The hell? People change jobs for a million reasons, few of which have anything to do with "back" and whatever macho/nationalistic fantasy you've got going on there.
- People at the beginning of their careers sometimes improve their skills more rapidly than their employers can accommodate. eg, the guy who starts out doing desktop support and grows into a sysadminning role, at a company that's already overstaffed on sysadmins.
- Companies downsize or go out of business. Any time you join a startup it is a crapshoot (mostly based upon factors outside your control) whether it will still be around next year. Does that mean that no one should ever join new companies?
- Many, many people simply cannot afford to live anywhere near their offices.
- Changes in medical conditions may alter the type and amount of work that you're capable of.
- Changes in your or your family's medical or educational situation may alter the amount or reliability of money necessary. eg, moving to a less fulfilling job at a big corporation with solid medical benefits.
And, frankly, change and drive and curiosity are good things. I would much rather hire someone who has displayed the ability to excel in ten different environments than someone who has sat still at one company for a decade.
Yes, clearly the only reasonable solution is for everyone to move (probably to a vastly different neighborhood with completely different safety and cost) every time they change jobs. Certainly there's nothing in the world wiser than applying for a new mortgage every time you have just started a new job.
Also, couples or people living together are only allowed to work within four blocks of one another.
I don't know what a "Humble Bundle" is; again, I suspect it's something that features far more prominently in some small specialized market than in the general world. I would suggest that your deep involvement with this niche may be impairing your perspective.
Just glancing at the small games market, 90k sales certainly seems unexceptional. The top few dozen games sold through itunes seem to each have 10k-30k _reviews_, which almost certainly implies many more than 90k sales.
And given that those all, obviously, run without Flash, it's hard to see this as supporting the case that Flash does something unique or important.
>>>...online multimedia platform. >> Can you tell us what that is? > Like he said, it doesn't have a viable feature-comparable alternative.
That... doesn't answer the question. If your argument is that Flash is so awesome because it's the best "online multimedia platform", then you're going to have to back that up to what the fuck an "online multimedia platform" is and why I would want one.
Because yes, like many others in this conversation, I have only seen Flash used for things that I quite strongly did not want happening in any browser of mine. So if the only consequence of Flash's death is that those things couldn't happen anymore that sounds to me like a huge improvement.
It backfires a bit when your argument in favor of Flash being at the heart of a vast and vital industry is citing a company no one has ever heard of and three games that no one has ever heard of.
It sounds as if you live in some tiny little niche universe in which "multimedia platform" is a thing. But you should be aware that for nearly everyone else out there, those words are not even meaningful, much less describe anything important or desired.
> Here's how it works: faced with low price competition, if you immediately drop your price to defend your market share
This is how it works for, say, the Dells of the world: the companies who just repackage others' technologies rather than creating anything, and thus have control only over market traits like price.
But you're forgetting the other lever available to companies that actually create new things, which is to compete on quality and innovation. This has always been Apple's chosen tactic, and it has served them incredibly well, making them the most stable and successful technology company over the last 35ish years.
Uh, what vintage of imac was that? If you mean the crt or lamp-style ones, that's fair.
But the past-several-years square imacs are incredibly simple to open. Three screws, and the whole back lifts off, exposing every component in the machine.
The very top of the list of things that constitute abusing a monopoly is leveraging it to force artificial success in a different market. This is in fact the specific thing the DoJ slapped them on the wrist for doing: leveraging their desktop OS monopoly into artificial success in the browser market.
The concern here is that Microsoft could leverage that resultant artificial success in the browser market into further artificial success in the online advertising market. Again, precisely the type of thing that antitrust laws are designed to prevent.
A lot of people go by different nicknames in highschool than in adult life. In fact, thank god that most of the ways we define ourselves in highschool don't end up as permanent choices.
What's so amazing about people not knowing the deep dark secret that at the age when everyone wants to fit in, Obama went by a more common nickname? Why would the "mass-media moron-tube", as your article so delicately puts it, consider that to be news? Or how is it relevant to what one should call him now?
I couldn't be less a fan of the Bush administration, but suggesting that they'll assassinate Obama is purest nonsense.
Even if we grant that they'd have no moral qualms about doing so or fear of getting caught, what exactly would that accomplish for them? Turning Obama into a martyr and Biden into President? Or if they decided they didn't like Biden either and got him at the same time, anointing Pelosi? Who exactly do you think simultaneously has that much hatred for Obama and feels that either of those options would be sufficiently better?
Or are you suggesting that they're just going to stage an armed overthrow of the entire government, and march Bush back into the Oval Office by way of force? Again, even if you believe they'd be in favor of the idea, it's not implementable in practice.
There are plenty of damning things to say about the Bush administration that are actually true. Let's stick to those, okay?
The fact that there are no _perfectly_ unbiased news sources does not mean that there are not varying degrees of bias, or that unbiased reporting is something we should stop demanding and striving for.
Just because other organizations only get 98% of the way there rather than Fox's 4%, you can't just stick your fingers in your ears, shout "everyone's biased!" and declare it a non-issue.
By most quantifiable measures (lifespan, infant mortality, etc) the US appears to be worse off than most other industrialized nations. This indicates that the US healthcare system is less effective than others.
As established above, the US healthcare system is more expensive than others.
In this context, I think that "more expensive and less effective" is a pretty sound definition of "less efficient."
I thought that glossy screens were an absolutely awful idea when I first heard of them. But after seeing and using them for a while, I now find them to be a far better choice.
Remember, the difference between matte and glossy is now how much glare the screen reflects, just how sharply focused that glare is. With a glossy screen, if you're sitting at the wrong angle, you get a big bright unusable glare. But if you adjust that angle even very slightly, the glare goes away _completely_.
A matte screen, on the other hand, is the hedging approach. There's no single point at which the glare is really awful... and there's no point at which the glare goes away entirely. You're just averaging the glare over all possible angles.
Given how painless it is to nudge a laptop one way or the other by a couple of degrees, I'm now much happier with the option to have no glare whatsoever, rather than just constant not-too-terrible glare. It's a little weird actually seeing true black on a laptop screen in a lit room, but I assure you that it's refreshing.
It's not obvious, but: boot the system with the mouse button held down. It will eject anything while still down in the firmware, before even getting up anywhere near software that may or may not recognize the disc.
Yes, the obvious design choice is that content should scale to any number of players. Maintaining the per-player difficulty, and per-player rewards.
This would solve a _lot_ of problems for players whose preferred group size is not exactly 5, 10, or 25. And it would solve a lot of problems for Blizzard, as they've been working far harder than necessary to create separate content for each of these groups, still doing a terrible job of balancing them against one another, and doing no job whatsoever of addressing people who want to play as a group of 2, 8, 16, or 60.
It is not technically difficult. Blizzard themselves managed it just fine with Diablo II in the mid-90s. Dusting off those fifty or so lines of code would make their subscriber base vastly happier. Certainly it would get me to sign back up in a heartbeat.
If they wanted to slow the rate at which pvp gear is acquired, they could have increased item costs or capped weekly honor accrual. If they wanted to skew gearing rates more in favor of success, they could have steepened the ratio of rewards for winners and losers in battlegrounds.
But what they did instead of either of those was to force everyone who wants to progress in pvp to play one extremely specific variety of it that they've recently tacked on. A variety that many of us don't enjoy, so I can assure you that it would only draw more AFKers and people slogging dutifully through it like a chore, so they can get back to the battlegrounds that they actually find fun.
The post you cite still discusses the arena as the pvp endgame, and talks about all other pvp as just a stepping stone on the way to it. This is, as I said, entirely too reminiscent of Blizzard's other belief that raiding is the only real pve endgame, and that all other pve content is just a stepping stone one passes through on the way there.
Are you concerned about the arena becoming the pvp equivalent of raiding? That is to say, the one blessed path to endgame progression, and anyone who doesn't enjoy it be damned?
I will admit my bias: I canceled my account three days ago over just this issue, after playing for over four years. I spent a long time being frustrated by getting only second-rate pve content because I wasn't interested in raiding; I would have canceled long ago, but I found and began enjoying pvp. Now I'm seeing pvp deteriorate in the same way: the same monomania on one very small corner of it, to the detriment of everything else.
The raiding/pve issue has never been solved to this day, so I'm afraid I see little hope that the arena/pvp issue will be. Or can you offer us any assurances that it might someday be possible to pursue these broad facets of the game without needing participate in the extremely narrow subset of them that have been deemed endgame-worthy?
No, plurality voting is a far larger problem than the electoral college. It does an absolutely atrocious job of representing the will of the electorate.
But the EC compounds the problem. By the time we've gotten through state caucuses and state primaries and party primaries and state quantization and the electoral college, there ends up being half a dozen layers of plurality voting all stacked atop one another. And just like stacking any other lossy algorithm, the output gets more and more distorted at every step. The result is a federal government whose behaviour bears very little resemblance to the desires of its citizens.
The ideal solution would be to address both of these at once. Switch to single direct election by Condorcet, approval voting, or a Borda count, the distorting intermediaries of parties and states would mostly be out of the picture, and the federal government would be vastly more answerable to the populace. Unfortunately, the only set of people who could enact such a change are the ones who have already mastered exploitation of the flaws of the current system, and thus have a strong incentive to not do so.
You don't have a constitutional right to vote for the president. The states do have a constitutional right to pick electors for the president. Where are you getting these "rights of voters" in a presidential election? Such rights only exist due to the actions of the individual states.
I did not suggest that the US Constitution guarantees individual citizens the ability to vote for national leaders. I was pointing out that our current system in fact disenfranchises individual voters, and suggesting that that's a very bad choice.
The goal of a democracy is to have the actions of the government reflect the desires of the populace as accurately as possible. The US varies from pure democracy in a number of places, and usually those are chosen for very good reason. For example, even a 90% majority cannot simply vote to enslave a 10% minority. These deviations from pure democracy were generally added very reluctantly, and chosen to protect against specific risks.
The electoral college, however, thwarts the goal of government reflecting the will of the populace without any particularly good reason. It causes the votes of individuals to carry vastly different amounts of weight, arranged in completely arbitrary ways that accomplish nothing useful. Unlike, say, the Bill of Rights, it was not designed with deviation from pure democracy as its goal. It was designed simply because of the mechanics of communicating votes across thousands of miles in the eighteenth century. Its thwarting of democracy was an unfortunate side effect, and one that we now have the technology to correct.
Please inform me if you think that I'm mistaken, and there is some important cause being served by each person in Ohio having a vote as powerful as ten thousand people in New York or Alabama. If there is some important goal that this accomplishes, I would love to hear it.
And by "states", I'm guessing you mean the 6 or so states that presidents bother to woo, at the expense of the 44 that they permanently ignore? This is a good deal for states how, exactly?
Usually when people say "states' rights", they're talking about the championing the rights of states over the rights of the federal government. But to say it in the context of the electoral college, you're championing the rights of states over the rights of voters. That seems like a much harder stance to defend.
Genetics and their influence on natural selection are usually more complex than a first glance implies. It's very rare that a gene will dictate exactly one trait, in all circumstances, without any linkage to other traits.
A great recent example was a study of homosexuality in men. You would think that this would be reproductive disadvantage, and so should have been bred out of all species, right? But it turns out that the trait is not so much gayness as androphilia. In males who possess it, it can manifest as being homosexual. But in their female relatives, it can manifest as a greater attraction to men and sex with men, thus leading to higher reproductive odds, thus balancing out the reproductive disadvantage it presents in males.
Complexities like this are a lot of why our behaviours, even sexual behaviours, are not all uniform. Different traits are more effective in different circumstances, so diversity is a strong overall strategy.
I'm guessing this thing is Windows-only? Usually when a company can't even be bothered to say on what platforms their software will run, it's because they're under the impression that Windows is the only one that exists.
Ah, well. Any bets on whether the couple million people who play WoW on macs will outnumber the total number of players this ever achieves?
You're right, a company that sells services rather than goods can never be sustainable in the long run. That's why all power companies, telephone companies, cleaning companies, shipping companies, security companies, doctors, lawyers, and accountants all went out of business decades ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The hell? People change jobs for a million reasons, few of which have anything to do with "back" and whatever macho/nationalistic fantasy you've got going on there.
- People at the beginning of their careers sometimes improve their skills more rapidly than their employers can accommodate. eg, the guy who starts out doing desktop support and grows into a sysadminning role, at a company that's already overstaffed on sysadmins.
- Companies downsize or go out of business. Any time you join a startup it is a crapshoot (mostly based upon factors outside your control) whether it will still be around next year. Does that mean that no one should ever join new companies?
- Many, many people simply cannot afford to live anywhere near their offices.
- Changes in medical conditions may alter the type and amount of work that you're capable of.
- Changes in your or your family's medical or educational situation may alter the amount or reliability of money necessary. eg, moving to a less fulfilling job at a big corporation with solid medical benefits.
And, frankly, change and drive and curiosity are good things. I would much rather hire someone who has displayed the ability to excel in ten different environments than someone who has sat still at one company for a decade.
Yes, clearly the only reasonable solution is for everyone to move (probably to a vastly different neighborhood with completely different safety and cost) every time they change jobs. Certainly there's nothing in the world wiser than applying for a new mortgage every time you have just started a new job.
Also, couples or people living together are only allowed to work within four blocks of one another.
I don't know what a "Humble Bundle" is; again, I suspect it's something that features far more prominently in some small specialized market than in the general world. I would suggest that your deep involvement with this niche may be impairing your perspective.
Just glancing at the small games market, 90k sales certainly seems unexceptional. The top few dozen games sold through itunes seem to each have 10k-30k _reviews_, which almost certainly implies many more than 90k sales.
And given that those all, obviously, run without Flash, it's hard to see this as supporting the case that Flash does something unique or important.
>>> ...online multimedia platform.
>> Can you tell us what that is?
> Like he said, it doesn't have a viable feature-comparable alternative.
That... doesn't answer the question. If your argument is that Flash is so awesome because it's the best "online multimedia platform", then you're going to have to back that up to what the fuck an "online multimedia platform" is and why I would want one.
Because yes, like many others in this conversation, I have only seen Flash used for things that I quite strongly did not want happening in any browser of mine. So if the only consequence of Flash's death is that those things couldn't happen anymore that sounds to me like a huge improvement.
It backfires a bit when your argument in favor of Flash being at the heart of a vast and vital industry is citing a company no one has ever heard of and three games that no one has ever heard of.
It sounds as if you live in some tiny little niche universe in which "multimedia platform" is a thing. But you should be aware that for nearly everyone else out there, those words are not even meaningful, much less describe anything important or desired.
> Here's how it works: faced with low price competition, if you immediately drop your price to defend your market share
This is how it works for, say, the Dells of the world: the companies who just repackage others' technologies rather than creating anything, and thus have control only over market traits like price.
But you're forgetting the other lever available to companies that actually create new things, which is to compete on quality and innovation. This has always been Apple's chosen tactic, and it has served them incredibly well, making them the most stable and successful technology company over the last 35ish years.
> Until we become more enlightened here on Earth and make some progress in the nature of the human heart, we will only bring those problems with us.
Really, sorting out the nature of the human heart will get rid of asteroids? I had no idea.
Man, dinosaurs must have been assholes.
Uh, what vintage of imac was that? If you mean the crt or lamp-style ones, that's fair.
But the past-several-years square imacs are incredibly simple to open. Three screws, and the whole back lifts off, exposing every component in the machine.
The very top of the list of things that constitute abusing a monopoly is leveraging it to force artificial success in a different market. This is in fact the specific thing the DoJ slapped them on the wrist for doing: leveraging their desktop OS monopoly into artificial success in the browser market.
The concern here is that Microsoft could leverage that resultant artificial success in the browser market into further artificial success in the online advertising market. Again, precisely the type of thing that antitrust laws are designed to prevent.
Wait, why?
A lot of people go by different nicknames in highschool than in adult life. In fact, thank god that most of the ways we define ourselves in highschool don't end up as permanent choices.
What's so amazing about people not knowing the deep dark secret that at the age when everyone wants to fit in, Obama went by a more common nickname? Why would the "mass-media moron-tube", as your article so delicately puts it, consider that to be news? Or how is it relevant to what one should call him now?
I couldn't be less a fan of the Bush administration, but suggesting that they'll assassinate Obama is purest nonsense.
Even if we grant that they'd have no moral qualms about doing so or fear of getting caught, what exactly would that accomplish for them? Turning Obama into a martyr and Biden into President? Or if they decided they didn't like Biden either and got him at the same time, anointing Pelosi? Who exactly do you think simultaneously has that much hatred for Obama and feels that either of those options would be sufficiently better?
Or are you suggesting that they're just going to stage an armed overthrow of the entire government, and march Bush back into the Oval Office by way of force? Again, even if you believe they'd be in favor of the idea, it's not implementable in practice.
There are plenty of damning things to say about the Bush administration that are actually true. Let's stick to those, okay?
Your straw man, it is so... strawy.
The fact that there are no _perfectly_ unbiased news sources does not mean that there are not varying degrees of bias, or that unbiased reporting is something we should stop demanding and striving for.
Just because other organizations only get 98% of the way there rather than Fox's 4%, you can't just stick your fingers in your ears, shout "everyone's biased!" and declare it a non-issue.
By most quantifiable measures (lifespan, infant mortality, etc) the US appears to be worse off than most other industrialized nations. This indicates that the US healthcare system is less effective than others.
As established above, the US healthcare system is more expensive than others.
In this context, I think that "more expensive and less effective" is a pretty sound definition of "less efficient."
I thought that glossy screens were an absolutely awful idea when I first heard of them. But after seeing and using them for a while, I now find them to be a far better choice.
Remember, the difference between matte and glossy is now how much glare the screen reflects, just how sharply focused that glare is. With a glossy screen, if you're sitting at the wrong angle, you get a big bright unusable glare. But if you adjust that angle even very slightly, the glare goes away _completely_.
A matte screen, on the other hand, is the hedging approach. There's no single point at which the glare is really awful... and there's no point at which the glare goes away entirely. You're just averaging the glare over all possible angles.
Given how painless it is to nudge a laptop one way or the other by a couple of degrees, I'm now much happier with the option to have no glare whatsoever, rather than just constant not-too-terrible glare. It's a little weird actually seeing true black on a laptop screen in a lit room, but I assure you that it's refreshing.
It's not obvious, but: boot the system with the mouse button held down. It will eject anything while still down in the firmware, before even getting up anywhere near software that may or may not recognize the disc.
Or alternatively, a little tool like http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/forceeject.html should do the trick. First hit on searching Apple's site for "force eject" (actually looking for documentation of the mouse button behaviour).
Yes, the obvious design choice is that content should scale to any number of players. Maintaining the per-player difficulty, and per-player rewards.
This would solve a _lot_ of problems for players whose preferred group size is not exactly 5, 10, or 25. And it would solve a lot of problems for Blizzard, as they've been working far harder than necessary to create separate content for each of these groups, still doing a terrible job of balancing them against one another, and doing no job whatsoever of addressing people who want to play as a group of 2, 8, 16, or 60.
It is not technically difficult. Blizzard themselves managed it just fine with Diablo II in the mid-90s. Dusting off those fifty or so lines of code would make their subscriber base vastly happier. Certainly it would get me to sign back up in a heartbeat.
If they wanted to slow the rate at which pvp gear is acquired, they could have increased item costs or capped weekly honor accrual. If they wanted to skew gearing rates more in favor of success, they could have steepened the ratio of rewards for winners and losers in battlegrounds.
But what they did instead of either of those was to force everyone who wants to progress in pvp to play one extremely specific variety of it that they've recently tacked on. A variety that many of us don't enjoy, so I can assure you that it would only draw more AFKers and people slogging dutifully through it like a chore, so they can get back to the battlegrounds that they actually find fun.
The post you cite still discusses the arena as the pvp endgame, and talks about all other pvp as just a stepping stone on the way to it. This is, as I said, entirely too reminiscent of Blizzard's other belief that raiding is the only real pve endgame, and that all other pve content is just a stepping stone one passes through on the way there.
Are you concerned about the arena becoming the pvp equivalent of raiding? That is to say, the one blessed path to endgame progression, and anyone who doesn't enjoy it be damned?
I will admit my bias: I canceled my account three days ago over just this issue, after playing for over four years. I spent a long time being frustrated by getting only second-rate pve content because I wasn't interested in raiding; I would have canceled long ago, but I found and began enjoying pvp. Now I'm seeing pvp deteriorate in the same way: the same monomania on one very small corner of it, to the detriment of everything else.
The raiding/pve issue has never been solved to this day, so I'm afraid I see little hope that the arena/pvp issue will be. Or can you offer us any assurances that it might someday be possible to pursue these broad facets of the game without needing participate in the extremely narrow subset of them that have been deemed endgame-worthy?
No, plurality voting is a far larger problem than the electoral college. It does an absolutely atrocious job of representing the will of the electorate.
But the EC compounds the problem. By the time we've gotten through state caucuses and state primaries and party primaries and state quantization and the electoral college, there ends up being half a dozen layers of plurality voting all stacked atop one another. And just like stacking any other lossy algorithm, the output gets more and more distorted at every step. The result is a federal government whose behaviour bears very little resemblance to the desires of its citizens.
The ideal solution would be to address both of these at once. Switch to single direct election by Condorcet, approval voting, or a Borda count, the distorting intermediaries of parties and states would mostly be out of the picture, and the federal government would be vastly more answerable to the populace. Unfortunately, the only set of people who could enact such a change are the ones who have already mastered exploitation of the flaws of the current system, and thus have a strong incentive to not do so.
I did not suggest that the US Constitution guarantees individual citizens the ability to vote for national leaders. I was pointing out that our current system in fact disenfranchises individual voters, and suggesting that that's a very bad choice.
The goal of a democracy is to have the actions of the government reflect the desires of the populace as accurately as possible. The US varies from pure democracy in a number of places, and usually those are chosen for very good reason. For example, even a 90% majority cannot simply vote to enslave a 10% minority. These deviations from pure democracy were generally added very reluctantly, and chosen to protect against specific risks.
The electoral college, however, thwarts the goal of government reflecting the will of the populace without any particularly good reason. It causes the votes of individuals to carry vastly different amounts of weight, arranged in completely arbitrary ways that accomplish nothing useful. Unlike, say, the Bill of Rights, it was not designed with deviation from pure democracy as its goal. It was designed simply because of the mechanics of communicating votes across thousands of miles in the eighteenth century. Its thwarting of democracy was an unfortunate side effect, and one that we now have the technology to correct.
Please inform me if you think that I'm mistaken, and there is some important cause being served by each person in Ohio having a vote as powerful as ten thousand people in New York or Alabama. If there is some important goal that this accomplishes, I would love to hear it.
And by "states", I'm guessing you mean the 6 or so states that presidents bother to woo, at the expense of the 44 that they permanently ignore? This is a good deal for states how, exactly?
Usually when people say "states' rights", they're talking about the championing the rights of states over the rights of the federal government. But to say it in the context of the electoral college, you're championing the rights of states over the rights of voters. That seems like a much harder stance to defend.
That's because being moderately fat used to be a healthy and attractive trait. So the geek stereotype was the opposite of that: the scrawny weakling.
These days being thin is suddenly fashionable, so the stereotype of the geek changed to be the converse of the new desirable trait.
Neither of these has anything to do with actual changes in geeks' or non-geeks' bodies. Just the whims of fashion.
Genetics and their influence on natural selection are usually more complex than a first glance implies. It's very rare that a gene will dictate exactly one trait, in all circumstances, without any linkage to other traits.
A great recent example was a study of homosexuality in men. You would think that this would be reproductive disadvantage, and so should have been bred out of all species, right? But it turns out that the trait is not so much gayness as androphilia. In males who possess it, it can manifest as being homosexual. But in their female relatives, it can manifest as a greater attraction to men and sex with men, thus leading to higher reproductive odds, thus balancing out the reproductive disadvantage it presents in males.
Complexities like this are a lot of why our behaviours, even sexual behaviours, are not all uniform. Different traits are more effective in different circumstances, so diversity is a strong overall strategy.
I'm guessing this thing is Windows-only? Usually when a company can't even be bothered to say on what platforms their software will run, it's because they're under the impression that Windows is the only one that exists.
Ah, well. Any bets on whether the couple million people who play WoW on macs will outnumber the total number of players this ever achieves?
You're right, a company that sells services rather than goods can never be sustainable in the long run. That's why all power companies, telephone companies, cleaning companies, shipping companies, security companies, doctors, lawyers, and accountants all went out of business decades ago.