Yeah, the whole ownership thing with G is really messed up. As far as I can tell, Sony has all the US VHS and DVD market, but Nintendo has a hammerlock on the video games.
I was so pumped by this game that, despite being a loyal PS2 player, I went out and bought a GameCube. You're right, the game is fab! There's something infinitely more satisfying about a fighter when the characters are daikaiju. I doubt I'll ever pick up DOA2 again...
... I sent an email to the webmaster (really content manager, as she had to consult the "techs") of my rep's (Robert Wexler, whom I have greatly tormented over his support of the P2P hacking bill and other idiotic anti-consumer, anti-tech legislation) site about a bug that made it only viewable in IE. She was very accomodating and informed me that a fix was in process.
In this case, the problem was a bad FORM element in the HTML. Because Opera is not as slop-tolerant (which I consider a Very Good Thing(TM)) as IE, I don't think it would have saved the occassion.
... the first post wasn't "but can I get it a'la carte?"
Re:International observers in Florida
on
Indecision 2002
·
· Score: 1
You people keep acting shocked about this. I live in Florida and I can attest: Florida *is* a third-world country, conveniently located between Cuba and the USA.
I'd be interested in any numbers regarding incidence of escalation and how they correlate to specific customers. For example, if customer A has called twice and both times been escalated to second line support, was it because A had so munged things that first line couldn't help, or because A didn't need to call until the system was so broken on the providers' end that it required second line intervention? You'd think that over time such a database could be built and would be useful in routing support calls. If you have a customer who calls once a month and is always fixed at the first line by stepping through the dialog boxes, then they obviously don't make it to the "expert user" status.
OTOH, I guess the quality of the product and the tech support are also key issues, and you can't trust any inference about your users unless you're sure the product is working as advertised and the techs are on the ball!:-)
Extremely insightful post. Thanks for providing a counterbalance to the self-congratulating, elitist zealotry that is rife on this board. As a software engineer and consultant, I am more than familiar with the classic "luser" phenomenon, and sadly we have to assume that 99% of our users are clueless at best, and likely flat out dangerous. On the other hand, as a consumer of technical services (e.g. my DSL line at home) I find that dealing with tech support is uniformly frustrating for the advanced user because the providers are so focused on the clueless.
It would not cost them a $50 support call to answer direct technical questions from experienced users if they would route questions properly based on their content. For example, if a user calls up, explains that he has changed network cards and asks to have the MAC entry changed in their database, it is not effective customer service to work through a thirty minute script only to end with an escalation to second line support when a direct bump to second line could have finished the call in one minute! (Example from my experience, obviously)
Basically, phone centers need to program their script bots with something akin to keyword matching to determine when the caller is not going to be served by a cookbook of click heres and tab theres. In my experience, it is luck of the draw whether you get a first line rep who knows their stuff or is just following the script, and there are a lot of gradations between first and second line that could be subdivided more efficiently. Can it really be that cost ineffective to provide decent, non-irritating support to all levels of users, as opposed to just the clueless ones?
It seems to me like the advertisements on/. are themed to the story content by a keyword algorithm. Maybe a high frequency of Windows or MS bashing in a post is to simultaneously and ironically dis the product and garner those ad $$$?:-)
I am so sick of these posts to Ask/. that can be answered by a Google search! Couldn't you come up with a query that would locate all the philanthropically minded hackers pining to make a contribution to the developing world on their home pages and Web logs?;-)
Seriously: I'd be interested! Just like the Peace Corps without the tropical fevers!
The statistics I've seen from year to year seem to show use of various drugs up and down with little correlation to the increasingly draconian drug policy that is the rule. This would suggest that drug laws seem to have little to do with the attractiveness of drugs to "kids" either way.
If anything, I would say that sound education (by which I don't mean D.A.R.E. propaganda but real, unbiased information) has been the most effective measure against drug abuse. Back in the 70s, there was a very effective campaign about the dangers of PCP - which unlike many drugs commonly demonized in the US - is quite demonstrably dangerous. When was the last time you heard about someone on a PCP rampage? Of course, this doesn't explain why crack took hold, but that is more of a social engineering issue IMO, and best left for another topic.
The bottom line is that (1) drugs satisfy primitive impulses by satisfying pleasure centers and (2) kids can smell disinformation. When they aren't communicated with honestly, they give little credence to the message. They then do their own risk-reward analysis and make up their own damn minds.
** Take your finger off that offtopic mod, the writer invited this discussion with his snide aside! **
Um.. For the guns that aren't in working order they make a fingerprint of the stock in case you whack someone in the head with it?
Can anyone identify this game?
on
High Score
·
· Score: 1
OK, I'll risk getting mod'ed off-topic. Can anyone identify the game from the following description? I've dug around on the Net several times and never turned anything up...
I played it on an arcade machine that was in my hometown pizza place for just a few weeks in the early eighties. I *think* the name was something like Megmania or Magmania. The levels consisted of alternating shooting modes. In the first mode, you shot at descending spiders that broke apart a'la asteroids and if they reached the bottom of the screen, you got munched. In the second mode (probably almost exactly the same code with different animations) you shot at little loops that would expand and if you didn't kill them before the expanded large enough to swallow your ship... well.. they would swallow your ship! The loops also broke up into smaller loops when hit.
Anyone else remember this or did I hallucinate the whole thing? It was the early eighties after all...
... always reckoning that PCs were always ahead of the curve technologically and more flexible. In the end, though, I switched to console gaming (PSX, then PS2, with a GameCube in my future the minute that Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee ships) and despite not always having the state of the art, I have a lot more fun playing games now. Not to mention my couch is a lot friendlier to my @ss than my desk chair (and I have a pretty good desk chair!), the ability for friends to gather round the entertainment center, and the fact that a modern console cost about the same as a top-end video card, something not to be underestimated when you're talking about mass market trends.
Bottom line: if you're into overclocking and hardware and config geeking, PCs are great for games. If your fun is a little more casual, consoles can't be beat! Just my $0.02...
Well observed. I did note that their reputation has built for decades. My issues with Gale Norton are distinct from the overall DOI problems: They are incompetent, she is evil. I won't attempt to weigh the merits of these qualities.
OK, since my earlier attempt at taut humor met with a troll mod, I will attempt to elaborate what I meant by "Brilliant Tactic: Now they can blame MS for their abysmal performance".
DOI has cultivated a reputation for being total mongos for decades, and since Gale Norton came on board, all pretenses of their mandate to protect US natural and cultural resources have been pretty much dropped. Their handling of Native American and environmental issues have been atrocious (so much so that they were recently called to task by a federal judge for their incompetence) and their recently publicized network security problems are just icing.
I would post links, but why/. the sites. Just google for some combination of: Department of Interior, Native American, Environment, Pollution, Oil, and - if you really want to loose the gates of heck - throw in Gale Norton by name.
In short, the DOI is largely derided as an incompetent bunch of bumbling boobs, hence my weak attempt at humor noting that installing a uniform MS environment would be an excellent diversion and scapegoat.
No, languages (other than French, which has its evolution restricted by government committee) evolve to conform with broad cultural usage in patterns of words and phrases, adoption of foreign patterns, etc. 1337/L33T/7337 (or whatever the hell it is, I admit to being an 07d f4r7) is more properly viewed as a substitution code/cypher than any evolution of the language. It is no more legitimate to use its affectations in your homework than it would be to write every other word in Morse or binary.
I say work for it. To me, open source is about the right to choose. Whether one chooses to sell or give away their work is an irrelevant debate so long as both options exist and the markets are fair.
Actually, rentals and retail are priced differently even if they ship to the market simultaneously. Video Stores pay $100 for their copy because they are licensing it to rent, unlike the consumer who pays $10 and gets a license only for "private" viewing.
Many good suggestions are turning up here, but I see one conspicuously missing.
Like it or not, the reason the music business succeeds at promoting talent (or what they pass for it in many cases) is that they have an infrastructure for creating interest. If you can't reliably count on your existing fans to spread the word for you gratis, then you are going to need a full-time person to do it for you. From my own experience (http://www.popes.com/) I can assure you that if you try to simultaneously be a band and your own promotional arm, you will soon find yourself burnt out on both. Hire someone (or enlist a truly dedicated fan) to make your tracks available on every streaming and download site you can find and cultivate relationships with those sites.
Your reply is presumptuous. He did not specify any particular way in which this "good" manifests. You assumed one. Perhaps by "good", he simply means that people who seek God are given a peace of mind that relieves them from the agitating impulse to troll others for their world views.
I anticipate and appreciate the retort that evangelicals are often (OK, generally more often) pricks of similar magniture to atheists. I'm not defending either here, just the right of all God's creatures (so to speak) to seek or ignore him/her/it/null in their own way and spend their time on better enterprises than rattling each other's cages.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the whole ownership thing with G is really messed up. As far as I can tell, Sony has all the US VHS and DVD market, but Nintendo has a hammerlock on the video games.
I was so pumped by this game that, despite being a loyal PS2 player, I went out and bought a GameCube. You're right, the game is fab! There's something infinitely more satisfying about a fighter when the characters are daikaiju. I doubt I'll ever pick up DOA2 again...
OK, you can mod me off-topic now...
... I sent an email to the webmaster (really content manager, as she had to consult the "techs") of my rep's (Robert Wexler, whom I have greatly tormented over his support of the P2P hacking bill and other idiotic anti-consumer, anti-tech legislation) site about a bug that made it only viewable in IE. She was very accomodating and informed me that a fix was in process.
In this case, the problem was a bad FORM element in the HTML. Because Opera is not as slop-tolerant (which I consider a Very Good Thing(TM)) as IE, I don't think it would have saved the occassion.
... the first post wasn't "but can I get it a'la carte?"
You people keep acting shocked about this. I live in Florida and I can attest: Florida *is* a third-world country, conveniently located between Cuba and the USA.
I'd be interested in any numbers regarding incidence of escalation and how they correlate to specific customers. For example, if customer A has called twice and both times been escalated to second line support, was it because A had so munged things that first line couldn't help, or because A didn't need to call until the system was so broken on the providers' end that it required second line intervention? You'd think that over time such a database could be built and would be useful in routing support calls. If you have a customer who calls once a month and is always fixed at the first line by stepping through the dialog boxes, then they obviously don't make it to the "expert user" status.
:-)
OTOH, I guess the quality of the product and the tech support are also key issues, and you can't trust any inference about your users unless you're sure the product is working as advertised and the techs are on the ball!
Extremely insightful post. Thanks for providing a counterbalance to the self-congratulating, elitist zealotry that is rife on this board. As a software engineer and consultant, I am more than familiar with the classic "luser" phenomenon, and sadly we have to assume that 99% of our users are clueless at best, and likely flat out dangerous. On the other hand, as a consumer of technical services (e.g. my DSL line at home) I find that dealing with tech support is uniformly frustrating for the advanced user because the providers are so focused on the clueless.
It would not cost them a $50 support call to answer direct technical questions from experienced users if they would route questions properly based on their content. For example, if a user calls up, explains that he has changed network cards and asks to have the MAC entry changed in their database, it is not effective customer service to work through a thirty minute script only to end with an escalation to second line support when a direct bump to second line could have finished the call in one minute! (Example from my experience, obviously)
Basically, phone centers need to program their script bots with something akin to keyword matching to determine when the caller is not going to be served by a cookbook of click heres and tab theres. In my experience, it is luck of the draw whether you get a first line rep who knows their stuff or is just following the script, and there are a lot of gradations between first and second line that could be subdivided more efficiently. Can it really be that cost ineffective to provide decent, non-irritating support to all levels of users, as opposed to just the clueless ones?
It seems to me like the advertisements on /. are themed to the story content by a keyword algorithm. Maybe a high frequency of Windows or MS bashing in a post is to simultaneously and ironically dis the product and garner those ad $$$? :-)
I am so sick of these posts to Ask /. that can be answered by a Google search! Couldn't you come up with a query that would locate all the philanthropically minded hackers pining to make a contribution to the developing world on their home pages and Web logs? ;-)
Seriously: I'd be interested! Just like the Peace Corps without the tropical fevers!
The statistics I've seen from year to year seem to show use of various drugs up and down with little correlation to the increasingly draconian drug policy that is the rule. This would suggest that drug laws seem to have little to do with the attractiveness of drugs to "kids" either way.
If anything, I would say that sound education (by which I don't mean D.A.R.E. propaganda but real, unbiased information) has been the most effective measure against drug abuse. Back in the 70s, there was a very effective campaign about the dangers of PCP - which unlike many drugs commonly demonized in the US - is quite demonstrably dangerous. When was the last time you heard about someone on a PCP rampage? Of course, this doesn't explain why crack took hold, but that is more of a social engineering issue IMO, and best left for another topic.
The bottom line is that (1) drugs satisfy primitive impulses by satisfying pleasure centers and (2) kids can smell disinformation. When they aren't communicated with honestly, they give little credence to the message. They then do their own risk-reward analysis and make up their own damn minds.
** Take your finger off that offtopic mod, the writer invited this discussion with his snide aside! **
Um.. For the guns that aren't in working order they make a fingerprint of the stock in case you whack someone in the head with it?
OK, I'll risk getting mod'ed off-topic. Can anyone identify the game from the following description? I've dug around on the Net several times and never turned anything up...
I played it on an arcade machine that was in my hometown pizza place for just a few weeks in the early eighties. I *think* the name was something like Megmania or Magmania. The levels consisted of alternating shooting modes. In the first mode, you shot at descending spiders that broke apart a'la asteroids and if they reached the bottom of the screen, you got munched. In the second mode (probably almost exactly the same code with different animations) you shot at little loops that would expand and if you didn't kill them before the expanded large enough to swallow your ship... well.. they would swallow your ship! The loops also broke up into smaller loops when hit.
Anyone else remember this or did I hallucinate the whole thing? It was the early eighties after all...
Nah, balls of steel maybe. Were they based in Miami, I'd credit 'em with a heavier metal. :-)
Haven't I seen this text before with another issue in place of "Illegal Links"? Is this a /bot?
... always reckoning that PCs were always ahead of the curve technologically and more flexible. In the end, though, I switched to console gaming (PSX, then PS2, with a GameCube in my future the minute that Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee ships) and despite not always having the state of the art, I have a lot more fun playing games now. Not to mention my couch is a lot friendlier to my @ss than my desk chair (and I have a pretty good desk chair!), the ability for friends to gather round the entertainment center, and the fact that a modern console cost about the same as a top-end video card, something not to be underestimated when you're talking about mass market trends.
Bottom line: if you're into overclocking and hardware and config geeking, PCs are great for games. If your fun is a little more casual, consoles can't be beat! Just my $0.02...
Well observed. I did note that their reputation has built for decades. My issues with Gale Norton are distinct from the overall DOI problems: They are incompetent, she is evil. I won't attempt to weigh the merits of these qualities.
OK, since my earlier attempt at taut humor met with a troll mod, I will attempt to elaborate what I meant by "Brilliant Tactic: Now they can blame MS for their abysmal performance".
/. the sites. Just google for some combination of: Department of Interior, Native American, Environment, Pollution, Oil, and - if you really want to loose the gates of heck - throw in Gale Norton by name.
DOI has cultivated a reputation for being total mongos for decades, and since Gale Norton came on board, all pretenses of their mandate to protect US natural and cultural resources have been pretty much dropped. Their handling of Native American and environmental issues have been atrocious (so much so that they were recently called to task by a federal judge for their incompetence) and their recently publicized network security problems are just icing.
I would post links, but why
In short, the DOI is largely derided as an incompetent bunch of bumbling boobs, hence my weak attempt at humor noting that installing a uniform MS environment would be an excellent diversion and scapegoat.
Now they can blame MS for their abysmal performance!
No, languages (other than French, which has its evolution restricted by government committee) evolve to conform with broad cultural usage in patterns of words and phrases, adoption of foreign patterns, etc. 1337/L33T/7337 (or whatever the hell it is, I admit to being an 07d f4r7) is more properly viewed as a substitution code/cypher than any evolution of the language. It is no more legitimate to use its affectations in your homework than it would be to write every other word in Morse or binary.
I say work for it. To me, open source is about the right to choose. Whether one chooses to sell or give away their work is an irrelevant debate so long as both options exist and the markets are fair.
Actually, rentals and retail are priced differently even if they ship to the market simultaneously. Video Stores pay $100 for their copy because they are licensing it to rent, unlike the consumer who pays $10 and gets a license only for "private" viewing.
Can't somebody write a bot to mod as Redundant every comment that includes this "only one good song on a $20 CD" argument?
For the record, they didn't make the Internet.
Many good suggestions are turning up here, but I see one conspicuously missing.
Like it or not, the reason the music business succeeds at promoting talent (or what they pass for it in many cases) is that they have an infrastructure for creating interest. If you can't reliably count on your existing fans to spread the word for you gratis, then you are going to need a full-time person to do it for you. From my own experience (http://www.popes.com/) I can assure you that if you try to simultaneously be a band and your own promotional arm, you will soon find yourself burnt out on both. Hire someone (or enlist a truly dedicated fan) to make your tracks available on every streaming and download site you can find and cultivate relationships with those sites.
Your reply is presumptuous. He did not specify any particular way in which this "good" manifests. You assumed one. Perhaps by "good", he simply means that people who seek God are given a peace of mind that relieves them from the agitating impulse to troll others for their world views.
I anticipate and appreciate the retort that evangelicals are often (OK, generally more often) pricks of similar magniture to atheists. I'm not defending either here, just the right of all God's creatures (so to speak) to seek or ignore him/her/it/null in their own way and spend their time on better enterprises than rattling each other's cages.
I think you might do a little better with your own priorities than trolling /.