That's awesome! That is the nicest, fairest, sneakiest way to deal with customers I've ever heard of. Makes perfect sense, the customers do all the work, and hey, you're even helping out your competition. Of course it only works if you can handle losing those bad customers in the first place...
Re:scalability is a dead issue
on
On PHP and Scaling
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree, but I've also seen the opposite - fairly simple projects completely buried in the complexity of multi-tiered architecture.
An example was a project I "inherited" a few years back that was written with ASP for the presentation layer, business logic in COM objects, MS-SQL stored procedures for the database calls and MS-SQL for the backend database. It needed three developers to maintain all the different parts, and a simple change like displaying an existing database field on a web page meant changing code in three different places.
Debugging was also several orders of magnitude more complex - I remember the guys had a serious crash bug we were chasing for days, which we only solved by rewriting as a single ASP script with direct db calls so we see what the bloody thing was doing. Obviously we had access to the existing working multi-tier code as a base, but we did this in only a few hours.
See... I'm not sure I want this to happen, although I feel like a bit of a sore loser/spoiler. I don't want to make IE look good, I want Firefox to look like Firefox, and people who use it to go "ooohhh this is the OTHER browser, the one that DOESN'T SUCK." Maybe I'm just getting crusty and mean in my old age...:-/
Yes, Stand Alone Complex is excellent. It's an episodic series, so there's far more scope for tangled plots, characters development and osmotic atmosphere than when such a story is crammed into a 2 hour movie.
There are 32 episodes translated now? Yikes... I better go check those newer ones out!
I understand the technical reasons why Microsoft are in this situation - they changed the CPU, the system architecture and the video card architecture. The problem is, consumers don't give a crap about any of that stuff. They care about playing good fun games, and price.
The Xbox 2 will launch with one or two good games, and a small bunch of other below-average games. At this stage, with backward compatibility, X1 users would sell their X1 to get some cash, and buy an X2. They could play the one good new game, and all their old X1 games. Without backward compatibility... well, most X1 owners of reasonable means and intelligence stick to playing their X1.
As X2 development continues, X1 games drop in price, which is another reason for current X1 owners to not buy an X2.
I agree... the Xbox is just getting up some speed! They have a solid lineup now (Halo, Knights of the Old Republic, Crimson Skies 2, Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell, Ninja Gaiden), with some good new games just coming out (Full Spectrum Warrior, Chronicles of Riddick) and some big ones coming in at the end of the year (Halo 2, Prince of Persia 2, Doom 3, Jade Empire, KOTOR 2). Xbox Live is kicking ass too, bringing the competition and teamplay seen in PC games to the console arena.
The idea that they want to rush in a new system that throws all this hard-fought good stuff out the window... it's mind-buggeringly stupid. This is exactly the same concept as written about in the recent How Microsoft Lost the API War article. Not having compatibility is suicidal.
I agree, this is way too soon. DVD is just hitting the mainstream, with burners this year becoming affordable and formats stabilising. Most players will successfully play DVD+R and DVD-R now, which means that consumers can spend with reasonable confidence without being betamaxed out of the market. DVD players are finally reaching a price point comparable with VCRs, although recordable DVD units are still far more expensive.
The idea that everyone should chuck all their DVD stuff that is finally, finally becoming stable and standardized enough is ridiculous. A successor to DVD is inevitable, but in about 10 years from now, when the market has stagnated and people are looking for the next step.
This is true... although from what I remember of the movie, he did all this cool flipping, zooming and manipulation and then had to put data on hard media and physically walk it across the room to his associate when he wanted to send him something. What, no email? No messaging? No network?
I just recently started using a similar app on Windows to store my password details, Password Safe. It uses Blowfish for its encryption, has versions for Linux and PocketPC and has had its security verified by Counterpane Labs (Bruce Schneier's company).
I guess it would be safer to keep all my password details in my head alone, but this is a damn sight better than sticky notes or text files. It also made me go through and change the weak or repeated passwords, too.
In all honesty, I think his habits have probably grown from a situation where he doesn't have to foot the bill. It reminds me of CEOs who have ridiculously expensive laptops - if they had to actually plonk down the cash out of their own wallets instead of just having their company buy it for them, they'd stop being so silly.
I think you're right - costs will definitely skyrocket as corporations' costs start to climb. However, the next step after that is even more interesting. Past a certain moment, being a consumer just isn't worthwhile, as buying food costs more than it would cost to make it yourself, given a modicum of skills and equipment.
When people start to look after their own needs in this fashion, this puts even more pressure on the corporations, and boom, hyperinflation, human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together... mass hysteria.
I'm fairly confident people have been saying this over and over for the last 100 years, but prices on all kinds of things seem to be getting pretty ridiculous. This starts me to wondering just how much it would cost for me to be able to produce basic things myself, instead of trying to keep on the inflation treadmill.
I used my Nokia 7650's "voice record" function for making notes while I was out and about. Very useful and much faster than twiddling away with the digit keyboard, although I can't use it at the moment (it's not tri-band and I'm in North America).
Most development teams these days have a Project Lead, who effectively is the "author" for the game. There's plenty of room for collaberation and individual expression, but that person is the one with the vision and the company clout to say stuff like "No, Gordon Freeman does NOT have nipple rings. Redo this whole thing."
I'm assuming the SD card they are talking about is any old SD card, ie: just storage? Newegg is selling Kingston 256MB cards for about US$50, which means about 4 hours of mp3 music at 128kbps. It makes the resulting unit a US$200 mp3 player, which is pretty decent in the portable player market but it naturally does a shedload lot more things than just play music.
I'm avoiding that argument all together. I think it would be kinda silly to argue about who caused the comet as it loomed large in the sky above our heads. I would prefer to organise Bruce Willis to fly a nuke up and blow it to hell, and worry about whose fault it was sometime later.
Geological records also have strong evidence that a comet smashing into the Earth's crust and wiping out all life is a perfectly natural, regular event. I'm fairly motivated to try and stop it happening, though.
Absolutely. What ends up happening in a pen and paper game is never quite what the GM plans, or what the players want. Plus, there's always that one critical fumble out there that will totally mess up the storyline, leaving the GM in stitches and the main hero in pieces...
Re:$33 cd? It is going to decrease profit
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
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· Score: 2, Informative
Excellent call. This is exactly the same conclusion I came to, particularly considering these guys' track record. Just when they were close to making this whole online music thing work, they do something mind-buggeringly stupid like this, and the whole damn thing falls apart.
Wow, the timing on this story (and your post) is pretty eerie... I had a very similar conversation about Microsoft just yesterday, and with a graphic artist, too.
I was trying to explain to him exactly why different browsers process or render html/css code differently. I'd spent my entire Easter friday in the office, buggering about with a particular website that shall remain nameless, trying to get it ready for its launch on Easter monday. He was completely mystified that Mac IE5.2 and Safari should look different with the same code, not to mention the differences between PC Firefox and PC IE 6. His opinion was "It's the internet, of course it should all look and work the same. Aren't there standards?" I tried to explain that yes, there are standards, but companies like Microsoft deviate from them to strengthen their position in the market. If a major company's product is the de facto standard, it follows that even if the minor players do things according to the standards, the perception is that their products are actually broken.
It was then a short step to his annoyance with people who like Macs, or hate Windows, or love Amiga (ok I added that one in there, he didn't mention Amiga at all). They're just tools, he said - you use whatever's around, do your job, and go home. If the buttons are in a different place on a Mac, who cares? If the Windows version does things differently, there's no difference. It's like a car, with its indicator on the left side of the steering column instead of the right. His blissful ignorance of the frustrations of incompatible protocols, file formats and systems comes from working in an industry where it doesn't matter. GIFs work everywhere. TIFFs do too, and when you print a poster out on A0, it's fairly unlikely that someone will wander along with an incompatible reality and make it look different.
About this time, I think I realised that Microsoft is going to be around for a long, long, long time. No-one outside IT cares that Microsoft Movie Player can load a bunch of movie formats, but only output one. In fact, no one even comprehends why that's even important.
Slashdot Mirror
That's awesome! That is the nicest, fairest, sneakiest way to deal with customers I've ever heard of. Makes perfect sense, the customers do all the work, and hey, you're even helping out your competition. Of course it only works if you can handle losing those bad customers in the first place...
I agree, but I've also seen the opposite - fairly simple projects completely buried in the complexity of multi-tiered architecture.
An example was a project I "inherited" a few years back that was written with ASP for the presentation layer, business logic in COM objects, MS-SQL stored procedures for the database calls and MS-SQL for the backend database. It needed three developers to maintain all the different parts, and a simple change like displaying an existing database field on a web page meant changing code in three different places.
Debugging was also several orders of magnitude more complex - I remember the guys had a serious crash bug we were chasing for days, which we only solved by rewriting as a single ASP script with direct db calls so we see what the bloody thing was doing. Obviously we had access to the existing working multi-tier code as a base, but we did this in only a few hours.
See... I'm not sure I want this to happen, although I feel like a bit of a sore loser/spoiler. I don't want to make IE look good, I want Firefox to look like Firefox, and people who use it to go "ooohhh this is the OTHER browser, the one that DOESN'T SUCK." Maybe I'm just getting crusty and mean in my old age... :-/
Yes, Stand Alone Complex is excellent. It's an episodic series, so there's far more scope for tangled plots, characters development and osmotic atmosphere than when such a story is crammed into a 2 hour movie.
There are 32 episodes translated now? Yikes... I better go check those newer ones out!
I understand the technical reasons why Microsoft are in this situation - they changed the CPU, the system architecture and the video card architecture. The problem is, consumers don't give a crap about any of that stuff. They care about playing good fun games, and price.
The Xbox 2 will launch with one or two good games, and a small bunch of other below-average games. At this stage, with backward compatibility, X1 users would sell their X1 to get some cash, and buy an X2. They could play the one good new game, and all their old X1 games. Without backward compatibility... well, most X1 owners of reasonable means and intelligence stick to playing their X1.
As X2 development continues, X1 games drop in price, which is another reason for current X1 owners to not buy an X2.
I agree... the Xbox is just getting up some speed! They have a solid lineup now (Halo, Knights of the Old Republic, Crimson Skies 2, Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell, Ninja Gaiden), with some good new games just coming out (Full Spectrum Warrior, Chronicles of Riddick) and some big ones coming in at the end of the year (Halo 2, Prince of Persia 2, Doom 3, Jade Empire, KOTOR 2). Xbox Live is kicking ass too, bringing the competition and teamplay seen in PC games to the console arena.
The idea that they want to rush in a new system that throws all this hard-fought good stuff out the window... it's mind-buggeringly stupid. This is exactly the same concept as written about in the recent How Microsoft Lost the API War article. Not having compatibility is suicidal.
I agree, this is way too soon. DVD is just hitting the mainstream, with burners this year becoming affordable and formats stabilising. Most players will successfully play DVD+R and DVD-R now, which means that consumers can spend with reasonable confidence without being betamaxed out of the market. DVD players are finally reaching a price point comparable with VCRs, although recordable DVD units are still far more expensive.
The idea that everyone should chuck all their DVD stuff that is finally, finally becoming stable and standardized enough is ridiculous. A successor to DVD is inevitable, but in about 10 years from now, when the market has stagnated and people are looking for the next step.
This is true... although from what I remember of the movie, he did all this cool flipping, zooming and manipulation and then had to put data on hard media and physically walk it across the room to his associate when he wanted to send him something. What, no email? No messaging? No network?
I just recently started using a similar app on Windows to store my password details, Password Safe. It uses Blowfish for its encryption, has versions for Linux and PocketPC and has had its security verified by Counterpane Labs (Bruce Schneier's company).
I guess it would be safer to keep all my password details in my head alone, but this is a damn sight better than sticky notes or text files. It also made me go through and change the weak or repeated passwords, too.
"...doing light-saber battles..."
"I see your Schwartz is as big as mine..."
In all honesty, I think his habits have probably grown from a situation where he doesn't have to foot the bill. It reminds me of CEOs who have ridiculously expensive laptops - if they had to actually plonk down the cash out of their own wallets instead of just having their company buy it for them, they'd stop being so silly.
Or at least, you'd HOPE they would.
I think by "free" these guys mean "really expensive".
I think you're right - costs will definitely skyrocket as corporations' costs start to climb. However, the next step after that is even more interesting. Past a certain moment, being a consumer just isn't worthwhile, as buying food costs more than it would cost to make it yourself, given a modicum of skills and equipment.
When people start to look after their own needs in this fashion, this puts even more pressure on the corporations, and boom, hyperinflation, human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together... mass hysteria.
I'm fairly confident people have been saying this over and over for the last 100 years, but prices on all kinds of things seem to be getting pretty ridiculous. This starts me to wondering just how much it would cost for me to be able to produce basic things myself, instead of trying to keep on the inflation treadmill.
I used my Nokia 7650's "voice record" function for making notes while I was out and about. Very useful and much faster than twiddling away with the digit keyboard, although I can't use it at the moment (it's not tri-band and I'm in North America).
Uh... there's a difference?
Unless they're guest-starring as Vogons.
This is known as lossy compression.
Most development teams these days have a Project Lead, who effectively is the "author" for the game. There's plenty of room for collaberation and individual expression, but that person is the one with the vision and the company clout to say stuff like "No, Gordon Freeman does NOT have nipple rings. Redo this whole thing."
I think this story wins the "formatting most likely to make people think Slashdot has been hacked" award.
I'm assuming the SD card they are talking about is any old SD card, ie: just storage? Newegg is selling Kingston 256MB cards for about US$50, which means about 4 hours of mp3 music at 128kbps. It makes the resulting unit a US$200 mp3 player, which is pretty decent in the portable player market but it naturally does a shedload lot more things than just play music.
Hmmm... that's actually a pretty good deal!
I'm avoiding that argument all together. I think it would be kinda silly to argue about who caused the comet as it loomed large in the sky above our heads. I would prefer to organise Bruce Willis to fly a nuke up and blow it to hell, and worry about whose fault it was sometime later.
Geological records also have strong evidence that a comet smashing into the Earth's crust and wiping out all life is a perfectly natural, regular event. I'm fairly motivated to try and stop it happening, though.
Absolutely. What ends up happening in a pen and paper game is never quite what the GM plans, or what the players want. Plus, there's always that one critical fumble out there that will totally mess up the storyline, leaving the GM in stitches and the main hero in pieces...
Excellent call. This is exactly the same conclusion I came to, particularly considering these guys' track record. Just when they were close to making this whole online music thing work, they do something mind-buggeringly stupid like this, and the whole damn thing falls apart.
Wow, the timing on this story (and your post) is pretty eerie... I had a very similar conversation about Microsoft just yesterday, and with a graphic artist, too.
I was trying to explain to him exactly why different browsers process or render html/css code differently. I'd spent my entire Easter friday in the office, buggering about with a particular website that shall remain nameless, trying to get it ready for its launch on Easter monday. He was completely mystified that Mac IE5.2 and Safari should look different with the same code, not to mention the differences between PC Firefox and PC IE 6. His opinion was "It's the internet, of course it should all look and work the same. Aren't there standards?" I tried to explain that yes, there are standards, but companies like Microsoft deviate from them to strengthen their position in the market. If a major company's product is the de facto standard, it follows that even if the minor players do things according to the standards, the perception is that their products are actually broken.
It was then a short step to his annoyance with people who like Macs, or hate Windows, or love Amiga (ok I added that one in there, he didn't mention Amiga at all). They're just tools, he said - you use whatever's around, do your job, and go home. If the buttons are in a different place on a Mac, who cares? If the Windows version does things differently, there's no difference. It's like a car, with its indicator on the left side of the steering column instead of the right. His blissful ignorance of the frustrations of incompatible protocols, file formats and systems comes from working in an industry where it doesn't matter. GIFs work everywhere. TIFFs do too, and when you print a poster out on A0, it's fairly unlikely that someone will wander along with an incompatible reality and make it look different.
About this time, I think I realised that Microsoft is going to be around for a long, long, long time. No-one outside IT cares that Microsoft Movie Player can load a bunch of movie formats, but only output one. In fact, no one even comprehends why that's even important.