I don't care about carrying multiple batteries, I care being able to have a phone that lasts as long as when it was new 5 years down the road, or even 10 years down the road, or that if I buy used I don't have to worry about how many charge cycles the previous user has gone through.
Phones nowadays are powerful enough that for normal (non-gaming) usage I don't see the need to upgrade them unless they die, and if you take care of your phone that's not going to happen for a long time, unless of course there is a forced failure due to the non-user-replaceable battery: same thing for laptops.
What is wrong with having a screwed in backplate and screwed in battery? why does it have to be glue-glue-glue-glue? there is no reason whatsoever, save maybe making the phone 0.01" thicker and 1 gram heavier which is not something worth sacrificing the environment for.
it kinda defeats the purpose to have a phone where you have to recharge it 2-3 times a day (which you will likely have to do some years down the road). I know, I know, "why should you keep using a phone that's more than 2 years old", see the comment above about environmental responsibility
No replaceable battery as far as I can see
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Android KitKat Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why is it that so few smartphones have replaceable batteries nowadays, it is such an environmentally irresponsible thing to do. Kudos to Samsung for still having them in the galaxy series, but seriously, every phone (and laptop) should have it. Wish Apple hadn't started this trend (for a company that supposedly prides itself as being environmental too...)
not so sure about relaxing if you get an unmanaged VPS... if you have an unmanaged VPS you automatically also have a full-time job trying to keep it secure.
I used to be a sysadmin for a webhosting company in the 90s (when things were not nearly as hostile on the net as they are now), and I would not use a VPS nowadays unless it was for business reasons and therefore I had enough time to keep a very close eye on it, for personal/fun stuff where I don't want to spend my time security admining, shared hosting is a lot less of a hassle (even if you have to go to different providers for different things)
just get a USB/PS2 keyboard adapter and use whatever keyboard you want. I still am using my first-generation microsoft natural keyboard and it's working great, with KeyRemap4MacBook I can also have all my 'weird' keybindings in emacs working perfectly too (super, hyper,...)
I have been using linux since 1992 or so, but lately I find that OS/X is just better: a lot of distributions now seem to have nonsensical defaults (I was reading with dismay about removing the middle mouse paste here the other day, that's crazy) are iffy from a security/privacy perspective (since when should a distribution connect to random internet sites without me configuring it to, run it in a vm with something like little snitch and you'll see) and seem more geared towards windows users vs old linux users.
Paradoxically I feel more at home with OS/X, most things 'just work', via macports I can install all the things I need, little snitch is great, and with the already mentioned KeyRemap4MacBook, Alfred and BetterTouchTool I can configure the keyboard/trackpad exactly how I want it (I have to say that as much as the mouse is better for FPS games, the mac trackpad is awesome for desktop use), etc. etc.
I do miss linux when something doesn't work as well though (like on my old macbook that sometimes randomly beachballs, which is next to impossible to debug unfortunately) but overall right now on my primary desktop I am fairly happy with OS/X. I do run linux vms for certain things, but I am really not sure about what distro I would use nowadays if I wasn't on OS/X, probably scientific linux or centos, not sure.
... as you said students today have laptops and tablets which are completely self enclosed and not-user-serviceable at all, fostering the idea that a computer is kind of a 'magic box'.
Having a complete teardown/reassembly with some explanation will show the kids that computers are not these black boxes, you can point out what/where the RAM is, the CPU, storage, NICs, port controllers, network cards (if the PCs are older especially) etc. etc. etc.
Everybody can do virtualization stuff at home already, try to let them do something that they would not be able to do on their own. Configuring an AP sounds 'cool' but really it's just a matter of again staring at a screen and changing some checkboxes, doing something hands on with hardware is a lot more fun IMHO.
I think you are trolling but I'll bite, I work in python mainly these days, and emacs is way, way, way faster than eclipse (which a lot of my coworkers use) at doing pretty much everything, from code completion, to 'tell me where this method is defined' to 'load a file that has a similar name to this in the project', to source control integration, to 'open with exactly the same window/buffer configuration I had yesterday when I quit', to all sorts of other tasks. Not to mention that it never crashes for no reason, it doesn't just "hang" at random times during the day, doesn't use a ton of RAM, etc. etc. etc.
I am really not sure how 'changing development practices' have anything to do with what editor one uses, especially considering when said editor is a LOT better than any of the 'new' alternatives once you get past the learning curve, and once you deal with the learning curve once you will be fine for all sorts of other projects, languages, etc. I have been using emacs as my sole development environment since the early 90s and the few months I spent back then learning my way around have paid themselves back in spades.
Regarding this article I am not really sure what the purpose of a 'package manager' for emacs is, if I need something I just google it on emacswiki.org, download the.el file, add whatever config variables are needed in my.emacs.el and that's it, no need for a package manager for that (not to mention I want in general to keep any extra.el files in ~/elisp, where as of right now I have about 35 megs of packages, and not in the general system install, because when I want emacs on a new host I can just copy it over).
the would/should care from the perspective of 'hey Apple, there are millions of devices I can't sell to because of your arbitrary restriction on what versions I can support', not every app requires an iphone 5 to run and I think it's really misleading on Apple's part to say that they don't have fragmentation issues where their solution to the fragmentation is basically to just ignore all devices older than a certain amount.
for ballot box votes it would be pretty easy to guarantee raw data trust via the usual observers, as long as the voting machines leave a paper trail (and they should). For remote e-voting you would set up end-to-end vote verification as the poster below was saying, it would just be part of the voting process, you go to vote on the day, and the next day you verify that your vote was counted. With vote verification and distributed verification of the results it seems it would be a very solid system.
This said IMHO simple paper ballots with manual counting have been used for a long time and given enough impartial observers are next to impossible to break, it is mildly inconvenient to have physical poll stations and manual counting (no touch screen machines, no chads, simple paper ballots in a box), but if one can't be bothered to go to the poll to vote it doesn't seem like they have that much interest in the democratic process anyways...
it's a lot simpler to have oversight of paper ballots being counted by hand than of a program running on a computer somewhere: there's no way anybody can be sure the program being actually run is the program that was generated via the source code you are given.
Not to mention that there is no way you can be sure about the *environment* the software is run on, since it would be trivial to have some kernel/environment exploits that could alter the result arbitrarily.
The only way one could be sure there are no electronic shenanigans would be redundancy:
- provide the source code and build instructions for all the software - at voting time anybody can come in, get the raw data and run it on their own compiled copy of the software, if there is a discrepancy flags would be raised and the result would not be accepted until at least a certain number of independent computers come up with the same result
how do they know the amount of devices running older iOS versions? my itouch 1st gen hasn't connected to the app store for years (since it's useless) and I am assuming a lot of others are the same.
iOS5 is supported only on itouch 3rd gen and above (which go up until 5.1.1) so currently any itouch 1st gen and 2nd gen are SOL, and I really doubt that itouch1 + itouch2 is 1% of the total amount of iOS devices around, because it would mean that 99% of the iOS devices sold by apple have been sold in the last 4 years... yes, if they calculate 'devices running older iOS versions' by saying 'devices running older iOS versions accessing the app store' maybe, but as I was saying pretty much nobody running itouch1 or 2 would be accessing it as it's useless.
can you confirm what I heard about newer versions of xcode making it impossible to write software that would still work on iOS 3.x and/or Apple making it impossible for 3.x apps to be listed in the app store? from what you are saying it seems android is more lenient about allowing you to target old devices.
I have a still perfectly functioning ipod touch first gen where I can't basically reinstall any of the apps I own because the current versions of them in the app store are not compatible with my IOS version. If I decided to wipe it and resell it it would basically be a paperweight for anybody who purchased it as they would not be able to install anything on it.
In the end companies should be free to EOL old versions of their OS, obviously, but there should be an official way to get versions of apps compatible with your old OS if the app existed already in the first place. If I have app foowiz 1.3 that runs just fine on OS 1.0 and recompile it to have a minor enhancement and the toolkit now makes it mandatory that I can support only OS 2.0 and up, there should be a way for OS 1.0 users to keep downloading 1.3 while everybody else moves to 1.4 and above.
It would definitely be a lot more environmental to allow customers to keep using their old devices, or sell them (rather than tossing them) not to mention that it would make them more likely to buy more of your devices since they would trust that said devices would remain supported in the future.
exactly, the problem is that any time any of these articles come up there are the usual cries of 'look at agriculture! people were saying the sky was falling back then and it didn't, so it will not fall even this time'.
As you said
- robots are getting more and more capable - humans are not getting more capable - the number of humans needed for 'work' keeps decreasing - the number of humans in the world keeps increasing - political / economic / societal pressure is for a fixed amount of work per-person rather than a fixed total amount (so if less work is available less people will be able to work, vs the same people be able to all work for less time)
now how a logical person look at the above and not be concerned I have no idea. Up to now any sort of mechanization was very specific, a machine was invented that made a SPECIFIC job obsolete, the machines we are creating now are making whole CATEGORIES of jobs obsolete.
It's not like somebody invented a mechanical loom and weavers can say, oh well, we'll retrain and become bricklayers, we are inventing things so that any physical job you can do can be done better and faster by a machine, which means that if things keep going this way less and less people will be able to support themselves or their families by working a physical job. Some artisans still might, but they will be the best of the best, if you are an 'average' craftsmaker who will want to buy your product? let alone if you are a 'fair' one.
Current societal structure does not seem capable of dealing with a situation where 'work' is not as needed anymore, of course some people will still manage just fine (if you are at the top of your field, whatever your field is, you'll be ok), but if you are not at the top what are you going to do? Do people here honestly assume that if wages stay the way they are now you will be able to make a living wage by being a mediocre stand-up comedian? or a mediocre painter? or a mediocre musician? what are you going to do if there are no jobs available to you that mesh with your skills that can enable you to earn a living?
that's why likely it's the same RAW file 'developed' in camera raw for shadows / midtones / highlights and merged in PS with layers/masking to create a good HDR composite.
It really depends from the rules of the contest if the above is acceptable or not, but I don't consider it more cheating than dodging & burning in the darkroom...
I have played WOW off and on since just after release (coworker was in beta and kept asking me to try it, once it was released I joined and was hooked) but MOP has been the first patch I didn't resub for. Personally the best times for me were TBC (Karazhan with friends, occasionally getting in higher tier raids as a sub) vanilla (so many great memories) and wotlk up to ulduar more or less.
In a game that has millions of players there are millions of stories and millions of reasons of why players play or quit, these are why I am personally not subscribed (even if I wish I could be, if TBC was going on I'd be resubbing tomorrow)
- no sense of community: LFR, LFD and CRZ have completely killed any sense of community: since there is no downside for being abusive most people seem to be, in the old days if you ninjaed something in a dungeon run the other player(s) would message your guild leader and you got a talking to, if you did it more than once you got kicked out, or your guild could even end up being blacklisted so you would never PUG again. You met people while levelling and ran dungeons together, and form friendships which sometimes led to guilds, and sometimes to various PUG runs, and in general again to a sense of community.
- difficulty levels are out of whack: in the old days there were easy instances, and hard instances, you brought your not-as-competent friends to the easy instances and carried them a bit, and it was fine, and it was fun. Nowadays it's super easy heroics, brainless LFR, and hard raids where most fights have a 'one person not as good can kill everybody else's evening'. In the old days it was possible to carry people in raids too, just look at how many people died on average on the safety dance in 'bad guilds' or mixed the polarity, but still it was possible to down the boss if at least 2/3rds of the raid was competent. Yes, this meant that the 'super hardcore' had a bit of a snoozefest at times, but it also meant that a LARGE part of the subscribers could do the content as it was written.
Now it seems that 'see the content' means 'tune it so drooling on random keyboard keys makes the boss go down' while normal and heroic are tuned hard in terms of mechanics. That might be good for the hardcore, but not for the average player (I shy from the 'casual' label because just because somebody is not as good at the game as somebody else it doesn't make them not care, which 'casual' seems to imply).
- game seems focused towards more and more time invested: in the old days the minimum amount of time you needed to play on a daily basis to do content was not nearly as high as it is now. People with less available time were still able to contribute very well, if they had more time they either had more alts or they did some of the OPTIONAL grinds (black thorium, furbolgs,...).
Nowadays if you can't put at least a few hours PER CHARACTER a day you're going to get left behind, because of the dailies, reps and so on. It seems that Blizzard listened to the loud cries of people with no life but the game that 'there isn't anything else to do' and so added more 'things to do' but also made them pretty much mandatory.
- design constraints shaped by non-game factors: many times reading GC's twitter replies you get some form of 'well, we could do xyz and give you this, or we could do this other thing and give you a lot more, we can't afford to do both' usually in the form of 'you either get a new raid or a new dungeon, and we think a new raid is a better investment of our money' or 'you either get 3 new scenarios or a new dungeon, and we think the scenarios are better'. It seems that vanilla/tbc were games where the design was the priority, not how much it cost to implement.
Complex problems have complex solutions, but if it was up to me for the next patch I would:
- keep LFR/LFD but make them REALM RESTRICTED, you get grouped ONLY with people on your realm - remove CRZ entirely - free transfers for everybody once every 3 months. - rework
yes and no, conceptually they do go hand in hand (I personally always write unit tests for my own code), but you do need to have a completely separate person/team testing from the person/team developing, because you do not want to misdirect them ('oh, this works, it's this part that might have issues' and then it turns out there were issues in the 'this works' part that won't be tested as much due to your feedback).
You really need all 3 legs of the tripod to deliver quality software:
- the developer codes to spec and writes unit test - the reviewer looks at the code, the spec and at the tests - QA validates the program based on what the spec said the program should work like
of course this assumes that you have time to write the spec, to keep it up to date, to do code reviews, and to do a proper job of QA. All the time doing these tasks pays off in spades, but you do need buy-in from management to make them happen consistently.
I think you are forgetting that if the release date is set, and dev gets asked to work 70 hour weeks, you will have to do all the testing you were planning to do in a LOT less time once the devs are done, and if some critical bug ships guess who's going to be held responsible?
Testing can be as hard as development: it's not easy, for example, to develop and execute a test plan for a complex failover in a distributed system, and to be able to give to the developer a good repro case/setup so they can debug things if something went wrong.
Just like there is 'drudge work' QA there is also 'drudge work' development, but the skill ceiling can be as high in QA as in Dev, because in the end you can think of a strong QA engineer as a developer trying to produce software that will validate your product, which can be as hard as writing it in the first place as you need a very clear understanding of how it should work and why and how to try to make it fail.
Good QA people are worth their weight in gold for complex software, but finding them (and retaining them, and compensating them properly, and not outsourcing them) is not easy...
according to your 'sweet spot' theory maybe the sweet spot for me riding my bike would be 30mph (should take less energy to go 30mph than 20mph) oh, wait...
Your comparison to EPA is apples/oranges, just because you can get 34mpg at 70mph it does NOT mean that if you go 55mph you will get only 29mpg everything else being equal...
the music, which used iMuse, was actually great if you ran it to an outboard midi GM module (I used my Roland D5 keyboard at the time, which worked as it was compatible-ish with the MT-32 a lot of games back then supported), it was also awesome since it was midi it would seamlessly switch between "quiet" and "battle", I was really sad when games switched from that tech to CD tracks as the switch in that case it's a heck of a lot more noticeable.
With the available quality of virtual instruments nowadays I am a bit miffed that more games don't go for stems and mix things on the fly vs having fully produced tracks.
noise cancellation headphones work well for airplanes, trains,..., I am not so sure they work very well for voices (or at least I haven't found any that do, usually they make voices even more annoying as they cut the background noise and make the voices stand out even more).
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I don't care about carrying multiple batteries, I care being able to have a phone that lasts as long as when it was new 5 years down the road, or even 10 years down the road, or that if I buy used I don't have to worry about how many charge cycles the previous user has gone through.
Phones nowadays are powerful enough that for normal (non-gaming) usage I don't see the need to upgrade them unless they die, and if you take care of your phone that's not going to happen for a long time, unless of course there is a forced failure due to the non-user-replaceable battery: same thing for laptops.
What is wrong with having a screwed in backplate and screwed in battery? why does it have to be glue-glue-glue-glue? there is no reason whatsoever, save maybe making the phone 0.01" thicker and 1 gram heavier which is not something worth sacrificing the environment for.
it kinda defeats the purpose to have a phone where you have to recharge it 2-3 times a day (which you will likely have to do some years down the road). I know, I know, "why should you keep using a phone that's more than 2 years old", see the comment above about environmental responsibility
Why is it that so few smartphones have replaceable batteries nowadays, it is such an environmentally irresponsible thing to do. Kudos to Samsung for still having them in the galaxy series, but seriously, every phone (and laptop) should have it. Wish Apple hadn't started this trend (for a company that supposedly prides itself as being environmental too...)
not so sure about relaxing if you get an unmanaged VPS... if you have an unmanaged VPS you automatically also have a full-time job trying to keep it secure.
I used to be a sysadmin for a webhosting company in the 90s (when things were not nearly as hostile on the net as they are now), and I would not use a VPS nowadays unless it was for business reasons and therefore I had enough time to keep a very close eye on it, for personal/fun stuff where I don't want to spend my time security admining, shared hosting is a lot less of a hassle (even if you have to go to different providers for different things)
just get a USB/PS2 keyboard adapter and use whatever keyboard you want. I still am using my first-generation microsoft natural keyboard and it's working great, with KeyRemap4MacBook I can also have all my 'weird' keybindings in emacs working perfectly too (super, hyper, ...)
I have been using linux since 1992 or so, but lately I find that OS/X is just better: a lot of distributions now seem to have nonsensical defaults (I was reading with dismay about removing the middle mouse paste here the other day, that's crazy) are iffy from a security/privacy perspective (since when should a distribution connect to random internet sites without me configuring it to, run it in a vm with something like little snitch and you'll see) and seem more geared towards windows users vs old linux users.
Paradoxically I feel more at home with OS/X, most things 'just work', via macports I can install all the things I need, little snitch is great, and with the already mentioned KeyRemap4MacBook, Alfred and BetterTouchTool I can configure the keyboard/trackpad exactly how I want it (I have to say that as much as the mouse is better for FPS games, the mac trackpad is awesome for desktop use), etc. etc.
I do miss linux when something doesn't work as well though (like on my old macbook that sometimes randomly beachballs, which is next to impossible to debug unfortunately) but overall right now on my primary desktop I am fairly happy with OS/X. I do run linux vms for certain things, but I am really not sure about what distro I would use nowadays if I wasn't on OS/X, probably scientific linux or centos, not sure.
I would've thought they'd bump to 128GB this time, especially given how large some apps are getting nowadays...
... as you said students today have laptops and tablets which are completely self enclosed and not-user-serviceable at all, fostering the idea that a computer is kind of a 'magic box'.
Having a complete teardown/reassembly with some explanation will show the kids that computers are not these black boxes, you can point out what/where the RAM is, the CPU, storage, NICs, port controllers, network cards (if the PCs are older especially) etc. etc. etc.
Everybody can do virtualization stuff at home already, try to let them do something that they would not be able to do on their own. Configuring an AP sounds 'cool' but really it's just a matter of again staring at a screen and changing some checkboxes, doing something hands on with hardware is a lot more fun IMHO.
and probably do not understand how nasty measles can be and what kind of lifelong disabilities it can leave you (deafness, meniere's, ...)
I think you are trolling but I'll bite, I work in python mainly these days, and emacs is way, way, way faster than eclipse (which a lot of my coworkers use) at doing pretty much everything, from code completion, to 'tell me where this method is defined' to 'load a file that has a similar name to this in the project', to source control integration, to 'open with exactly the same window/buffer configuration I had yesterday when I quit', to all sorts of other tasks. Not to mention that it never crashes for no reason, it doesn't just "hang" at random times during the day, doesn't use a ton of RAM, etc. etc. etc.
I am really not sure how 'changing development practices' have anything to do with what editor one uses, especially considering when said editor is a LOT better than any of the 'new' alternatives once you get past the learning curve, and once you deal with the learning curve once you will be fine for all sorts of other projects, languages, etc. I have been using emacs as my sole development environment since the early 90s and the few months I spent back then learning my way around have paid themselves back in spades.
Regarding this article I am not really sure what the purpose of a 'package manager' for emacs is, if I need something I just google it on emacswiki.org, download the .el file, add whatever config variables are needed in my .emacs.el and that's it, no need for a package manager for that (not to mention I want in general to keep any extra .el files in ~/elisp, where as of right now I have about 35 megs of packages, and not in the general system install, because when I want emacs on a new host I can just copy it over).
the would/should care from the perspective of 'hey Apple, there are millions of devices I can't sell to because of your arbitrary restriction on what versions I can support', not every app requires an iphone 5 to run and I think it's really misleading on Apple's part to say that they don't have fragmentation issues where their solution to the fragmentation is basically to just ignore all devices older than a certain amount.
for ballot box votes it would be pretty easy to guarantee raw data trust via the usual observers, as long as the voting machines leave a paper trail (and they should). For remote e-voting you would set up end-to-end vote verification as the poster below was saying, it would just be part of the voting process, you go to vote on the day, and the next day you verify that your vote was counted. With vote verification and distributed verification of the results it seems it would be a very solid system.
This said IMHO simple paper ballots with manual counting have been used for a long time and given enough impartial observers are next to impossible to break, it is mildly inconvenient to have physical poll stations and manual counting (no touch screen machines, no chads, simple paper ballots in a box), but if one can't be bothered to go to the poll to vote it doesn't seem like they have that much interest in the democratic process anyways...
it's a lot simpler to have oversight of paper ballots being counted by hand than of a program running on a computer somewhere: there's no way anybody can be sure the program being actually run is the program that was generated via the source code you are given.
Not to mention that there is no way you can be sure about the *environment* the software is run on, since it would be trivial to have some kernel/environment exploits that could alter the result arbitrarily.
The only way one could be sure there are no electronic shenanigans would be redundancy:
- provide the source code and build instructions for all the software
- at voting time anybody can come in, get the raw data and run it on their own compiled copy of the software, if there is a discrepancy flags would be raised and the result would not be accepted until at least a certain number of independent computers come up with the same result
how do they know the amount of devices running older iOS versions? my itouch 1st gen hasn't connected to the app store for years (since it's useless) and I am assuming a lot of others are the same.
iOS5 is supported only on itouch 3rd gen and above (which go up until 5.1.1) so currently any itouch 1st gen and 2nd gen are SOL, and I really doubt that itouch1 + itouch2 is 1% of the total amount of iOS devices around, because it would mean that 99% of the iOS devices sold by apple have been sold in the last 4 years... yes, if they calculate 'devices running older iOS versions' by saying 'devices running older iOS versions accessing the app store' maybe, but as I was saying pretty much nobody running itouch1 or 2 would be accessing it as it's useless.
can you confirm what I heard about newer versions of xcode making it impossible to write software that would still work on iOS 3.x and/or Apple making it impossible for 3.x apps to be listed in the app store? from what you are saying it seems android is more lenient about allowing you to target old devices.
I have a still perfectly functioning ipod touch first gen where I can't basically reinstall any of the apps I own because the current versions of them in the app store are not compatible with my IOS version. If I decided to wipe it and resell it it would basically be a paperweight for anybody who purchased it as they would not be able to install anything on it.
In the end companies should be free to EOL old versions of their OS, obviously, but there should be an official way to get versions of apps compatible with your old OS if the app existed already in the first place. If I have app foowiz 1.3 that runs just fine on OS 1.0 and recompile it to have a minor enhancement and the toolkit now makes it mandatory that I can support only OS 2.0 and up, there should be a way for OS 1.0 users to keep downloading 1.3 while everybody else moves to 1.4 and above.
It would definitely be a lot more environmental to allow customers to keep using their old devices, or sell them (rather than tossing them) not to mention that it would make them more likely to buy more of your devices since they would trust that said devices would remain supported in the future.
exactly, the problem is that any time any of these articles come up there are the usual cries of 'look at agriculture! people were saying the sky was falling back then and it didn't, so it will not fall even this time'.
As you said
- robots are getting more and more capable
- humans are not getting more capable
- the number of humans needed for 'work' keeps decreasing
- the number of humans in the world keeps increasing
- political / economic / societal pressure is for a fixed amount of work per-person rather than a fixed total amount (so if less work is available less people will be able to work, vs the same people be able to all work for less time)
now how a logical person look at the above and not be concerned I have no idea. Up to now any sort of mechanization was very specific, a machine was invented that made a SPECIFIC job obsolete, the machines we are creating now are making whole CATEGORIES of jobs obsolete.
It's not like somebody invented a mechanical loom and weavers can say, oh well, we'll retrain and become bricklayers, we are inventing things so that any physical job you can do can be done better and faster by a machine, which means that if things keep going this way less and less people will be able to support themselves or their families by working a physical job. Some artisans still might, but they will be the best of the best, if you are an 'average' craftsmaker who will want to buy your product? let alone if you are a 'fair' one.
Current societal structure does not seem capable of dealing with a situation where 'work' is not as needed anymore, of course some people will still manage just fine (if you are at the top of your field, whatever your field is, you'll be ok), but if you are not at the top what are you going to do? Do people here honestly assume that if wages stay the way they are now you will be able to make a living wage by being a mediocre stand-up comedian? or a mediocre painter? or a mediocre musician? what are you going to do if there are no jobs available to you that mesh with your skills that can enable you to earn a living?
that's why likely it's the same RAW file 'developed' in camera raw for shadows / midtones / highlights and merged in PS with layers/masking to create a good HDR composite.
It really depends from the rules of the contest if the above is acceptable or not, but I don't consider it more cheating than dodging & burning in the darkroom...
I have played WOW off and on since just after release (coworker was in beta and kept asking me to try it, once it was released I joined and was hooked) but MOP has been the first patch I didn't resub for. Personally the best times for me were TBC (Karazhan with friends, occasionally getting in higher tier raids as a sub) vanilla (so many great memories) and wotlk up to ulduar more or less.
In a game that has millions of players there are millions of stories and millions of reasons of why players play or quit, these are why I am personally not subscribed (even if I wish I could be, if TBC was going on I'd be resubbing tomorrow)
- no sense of community: LFR, LFD and CRZ have completely killed any sense of community: since there is no downside for being abusive most people seem to be, in the old days if you ninjaed something in a dungeon run the other player(s) would message your guild leader and you got a talking to, if you did it more than once you got kicked out, or your guild could even end up being blacklisted so you would never PUG again. You met people while levelling and ran dungeons together, and form friendships which sometimes led to guilds, and sometimes to various PUG runs, and in general again to a sense of community.
- difficulty levels are out of whack: in the old days there were easy instances, and hard instances, you brought your not-as-competent friends to the easy instances and carried them a bit, and it was fine, and it was fun. Nowadays it's super easy heroics, brainless LFR, and hard raids where most fights have a 'one person not as good can kill everybody else's evening'. In the old days it was possible to carry people in raids too, just look at how many people died on average on the safety dance in 'bad guilds' or mixed the polarity, but still it was possible to down the boss if at least 2/3rds of the raid was competent. Yes, this meant that the 'super hardcore' had a bit of a snoozefest at times, but it also meant that a LARGE part of the subscribers could do the content as it was written.
Now it seems that 'see the content' means 'tune it so drooling on random keyboard keys makes the boss go down' while normal and heroic are tuned hard in terms of mechanics. That might be good for the hardcore, but not for the average player (I shy from the 'casual' label because just because somebody is not as good at the game as somebody else it doesn't make them not care, which 'casual' seems to imply).
- game seems focused towards more and more time invested: in the old days the minimum amount of time you needed to play on a daily basis to do content was not nearly as high as it is now. People with less available time were still able to contribute very well, if they had more time they either had more alts or they did some of the OPTIONAL grinds (black thorium, furbolgs, ...).
Nowadays if you can't put at least a few hours PER CHARACTER a day you're going to get left behind, because of the dailies, reps and so on. It seems that Blizzard listened to the loud cries of people with no life but the game that 'there isn't anything else to do' and so added more 'things to do' but also made them pretty much mandatory.
- design constraints shaped by non-game factors: many times reading GC's twitter replies you get some form of 'well, we could do xyz and give you this, or we could do this other thing and give you a lot more, we can't afford to do both' usually in the form of 'you either get a new raid or a new dungeon, and we think a new raid is a better investment of our money' or 'you either get 3 new scenarios or a new dungeon, and we think the scenarios are better'. It seems that vanilla/tbc were games where the design was the priority, not how much it cost to implement.
Complex problems have complex solutions, but if it was up to me for the next patch I would:
- keep LFR/LFD but make them REALM RESTRICTED, you get grouped ONLY with people on your realm
- remove CRZ entirely
- free transfers for everybody once every 3 months.
- rework
yes and no, conceptually they do go hand in hand (I personally always write unit tests for my own code), but you do need to have a completely separate person/team testing from the person/team developing, because you do not want to misdirect them ('oh, this works, it's this part that might have issues' and then it turns out there were issues in the 'this works' part that won't be tested as much due to your feedback).
You really need all 3 legs of the tripod to deliver quality software:
- the developer codes to spec and writes unit test
- the reviewer looks at the code, the spec and at the tests
- QA validates the program based on what the spec said the program should work like
of course this assumes that you have time to write the spec, to keep it up to date, to do code reviews, and to do a proper job of QA. All the time doing these tasks pays off in spades, but you do need buy-in from management to make them happen consistently.
I think you are forgetting that if the release date is set, and dev gets asked to work 70 hour weeks, you will have to do all the testing you were planning to do in a LOT less time once the devs are done, and if some critical bug ships guess who's going to be held responsible?
Testing can be as hard as development: it's not easy, for example, to develop and execute a test plan for a complex failover in a distributed system, and to be able to give to the developer a good repro case/setup so they can debug things if something went wrong.
Just like there is 'drudge work' QA there is also 'drudge work' development, but the skill ceiling can be as high in QA as in Dev, because in the end you can think of a strong QA engineer as a developer trying to produce software that will validate your product, which can be as hard as writing it in the first place as you need a very clear understanding of how it should work and why and how to try to make it fail.
Good QA people are worth their weight in gold for complex software, but finding them (and retaining them, and compensating them properly, and not outsourcing them) is not easy...
according to your 'sweet spot' theory maybe the sweet spot for me riding my bike would be 30mph (should take less energy to go 30mph than 20mph) oh, wait...
Your comparison to EPA is apples/oranges, just because you can get 34mpg at 70mph it does NOT mean that if you go 55mph you will get only 29mpg everything else being equal...
just because the speed limit is 80 it doesn't make it any more fuel efficient to go over 70...
the music, which used iMuse, was actually great if you ran it to an outboard midi GM module (I used my Roland D5 keyboard at the time, which worked as it was compatible-ish with the MT-32 a lot of games back then supported), it was also awesome since it was midi it would seamlessly switch between "quiet" and "battle", I was really sad when games switched from that tech to CD tracks as the switch in that case it's a heck of a lot more noticeable.
With the available quality of virtual instruments nowadays I am a bit miffed that more games don't go for stems and mix things on the fly vs having fully produced tracks.
noise cancellation headphones work well for airplanes, trains, ..., I am not so sure they work very well for voices (or at least I haven't found any that do, usually they make voices even more annoying as they cut the background noise and make the voices stand out even more).