The corporate world is not all about compromising as you've been led to believe. At least in the tech industry, successful companies value people who know what's right, and take action on that knowledge. What they don't value is people who are mean about it, or who have a victim complex. They don't want yes men, although they sometimes have difficulty ferreting them out. They want someone who can identify problems, speak up, and solve the problems.
But there are other issues that come up, that can fool you into believing that they don't want informed, stubborn people. It sounds like you don't have much respect for managers, and that could be your downfall. If you don't like somebody, and you let them know, how can you expect them to like you? People who are perceived as mean or unfriendly are often singled out and discriminated against, even when they're in the right.
Here's the truth that you probably won't like hearing: management is fucking hard, and it's not much fun. I try to avoid it if at all possible, preferring to come up with clever software designs and banging out code -- you know, the fun stuff.
Those people who you complain about making tons of money for knowing how to shake hands and smile? Their job is a lot harder than you think. They have to keep track of every aspect of a project, figure out ways of communicating what needs to be done, deliver information to their superiors in a way that won't freak them out, and try to extract good performance out of engineers who see them as just another smile and a handshake.
Good managers are hard to come by. With no management, stress and uncertainty accumulate, and projects go to bad places. With bad management, they tend to go to even worse places. With good management, things get done, and people feel satisfied in their jobs.
You may feel like people want you to be someone who you're not. I honestly don't know who you are, but I'm guessing you're angry and bitter. That does not define who you are -- that's just what you're thinking right now. You can choose to do what you want, and it's what you do that defines who you are, not what's happened to you, or what you've done in the past. I think you might find that if you try to be nice to people, treat them with respect, and genuinely convince yourself that they're not all fucktards, things might turn out a little better for you.
The difference is that used cars aren't sold at a 600% markup over their trade-in value. Your argument holds for used games in general, but not for predatory used game stores. Stores like Gamestop pressure customers into trading in games that they otherwise would have left on their shelves gathering dust. These customers then bring in their games for store credit without considering that they could make a lot more money off of Ebay or Amazon Marketplace.
I know, let the buyer beware, and there's a sucker born every minute, but regardless whether or not the customer deserves to get a bad deal, Gamestop is doing damage to the economy as a whole. It's good for developers if the customers have money to spend, because they're likely to spend it on games. If those customers are losing money to a company that isn't supporting the industry proportionately, then that's bad for the industry.
While the SUV revolution is more than a little bit to blame for today's lackluster fuel numbers, the article fails to point out collision safety as a factor in the modern design of cars. It's not just the trucks and SUV's that are bringing the average down -- compact cars these days are still way heavier than they used to be, with much worse visibility, largely as a result of increasingly stringent crash standards.
Cars these days have to be able to protect you in a 60 mph (30 + 30) corner collision, with rollover, even if you aren't wearing a seatbelt. The result is bigger, heavier frames, and thick pillars that prevent you from seeing pedestrians. As a result, cars are heavier, and their engines have to be more powerful to compensate.
Does anyone else find it ironic that an article on standards compliance doesn't display in Google Chrome? As soon as the page finishes loading, the entire screen turns white. I had to open IE in order to read it.
I honestly can't see a way this can even work with third-party applications. Either you need a specialized API for tabs (in which case, good luck getting any of the major projects to adopt it), or you sweepingly treat all windows as tabs, in which case you get nested tabs.
From the video that was posted, they've only shown this working with the file manager (or whatever it's called in KDE). Maybe that's all it works for?
The problem with enterprise software is that it's essentially niche software. There often aren't enough customers to justify the common-sense improvements that we expect in consumer software, and even if there are plenty of customers, there isn't enough competition to force them to make those improvements. In the enterprise world, the usability, documentation, and in some cases, even stability, can all be ignored if the product has that one feature that your customers need.
The problem is that in Linuxland, nearly *all* software is niche software, and unless you're only working with core utilities, you're dealing with software made by people who have very little incentive to polish it, so you get the same list of complaints as with enterprise software (regardless of platform). The only thing that's missing is draconian copy protection.
"Even" was me being sarcastic. Also, the law allows for massive statutory damages like this. Sympathy would be deciding that a fair punishment would be a fine of a few bucks.
While it seems absolutely insane that an individual can be sued for so much for something so inconsequential, I have to say that she really made it easy to side with the RIAA.
If it weren't for her destruction of evidence and blatant perjury, the courts might be likely to have some sympathy for her. Instead, she insulted the courts in a way that made Hans Reiser look well grounded. It was obvious to anyone following the trial that she was the one sharing the files, and while she didn't need to volunteer that information necessarily, the deliberate obfuscation (returned hard drives, etc.) put her on the wrong side of the line.
I think this is a terrible precedent that was set, but really, I'm not surprised. The RIAA, of course, will never see their money, but then Jammie Thomas will never own a material possession again, either, so I guess it's even.
If this is true, I don't think it's a case of cause and effect.
Google as a company cares very much about end-user experience, as do a lot of for-profit companies. Adobe probably does too, even though they suck at it. The things that annoy developers like these are the things that annoy regular users, too. If a user can't use your product, then you're not going to make money off of them using your product, so it's in your best incentive to fix it. Non-commercial developers don't have to fix these things unless they want to, and they don't complain as much (or at least they don't get as much attention when they do).
Remember, the people doing the complaining are not Windows/Mac zealots -- do you think Google can't afford to hire Linux people? The people who work on these projects, who run into these very real obstacles, know what they're doing, way better than you do. However, they're getting paid for it, have deadlines to meet, have usability guidelines to adhere to, and are accountable to other human beings, which you are not.
Just saying.
Actually, I'd put TMNT up as an example of a popular NES sidescroller that is truly awful. I remember it being hard, but entertaining at the time, mainly because I was obsessed with the cartoon. I bought it for the Virtual Console when it first came out, and realized that what made the game hard wasn't clever puzzles or enemy scripts, but bad level design combined with terrible, laggy controls.
I remember several places that required perfect mastery of controls that weren't responsive enough to begin with. It's like the obligatory action sequence in every stealth game, or the escort mission in the action game with bad AI, except that the entire game is like that.
Maybe people here should actually read the article before commenting on it. The article isn't just your average list of top ten games from the '80s, or "boy, games sure suck right now" rant. The author actually lays out some decent guidelines for what makes a good sidescroller, given the benefit of experience.
So many of the posts seem to be parrotting the "nostalgia" line, while refusing to acknowledge that some of those games were just plain *good*. Super Mario Bros. 3 and Mega Man 2 are good games, and the existence of Pac Land doesn't make them any less good. The article does a pretty good job of explaining why.
Look, I've been on that end of the argument before. Yes, I do think it's important to follow security guidelines, but it's still difficult to convince management of this, and they're the ones paying the bills.
Unless a customer specifically says, "we need to be able to run as a Limited User," proper security compliance is going to fall into one of those "nice to have" areas. If it works as Administrator, and the customer is fine with that, then the company is going to want you to work on something else.
I didn't mean to come off as anti-Microsoft. I'm just saying from the company's perspective, this really looks like Microsoft is coming down from on high to unilaterally tell everyone to change their software that was written 10 years ago, and worked perfectly well back then.
And I'm accusing the parent of trolling because this is the exact situation the GP was talking about, which he completely ignored in favor of name calling. Just because somebody's on the opposing side of the argument does not make it okay to reply without reading his post. Even if it is Slashdot.
In most companies, insubordination is a fireable offense. If your manager tells you to implement a feature, you either do it, or provide a good reason not to. Either way, at the end of the day, it's your manager's call.
If you're writing code for the first time, sure, get it right. If you've already got code, and it works, it's going to be a really hard sell to change it just because Microsoft published a memo.
Do you honestly expect that at $800, his surround speakers are going to be noticeably bad? The difference between a $100 speaker and a $1000, let alone a $5000 speaker is pretty subtle, and won't come across when you're listening to crunches and explosions. The front speakers are for listening to music, where you might actually be able to tell the difference.
I had an AIW in 2000, and it didn't do anything near what Tivo did. Yes, it had video recording features, and it was conceivably possible to use as a VCR, but it wasn't very practical. It didn't encode the video to MPEG2, so the size of the videos it recorded was on the order of gigabytes per minute. Given that hard drives at the time didn't have all that much capacity, it was a pretty useless feature.
Note also that the version I had came two years after Tivo launched, and I'm sure many of the Tivo-like features, such as pausing live TV, were added later, in an attempt to be like Tivo.
If you think for a second the ESA is any better than the RIAA or the MPAA you're a fool.
It's a fair comparison. They're both well-funded, largely amoral organizations that have either wronged us in the past, or intend to wrong us in the future. However, bad as the RIAA is now, I don't want to think what would've come if they hadn't been fighting against the PMRC in the '80s.
If I lose my PS2, I lose the console and possibly the game sitting inside it. If I lose my Wii, I lose all my games, too. Reasonable difference there. Hasn't stopped me using the Virtual Console, but should anything happen to mine, I'm gonna be right pissed about it.
I wonder if the perception of fragility comes from the price of the controllers. The NES and SNES controllers were pretty cheap and light, and felt indestructable, even though I've used more than a few with sticky buttons. The Wii controller is expensive and heavy, and has flashing lights and other gizmos, and man, that shit's gotta be fragile. It doesn't matter if they make it strong enough to withstand an apartment complex falling on it -- people will still think it's fragile.
It's the same principle as the iPhone. Aside from the occasional manufacturing defect, the iPhone is nigh indestructable, yet people still joke about it being a quick $600 ($400 now) down the drain if you accidentally roll over it in your sleep.
By the time you add everything up, you're looking at $600+ versus $700+. I just have a hard time believing that there is a significant contingent of people who are happy to pay $600 to play games, but think that $700 is too much.
No, you're looking at $400 versus $700, which is a fucking huge difference, actually. $600 is closer to what it costs to get an XBox 360 all kitted out, and while that might be a good argument, we're not really discussing the XBox now are we?
I'm interested in knowing what bank you use. It seems all the banks I've encountered so far have had really badly coded web interfaces. Tons of float-over menus, checkboxes that change parts of the page when you click them, but then don't completely work if you're using anything other than Internet Explorer. Heck, for the longest time, MBNA's website checked to make sure you were using IE, even though the page worked fine in Firefox.
Anyway, I'd be interested in a list of financial institutions that have compatible websites. Right now, I'd consider Bank of America's website to be borderline compatible, but not without a few bugs. The sad part is that before they got bought out, MBNA's webapp worked fine in all the major browsers.
3) Opera not free (as in free beer). Who cares if it is open source or free to use. It supports standards, something the firefox "fanboys" are always screaming about! Standards, Standards, Standards! (Hey you - Try the blink tag in FF. In FF 2.0 it works great! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_tag )
The thing is Opera actually is free as in beer. It's just not free as in GNU. It's about as free as uTorrent, and the level of support is roughly the same.
The funny thing is that now that IE7 is more standards-compliant and robust than the old IE, a lot of "IE-specific" sites don't render correctly anymore. The Bank of America web site, for example, renders better on Firefox than on IE7, and even that's not entirely bug-free. As a result, BoA now has a web site that doesn't render on any web browser in current distribution. Web developers are slowly having to learn not to be douches.
I speak from personal experience saying that when you switch to Firefox, the first thing you'll do is try to find extensions to make it more Opera-like. These extensions, like Ad-Block, All-In-One Gestures and Sage, tend to be buggy, and generally don't work after a new version of Firefox gets released. Ad-Block crashed the browser on a lot of Slate.com pages, AIO Gestures had horrible memory leaks that ate up a gig of RAM, and Sage had trouble rendering a bunch of the RSS posts that I had.
I don't know if you used the mouse gestures or RSS reader very much, but those were two things that made me breathe a sigh of relief when I switched back to Opera after a four-year hiatus.
Slashdot Mirror
The corporate world is not all about compromising as you've been led to believe. At least in the tech industry, successful companies value people who know what's right, and take action on that knowledge. What they don't value is people who are mean about it, or who have a victim complex. They don't want yes men, although they sometimes have difficulty ferreting them out. They want someone who can identify problems, speak up, and solve the problems.
But there are other issues that come up, that can fool you into believing that they don't want informed, stubborn people. It sounds like you don't have much respect for managers, and that could be your downfall. If you don't like somebody, and you let them know, how can you expect them to like you? People who are perceived as mean or unfriendly are often singled out and discriminated against, even when they're in the right.
Here's the truth that you probably won't like hearing: management is fucking hard, and it's not much fun. I try to avoid it if at all possible, preferring to come up with clever software designs and banging out code -- you know, the fun stuff.
Those people who you complain about making tons of money for knowing how to shake hands and smile? Their job is a lot harder than you think. They have to keep track of every aspect of a project, figure out ways of communicating what needs to be done, deliver information to their superiors in a way that won't freak them out, and try to extract good performance out of engineers who see them as just another smile and a handshake.
Good managers are hard to come by. With no management, stress and uncertainty accumulate, and projects go to bad places. With bad management, they tend to go to even worse places. With good management, things get done, and people feel satisfied in their jobs.
You may feel like people want you to be someone who you're not. I honestly don't know who you are, but I'm guessing you're angry and bitter. That does not define who you are -- that's just what you're thinking right now. You can choose to do what you want, and it's what you do that defines who you are, not what's happened to you, or what you've done in the past. I think you might find that if you try to be nice to people, treat them with respect, and genuinely convince yourself that they're not all fucktards, things might turn out a little better for you.
The difference is that used cars aren't sold at a 600% markup over their trade-in value. Your argument holds for used games in general, but not for predatory used game stores. Stores like Gamestop pressure customers into trading in games that they otherwise would have left on their shelves gathering dust. These customers then bring in their games for store credit without considering that they could make a lot more money off of Ebay or Amazon Marketplace.
I know, let the buyer beware, and there's a sucker born every minute, but regardless whether or not the customer deserves to get a bad deal, Gamestop is doing damage to the economy as a whole. It's good for developers if the customers have money to spend, because they're likely to spend it on games. If those customers are losing money to a company that isn't supporting the industry proportionately, then that's bad for the industry.
While the SUV revolution is more than a little bit to blame for today's lackluster fuel numbers, the article fails to point out collision safety as a factor in the modern design of cars. It's not just the trucks and SUV's that are bringing the average down -- compact cars these days are still way heavier than they used to be, with much worse visibility, largely as a result of increasingly stringent crash standards.
Cars these days have to be able to protect you in a 60 mph (30 + 30) corner collision, with rollover, even if you aren't wearing a seatbelt. The result is bigger, heavier frames, and thick pillars that prevent you from seeing pedestrians. As a result, cars are heavier, and their engines have to be more powerful to compensate.
"It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena."
Isn't this a good enough reason not to do it at all?
Does anyone else find it ironic that an article on standards compliance doesn't display in Google Chrome? As soon as the page finishes loading, the entire screen turns white. I had to open IE in order to read it.
Exactly.
I honestly can't see a way this can even work with third-party applications. Either you need a specialized API for tabs (in which case, good luck getting any of the major projects to adopt it), or you sweepingly treat all windows as tabs, in which case you get nested tabs.
From the video that was posted, they've only shown this working with the file manager (or whatever it's called in KDE). Maybe that's all it works for?
The problem with enterprise software is that it's essentially niche software. There often aren't enough customers to justify the common-sense improvements that we expect in consumer software, and even if there are plenty of customers, there isn't enough competition to force them to make those improvements. In the enterprise world, the usability, documentation, and in some cases, even stability, can all be ignored if the product has that one feature that your customers need.
The problem is that in Linuxland, nearly *all* software is niche software, and unless you're only working with core utilities, you're dealing with software made by people who have very little incentive to polish it, so you get the same list of complaints as with enterprise software (regardless of platform). The only thing that's missing is draconian copy protection.
"Even" was me being sarcastic. Also, the law allows for massive statutory damages like this. Sympathy would be deciding that a fair punishment would be a fine of a few bucks.
While it seems absolutely insane that an individual can be sued for so much for something so inconsequential, I have to say that she really made it easy to side with the RIAA.
If it weren't for her destruction of evidence and blatant perjury, the courts might be likely to have some sympathy for her. Instead, she insulted the courts in a way that made Hans Reiser look well grounded. It was obvious to anyone following the trial that she was the one sharing the files, and while she didn't need to volunteer that information necessarily, the deliberate obfuscation (returned hard drives, etc.) put her on the wrong side of the line.
I think this is a terrible precedent that was set, but really, I'm not surprised. The RIAA, of course, will never see their money, but then Jammie Thomas will never own a material possession again, either, so I guess it's even.
If this is true, I don't think it's a case of cause and effect. Google as a company cares very much about end-user experience, as do a lot of for-profit companies. Adobe probably does too, even though they suck at it. The things that annoy developers like these are the things that annoy regular users, too. If a user can't use your product, then you're not going to make money off of them using your product, so it's in your best incentive to fix it. Non-commercial developers don't have to fix these things unless they want to, and they don't complain as much (or at least they don't get as much attention when they do). Remember, the people doing the complaining are not Windows/Mac zealots -- do you think Google can't afford to hire Linux people? The people who work on these projects, who run into these very real obstacles, know what they're doing, way better than you do. However, they're getting paid for it, have deadlines to meet, have usability guidelines to adhere to, and are accountable to other human beings, which you are not. Just saying.
Actually, I'd put TMNT up as an example of a popular NES sidescroller that is truly awful. I remember it being hard, but entertaining at the time, mainly because I was obsessed with the cartoon. I bought it for the Virtual Console when it first came out, and realized that what made the game hard wasn't clever puzzles or enemy scripts, but bad level design combined with terrible, laggy controls.
I remember several places that required perfect mastery of controls that weren't responsive enough to begin with. It's like the obligatory action sequence in every stealth game, or the escort mission in the action game with bad AI, except that the entire game is like that.
Maybe people here should actually read the article before commenting on it. The article isn't just your average list of top ten games from the '80s, or "boy, games sure suck right now" rant. The author actually lays out some decent guidelines for what makes a good sidescroller, given the benefit of experience.
So many of the posts seem to be parrotting the "nostalgia" line, while refusing to acknowledge that some of those games were just plain *good*. Super Mario Bros. 3 and Mega Man 2 are good games, and the existence of Pac Land doesn't make them any less good. The article does a pretty good job of explaining why.
Look, I've been on that end of the argument before. Yes, I do think it's important to follow security guidelines, but it's still difficult to convince management of this, and they're the ones paying the bills.
Unless a customer specifically says, "we need to be able to run as a Limited User," proper security compliance is going to fall into one of those "nice to have" areas. If it works as Administrator, and the customer is fine with that, then the company is going to want you to work on something else.
I didn't mean to come off as anti-Microsoft. I'm just saying from the company's perspective, this really looks like Microsoft is coming down from on high to unilaterally tell everyone to change their software that was written 10 years ago, and worked perfectly well back then.
And I'm accusing the parent of trolling because this is the exact situation the GP was talking about, which he completely ignored in favor of name calling. Just because somebody's on the opposing side of the argument does not make it okay to reply without reading his post. Even if it is Slashdot.
You're trolling, aren't you.
In most companies, insubordination is a fireable offense. If your manager tells you to implement a feature, you either do it, or provide a good reason not to. Either way, at the end of the day, it's your manager's call.
If you're writing code for the first time, sure, get it right. If you've already got code, and it works, it's going to be a really hard sell to change it just because Microsoft published a memo.
Do you honestly expect that at $800, his surround speakers are going to be noticeably bad? The difference between a $100 speaker and a $1000, let alone a $5000 speaker is pretty subtle, and won't come across when you're listening to crunches and explosions. The front speakers are for listening to music, where you might actually be able to tell the difference.
I had an AIW in 2000, and it didn't do anything near what Tivo did. Yes, it had video recording features, and it was conceivably possible to use as a VCR, but it wasn't very practical. It didn't encode the video to MPEG2, so the size of the videos it recorded was on the order of gigabytes per minute. Given that hard drives at the time didn't have all that much capacity, it was a pretty useless feature.
Note also that the version I had came two years after Tivo launched, and I'm sure many of the Tivo-like features, such as pausing live TV, were added later, in an attempt to be like Tivo.
If you think for a second the ESA is any better than the RIAA or the MPAA you're a fool.
It's a fair comparison. They're both well-funded, largely amoral organizations that have either wronged us in the past, or intend to wrong us in the future. However, bad as the RIAA is now, I don't want to think what would've come if they hadn't been fighting against the PMRC in the '80s.
You suck at analogies.
If I lose my PS2, I lose the console and possibly the game sitting inside it. If I lose my Wii, I lose all my games, too. Reasonable difference there. Hasn't stopped me using the Virtual Console, but should anything happen to mine, I'm gonna be right pissed about it.
I wonder if the perception of fragility comes from the price of the controllers. The NES and SNES controllers were pretty cheap and light, and felt indestructable, even though I've used more than a few with sticky buttons. The Wii controller is expensive and heavy, and has flashing lights and other gizmos, and man, that shit's gotta be fragile. It doesn't matter if they make it strong enough to withstand an apartment complex falling on it -- people will still think it's fragile.
It's the same principle as the iPhone. Aside from the occasional manufacturing defect, the iPhone is nigh indestructable, yet people still joke about it being a quick $600 ($400 now) down the drain if you accidentally roll over it in your sleep.
By the time you add everything up, you're looking at $600+ versus $700+. I just have a hard time believing that there is a significant contingent of people who are happy to pay $600 to play games, but think that $700 is too much.
No, you're looking at $400 versus $700, which is a fucking huge difference, actually. $600 is closer to what it costs to get an XBox 360 all kitted out, and while that might be a good argument, we're not really discussing the XBox now are we?
I'm interested in knowing what bank you use. It seems all the banks I've encountered so far have had really badly coded web interfaces. Tons of float-over menus, checkboxes that change parts of the page when you click them, but then don't completely work if you're using anything other than Internet Explorer. Heck, for the longest time, MBNA's website checked to make sure you were using IE, even though the page worked fine in Firefox.
Anyway, I'd be interested in a list of financial institutions that have compatible websites. Right now, I'd consider Bank of America's website to be borderline compatible, but not without a few bugs. The sad part is that before they got bought out, MBNA's webapp worked fine in all the major browsers.
I take it you don't have a bank account.
3) Opera not free (as in free beer). Who cares if it is open source or free to use. It supports standards, something the firefox "fanboys" are always screaming about! Standards, Standards, Standards! (Hey you - Try the blink tag in FF. In FF 2.0 it works great! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_tag )
The thing is Opera actually is free as in beer. It's just not free as in GNU. It's about as free as uTorrent, and the level of support is roughly the same.
The funny thing is that now that IE7 is more standards-compliant and robust than the old IE, a lot of "IE-specific" sites don't render correctly anymore. The Bank of America web site, for example, renders better on Firefox than on IE7, and even that's not entirely bug-free. As a result, BoA now has a web site that doesn't render on any web browser in current distribution. Web developers are slowly having to learn not to be douches.
I speak from personal experience saying that when you switch to Firefox, the first thing you'll do is try to find extensions to make it more Opera-like. These extensions, like Ad-Block, All-In-One Gestures and Sage, tend to be buggy, and generally don't work after a new version of Firefox gets released. Ad-Block crashed the browser on a lot of Slate.com pages, AIO Gestures had horrible memory leaks that ate up a gig of RAM, and Sage had trouble rendering a bunch of the RSS posts that I had.
I don't know if you used the mouse gestures or RSS reader very much, but those were two things that made me breathe a sigh of relief when I switched back to Opera after a four-year hiatus.