Arrogance has nothing to do with it. With CCP holding all the keys, public outcry is the only alternative left. It just so happens that the Goonswarm is just really, really good at internet based public outcry. I would be willing to bet it was less than half of the goons that took part, so by blaming all of them - especially those like myself that just watched - you're severely over generalizing.
The leadership is not "the brain", they're just the crazies shouting "WITCH". You continue to think of the Goonswarm as one large coordinated entity. I already told you it's not. It's a big uncoordinated mob from my perspective (sorta on the inside - when I bother to pay attention). It's just that when somebody yells witch and 10% or more of it moves in one general direction it makes a big impact because it's 300 people. Yeah, 10% of the alliance is enough to get a a story on the front page of digg and slashdot. It's a pity we can't all pull in one direction all the time.
Having been a part of a mostly support team (read: virtually no new development) for the past year and a half I can tell you that each extra minute you spend tweaking those variable names into something meaningful, encapsulating logic into methods, writing good comments that are meaningful to someone who's never seen the code before - and generally, writing good, commented code will save you man-months in the future.
I can't emphasize this strongly enough. Spend the time right now to write it so damn well you never have to see it again, or waste man-weeks fixing it later.
If it's short and terse, it's fucking wrong. If it's clever and creative, it's fucking wrong. If it's convenient and "more compact" to write it all on one with ternaries or lots of nested or chained operations on one line rather than a method, it's fucking wrong.
They say that brevity is the soul of wit. But in code, brevity is the soul of insanity.
Write it well the first time and subsequent changes are easy. Writing it poorly the first time leads to buildings full of maintenance programmers. You don't want your code to be that bad do you?
I'm not "loosing" EVE and I don't care if BoB and only BoB members chat it up with developers, but when they have access to channels for in-game stuff that other players do not it's clearly unfair.
I neither participated nor condoned the particular method Goonswarm used to make their complaint, but I think doing something above and beyond proper channels was called for. It's the only course of action left to them because CCP holds all the keys to the game itself.
And I don't for a minute believe that the "attack" was planned for a three day weekend. I seriously doubt that ever even came to mind to those that kicked it off. One of the leaders probably said something like "THREADSPAMZORZ!@#". And the mob took action. If you think the Goonswarm is good at large coordinated.....anything...you're crazy. Think of it as a rabid mob with a few people that get sorta listened to.
If you know anything about the Goonswarm you'd know they plan little and poorly at that. It was probably a coincidence. I bet it was simply that most of the players had the weekend off too, and therefore had the time to do it. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Or in this case, mob mentality.
Think of the Goonswarm as a large, crazy, uncoordinated mob and you'll be surprised less often. The leadership can occasionally point a lot of them in one direction for a while, but that's about it. I say "them" even though I am one, because I mostly fly with my own corp who has it's own agenda and flies more or less on our own.
The favoritism needs to stop. It's that simple. The alliance that CCP is accused of playing favorites has admitted in the official forums three times that they're friends with the developers and chat with them over MSN. Those posts have since been immortalized by the other big opposing alliance.
The very proof that CCP posted on their site makes it clear that when a Band of Brothers member complains to them over MSN the response is near-instantaneous (see the IRC log in the open letter).
This type of favoritism is unacceptable to most players and probably should be to all. I don't care if they chat about their personal lives, or their "real lives", or even about EVE on MSN. That's cool by me. But when they solicit in-game responses from the company over a channel that no other alliance, corporation, or player has access to - and get it immediately, then there is a problem. That's favoritism and is not acceptable. It's not even that difficult a policy to implement and it won't even ruffle anyone's feathers too badly. Developers: If you get a request for customer support over MSN, tell the requestor to file a petition just like everyone else. And obviously don't provide them in-game resources of any kind. That I shouldn't have to explain.
Yes, I am in Goonswarm. No I did not participate in the Goonswarm's massive public campaign across the internet to stir up trouble. Thus far, this has been my first post on any forum regarding what's been going on.
It's very disappointing. I love the game, but the proven favoritism is sickening. Who wants to play a game where the house is playing favorites for one of the players?
Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.[emphasis mine]
So it's pleasurable...and therefore has selfish backing. That pretty much invalidates the whole damn thing.
The human animal is really not so complicated.
Every human being will do anything they can get away with if it means a net personal gain in the end.
You need no further explaination for 90% of human behavior than that solitary sentence.
Why does everybody thing that people's views and that the things they advocate are ever anything other than selfish motives?
The human animal is really not so complicated.
Every human being will, for the most part, do anything they can get away with if it means personal gain.
This simple fact explains the actions of almost anyone in almost all circumstances. These people aren't "pro-big business" they're "pro-self", just like you and I. This alliance is made up of people, and those people are simply seeking to make themselves richer, preserve their incomes or protect their existing business models.
Given this simple fact, you can't honestly expect them to do anything less.
They want as much of our money as possible for as little effort as possible. We want as much of their stuff as we can get for as little as we can pay for it. They just have a lot more power (money) than we do.
In a free market artificial scarcity is a factor that should be taken into account. Not something that makes it a non-free market.
If you want to posit that any artificial market factor invalidates the free market status, then you're going to have to rule out control of supply, DRM, DMCA and all other artificial means, like owning politicians. For example, diamonds (DeBeers), music (RIAA), movies (MPAA)...
A free market is anything that isn't regulated or monopolized. Everything else is fair game.
Something has value if and only if you can get anyone to pay or exchange something else for it. Therefore software has value. One need not go further than that.
Software itself violates the free market. For an item to have value, it must have utility and scarcity. As the marginal cost of production of a unit of software is damn near 0 (its fractions of a penny of electricity), software does not have scarcity. Thus it has no value. The rules of economics don't apply to it (or more correctly, an entirely new model needs to be created, but does not currently exist).
The scarcity is artificially enforced through EULAs, license agreements, copyrights and laws, but it still exists. Thus your premise is false, and so your argument is false too. But hey, you got to work in the cool, punchy sounding statement: "the rules of economics don't apply to it".
I can't stand to watch anything that isn't something I downloaded.
I don't even have cable; despite being offered digital cable for $2 a month for a year (which shocked the people selling it when I turned it down).
For TV shows there are just too many god damn commercials. Sorry guys, if I'm paying for cable I don't want to watch them. I have an alternative, so screw you broadcasting companies.
For movies I absolutely cannot stand the "user prohibited actions" like being able to skip previews, the FBI warnings and the "you wouldn't steal a car, would you?" bullshit. Once again, I have an alternative, so screw you MPAA.
Funny how I only have to see that on DVDs I legitimately purchased, not on downloaded stuff that I didn't. If I buy DVDs, I get treated like a criminal. If I download movies I get treated like a customer. Funny how that works.
Lastly, I play games from my computer or on my XBMC'ed XBox or 360 than I really watch TV anyway.
1) You're using an 11 step process that involves pre-warming your mug and a french press and calling other people snobs?
You're counting obtaining the materials, and preparing the required equipment for the next cup, and STFU as steps? You sir, are retarded.
2) According to "scientific testing", you get drastically reduced caffeine extraction at the temperatures you'd get from tap water. You need near boiling water (200 degrees) for the best flavor and caffeine extraction.
Define drastically in terms of temperature vs. percentage of caffeine extracted. Define "best flavor" in non-opinion terms. Cite your source. My coffee is still plenty strong enough to give me the shakes so I'm not worried about caffeine extraction.
With my process it takes less than a minute to go from wanting coffee to drinking coffee and that includes being ready to brew the next cup. I don't have to empty a filter, get a new one, throw the grounds away or wash anything. If I itemized using a traditional coffee pot in that much detail it would probably be twenty steps.
here's my preferred method, optimized for laziness:
1. get a scoop that is perfectly sized to the amount of coffee you want in one cup
2. Sit your mug in the sink and run hot water out of the tap into your mug until you get hot water and a hot mug
3. While that is going on, scoop one scoop of ground coffee into a 1 cup sized french press
4. Pour the hot water into the press from the mug
5. Put the lid on the press but leave the plunger at the top
6. Jiggle the press to break up the clump of grounds at the top
7. Wait an irrelevant amount of time, anywhere from 10 seconds to a few minutes
8. Press the plunger down, pour the coffee into the hot mug
9. Rinse the press
10. Drink
11. STFU and quit being coffee snobs. Most of your theories regarding how to make coffee would not stand up to scientific testing. Congratulations, you're experts on your own opinions.
Bill Gates gives the credit to accelerating consumer shift to digital lifestyles
Bill, you're full of shit.
Your company has a monopoly. That's the reason.
Nearly all vendors of computer hardware but Apple force Vista down the throats of users by making it the only operating system available on their new machine.
Just try and by anything from dell, HP, Gateway etc without Vista on it. Especially a laptop. None of the new laptops will let you pick anything else.
Their patches have only the most minimal content despite having promised "free monthly content updates" and the expansion was the price of a full game on top of that.
Their "free patches" were mostly bug fixes and balance corrections, not content.
I was extremely disappointed in them for that. I bought the collector's edition when it first came out and was eagerly anticipating the Honor System, the Dishonor System and Battlegrounds from day one. Both of those things were promised to be already in the game by the freaking game manual. But they didn't actually come out until over a year later. I got bored and canceled my subscription before they ever came out with features promised at release. And they never did deliver the free monthly content updates they promised.
So screw'em.
I play EVE Online now. The UI sucks, but we get a free expansion every year and constant improvements every month or two.
[rant]I read the Wikipedia entry about "pre-texting", but I remain unconvinced that calling it "pre-texting" makes it any less of a lie or anything more than a lie.[/rant]
As much as it hurts to say, both Novell Groupwise and IBM Lotus Notes are far superior groupware applications.
You've got to be kidding me.
Outlook has usability problems, but Lotus Notes is a usability nightmare.
Outlook: Options buried 23409823 clicks deep. Parts of the interface aren't very intuitive. Search utilities suck horribly. Mail and calendar work beautifully, especially scheduling meetings for when 20 people and the conference room are free.
Cons of Lotus Notes: Exposes the user to the fact that its a database trying to be an email/calendar collaboration tool. Why the hell would I care about what database I'm connected to and when it replicates? It takes a sysadmin to setup and keep running. The entire UI is complete and total garbage. And if you thought Outlook buried options, try Notes. I guess it does line wrapping better.
You'd have to drag me back to Notes kicking and freaking screaming. I'd rather use intra-office snail mail. I'm not even joking.
Here is a viewing distance calculator (in Excel) you can use to figure out way more about home theater setups than you'll ever really need.
It has viewing distances for user selectable monitor/TV/projector resolutions & sizes, seating distances, optimal viewing distances, seating heights(?!), THX viability(?!) etc. It's well researched and cited.
No I'm not affiliated with it, I just found it and liked it.
Slashdot Mirror
Arrogance has nothing to do with it. With CCP holding all the keys, public outcry is the only alternative left. It just so happens that the Goonswarm is just really, really good at internet based public outcry. I would be willing to bet it was less than half of the goons that took part, so by blaming all of them - especially those like myself that just watched - you're severely over generalizing.
The leadership is not "the brain", they're just the crazies shouting "WITCH". You continue to think of the Goonswarm as one large coordinated entity. I already told you it's not. It's a big uncoordinated mob from my perspective (sorta on the inside - when I bother to pay attention). It's just that when somebody yells witch and 10% or more of it moves in one general direction it makes a big impact because it's 300 people. Yeah, 10% of the alliance is enough to get a a story on the front page of digg and slashdot. It's a pity we can't all pull in one direction all the time.
Having been a part of a mostly support team (read: virtually no new development) for the past year and a half I can tell you that each extra minute you spend tweaking those variable names into something meaningful, encapsulating logic into methods, writing good comments that are meaningful to someone who's never seen the code before - and generally, writing good, commented code will save you man-months in the future.
I can't emphasize this strongly enough. Spend the time right now to write it so damn well you never have to see it again, or waste man-weeks fixing it later.
If it's short and terse, it's fucking wrong.
If it's clever and creative, it's fucking wrong.
If it's convenient and "more compact" to write it all on one with ternaries or lots of nested or chained operations on one line rather than a method, it's fucking wrong.
They say that brevity is the soul of wit. But in code, brevity is the soul of insanity.
Write it well the first time and subsequent changes are easy. Writing it poorly the first time leads to buildings full of maintenance programmers. You don't want your code to be that bad do you?
Don't take it personal.
I'm not "loosing" EVE and I don't care if BoB and only BoB members chat it up with developers, but when they have access to channels for in-game stuff that other players do not it's clearly unfair.
I neither participated nor condoned the particular method Goonswarm used to make their complaint, but I think doing something above and beyond proper channels was called for. It's the only course of action left to them because CCP holds all the keys to the game itself.
And I don't for a minute believe that the "attack" was planned for a three day weekend. I seriously doubt that ever even came to mind to those that kicked it off. One of the leaders probably said something like "THREADSPAMZORZ!@#". And the mob took action. If you think the Goonswarm is good at large coordinated.....anything...you're crazy. Think of it as a rabid mob with a few people that get sorta listened to.
If you know anything about the Goonswarm you'd know they plan little and poorly at that. It was probably a coincidence. I bet it was simply that most of the players had the weekend off too, and therefore had the time to do it. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Or in this case, mob mentality.
Think of the Goonswarm as a large, crazy, uncoordinated mob and you'll be surprised less often. The leadership can occasionally point a lot of them in one direction for a while, but that's about it. I say "them" even though I am one, because I mostly fly with my own corp who has it's own agenda and flies more or less on our own.
The favoritism needs to stop. It's that simple. The alliance that CCP is accused of playing favorites has admitted in the official forums three times that they're friends with the developers and chat with them over MSN. Those posts have since been immortalized by the other big opposing alliance.
The very proof that CCP posted on their site makes it clear that when a Band of Brothers member complains to them over MSN the response is near-instantaneous (see the IRC log in the open letter).
This type of favoritism is unacceptable to most players and probably should be to all. I don't care if they chat about their personal lives, or their "real lives", or even about EVE on MSN. That's cool by me. But when they solicit in-game responses from the company over a channel that no other alliance, corporation, or player has access to - and get it immediately, then there is a problem. That's favoritism and is not acceptable. It's not even that difficult a policy to implement and it won't even ruffle anyone's feathers too badly. Developers: If you get a request for customer support over MSN, tell the requestor to file a petition just like everyone else. And obviously don't provide them in-game resources of any kind. That I shouldn't have to explain.
Yes, I am in Goonswarm.
No I did not participate in the Goonswarm's massive public campaign across the internet to stir up trouble. Thus far, this has been my first post on any forum regarding what's been going on.
It's very disappointing. I love the game, but the proven favoritism is sickening. Who wants to play a game where the house is playing favorites for one of the players?
So it's pleasurable...and therefore has selfish backing. That pretty much invalidates the whole damn thing.
The human animal is really not so complicated.
Every human being will do anything they can get away with if it means a net personal gain in the end.
You need no further explaination for 90% of human behavior than that solitary sentence.
Why does everybody thing that people's views and that the things they advocate are ever anything other than selfish motives?
The human animal is really not so complicated.
Every human being will, for the most part, do anything they can get away with if it means personal gain.
This simple fact explains the actions of almost anyone in almost all circumstances. These people aren't "pro-big business" they're "pro-self", just like you and I. This alliance is made up of people, and those people are simply seeking to make themselves richer, preserve their incomes or protect their existing business models.
Given this simple fact, you can't honestly expect them to do anything less.
They want as much of our money as possible for as little effort as possible. We want as much of their stuff as we can get for as little as we can pay for it. They just have a lot more power (money) than we do.
In a free market artificial scarcity is a factor that should be taken into account. Not something that makes it a non-free market.
If you want to posit that any artificial market factor invalidates the free market status, then you're going to have to rule out control of supply, DRM, DMCA and all other artificial means, like owning politicians. For example, diamonds (DeBeers), music (RIAA), movies (MPAA)...
A free market is anything that isn't regulated or monopolized. Everything else is fair game.
Something has value if and only if you can get anyone to pay or exchange something else for it. Therefore software has value. One need not go further than that.
The scarcity is artificially enforced through EULAs, license agreements, copyrights and laws, but it still exists. Thus your premise is false, and so your argument is false too. But hey, you got to work in the cool, punchy sounding statement: "the rules of economics don't apply to it".
I can't stand to watch anything that isn't something I downloaded.
I don't even have cable; despite being offered digital cable for $2 a month for a year (which shocked the people selling it when I turned it down).
For TV shows there are just too many god damn commercials. Sorry guys, if I'm paying for cable I don't want to watch them. I have an alternative, so screw you broadcasting companies.
For movies I absolutely cannot stand the "user prohibited actions" like being able to skip previews, the FBI warnings and the "you wouldn't steal a car, would you?" bullshit. Once again, I have an alternative, so screw you MPAA.
Funny how I only have to see that on DVDs I legitimately purchased, not on downloaded stuff that I didn't. If I buy DVDs, I get treated like a criminal. If I download movies I get treated like a customer. Funny how that works.
Lastly, I play games from my computer or on my XBMC'ed XBox or 360 than I really watch TV anyway.
With my process it takes less than a minute to go from wanting coffee to drinking coffee and that includes being ready to brew the next cup. I don't have to empty a filter, get a new one, throw the grounds away or wash anything. If I itemized using a traditional coffee pot in that much detail it would probably be twenty steps.
here's my preferred method, optimized for laziness:
1. get a scoop that is perfectly sized to the amount of coffee you want in one cup
2. Sit your mug in the sink and run hot water out of the tap into your mug until you get hot water and a hot mug
3. While that is going on, scoop one scoop of ground coffee into a 1 cup sized french press
4. Pour the hot water into the press from the mug
5. Put the lid on the press but leave the plunger at the top
6. Jiggle the press to break up the clump of grounds at the top
7. Wait an irrelevant amount of time, anywhere from 10 seconds to a few minutes
8. Press the plunger down, pour the coffee into the hot mug
9. Rinse the press
10. Drink
11. STFU and quit being coffee snobs. Most of your theories regarding how to make coffee would not stand up to scientific testing. Congratulations, you're experts on your own opinions.
It's going to suck for them if the helicopter's jamming sets off a bomb.
Bill, you're full of shit.
Your company has a monopoly. That's the reason.
Nearly all vendors of computer hardware but Apple force Vista down the throats of users by making it the only operating system available on their new machine.
Just try and by anything from dell, HP, Gateway etc without Vista on it. Especially a laptop. None of the new laptops will let you pick anything else.
Another alternative is Foxit Reader
As always, not affiliated, just like it.
Their patches have only the most minimal content despite having promised "free monthly content updates" and the expansion was the price of a full game on top of that.
Their "free patches" were mostly bug fixes and balance corrections, not content.
I was extremely disappointed in them for that. I bought the collector's edition when it first came out and was eagerly anticipating the Honor System, the Dishonor System and Battlegrounds from day one. Both of those things were promised to be already in the game by the freaking game manual. But they didn't actually come out until over a year later. I got bored and canceled my subscription before they ever came out with features promised at release. And they never did deliver the free monthly content updates they promised.
So screw'em.
I play EVE Online now. The UI sucks, but we get a free expansion every year and constant improvements every month or two.
The former.
Tons of companies say they're committed to lots of things. It doesn't mean anything.
Wait until they produce something that fixes the problem.
A giant WTF to whomever modded parent Funny. Please tell me you just misclicked. This shit isn't funny anymore.
Please tag this story with "no".
No.
Mark my words. The turning point has been reached. Linux popularity has reached critical mass. Microsoft is in trouble serious trouble.
Watch as it spreads like Firefox from this point forward.
[rant]I read the Wikipedia entry about "pre-texting", but I remain unconvinced that calling it "pre-texting" makes it any less of a lie or anything more than a lie.[/rant]
You've got to be kidding me.
Outlook has usability problems, but Lotus Notes is a usability nightmare.
Outlook:
Options buried 23409823 clicks deep. Parts of the interface aren't very intuitive. Search utilities suck horribly.
Mail and calendar work beautifully, especially scheduling meetings for when 20 people and the conference room are free.
Cons of Lotus Notes:
Exposes the user to the fact that its a database trying to be an email/calendar collaboration tool. Why the hell would I care about what database I'm connected to and when it replicates?
It takes a sysadmin to setup and keep running.
The entire UI is complete and total garbage. And if you thought Outlook buried options, try Notes.
I guess it does line wrapping better.
You'd have to drag me back to Notes kicking and freaking screaming. I'd rather use intra-office snail mail. I'm not even joking.
Here is a viewing distance calculator (in Excel) you can use to figure out way more about home theater setups than you'll ever really need.
It has viewing distances for user selectable monitor/TV/projector resolutions & sizes, seating distances, optimal viewing distances, seating heights(?!), THX viability(?!) etc. It's well researched and cited.
No I'm not affiliated with it, I just found it and liked it.
Microsoft depends on piracy to increase the number of computers their products are on. People using torrents are just helping them out.