's shortcomings.
There's no reason [why] someone [couldn't] make modern republicanism work- at least in the altered rules of a video game.
Troll.
Re:Do not give them access to your account
on
Paperless Billing?
·
· Score: 1
Duh. That should be "very little" regulation of this.
As in, I have done "very little" previewing of the previous post.
Do not give them access to your account
on
Paperless Billing?
·
· Score: 1
It depends on what you mean by "paperless billing."
Many companies are offering the ability to directly debit your account automatically each month. If that's what you're talking about, you DO NOT want this.
The problem is, there is very regulation of this. I believe there have been related slashdot stories which probably have better details than I'll be able to provide, but in a nutshell, once you give them access to your account -- wether it's a cable company billing you for services, a bank auto-paying against a car loan, a mortgage, or a credit card, or an employer direct-depositing your pay-check, all bets are off when you sign that paper. You are giving them an open checkbook and simply trusting them to withdraw or deposit the correct amounts.
In my area, so far only ONE company I deal with (the electric company) has offered what I consider "true" paperless billing, which is that they simply send you a notification of your bill, or make your current billing information available online. This would be acceptable since YOU are still in control of your account. They don't get paid until you say they do, and they get only what you send to them.
However, as others have already discussed exhaustively, you're then trusting them to play by the rules, and you're trusting a non-physical medium. I personally don't trust either well enough yet. They can keep sending me paper for now.
Try moving to a house where your girlfriend can sleep in a bedroom instead of in your office. If your mouse clicks so loudly it wakes her up in another room, replace either the mouse, or the girlfriend, or both.
Plus Win98 is the last MS offering that allows a user to directly access input/output ports. I still have a few ten year old ISA PC cards that interface electronics to PCs. The control programs for these cards directly access I/O as they were written in DOS in most cases. Without Win98, they are useless.
The problem isn't the OS, the problem is the software you're using. It's just old. It's still very easy for a programmer to gain direct access I/O ports directly under Win2K, WinXP, or Win2003. It was never easy for a "user" to directly access I/O ports.
Furthermore, since you're talking about old ISA controller cards, they're almost certainly not standard PC hardware (unless maybe you have some of those 8-way serial port multiplexers or something like that), so again the problem isn't the OS, the problem is the hardware/software combo you're using. Finally, direct I/O port access also probably isn't what you're looking for -- you don't normally talk directly to hardware via actual *ports*, you normally run them off IRQs or something similar... "ports" has a very specific meaning and I don't think it means what you think it does.
The concept that millions of people are just going to throw away the equipment that they have bought five to ten years ago because of an arbitrary decision of one company in the support chain is simply corporate arrogance.
That would be true if your statement was accurate. But the fact is, older computers are damned slow and not very good for the kinds of things people want to do today. I'm running 13 computers at my house for various things, one of which is an old 75MHz Pentium, which replaced a very recently retired 66MHz 486, and the machines cover the range up to my current box, a 2.26GHz P4 running at a steady 3GHz. But you have to be a fairly dedicated geek to be able to come up with a good use for something like a 75MHz Pentium these days, when you can pick up a used 1GHz machine for maybe $150.
Besides, nothing about that company's "arbitrary" decision prevents the existing copies of the OS from working. Win98 is going on six years old. I don't expect support for *anything* I own that's six years or more years old -- not my cars and trucks and motorcycles, not televisions, not my microwave oven, nothing -- all of which cost me a hell of a lot more than a copy of Win98.
The reason more cars don't have HUDs is... yep, PATENTS. GM owns the patents on the most economical approach, a reflected LED. Many years ago I owned a Grand Prix GTP and I loved the HUD.
I'm tempted to cut up the dash on my Viper and try to build one myself. It would be fantastic for road racing...
"Excellent debugging / problem solving / communications skills": in your humble opinion?
It is my experience that most developers are lamentably weak in these areas. If someone claims to have "excellent" performance in those areas, I definitely want to know, because I'm going to test that claim in the interview, and assuming the claim withstands scrutiny, that could be a deal-breaker. There is nothing I dislike more than a programmer who can't debug.
All I can say is, if guns were illegal, my mother, my brother and I would have been killed about 30 years ago. Thankfully, my mother blew a hole in Charlie, our gas-huffing neighbor, as slipped into her bedroom window one night, muttering threats around the knife held between his teeth -- the same knife he'd just used to kill my dog. There is no way she could have physically fought this guy off, and our wonderful police simply ignored complaints about threats he made against our family in the past. My father (who was away on deployment with the Navy) had taught her how to shoot, and it literally saved our lives.
Slashdot Mirror
All but the largest interactive multimedia companies get their artwork done by external graphic arts companies on a contractual basis. Granted, someone at UbiSoft is probably responsible for reviewing those assets, but even then it isn't too surprising -- I've been in that environment and I know how things can slip through when the deadline is looming.
Actually, they *can* issue updates through XBOX Live...
Quality is down, there is no question about it. Business Week ran an article on the topic only a few months ago. Forbes had one recently, too. The point is not quality, that is rhetoric used to justify what they're doing. The sole point is to drive down cost. It's a slash-and-burn tactic being used by corporate executives who only hang around long enough to take a juicy salary while the stock is still high.
Frankly, I also don't give a damn when my own country's companies exploit third world nations, and I don't mind a fight. That's fine, as long as their actions benefit us. Take your "free global citizens" crap and stick it where the sun doesn't rise. I truly do not care. We didn't get to be a superpower by kissing ass, but that sure as hell is dragging us back into European-grade medocrity.
Finally -- investment is not synonymous with reciprocal trade. I want them buying products we make here. There is a major difference, and if you don't understand it, we have reached an impasse.
There is no such thing as "economic integration" because the foreign workers in question are not buying anything we produce, and in most cases they simply would not be able to buy anything we produce. A Malaysian worker in a Nike factory pulling down a whopping $180 annual salary isn't going to be buying many General Motors products.
Go reinvent yourself somewhere else.
Hilarious. Wish I had mod points.
If you run over his RC car in the street, should we send you to prison for murder?
You brought India into this, not me. My comments apply equally, whether the contractors are from India, China, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the UK, or Mexico. It has nothing to do with liking or not liking people from India. Which makes the third time you've totally missed the point. At least you're consistent.
Again, you miss the point. The question is whether your COMPANY has shipped off critical systems knowledge to another country. Forget it. Don't bother replying. Arguing sentence fragments with an AC who can't track a discussion beyond a single message isn't my idea of a good time.
It's a HUGE leap to go from shipping with a known problem to "not bothering to make sure it works right".
However, I will cheerfully agree (in general) that far too many apps are shipped with inadequate testing. I honestly think people (damn whippersnappers) don't know how to debug any more. Call it the "It compiles, ship it!" syndrome.
It is not valuable to behave like Nazis and discriminate against workers who can do the job better just because the workers are foreign.
I didn't say anything about behaving like Nazis, nor did I suggest there was anything good or desirable about wars of that nature. But the fact is, when all of your brainpower is offshore, world events can quickly leave you high and dry. The thinking is all short-term: cut jobs to pump up profits, ride a higher stock price to a couple years of good bonuses, then jump ship.
Alternately:
-- They knew about it, and management wouldn't let them do shit about it.
-- They knew about it, but addressing it would take significant time and effort, so they opted to defer that to a later release. After all, a million people running a mediocre firewall is better than a million people running no firewall at all.
-- They didn't actually realize it until later on. Are you psychic, or do you just happen to have a buddy who was on the ICF dev team?
But I suppose those angles would just mess up a good troll.
You forgot to preface your sentence with, "In theory".
In reality, you are sending money (personal wealth and tax revenue) out-of-country PERMANENTLY, as well as creating unemployment in this country. Offshoring is perhaps one of the most short-sighted things big business has dreamed up in the past fifty years or so, and I believe it's largely due to the fact that most people running companies these days haven't suffered through any truly major continent-spanning wars to remind them of WHY it's valuable to show a little enthusiasm for the strip if dirt you live on.
The MPAA will provide region-free DVDs to large renters like BlockBuster, and the rest of us will still have to deal with it. No, BlockBuster isn't on *your* side.
Obligatory response: They sure as hell can't possibly run any slower...
Heh, we had a whole room full of those. We used Adaptec's EZ-CD. The nice thing about those units (compared to what came out during the following couple of years) was that they NEVER burned a bad disc. Ever. And back then, blanks cost as much as $2.50 each, so that was a real concern when you were doing a run of a couple hundred every few days...
It sounds like a metaphor for the entire Japanese culture...
Political novels are about situations involving people who happen to be politicians. They aren't about politics themselves because that's boring. There isn't any "political fiction" category, where somebody writes a story about an entire made-up campaign just for the sake of doing it -- because that would be boring.
So... *sigh*... do YOU play games? The few games that exist which about *people* simply aren't very good. RPG's come about as close to that as you'll get (excluding the usually awful "choose a path" story-novel things), and you need only look as far as this site during the past 60 days to find multiple discussions about that genre's shortcomings.
There's no reason [why] someone [couldn't] make modern republicanism work- at least in the altered rules of a video game.
Troll.
Duh. That should be "very little" regulation of this.
As in, I have done "very little" previewing of the previous post.
Many companies are offering the ability to directly debit your account automatically each month. If that's what you're talking about, you DO NOT want this.
The problem is, there is very regulation of this. I believe there have been related slashdot stories which probably have better details than I'll be able to provide, but in a nutshell, once you give them access to your account -- wether it's a cable company billing you for services, a bank auto-paying against a car loan, a mortgage, or a credit card, or an employer direct-depositing your pay-check, all bets are off when you sign that paper. You are giving them an open checkbook and simply trusting them to withdraw or deposit the correct amounts.
In my area, so far only ONE company I deal with (the electric company) has offered what I consider "true" paperless billing, which is that they simply send you a notification of your bill, or make your current billing information available online. This would be acceptable since YOU are still in control of your account. They don't get paid until you say they do, and they get only what you send to them.
However, as others have already discussed exhaustively, you're then trusting them to play by the rules, and you're trusting a non-physical medium. I personally don't trust either well enough yet. They can keep sending me paper for now.
Try moving to a house where your girlfriend can sleep in a bedroom instead of in your office. If your mouse clicks so loudly it wakes her up in another room, replace either the mouse, or the girlfriend, or both.
The problem isn't the OS, the problem is the software you're using. It's just old. It's still very easy for a programmer to gain direct access I/O ports directly under Win2K, WinXP, or Win2003. It was never easy for a "user" to directly access I/O ports.
Furthermore, since you're talking about old ISA controller cards, they're almost certainly not standard PC hardware (unless maybe you have some of those 8-way serial port multiplexers or something like that), so again the problem isn't the OS, the problem is the hardware/software combo you're using. Finally, direct I/O port access also probably isn't what you're looking for -- you don't normally talk directly to hardware via actual *ports*, you normally run them off IRQs or something similar... "ports" has a very specific meaning and I don't think it means what you think it does.
The concept that millions of people are just going to throw away the equipment that they have bought five to ten years ago because of an arbitrary decision of one company in the support chain is simply corporate arrogance.
That would be true if your statement was accurate. But the fact is, older computers are damned slow and not very good for the kinds of things people want to do today. I'm running 13 computers at my house for various things, one of which is an old 75MHz Pentium, which replaced a very recently retired 66MHz 486, and the machines cover the range up to my current box, a 2.26GHz P4 running at a steady 3GHz. But you have to be a fairly dedicated geek to be able to come up with a good use for something like a 75MHz Pentium these days, when you can pick up a used 1GHz machine for maybe $150.
Besides, nothing about that company's "arbitrary" decision prevents the existing copies of the OS from working. Win98 is going on six years old. I don't expect support for *anything* I own that's six years or more years old -- not my cars and trucks and motorcycles, not televisions, not my microwave oven, nothing -- all of which cost me a hell of a lot more than a copy of Win98.
I'm tempted to cut up the dash on my Viper and try to build one myself. It would be fantastic for road racing...
It is my experience that most developers are lamentably weak in these areas. If someone claims to have "excellent" performance in those areas, I definitely want to know, because I'm going to test that claim in the interview, and assuming the claim withstands scrutiny, that could be a deal-breaker. There is nothing I dislike more than a programmer who can't debug.
If they turned it down, should it say "declined" rather than "denied"? Or perhaps post-docs aren't what they used to be.
Gun-control freaks piss me off.