I've got a Cube and a Playstation so I'll go ahead and ad my two cents. The Cube controller is an excellent controller that is just a joy to use. However, it's odd array of buttons can often lead much to be desired from games that are cross platform. Soul Calibur is an excellent example of this. Designed for a Dreamcast / PS controller type with four buttons in diamond, it relies on hitting 2 buttons simultaneously to do many moves. For moves that don't use "A" the Gamecube is tricky and/or relies on mapping a trigger to the combination. This leaves you short.
Sports games also tend to assume a PS type layout but the problem there is differant. They want you to have the 4 triggers. When they don't, they tend to map things to the second analog stick (C) which can be trickier to hit properly. I now tend to buy my sports games for the PS.
That said, when you look at games that are exclusive to the Cube, they use the controller in just wonderful ways. First part games are the obvious examples. Metroid Prime had some simple controls but had incredible depth just a flick of the C stick away. WindWaker was just great. Then look to something like F-Zero to see how those big ol' analog triggers can be used to give a player the finesse that a controller like the dual shock just doesn't offer.
The dual shock is great about giving you a lot of buttons to press, and if they add another button somewhere, they are playing to their strength. The cube controller on the other hand is about initial ease of use and later finesse. When you pick up a controller and and a game it's obvious how to do the most basic thing in that game. You press that big A in the middle of the controller.
Thanks for this article. I was going to write an "Ask Slashdot" asking if there were any Tivo like services for streaming web radio. I just wanted to do a bit of research on my own first. If one of these works for me, I'll be able to record all my favorite NPR weekend shows and perhaps avoid "car moments."
Origin was my favorite studio for quite a while. For some reason Ultima Underworld really stuck with me and I played and loved the various Wing Commanders - even if the second (?) one had the lovely feature where if you underperformed in a mission the next missions would get harder inevitably leading to a vicious cycle where you fly a slow, useless ship without support against many tough enemy ships. It did add replayability though:)
I haven't been moved by Origin in a while though. I have mixed feelings now. I mourn the loss of them, I'm angry at EA and a bit of me feels like the studio was put out of its misery (not to discout how much it sucks to lose one's job). So long Origin, you're missed already.
I agree as well. But the demo I played that most sticks with me was the demo for UT. I had played some LAN games of the original Unreal but UT was just a joyous paradigm shift. The first time I won a match by leaping the rockets that were shot at my knees and firing a clean shot sticks with me. In some ways, I'd rather be playing UT than 2K4, but 2K4 is good enough to get me excited again - even if it is too bouncy.
What's so great about the UT demos is that they are high enough quality that they allow a decent player base to form and folks to get fairly good. Then the game comes out and if you want the same level of competition you need to buy the game. If you aren't so good, the demo servers will be a good place to practice.
Interesting, but looking at the pictures with the article, it looks like somebody made a boneheaded decision. They spend a couple hundred bucks on a playstation, a game and a mat. If they had dug deep and spent another 20 bucks, they could have had twice as many people using the mats at a time.
Another weird thing is that they put the mat straight on a gym floor. Maybe these kids who are much lighter than me won't have a problem, but I'm sure that mat would take a long walk under me if it wasn't on something more sticky - maybe it's a hard mat.
Anyway, nice of you guys to point this out since I just got done with my Saturday DDR work-out. Those six and seven footers are definately more demanding than anything I did in PE.
I can't imagine it either. My favorite source control approach that I've seen is having each developers machine backed up to tape nightly. You want your source as it was last week? Let's go get that tape.
It's still amazing to me that a project as large as Linux was able to be so successfull BEFORE the changes that were made to the development process. It lacked a centralized CVS, coherent bug tracking, automated testing... These are all things I use in the smallest of professional projets. Many eyes goes a long way towards compensating for having many hands in a big project, but some structure seems like it's helped.
I thought it'd be interesting to see how Yahoo handled 2 classic google bombs. "Miserable Failure" and "French Military Victories".
Miserable Failure:
History (as I understand it): There was an effort to link "miserable failure" to the white house biography of W. This happened after Gephardt declared Bush a miserable failure of a President. If the sites were bomb proof, we'd see articles relating to that major declaration high. If not we'd see the bomb's target high followed by the numerous right wing counter attacks against Michael Moore and others.
Google: Google's results are dominated by the bomb, but its fifth place mark gets a relevant article.
Yahoo: Also bombed, but has the article as its 1st link.
Winner: Yahoo
French military victories: History:
The French military has had some victories, but not a ton. To mock them for not jumping on board on the whole blow up Iraq gig, somebody spoofed a google result to make it appear that there were no results but did you mean "defeats"? It got big.
Google: Totally overwhelmed by the bomb. It's top choice is the bomb target and everything else is people linking to the bomb, talking about it, or reporting on it. No non-bomb related historical pages for 100 hits as far as i could see.
Yahoo: Pretty much the same results. Although results 21 and 35 suggests Yahoo selling your search results. However, hit number 80 scored a paper on Napolean.
Winner: Yahoo by a hair.
Overall: Yahoo shows itself to be vulnerable to attacks targetting Google albiet slightly less so. It also appears to intentionally seed its results with crap you don't want. I'll stick to google for now.
I was stepping out of the room when the Today show started covering this story this morning. They showed a clip of what appeared to be a Final Fantasy type game. The "outrageous" teaser they gave us before cutting to commercial was a cut scene of a woman's face as she's taking a shower, the view shifts up to the shower head as the shower is turned off, then (it what might be a differant cut scene spliced for TV) we see her in a tank top and panties. It wasn't over the top, but it was definately a shout out to hormonal 14 year olds.
It might be surprising for some parents here in prudish America who wouldn't expect that from a game rated "T". On the other hand, you can turn on the network broadcasters on TV and see shows like Dog Eat Dog where they get women (and men) in skimpy swimsuits to perform athletic challenges while getting sprayed with water.
It's not just a lack of time, but my time has taken a differant shape. You'd think a 40 hr\week job would leave my evenings fairly free, and they do. However, I spend good chunks of those evenings with my wife, and when I do go ahead and play a game during the evening, it has to be a game that I can pause and come back to. I'm just not willing to ignore my wife if she has anything to talk about.
The pausing requirement is a surprisingly huge one. It totally rules out a game like Warcraft 3's online play. Leaving your team high and dry for 2 minutes makes you an ass. The games aren't short either. Even an online FPS can be tough to step away from. That means I'm usually playing offline. With a general lack of time, epic strategy games like Civ get some attention but I tend to lose interest more than in the past when a 4 hour Civ session was fun and reasonable.
I'm left playing a lot of sports games on consoles and getting my online competitive fix by playing Hattrick which is fairly time independant. I will probably pick up UT2K4 though I skipped 3. I think weekend mornings and some other times will allow me some good blocks to play. I'm not sure how I'll handle not being as good as I was in UT, but I think I'll still be able to take out my share of fourteen year-old pimple faced punks (FPFPs).
I've been pretty darn bummed about gaming recently. I do have hope for UT2k4 as the demo was great, but I've bought a few games recently that I just haven't got much out of. I feel like an athlete who is out of his prime but refuses to retire.
I tend to disagree. It would seem to be difficult to impossible to prove the correctness of a fairly large app - for instance Microsoft Word. Particularly when that app has to interact with numerous third party drivers etc. Furthermore, as the article states, the number of people who are really capable of "proving" things conclusively is quite limited.
Also, the article makes the point that we often the code does excactly what the coder wanted it to do - that's just wrong because of wrong or changing requirements. If the definition of "correct" has bugs, there's no hope for proving based on that definition. Furthermore, it requires an absurd level of specification when interacting with a graphical UI. The customer really doesn't want to specify the UI, they just want one that lets them get their work done and is "nice".
Why is it better to pay for a support contract to use another companies geeks than your own? The other geeks are looking out for their corporate bottom line, not your bottom line. They have no vested interest in your success or failure. Every customer is just like the other.
Ok. The support contract is like insurance. You use it if you have problems, you don't if you don't. The alternative approach to buying insurance is to self-insure. Essentially put a stack of money in the bank to spend when you have problems. Only really big companies can afford this. Likewise, if you have a sticky problem with software, you need some expertise. You can either pay to have that expertise at your disposal when you need it by calling the vendor or pay to have that expertise stockpiled in house. If you never use it, you lose. Further, since we're talking knowledge, not money, it's easier for the vendor to stockpile that knowledge. Gaps in any individual's understanding are more likely to be filled by somebody else on that team.
A large corporation may be able to self-insure with knowledge as well. They have a ton of people babysitting products and get to learn them very well.
The downside to that from a manger's perspective is that if something ever goes seriously wrong, they don't have anyone to blame but themselves. There's no lifeline to grab onto and force to make it right. It is because the vendor's people act with the vendor's best interest in mind - they need to keep your contract - that they are strong. Clearly some vendors and some contracts are better than others about this sort of stuff.
Very cool. I hadn't even considered the posibility of using the system AFTER the call had been transfered to a warm body. In retrospect, that seems fairly obvious. Thanks for sharing.
Hey thanks, I appreciate it. I was also expecting somebody to have written something to this effect and just got angrier as I scrolled down the thread to see an endlist list of one-liners. Guess, I just beat you to it:)
I hate seeing this sort of stuff. Because a customer is angry, you decide to give them better support than someone who treats you well. The obvious next step is that if someone takes his anger out on the help desk worker, they get to speak to a manager / higher level support person. Is his actual problem any more real / difficult to solve than the person who contains their frustration and treats the employees with respect? Who would you rather have as a customer?
That all said, there is a good use for this technology. Detect where in your phone tree people seem to be getting angry. Log that and analyse that for future use. If there are consistent places in the tree that people get frustrated with, you know where to focus your redesign efforts to make it better. Of course, you may see the anger develop two or more steps down the tree from the unclear question that causes the pissed-offedness. It'd probably take some careful analysis / research to really use this effectively.
While I agree with others that you made some broad judgement about this family from only a few fews of it, I think you touch on an important point. I also see a trend in parents be subservient to their children and that frightens me as well. A nurse friend of mine in pediatrics has noted a steady increase in the number of children who badly misbehave. Coupled with this are parents who describe exceptionally soft discipline approaches - Mostly the "try to reason with a 3 year old" types. They go so far as to argue that not treating children like you would an adult hurts the child's self esteem. Remembering my bad experiences in elementary and middle school, I tend to think kids start out with too much self estemm:).
Anyway, I've got off point. While the family she saw might have been at an off-moment, I think it's fair to assume that there are many families with the characteristics the observation led her to conclude. Parents are a critical link in a child's upbrining. As someone without a stay-at-home mom, I definately respect the role of baby-sitters, day-care facilities and school. Somewhere in that chain, kids need to be taught to respect eachother and that people dieing is not funny / entertaining it's sad. There needs to be a teaching of values. Part of that is being aware of what your kids do for entertainment and providing counter-balance. If the awareness isn't there, we are in trouble.
For those of you with single mothers who have attacked the poster, I appreciate some of your insight. Clearly, the are overwhelmed women who work their asses off to put food on the table and raise good kids. Part of their teaching values is by example. They show a strong work ethic and an example of sacrifice for the children they pour their love onto. Where they are unable to be good "police" they rely on having taught strong values early on. If the your mother was tough enough to raise some kids while working a full time job or two, I suspect she also didn't get pushed around by her kids too often - as in the example. That's merely speculation. That said, I think when you look into the parts of the US with the highest rates of single mothers - ie where you are raised by a single mom and so are your friends, you often find a nasty breakdown of society. It's a really hard thing to pull off and not everyone's mom can do it as well as yours might have.
To the respondants who attacked her for being a girl who false expectations of policing, I've seen plenty of male friends (myself included) whose parents wanted to know what they were upto, who they were with etc. Those restrictions probably tend to be tougher on girls, but they exist for the boys too.
Finally, I think we should be aware that the part of our youth we remember best is probably when we were teenages - most able to make our own choices and most allowed to do so. Meanwhile, it was while we were younger when our values were even more maleable when our parents were probably policing harder and filtering more things from us - without us neccassarily being able to remember that today. That's when we learned that there were limits we needed to live within.
Here is a guy who tries to take the right steps. He knows many video games label themselves as dangerous. He's scanned them and filters out the ones which he believed were dangerous to his son. This is good parenting. Sadly, the system he depended on failed him. Now he needs to know why it failed, much like the US needs to know how the CIA could be as misinformed about Iraq as it was.
When he asks who is responsible for labelling, he's trying to understand the system better. Don't attack him for that. What does this get him other than fodder for legal recourse? If he finds out publishers are responsible, then he knows to that the publisher of the game he bought can't be trusted and should be avoided. Likewise up and down the chain. This improves safety for him. If labelling is mandatory, he can be relatively comfortable getting games from large companies who would have the adaquate fear of litigation to check. If it's optional, he may need to reasses his strategy alltogether - perhaps try and play all these games through himself before sharing them with his son. Will he be able to detect the danger signs? Maybe.
Don't attack a guy in a rough situation who is watching over his kid at the hospital for trying to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future. I suspect he knows that all games carry some risk. Instead of depriving his kid of all games, he is doing his best to filter the games that pose the highest risk. Likewise, instead of not driving cars, I try to purchase cars with good reliability, anti-lock brakes and airbags. Again, attacking someone who is struggling to limit risks for his son is insensitive, and childish.
If it can be proven that people fed Saddam chemical weapons knowing he'd hit civilians, they should be prosecuted. Honestly, my research on that isn't great. What I did read suggests that the US classified him as an ally which allowed private companies to sell him things that could be used to create WMD. After Iraq committed some horrible atrocities the US, together with most of Western Europe, continued to fund fund Iraq and provide logistical support against Iran.
Feeding him chemical weapons can't be defended. Letting companies sell Iraq the building blocks for these weapons - dual use products - is frightening. It's either gross ignorance or callous wrong behaviour. The documents suggest that folks in charge didn't really care. They knew he'd kill who he wanted to and whether he used bullets or gas wasn't their concern. Scary.
Feeding him conventional arms could be argued for. When I say that it may have been a mistake to do that, I'm not making euphimisms. There was a strategic choice to be made. Let Iran form a fundemental Islamist empire across the ME or aid a nasty but secular dictatorship in resisting. When you aid a dictatorship you know some of that aid will be diverted to propping up the dictatorship - that's part of the deal.
When you talk conventional arms, you see the same problems in Afganistan. The warlords, and many who went on to form Al-Queda, cut their teeth fighting the Soviets and were Western trained and armed. When I say Western, I of course mean US - nobody else has the funds. There have been simply aweful consequence from that. Certaintly, not providing aid to Afganistan in its post-war rebuilding was a critical error. Was aiding it against the USSR? Probably not.
All of this taken into account, it doesn't affect the core arguement very much. While the past suggests that several members of the administration should not still be holding public office these days, where Iraq got their weapons doesn't have much to do with what to do with them later.
You should have disarmed Saddam, searched and destroyed the WMD and controlled the influx of food/medicins/oil back when you had won the first GW.
I agree that Iraq should have been disarmed after GW1. When you say, "you should have disarmed..." I take that to mean the US should have taken unilateral responsibility for search and destroy within Iraq as opposed to the plan of the UN which was to insist Iraq disarm itself and provide proof to inspectors in the same fashion the US and USSR verify the destruction of nuclear weapons. You've made the right wing here in the US very happy. They always thought it was a mistake not to "finish the job" at the end of GW1. That approach would have lost the support of the other ME countries though. Perhaps, it would have been better that way. God knows that trusting Iraq to disarm itself and document that didn't work. Frankly, when the inspectors stopped being verifiers and started to be the ones doing search and destroy was when it was pretty much doomed.
You're also right that the UN did a terrible job of controlling the flow of humanitarian supplies into Iraq. They trusted the leadership of that country to spend its income saving the lives of its people - what a bonehead move. To suggest Americans control those supplies is much better. We'd of course have to form a.. uh.. "peace-keeping" contigent which the US army is \ was badly trained for and secure distribution centers throughout Iraq. From there we could do our best to see that food and medicine got to those who needed it.
In the last two sections, I mostly jumped all over your use of the word "you". I think you're placing the responsibility and blame soley on the Americans for an international system and responsibility. I think if the Americans had to do it all, this is how it would have to be done. I think in effect, you suggest that the correct action after GW1 was GW2. I don't think so, and I don't think that's what you really mean to say.
Right... So you are in support of firearms and explosives on your airplane? I assume you'll say something like, "Sure! if someone tries to pull something everyone else will shoot them." There are always limits, like not being able to scream "Fire!" in a movie theatre. You're also not free to not pay your taxes or exercise your right to push old ladies down.
While we're argueing over the number of countries involved (not that it really matters as far as justification is concerned) here's one person's description of who is in the coalition
The obvious problem with these lists though is that many countries added themselves to the list to help in peace keeping who opposed the war. I don't really vouch for the validity of the list and don't feel like being attacked about it, I'm just trying to be helpful.
For the thousandth time. There probably aren't any WMDs in Iraq. That doesn't mean that prior to going in, anyone outside of Iraq actually knew that. And without knowing that was the case, most assumed that weapons would be there.
For sake of nerddom, a slashdot appropriate anology:
Let's say Iraq is a closed box. It's got a cat inside. The cat is dead if this radioactive doohickey pings the box. If the cat is dead, the scientists have 10 minutes until the box explodes destroying the lab and probably killing some scientists. The scientists rap on the box but the cat doesn't meow back. The cat is either alive or dead - or if you're really into quantum - it's both. As a scientist, I think I'd have to open that box and diffuse the cat - even if I have to break the box to do it.
- please don't take that too seriously.
Back to spies. My understanding is that US and USSR treaties allowed third party verification of weapons destruction. Isn't that somewhat similar?
SJames, just want to say thanks for being a reasonable person on this forum. We've got our differences, but I'm glad I was able to call you on something, you answered well and then reasonably critiqued my critique. Thanks, I hope you get modded up - not because of karma which you've probably got enough of - but because you're far more reasonable than many of the loons on this board - perhaps myself included.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a Cube and a Playstation so I'll go ahead and ad my two cents. The Cube controller is an excellent controller that is just a joy to use. However, it's odd array of buttons can often lead much to be desired from games that are cross platform. Soul Calibur is an excellent example of this. Designed for a Dreamcast / PS controller type with four buttons in diamond, it relies on hitting 2 buttons simultaneously to do many moves. For moves that don't use "A" the Gamecube is tricky and/or relies on mapping a trigger to the combination. This leaves you short.
Sports games also tend to assume a PS type layout but the problem there is differant. They want you to have the 4 triggers. When they don't, they tend to map things to the second analog stick (C) which can be trickier to hit properly. I now tend to buy my sports games for the PS.
That said, when you look at games that are exclusive to the Cube, they use the controller in just wonderful ways. First part games are the obvious examples. Metroid Prime had some simple controls but had incredible depth just a flick of the C stick away. WindWaker was just great. Then look to something like F-Zero to see how those big ol' analog triggers can be used to give a player the finesse that a controller like the dual shock just doesn't offer.
The dual shock is great about giving you a lot of buttons to press, and if they add another button somewhere, they are playing to their strength. The cube controller on the other hand is about initial ease of use and later finesse. When you pick up a controller and and a game it's obvious how to do the most basic thing in that game. You press that big A in the middle of the controller.
Thanks for this article. I was going to write an "Ask Slashdot" asking if there were any Tivo like services for streaming web radio. I just wanted to do a bit of research on my own first. If one of these works for me, I'll be able to record all my favorite NPR weekend shows and perhaps avoid "car moments."
Origin was my favorite studio for quite a while. For some reason Ultima Underworld really stuck with me and I played and loved the various Wing Commanders - even if the second (?) one had the lovely feature where if you underperformed in a mission the next missions would get harder inevitably leading to a vicious cycle where you fly a slow, useless ship without support against many tough enemy ships. It did add replayability though :)
I haven't been moved by Origin in a while though. I have mixed feelings now. I mourn the loss of them, I'm angry at EA and a bit of me feels like the studio was put out of its misery (not to discout how much it sucks to lose one's job). So long Origin, you're missed already.
I agree as well. But the demo I played that most sticks with me was the demo for UT. I had played some LAN games of the original Unreal but UT was just a joyous paradigm shift. The first time I won a match by leaping the rockets that were shot at my knees and firing a clean shot sticks with me. In some ways, I'd rather be playing UT than 2K4, but 2K4 is good enough to get me excited again - even if it is too bouncy.
What's so great about the UT demos is that they are high enough quality that they allow a decent player base to form and folks to get fairly good. Then the game comes out and if you want the same level of competition you need to buy the game. If you aren't so good, the demo servers will be a good place to practice.
Interesting, but looking at the pictures with the article, it looks like somebody made a boneheaded decision. They spend a couple hundred bucks on a playstation, a game and a mat. If they had dug deep and spent another 20 bucks, they could have had twice as many people using the mats at a time.
Another weird thing is that they put the mat straight on a gym floor. Maybe these kids who are much lighter than me won't have a problem, but I'm sure that mat would take a long walk under me if it wasn't on something more sticky - maybe it's a hard mat.
Anyway, nice of you guys to point this out since I just got done with my Saturday DDR work-out. Those six and seven footers are definately more demanding than anything I did in PE.
I can't imagine it either. My favorite source control approach that I've seen is having each developers machine backed up to tape nightly. You want your source as it was last week? Let's go get that tape.
Yet another mistake. Both times I should have said SCM (Source Control Management) if I wanted to be proper.
My mistake :). I wrote CVS when I should have said VCS - meaning some sort of version control system.
It's still amazing to me that a project as large as Linux was able to be so successfull BEFORE the changes that were made to the development process. It lacked a centralized CVS, coherent bug tracking, automated testing... These are all things I use in the smallest of professional projets. Many eyes goes a long way towards compensating for having many hands in a big project, but some structure seems like it's helped.
I thought it'd be interesting to see how Yahoo handled 2 classic google bombs. "Miserable Failure" and "French Military Victories".
Miserable Failure:
History (as I understand it): There was an effort to link "miserable failure" to the white house biography of W. This happened after Gephardt declared Bush a miserable failure of a President. If the sites were bomb proof, we'd see articles relating to that major declaration high. If not we'd see the bomb's target high followed by the numerous right wing counter attacks against Michael Moore and others.
Google: Google's results are dominated by the bomb, but its fifth place mark gets a relevant article.
Yahoo: Also bombed, but has the article as its 1st link.
Winner: Yahoo
French military victories:
History:
The French military has had some victories, but not a ton. To mock them for not jumping on board on the whole blow up Iraq gig, somebody spoofed a google result to make it appear that there were no results but did you mean "defeats"? It got big.
Google: Totally overwhelmed by the bomb. It's top choice is the bomb target and everything else is people linking to the bomb, talking about it, or reporting on it. No non-bomb related historical pages for 100 hits as far as i could see.
Yahoo: Pretty much the same results. Although results 21 and 35 suggests Yahoo selling your search results. However, hit number 80 scored a paper on Napolean.
Winner: Yahoo by a hair.
Overall: Yahoo shows itself to be vulnerable to attacks targetting Google albiet slightly less so. It also appears to intentionally seed its results with crap you don't want. I'll stick to google for now.
The sad thing is that this was the first thing I thought of when I red that line as well.
I was stepping out of the room when the Today show started covering this story this morning. They showed a clip of what appeared to be a Final Fantasy type game. The "outrageous" teaser they gave us before cutting to commercial was a cut scene of a woman's face as she's taking a shower, the view shifts up to the shower head as the shower is turned off, then (it what might be a differant cut scene spliced for TV) we see her in a tank top and panties. It wasn't over the top, but it was definately a shout out to hormonal 14 year olds.
It might be surprising for some parents here in prudish America who wouldn't expect that from a game rated "T". On the other hand, you can turn on the network broadcasters on TV and see shows like Dog Eat Dog where they get women (and men) in skimpy swimsuits to perform athletic challenges while getting sprayed with water.
It's not just a lack of time, but my time has taken a differant shape. You'd think a 40 hr\week job would leave my evenings fairly free, and they do. However, I spend good chunks of those evenings with my wife, and when I do go ahead and play a game during the evening, it has to be a game that I can pause and come back to. I'm just not willing to ignore my wife if she has anything to talk about.
The pausing requirement is a surprisingly huge one. It totally rules out a game like Warcraft 3's online play. Leaving your team high and dry for 2 minutes makes you an ass. The games aren't short either. Even an online FPS can be tough to step away from. That means I'm usually playing offline. With a general lack of time, epic strategy games like Civ get some attention but I tend to lose interest more than in the past when a 4 hour Civ session was fun and reasonable.
I'm left playing a lot of sports games on consoles and getting my online competitive fix by playing Hattrick which is fairly time independant. I will probably pick up UT2K4 though I skipped 3. I think weekend mornings and some other times will allow me some good blocks to play. I'm not sure how I'll handle not being as good as I was in UT, but I think I'll still be able to take out my share of fourteen year-old pimple faced punks (FPFPs).
I've been pretty darn bummed about gaming recently. I do have hope for UT2k4 as the demo was great, but I've bought a few games recently that I just haven't got much out of. I feel like an athlete who is out of his prime but refuses to retire.
I tend to disagree. It would seem to be difficult to impossible to prove the correctness of a fairly large app - for instance Microsoft Word. Particularly when that app has to interact with numerous third party drivers etc. Furthermore, as the article states, the number of people who are really capable of "proving" things conclusively is quite limited.
Also, the article makes the point that we often the code does excactly what the coder wanted it to do - that's just wrong because of wrong or changing requirements. If the definition of "correct" has bugs, there's no hope for proving based on that definition. Furthermore, it requires an absurd level of specification when interacting with a graphical UI. The customer really doesn't want to specify the UI, they just want one that lets them get their work done and is "nice".
Why is it better to pay for a support contract to use another companies geeks than your own? The other geeks are looking out for their corporate bottom line, not your bottom line. They have no vested interest in your success or failure. Every customer is just like the other.
Ok. The support contract is like insurance. You use it if you have problems, you don't if you don't. The alternative approach to buying insurance is to self-insure. Essentially put a stack of money in the bank to spend when you have problems. Only really big companies can afford this. Likewise, if you have a sticky problem with software, you need some expertise. You can either pay to have that expertise at your disposal when you need it by calling the vendor or pay to have that expertise stockpiled in house. If you never use it, you lose. Further, since we're talking knowledge, not money, it's easier for the vendor to stockpile that knowledge. Gaps in any individual's understanding are more likely to be filled by somebody else on that team.
A large corporation may be able to self-insure with knowledge as well. They have a ton of people babysitting products and get to learn them very well.
The downside to that from a manger's perspective is that if something ever goes seriously wrong, they don't have anyone to blame but themselves. There's no lifeline to grab onto and force to make it right. It is because the vendor's people act with the vendor's best interest in mind - they need to keep your contract - that they are strong. Clearly some vendors and some contracts are better than others about this sort of stuff.
Very cool. I hadn't even considered the posibility of using the system AFTER the call had been transfered to a warm body. In retrospect, that seems fairly obvious. Thanks for sharing.
Hey thanks, I appreciate it. I was also expecting somebody to have written something to this effect and just got angrier as I scrolled down the thread to see an endlist list of one-liners. Guess, I just beat you to it :)
I hate seeing this sort of stuff. Because a customer is angry, you decide to give them better support than someone who treats you well. The obvious next step is that if someone takes his anger out on the help desk worker, they get to speak to a manager / higher level support person. Is his actual problem any more real / difficult to solve than the person who contains their frustration and treats the employees with respect? Who would you rather have as a customer?
That all said, there is a good use for this technology. Detect where in your phone tree people seem to be getting angry. Log that and analyse that for future use. If there are consistent places in the tree that people get frustrated with, you know where to focus your redesign efforts to make it better. Of course, you may see the anger develop two or more steps down the tree from the unclear question that causes the pissed-offedness. It'd probably take some careful analysis / research to really use this effectively.
While I agree with others that you made some broad judgement about this family from only a few fews of it, I think you touch on an important point. I also see a trend in parents be subservient to their children and that frightens me as well. A nurse friend of mine in pediatrics has noted a steady increase in the number of children who badly misbehave. Coupled with this are parents who describe exceptionally soft discipline approaches - Mostly the "try to reason with a 3 year old" types. They go so far as to argue that not treating children like you would an adult hurts the child's self esteem. Remembering my bad experiences in elementary and middle school, I tend to think kids start out with too much self estemm :).
Anyway, I've got off point. While the family she saw might have been at an off-moment, I think it's fair to assume that there are many families with the characteristics the observation led her to conclude. Parents are a critical link in a child's upbrining. As someone without a stay-at-home mom, I definately respect the role of baby-sitters, day-care facilities and school. Somewhere in that chain, kids need to be taught to respect eachother and that people dieing is not funny / entertaining it's sad. There needs to be a teaching of values. Part of that is being aware of what your kids do for entertainment and providing counter-balance. If the awareness isn't there, we are in trouble.
For those of you with single mothers who have attacked the poster, I appreciate some of your insight. Clearly, the are overwhelmed women who work their asses off to put food on the table and raise good kids. Part of their teaching values is by example. They show a strong work ethic and an example of sacrifice for the children they pour their love onto. Where they are unable to be good "police" they rely on having taught strong values early on. If the your mother was tough enough to raise some kids while working a full time job or two, I suspect she also didn't get pushed around by her kids too often - as in the example. That's merely speculation. That said, I think when you look into the parts of the US with the highest rates of single mothers - ie where you are raised by a single mom and so are your friends, you often find a nasty breakdown of society. It's a really hard thing to pull off and not everyone's mom can do it as well as yours might have.
To the respondants who attacked her for being a girl who false expectations of policing, I've seen plenty of male friends (myself included) whose parents wanted to know what they were upto, who they were with etc. Those restrictions probably tend to be tougher on girls, but they exist for the boys too.
Finally, I think we should be aware that the part of our youth we remember best is probably when we were teenages - most able to make our own choices and most allowed to do so. Meanwhile, it was while we were younger when our values were even more maleable when our parents were probably policing harder and filtering more things from us - without us neccassarily being able to remember that today. That's when we learned that there were limits we needed to live within.
Here is a guy who tries to take the right steps. He knows many video games label themselves as dangerous. He's scanned them and filters out the ones which he believed were dangerous to his son. This is good parenting. Sadly, the system he depended on failed him. Now he needs to know why it failed, much like the US needs to know how the CIA could be as misinformed about Iraq as it was.
When he asks who is responsible for labelling, he's trying to understand the system better. Don't attack him for that. What does this get him other than fodder for legal recourse? If he finds out publishers are responsible, then he knows to that the publisher of the game he bought can't be trusted and should be avoided. Likewise up and down the chain. This improves safety for him. If labelling is mandatory, he can be relatively comfortable getting games from large companies who would have the adaquate fear of litigation to check. If it's optional, he may need to reasses his strategy alltogether - perhaps try and play all these games through himself before sharing them with his son. Will he be able to detect the danger signs? Maybe.
Don't attack a guy in a rough situation who is watching over his kid at the hospital for trying to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future. I suspect he knows that all games carry some risk. Instead of depriving his kid of all games, he is doing his best to filter the games that pose the highest risk. Likewise, instead of not driving cars, I try to purchase cars with good reliability, anti-lock brakes and airbags. Again, attacking someone who is struggling to limit risks for his son is insensitive, and childish.
If it can be proven that people fed Saddam chemical weapons knowing he'd hit civilians, they should be prosecuted. Honestly, my research on that isn't great. What I did read suggests that the US classified him as an ally which allowed private companies to sell him things that could be used to create WMD. After Iraq committed some horrible atrocities the US, together with most of Western Europe, continued to fund fund Iraq and provide logistical support against Iran.
Feeding him chemical weapons can't be defended. Letting companies sell Iraq the building blocks for these weapons - dual use products - is frightening. It's either gross ignorance or callous wrong behaviour. The documents suggest that folks in charge didn't really care. They knew he'd kill who he wanted to and whether he used bullets or gas wasn't their concern. Scary.
Feeding him conventional arms could be argued for. When I say that it may have been a mistake to do that, I'm not making euphimisms. There was a strategic choice to be made. Let Iran form a fundemental Islamist empire across the ME or aid a nasty but secular dictatorship in resisting. When you aid a dictatorship you know some of that aid will be diverted to propping up the dictatorship - that's part of the deal.
When you talk conventional arms, you see the same problems in Afganistan. The warlords, and many who went on to form Al-Queda, cut their teeth fighting the Soviets and were Western trained and armed. When I say Western, I of course mean US - nobody else has the funds. There have been simply aweful consequence from that. Certaintly, not providing aid to Afganistan in its post-war rebuilding was a critical error. Was aiding it against the USSR? Probably not.
All of this taken into account, it doesn't affect the core arguement very much. While the past suggests that several members of the administration should not still be holding public office these days, where Iraq got their weapons doesn't have much to do with what to do with them later.
You should have disarmed Saddam, searched and destroyed the WMD and controlled the influx of food/medicins/oil back when you had won the first GW.
I agree that Iraq should have been disarmed after GW1. When you say, "you should have disarmed..." I take that to mean the US should have taken unilateral responsibility for search and destroy within Iraq as opposed to the plan of the UN which was to insist Iraq disarm itself and provide proof to inspectors in the same fashion the US and USSR verify the destruction of nuclear weapons. You've made the right wing here in the US very happy. They always thought it was a mistake not to "finish the job" at the end of GW1. That approach would have lost the support of the other ME countries though. Perhaps, it would have been better that way. God knows that trusting Iraq to disarm itself and document that didn't work. Frankly, when the inspectors stopped being verifiers and started to be the ones doing search and destroy was when it was pretty much doomed.
You're also right that the UN did a terrible job of controlling the flow of humanitarian supplies into Iraq. They trusted the leadership of that country to spend its income saving the lives of its people - what a bonehead move. To suggest Americans control those supplies is much better. We'd of course have to form a.. uh.. "peace-keeping" contigent which the US army is \ was badly trained for and secure distribution centers throughout Iraq. From there we could do our best to see that food and medicine got to those who needed it.
In the last two sections, I mostly jumped all over your use of the word "you". I think you're placing the responsibility and blame soley on the Americans for an international system and responsibility. I think if the Americans had to do it all, this is how it would have to be done. I think in effect, you suggest that the correct action after GW1 was GW2. I don't think so, and I don't think that's what you really mean to say.
Actually as I reread what you say, I
Right... So you are in support of firearms and explosives on your airplane? I assume you'll say something like, "Sure! if someone tries to pull something everyone else will shoot them." There are always limits, like not being able to scream "Fire!" in a movie theatre. You're also not free to not pay your taxes or exercise your right to push old ladies down.
While we're argueing over the number of countries involved (not that it really matters as far as justification is concerned) here's one person's description of who is in the coalition
The obvious problem with these lists though is that many countries added themselves to the list to help in peace keeping who opposed the war. I don't really vouch for the validity of the list and don't feel like being attacked about it, I'm just trying to be helpful.
For the thousandth time. There probably aren't any WMDs in Iraq. That doesn't mean that prior to going in, anyone outside of Iraq actually knew that. And without knowing that was the case, most assumed that weapons would be there.
For sake of nerddom, a slashdot appropriate anology:
Let's say Iraq is a closed box. It's got a cat inside. The cat is dead if this radioactive doohickey pings the box. If the cat is dead, the scientists have 10 minutes until the box explodes destroying the lab and probably killing some scientists. The scientists rap on the box but the cat doesn't meow back. The cat is either alive or dead - or if you're really into quantum - it's both. As a scientist, I think I'd have to open that box and diffuse the cat - even if I have to break the box to do it.
- please don't take that too seriously.
Back to spies. My understanding is that US and USSR treaties allowed third party verification of weapons destruction. Isn't that somewhat similar?
SJames, just want to say thanks for being a reasonable person on this forum. We've got our differences, but I'm glad I was able to call you on something, you answered well and then reasonably critiqued my critique. Thanks, I hope you get modded up - not because of karma which you've probably got enough of - but because you're far more reasonable than many of the loons on this board - perhaps myself included.