Come on fuckers! Vote em out! Vote em all out! or was the rest of that just bullshit talk because you keep your fucking blinders on when it comes to the democrats? Do you vote on ideals or do you vote on the party line? I think the answer is apparent.
Incredible. So sneeringly condescending, yet so naïve...
So many of us would love to vote them out. We would gladly cast votes for candidates who don't propose legislation based entirely on the bleatings of focus groups, and who doesn't put popularity above common sense.
The problem is, you're preaching to the choir, bruthah. (If by "preaching" you mean "being alienating and insulting.") We're not the problem. The problem is that there is no shortage of candidates who do just that--they've literally made a science out of fooling as many people as possible into thinking that they represent their best interests while doing little but muddy the waters and sully their station. And there's no shortage of induhviduals who eat up the FUD with a spoon in each hand because they think they're voting for their man.
Personally, I think the situation needs to get significantly worse. Slave-labor-camp worse. RIAA-rent-a-cops-shooting-to-kill worse. Eminent-domain-gone-wild worse. American-Idol-gets-preempted-three-straight-weeks- by-the-President-saying-everything-is-improving worse. Only when they start to notice that something is amiss, when they, or their children, or their relatives is finally inconvenienced to death, will they be ready for a long-overdue sea change.
And now the eternal question: what the fuck would be wrong with simply enforcing the existing, objective, ubiquitous rating system? You know, like we do here in Britain? It sounds to me like he's deliberately avoiding this because he wants to create a situation in which he can sit back and pick targets at his leisure.
While that would be a big win for him, look at the bigger picture: he keeps introducing legislation which says basically that OMFG TEH GAMEZ ARE TURNING UR KIDS INTO KILLAHS!!!1!!ONE!ELEVENTY. It gets reported on. And those who don't know better buy the subtext and become that much more worried.
It's said that if something gets repeated enough times, people will believe it. (As long as that phrase has been bouncing around, it must be true.) If he tells people enough people that video games are dangerous, then it doesn't matter if they strike down his dumbass laws now so long as they come to believe it eventually and outlaw them then.
It's meme warfare, pure and simple. And amazingly, it's so pure and simple that he probably doesn't even recognize it.
GI.biz reports that the core version can upgraded with WiFi and memory card adapters, as well as a higher capacity hard drive. However, HDMI output will be non-upgradeable.
Hate to say it, but I think it'll be a good thing. Mostly because I'd like to see some kind of set standard, so I can listen to my music from any service on any player. Thats not too much to ask, right?
Excellent work, sir! That was some wickedly subdued sarcasm! I look forward to the flamewar the misunderstanding of that statement spawns downthread.
Apple won out against the RIAA, Apple won out against France, and now Apple won out against the Beatles' old label. Despite it, every investor knows the truth: Apple is dying. Watch their stock price for a decline this afternoon in light of this terrible, tragic, positive news.
Yes, this is sarcasm. Except for the stock decline thing.
The solution to the problem of Chinese censorship on the Internet is simple enough -- we just make the internet flee China completely. How? [insert evil grin here]
Imagine a botnet, sending out rapid-fire cease-and-desist notices to every site operating in China, informing site owners of out-of-compliace content. Companies will struggle to remove content from the web fast enough to keep up with the vaguely threatening notices. That's the second edge of self-censorship, turned against the people wielding it: the fear of running afoul of the government will cause the mass removal of otherwise non-infringing content and leave the space behind the Great Firewall a vast wasteland.
For bonus points and delicious irony, a Chinese botnet could run this scheme. In fact, if they're monitoring incoming traffic, this may even be necessary.
...was compliments of Tantek Çelik, standards evangelist, and main designer of the Tasman rendering engine which drove IE for Mac. In digging for his history with the project, I note a few things:
Daring Fireball's archived recap of the history of IE for Mac leading up to its cancellation,
A blog entry describing how after Tantek was finished with IE for Mac, Microsoft moved him over to...WebTV (?!),
An entry on the IE Blog where it looks like Microsoft is advertising for various open positions, and many people are responding with mixed emotions.
I also considered throwing in a link to Tantek's Box Model Hack (well! I guess I did after all!).
As for TFA... gah. Don't get me started on TFA. It doesn't mention IE for Mac at all (perhaps the Publications Coordinator who wrote TFA never heard of it?) and makes some innocent and half-assed assumptions about Web Standards—mostly their lack of existence.
And the marginalization of other browsers? Her argument basically runs that other browsers don't stand a chance against IE's installed base, while conveniently overlooking the fact that IE itself was once an "other" browser and citing ways that IE got the leg-up on Netscape without ever noting that those other browsers are doing the same things to IE. The argument basically runs "Yes, things changed in the past, but things will remain as they are now because they're the way they are now." Buh?
Unfortunate? Yes. Ugly? Absolutely. And some folks are aware of just how bad it can get. But it may also be unavoidable in the rarified air of the management environment.
Communication is, among many other things, using terms and phrases that others understand. And some management-speak ("deliverables," "work-products," etc.) has precise meaning within the work environment. Not everyone knows what those terms mean, but in the shop that uses them regularly, not only will they be recognized, but for instance if you ask them what the difference between deliverables and work-products are, they can tell you. (I picked those two because, having worked in the office of a process improvement consultancy, I know what the difference is too. Or at least, I know a reasonable-sounding set of definitions.)
It may be an odd dialect they speak, but they don't do it just to confuse people. They do it to communicate, and it's worthwhile to learn it even if it does sound stupid.
I am a consumer and I am _NOT_ demanding DRM.
DRM is E-fascisme.
Tsk! You shouldn't have such a low opinion of yourself.
You are not a consumer. You are a customer. Got that? To be a consumer is to become the product, sold by an advertising company to a content provider in the form of click-throughs, CD sales, or statistics. To be a customer means being reasonably educated and selective in the choice of product you buy from the merchant of your choice, and expect it to work the way you want it to.
We're not there yet, but we'll work toward that "beautiful and delicate snowflake" thing slowly, mmmkay?
for the ROKR (I know it was, at least supposedly, a total pos) and another model or other thats supposed to be better than the ROKR (both are supposed to work with iTunes, right?)
Correct me if I'm wrong (about my argument or the phones), but that looks more like cooperation than competition...
That was cooperation all right, but it fell through. I remain hopeful, though, for events and reasons completely different. And my hope even comes with its own half-assed speculation. Follow:
Apple and CompUSA got together many years ago to create an Apple Ghetto Store within each CompUSA. It sucked. Apple pulled out, created their own retail outlets at a time when critics said they were crazy to do so, and they took off.
Apple and Motorola got together years later to create an iTunes/phone. Judging by the reports, it sucked too. Apple pulled out.........and the rest of the story hasn't been written yet. But you can probably guess the rest.
It's a wonderful dream, but probably won't work. To create the standalone Apple Stores, they needed retail space in many different malls, with relatively little competition between them (distance is a limiting factor on competition). Mobile phone carriers have almost total overlay of coverage, which makes them bitterly competetive. Furthermore, they're competitive in a "screw the customers who want to leave" scorched-earth kind of way. To make the sales of an iPhone work, they'd need either to set up their own network (and they don't have enough experience with that yet) or build the iPhone to work with existing digital networks, which will do their damndest to lock whatever phone the customer tries to put onto it seven ways to Sunday.
I don't think Apple wants to build a phone which the customer will want to throw away annually, even if it means a boost in sales.
On that subject... does anyone know why people feel they have to defend their choice to the extent that they lose all rational capability?
Oh, that's easy: many people lack self-esteem and don't want to be ridiculed for the choices they make. It applies to everything -- editors (vi! emacs!), desktop environments (kde! gnome!), operating systems (Windows! Mac OS! Unix! Linux!), consoles (Sony! Microsoft! Nintendo!), politics (Fill in your own damn names!), you name it. If there are two or more choices, sooner or later an argument will break out about it.
Any challenge to any choice can be conflated into personal insult by the right (or rather, sufficiently wrong) person, requiring a response, usually visceral and insulting. And there's an even stranger response on the part of some designers, where they simultaneously insult a product for being clunky and hard to use at the same time as they're lifting UI elements for use in the version of the app that they're designing.
The only exception I can think of is U.S. mobile phone service. ("My service sucks more." "No, I have worse coverage." "Maybe, but at least you don't have as many dropped calls as I do!" Etc.)
Here's the thing. It's not like setting a schedule is going to magically make something happen. Programs are written by programmers, they aren't willed into existence by Gantt charts, no matter what PMs think.
Agreed; there exists in too many workplaces a fundamental disconnect between the people who actually develop the products and the people at the top. That fundamental disconnect is, indeed, middle management whose success depends either 1) on the performance of their underlings or 2) on their ability to spread bullshit. However...
The only problem here is not that the release was pushed back, it's that someone's Gantt chart wasn't updated with good information. So when the real numbers went in, the "realistic shipdate" suddenly met reality.
The only problem? You oversimplify. There are a bunch of ways realistic-sounding time estimates fly off the rails. They fall into a handful of categories. And before someone decides to pick nits: yes, most of these are management's fault, but no, this isn't a complete list:
Management intentionally understated the complexity or scope of the task
Management needed to set goals that made them look good to senior management
Management needed to parrot goals that Marketing already published or die
Management accidentally underestimated the complexity or scope of the task
Developers or Management didn't take into account some of the requirements when making estimates
Developers intentionally understated the complexity or scope of the task to look good to management (hey, it's been known to happen too)
Developers accidentally underestimated the complexity or scope of the task
Developers understood the complexity and scope of the task, but didn't have the skills to deliver.
Feature Creep (This is Microsoft. 'Nuff said.)
Management accurately predicted the complexity of the task, but "something came up"
Talented developers left, taking with them necessary skills which were unique
Management forgot to consider that people might be needed on other tasks
Problems within the development environment
Coffee Shortage
Sick days, pregnancy, and other potentially life-ending events
The Second Coming
The simple reason that I hate Gantt charts as the be-all and end-all of a project schedule is that even on the most carefully controlled project, there are always speed-ups and slow-downs that can throw the most enlightened of schedules into a cocked hat...and then sit on it. Not to say it shouldn't be attempted, but advertising release dates based on them should be a punishable offense (and in this case, it might well be).
The big announcement of course being that Sony is skipping the Playstation 3, ditching the Cell and going right to Playstation 4 which is powered purely by marketing.
Powered purely by marketing...? So, what? It's not going to plug into the wall, and will instead have a bullshit-combusting turbine attached to it? Incredibly powerful and environmentally friendly a console as it might be, I don't want my apartment to smell like a burning septic tank!
Once you define the word "addiction" broadly enough that you can become "addicted" to gambling... a process with no chemical interactions we weren't all born with... you can become "addicted" to anything that you happen to find pleasurable. Playing EverQuest. Bird-watching. Playing Puzzle Pirates. Exercising. Playing Civilization IV.
I don't know about you, but I can see a bright side with this: we now have one more piece of information which we'll need to dismantle governments and federal level. It's not revolution, it's not rebellion, it's an intervention to help our legislators break their addiction to other peoples' money!
...thinks that DHS would love for this to happen again.
From TFA:Baker stopped short of mentioning Sony by name, but Frenkel did not. "The recent Sony experience shows us that we need to be thinking about how to ensure that consumers aren't surprised by what their software is programmed to do," he said.
I could almost see them thinking, . o O (...and the best way to do it would be to stringently regulate consumers' computers, so that we can watch for intrusions of this sort in future and prepare for them. Oh, do it again Sony? Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohsnausagesohplease!)
I guess it never occurred to anyone at Disney that milking these franchises to the point of nearly destroying them not only ruins the value of the first few good ones for future generations (like what the Matrix sequels did to the first one) and the exploitation of old stories instead of creating new ones tends to make a company look washed up to its customers.
"But we're rolling in money, so who cares what they think of us?"
It's short-term profit-taking thinking at work here. Give them the golden goose, tell them there's only one, tell them they need to wait for the eggs, and their first thought will still be what kind of stuffing to serve it with.
If we search, I'm sure we can come up with historical parallels, to other groups who didn't understand how to manage something and ultimately died out for lack of it.
Sequels are not always teh e-ville--just usually.
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 1
Recycled "franchieses" aren't nearly so important to a company with some actual creativity. I'd much rather see Pixar given a free hand than chained to some sequel assembly line because somebody thinks it's 'safer.'
And yet, at the same time, I secretly salivate for a sequel to The Incredibles... something which gives Edna Mode, throwaway gag fashion designer with the equipment aesthetic of a coked-up mad scientist, not just more screen time but an actual part in the action. (I guess it's not such a secret now. C'est la vie.)
Sequels are not always tired old rehashings of the same story. Sometimes they tell whole new stories while taking elements of the old story's setting and expanding them. If the old setting is a skeleton, a good sequel can give it new life. A bad sequel will just wrap it in new skin and teach it the same old dance steps; it may look fresh, but there's still an aroma of decay about it. Or something.
Sequels promote laziness, in the form of the temptation to tell the same old story or use the same old elements (or worst, both), but a #2 film can still be damn fine viewing if the storytellers can resist that temptation, or the corporate office lets the storytellers exercise the full potential of their creativity.
Whether Pixar can work without being led by the nose by the corporate office will depend on the board... and the former owner is now the largest stockholder on that board. I look forward to the massacre.
I'm on a Powerbook G4 armed with both Dreamweaver and GoLive. (What can I say? For a while I had very low overhead and could afford extravagances like that). And I have a droplet that launches Terminal and fires up lynx pointed at the test files created by either program.
See, funny thing about lynx: it's useful precisely because it doesn't show graphics, style sheets, and fancy web technologies. View your site in a text-only browser like lynx first, and then you'll know how other people using non-graphical browsers. This means not just lynx, but braille or speech browsers used by the blind. If after launching your site in lynx you find you can't get around in it or can't find links, then guess what? Neither can they.
It's not a perfect guarantee of accessibility, but it's a great head-start. You'll still want to keep your favorite tools on hand, but right now lynx is cheaper than Bobby.
According to the poll in the article, only 3% of the people responding agree with MLB. Given the recent declining popularity of baseball as it tries to compete with video games, hockey, extreme sports, arena football, DVDs, and internet poker, maybe they should take into consideration the opinion of their fans on issues like this.
It's interesting that you mention those other activities. Let's skip the video games, DVDs, and internet poker and concentrate on hockey (especially hockey, since that sport was offline due to strike for over a year), extreme sports, and arena football. There's a significant difference between them: fan accessibility.
Look at baseball for a moment. It's not like it once was. Exorbitant salaries, big impressive stadiums (which admittedly don't cost the franchises much because they wangle sweetheart deals with desperate city governments), high-priced concessions... well, it's not the family activity it once was unless your last name is Rockefeller, Gates, or Trump. Even then, wanna watch the game on TV? Risky; with blackouts and trades, it's likely that the game being played in your area isn't being televised in your area. Why? Because they want you to go see the game at the stadium!
Baseball has taken on an air of exclusiveness that Joe Sixpack can't handle. He loses interest. He changes the channel... and these other activities are on, they're struggling to get noticed, they feature ordinary people (physical conditioning aside), and they don't make any pretense about owning everything under the sun which has anything to do with them. Or if they do, it makes less sense because the activity hasn't cusped yet.
Even the other stuff has appeals over baseball. Even DVDs: Feature-length films that you can decide when they start or stop? And at less than the cost of stadium seating? And they're reusable? Video games are highly interactive, if not necessarily social unless you have some sort of network hookup. And internet poker and MMORPGs can be very socially rewarding activities if you concentrate on more than just maximizing your score.
Baseball has become a victim of its own size, sense of entitlement, and the fundamental desire to maximize profits. It'd be nice to think that it could return to its old days, but I doubt MLB in its current form could survive the rightsizing that it desperately needs.
What's the best way to change the balance in a political party or keep a government agency in line? Sign up.
Who gets second interviews at the NSA? What are they looking for in their candidates for hire? What kinds of positions are available at the NSA?
I hold out little hope for that approach. I applied to the NSA for a job once. They sent me two letters, declining my offer. On both letters, they got my middle initial wrong, and it was on my fricking resumeact on it.
Argue with me that that's not a good enough reason to maintain privacy, and I'll be forced to report what my imaginary penguin told me about you to Homeland Security.
Surely the racism is in the eyes of the people complaining about this, rather than in the programmed system that is probably matching keywords?
I had the same feeling as I read about this. The system only observes and responds according to its observations, without any judgement. People, however, are full of biases and inclinations, and are quick to see racial slurs (at best) and conspiracies (at worst) where none really exist.
In that way, I have to say I find Wal-Mart's apology to be a greater racial slur than the dumb system's recommendation. The system connected them most likely because someone had looked at the descriptions of both in a session. Wal-Mart connected them because they saw a racial slur which they had to claim their system was not making.
You always get a slightly strange recommendation when shopping on sites with this feature. It is to be expected, categorisation can only go so far...
Categorization, and the fact that the whole neural net thing is capable of pushing out surprising results depending upon the actions of all those people that came before you, pushing in data. You know, I'm forty and Amazon still occasionally recommends crib toys for me? Trust me, it's a long story...
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Incredible. So sneeringly condescending, yet so naïve...
So many of us would love to vote them out. We would gladly cast votes for candidates who don't propose legislation based entirely on the bleatings of focus groups, and who doesn't put popularity above common sense.
The problem is, you're preaching to the choir, bruthah. (If by "preaching" you mean "being alienating and insulting.") We're not the problem. The problem is that there is no shortage of candidates who do just that--they've literally made a science out of fooling as many people as possible into thinking that they represent their best interests while doing little but muddy the waters and sully their station. And there's no shortage of induhviduals who eat up the FUD with a spoon in each hand because they think they're voting for their man.
Personally, I think the situation needs to get significantly worse. Slave-labor-camp worse. RIAA-rent-a-cops-shooting-to-kill worse. Eminent-domain-gone-wild worse. American-Idol-gets-preempted-three-straight-weeks- by-the-President-saying-everything-is-improving worse. Only when they start to notice that something is amiss, when they, or their children, or their relatives is finally inconvenienced to death, will they be ready for a long-overdue sea change.
Now, how can we make it worse?
While that would be a big win for him, look at the bigger picture: he keeps introducing legislation which says basically that OMFG TEH GAMEZ ARE TURNING UR KIDS INTO KILLAHS!!!1!!ONE!ELEVENTY. It gets reported on. And those who don't know better buy the subtext and become that much more worried.
It's said that if something gets repeated enough times, people will believe it. (As long as that phrase has been bouncing around, it must be true.) If he tells people enough people that video games are dangerous, then it doesn't matter if they strike down his dumbass laws now so long as they come to believe it eventually and outlaw them then.
It's meme warfare, pure and simple. And amazingly, it's so pure and simple that he probably doesn't even recognize it.
Says it all, I think.
Yay! The upgrade is almost not broken!
Excellent work, sir! That was some wickedly subdued sarcasm! I look forward to the flamewar the misunderstanding of that statement spawns downthread.
Apple won out against the RIAA, Apple won out against France, and now Apple won out against the Beatles' old label. Despite it, every investor knows the truth: Apple is dying. Watch their stock price for a decline this afternoon in light of this terrible, tragic, positive news.
Yes, this is sarcasm. Except for the stock decline thing.
Memo to Myself: If I ever need a babysitter, do not call CmdrTaco.
The solution to the problem of Chinese censorship on the Internet is simple enough -- we just make the internet flee China completely. How? [insert evil grin here]
Imagine a botnet, sending out rapid-fire cease-and-desist notices to every site operating in China, informing site owners of out-of-compliace content. Companies will struggle to remove content from the web fast enough to keep up with the vaguely threatening notices. That's the second edge of self-censorship, turned against the people wielding it: the fear of running afoul of the government will cause the mass removal of otherwise non-infringing content and leave the space behind the Great Firewall a vast wasteland.
For bonus points and delicious irony, a Chinese botnet could run this scheme. In fact, if they're monitoring incoming traffic, this may even be necessary.
Note: technically, above I said imagine...
...was compliments of Tantek Çelik, standards evangelist, and main designer of the Tasman rendering engine which drove IE for Mac. In digging for his history with the project, I note a few things:
- Daring Fireball's archived recap of the history of IE for Mac leading up to its cancellation,
- A blog entry describing how after Tantek was finished with IE for Mac, Microsoft moved him over to
...WebTV (?!),
- An entry on the IE Blog where it looks like Microsoft is advertising for various open positions, and many people are responding with mixed emotions.
I also considered throwing in a link to Tantek's Box Model Hack (well! I guess I did after all!).As for TFA... gah. Don't get me started on TFA. It doesn't mention IE for Mac at all (perhaps the Publications Coordinator who wrote TFA never heard of it?) and makes some innocent and half-assed assumptions about Web Standards—mostly their lack of existence.
And the marginalization of other browsers? Her argument basically runs that other browsers don't stand a chance against IE's installed base, while conveniently overlooking the fact that IE itself was once an "other" browser and citing ways that IE got the leg-up on Netscape without ever noting that those other browsers are doing the same things to IE. The argument basically runs "Yes, things changed in the past, but things will remain as they are now because they're the way they are now." Buh?
Unfortunate? Yes. Ugly? Absolutely. And some folks are aware of just how bad it can get. But it may also be unavoidable in the rarified air of the management environment.
Communication is, among many other things, using terms and phrases that others understand. And some management-speak ("deliverables," "work-products," etc.) has precise meaning within the work environment. Not everyone knows what those terms mean, but in the shop that uses them regularly, not only will they be recognized, but for instance if you ask them what the difference between deliverables and work-products are, they can tell you. (I picked those two because, having worked in the office of a process improvement consultancy, I know what the difference is too. Or at least, I know a reasonable-sounding set of definitions.)
It may be an odd dialect they speak, but they don't do it just to confuse people. They do it to communicate, and it's worthwhile to learn it even if it does sound stupid.
Tsk! You shouldn't have such a low opinion of yourself.
You are not a consumer. You are a customer. Got that? To be a consumer is to become the product, sold by an advertising company to a content provider in the form of click-throughs, CD sales, or statistics. To be a customer means being reasonably educated and selective in the choice of product you buy from the merchant of your choice, and expect it to work the way you want it to.
We're not there yet, but we'll work toward that "beautiful and delicate snowflake" thing slowly, mmmkay?
That was cooperation all right, but it fell through. I remain hopeful, though, for events and reasons completely different. And my hope even comes with its own half-assed speculation. Follow:
Apple and CompUSA got together many years ago to create an Apple Ghetto Store within each CompUSA. It sucked. Apple pulled out, created their own retail outlets at a time when critics said they were crazy to do so, and they took off.
Apple and Motorola got together years later to create an iTunes/phone. Judging by the reports, it sucked too. Apple pulled out.........and the rest of the story hasn't been written yet. But you can probably guess the rest.
It's a wonderful dream, but probably won't work. To create the standalone Apple Stores, they needed retail space in many different malls, with relatively little competition between them (distance is a limiting factor on competition). Mobile phone carriers have almost total overlay of coverage, which makes them bitterly competetive. Furthermore, they're competitive in a "screw the customers who want to leave" scorched-earth kind of way. To make the sales of an iPhone work, they'd need either to set up their own network (and they don't have enough experience with that yet) or build the iPhone to work with existing digital networks, which will do their damndest to lock whatever phone the customer tries to put onto it seven ways to Sunday.
I don't think Apple wants to build a phone which the customer will want to throw away annually, even if it means a boost in sales.
Oh, that's easy: many people lack self-esteem and don't want to be ridiculed for the choices they make. It applies to everything -- editors (vi! emacs!), desktop environments (kde! gnome!), operating systems (Windows! Mac OS! Unix! Linux!), consoles (Sony! Microsoft! Nintendo!), politics (Fill in your own damn names!), you name it. If there are two or more choices, sooner or later an argument will break out about it.
Any challenge to any choice can be conflated into personal insult by the right (or rather, sufficiently wrong) person, requiring a response, usually visceral and insulting. And there's an even stranger response on the part of some designers, where they simultaneously insult a product for being clunky and hard to use at the same time as they're lifting UI elements for use in the version of the app that they're designing.
The only exception I can think of is U.S. mobile phone service. ("My service sucks more." "No, I have worse coverage." "Maybe, but at least you don't have as many dropped calls as I do!" Etc.)
Agreed; there exists in too many workplaces a fundamental disconnect between the people who actually develop the products and the people at the top. That fundamental disconnect is, indeed, middle management whose success depends either 1) on the performance of their underlings or 2) on their ability to spread bullshit. However...
The only problem? You oversimplify. There are a bunch of ways realistic-sounding time estimates fly off the rails. They fall into a handful of categories. And before someone decides to pick nits: yes, most of these are management's fault, but no, this isn't a complete list:
- Management intentionally understated the complexity or scope of the task
- Management needed to set goals that made them look good to senior management
- Management needed to parrot goals that Marketing already published or die
- Management accidentally underestimated the complexity or scope of the task
- Developers or Management didn't take into account some of the requirements when making estimates
- Developers intentionally understated the complexity or scope of the task to look good to management (hey, it's been known to happen too)
- Developers accidentally underestimated the complexity or scope of the task
- Developers understood the complexity and scope of the task, but didn't have the skills to deliver.
- Feature Creep (This is Microsoft. 'Nuff said.)
- Management accurately predicted the complexity of the task, but "something came up"
- Talented developers left, taking with them necessary skills which were unique
- Management forgot to consider that people might be needed on other tasks
- Problems within the development environment
- Coffee Shortage
- Sick days, pregnancy, and other potentially life-ending events
- The Second Coming
The simple reason that I hate Gantt charts as the be-all and end-all of a project schedule is that even on the most carefully controlled project, there are always speed-ups and slow-downs that can throw the most enlightened of schedules into a cocked hatPowered purely by marketing...? So, what? It's not going to plug into the wall, and will instead have a bullshit-combusting turbine attached to it? Incredibly powerful and environmentally friendly a console as it might be, I don't want my apartment to smell like a burning septic tank!
I don't know about you, but I can see a bright side with this: we now have one more piece of information which we'll need to dismantle governments and federal level. It's not revolution, it's not rebellion, it's an intervention to help our legislators break their addiction to other peoples' money!
...thinks that DHS would love for this to happen again.
I could almost see them thinking, . o O (...and the best way to do it would be to stringently regulate consumers' computers, so that we can watch for intrusions of this sort in future and prepare for them. Oh, do it again Sony? Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohsnausagesohplease!)
"But we're rolling in money, so who cares what they think of us?"
It's short-term profit-taking thinking at work here. Give them the golden goose, tell them there's only one, tell them they need to wait for the eggs, and their first thought will still be what kind of stuffing to serve it with.
If we search, I'm sure we can come up with historical parallels, to other groups who didn't understand how to manage something and ultimately died out for lack of it.
E3 "grows up," and then is not allowed to view or show mature content??
That's what we'd been saying is the problem with censorship like that all along!
+1, damn clever hardware hackery.
And yet, at the same time, I secretly salivate for a sequel to The Incredibles... something which gives Edna Mode, throwaway gag fashion designer with the equipment aesthetic of a coked-up mad scientist, not just more screen time but an actual part in the action. (I guess it's not such a secret now. C'est la vie.)
Sequels are not always tired old rehashings of the same story. Sometimes they tell whole new stories while taking elements of the old story's setting and expanding them. If the old setting is a skeleton, a good sequel can give it new life. A bad sequel will just wrap it in new skin and teach it the same old dance steps; it may look fresh, but there's still an aroma of decay about it. Or something.
Sequels promote laziness, in the form of the temptation to tell the same old story or use the same old elements (or worst, both), but a #2 film can still be damn fine viewing if the storytellers can resist that temptation, or the corporate office lets the storytellers exercise the full potential of their creativity.
Whether Pixar can work without being led by the nose by the corporate office will depend on the board... and the former owner is now the largest stockholder on that board. I look forward to the massacre.
I'm on a Powerbook G4 armed with both Dreamweaver and GoLive. (What can I say? For a while I had very low overhead and could afford extravagances like that). And I have a droplet that launches Terminal and fires up lynx pointed at the test files created by either program.
See, funny thing about lynx: it's useful precisely because it doesn't show graphics, style sheets, and fancy web technologies. View your site in a text-only browser like lynx first, and then you'll know how other people using non-graphical browsers. This means not just lynx, but braille or speech browsers used by the blind. If after launching your site in lynx you find you can't get around in it or can't find links, then guess what? Neither can they.
It's not a perfect guarantee of accessibility, but it's a great head-start. You'll still want to keep your favorite tools on hand, but right now lynx is cheaper than Bobby.
It's interesting that you mention those other activities. Let's skip the video games, DVDs, and internet poker and concentrate on hockey (especially hockey, since that sport was offline due to strike for over a year), extreme sports, and arena football. There's a significant difference between them: fan accessibility.
Look at baseball for a moment. It's not like it once was. Exorbitant salaries, big impressive stadiums (which admittedly don't cost the franchises much because they wangle sweetheart deals with desperate city governments), high-priced concessions... well, it's not the family activity it once was unless your last name is Rockefeller, Gates, or Trump. Even then, wanna watch the game on TV? Risky; with blackouts and trades, it's likely that the game being played in your area isn't being televised in your area. Why? Because they want you to go see the game at the stadium!
Baseball has taken on an air of exclusiveness that Joe Sixpack can't handle. He loses interest. He changes the channel... and these other activities are on, they're struggling to get noticed, they feature ordinary people (physical conditioning aside), and they don't make any pretense about owning everything under the sun which has anything to do with them. Or if they do, it makes less sense because the activity hasn't cusped yet.
Even the other stuff has appeals over baseball. Even DVDs: Feature-length films that you can decide when they start or stop? And at less than the cost of stadium seating? And they're reusable? Video games are highly interactive, if not necessarily social unless you have some sort of network hookup. And internet poker and MMORPGs can be very socially rewarding activities if you concentrate on more than just maximizing your score.
Baseball has become a victim of its own size, sense of entitlement, and the fundamental desire to maximize profits. It'd be nice to think that it could return to its old days, but I doubt MLB in its current form could survive the rightsizing that it desperately needs.
I hold out little hope for that approach. I applied to the NSA for a job once. They sent me two letters, declining my offer. On both letters, they got my middle initial wrong, and it was on my fricking resumeact on it.
Argue with me that that's not a good enough reason to maintain privacy, and I'll be forced to report what my imaginary penguin told me about you to Homeland Security.
I had the same feeling as I read about this. The system only observes and responds according to its observations, without any judgement. People, however, are full of biases and inclinations, and are quick to see racial slurs (at best) and conspiracies (at worst) where none really exist.
In that way, I have to say I find Wal-Mart's apology to be a greater racial slur than the dumb system's recommendation. The system connected them most likely because someone had looked at the descriptions of both in a session. Wal-Mart connected them because they saw a racial slur which they had to claim their system was not making.
Categorization, and the fact that the whole neural net thing is capable of pushing out surprising results depending upon the actions of all those people that came before you, pushing in data. You know, I'm forty and Amazon still occasionally recommends crib toys for me? Trust me, it's a long story...