Blackberries aren't the problem as much as it is the people who abuse them
But Blackberries seem to invite abuse. It's true that people who are jerks (such as my former uber-boss) would be a jerk with any technology, but there were other people who might have paid attention if they didn't have this device strapped to their hips that was constantly bothering them.
At my last job, people in our parent office were addicted to various forms of "multitasking" including reading their email during meetings, answering the blackberries, etc. The only problem was that they weren't multitasking, they were unitasking and not paying attention to the current situation, which meant that the meeting was useless. They seemed to be incapable for focusing on a single topic for more than a couple of minutes.
The funniest thing was when the uber-development boss, who was the worst offender, both in showing up late to meetings and not paying attention, decided that his particular meeting was critical and that laptops, blackberries, etc would be forbidden. Of course, then he pulled out his blackberry at the first meeting.
Unfortunately, your children will probably be turning tricks for crack once the shock of finally entering the real world passes by them. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Right. His kids would have a much better chance of surviving if he just ignored them and let them do whatever they want, because teenagers know everything and don't need any adult supervision.
Basically, the #1 reason why IPv6 is not widely deployed yet is that it makes VoIP and peer-to-peer work flawlessly, something that goes against the concept of tiered internet. Those "major network companies" you're speaking of are our enemies, not friends.
Strangely enough, it wasn't uncommon to hear stories of Bill Gates saying that he could outcode anyone in the room and that therefore his opinion was the only one that really mattered.
Sounds like the CEO of the last place I worked at. He thought he was a genius and was constantly dipping into low-level design and coming up with crap that would have barely worked for one customer and would have broken 300 other customers. I actually saved an email from him where, after the 4th or 5th meeting, he started asking how something worked, instead of assuming that he knew it all by intuition.
Its graphics/art were not too great of an improvement. (Not to mention the fact that its system requirements at launch were considered to be high-end.)
They weren't just considered high-end, they were high end. I had a machine that had been top of the line 3 years earlier. I had upgraded it with a new video card and gotten 1gb of memory, and EQ2 was still just barely barely playable. In town it was slideshow. WoW, on the other hand, played just fine.
In fact, my wife and I were planning on doing EQ2, and just bought WoW as a stopgap while I was getting a shiny new machine. By the time my new machine came, I was hooked on WoW and never looked back. I suspect that EQ2 lost a lot of potential business by just being unplayable on most existing machines.
WoW wasn't "groundbreaking", but it gets an amazing number of things, both large and small, just right. For example: no zoning (not quite true, but pretty much). As you move about the world, you are passing from zone to zone, but aside from a few places like travel between the continents, or entry into an instance, you don't get a "zoning" screen. Gives you a much higher sense of immersion in the game.
I can carry on multiple conversations at the same time without negelecting any conversation.
Correction: you think you can carry on multiple conversations at the ame time without negelecting any conversation. My last company was filled with techno-hotshots who thought they could do that. Turned out they had an attention span of 10 seconds. Everyone at my office finally realized that when we sent email, we couldn't write more than 3 sentences, and the first sentence had to be the critical one. Anything beyond the first paragraph wasn't even noticed.
EQ may have been a "stepping stone" but it was a pretty huge step. For about 5 years it was the unchallenged leader in online gaming. It really created the mass MMO market. I would be VERY surprised if any game, including WoW, has the staying power of EQ now that so many games are following in EQs footsteps.
I agree that mixing experience and youth can work. It's true that when I was younger, I was more willing to come in and work weekends, etc. If you mix talented young developers who are willing to listen and learn with experienced people who can guide that energy you're in a good situation.
What I disagree with is the grandparent poster's comment about "Most of the ground-level coders (folks who code full time or more) are very young and work crazy hours" as a model for doing development. The results at the parent company that I worked for were:
. Massive turnover, so they continually had to hire new people and get them up to speed. Often developers were leaving before they were even productive. . Lack of attention to customer needs. . Quick generation of untested crap code. As a result, they were always busy fighting fires. . As a consequence of fire fighting, there was no time for building in code quality that would avoid future fires. . Burned out programmers who would "rest on their oars" after an intense spurt of work.
In my last job, two of the programmers I worked with were in their 50s, and were two of the most talented, thoughtful, productive developers I've ever worked with. Anyone who thinks that once you hit 40 (or 50) "it's all over" is nuts.
I worked in a company with lots of programmers in their 40s and 50s. We got bought out by a company with lots of young coders working crazy hours. And you know what? After 6 years of running as fast as they can, they've produced almost nothing. In fact, the core product they were working on was just tossed, along with the programmers that were working on it.
Meanwhile we've been trying to keep moving and developing, but with all the "rush rush rush internet time must code and release right now!!!" it's pretty tough.
So right now it looks kinda bleak, but if companies wise up there will still be interesting programming jobs when you hit the ripe old age of 40 (or 50).
A better solution would be to ghost the hard drive when you get the laptop at your new job. Returning the computer to them in EXACTLY the same condition that it was given to you (data-wise) would then be trivial. How can they punish you for that?
When a company "gives" you a laptop it is still the company's laptop. The data that is on the laptop is still the company's data. Think of it this way: suppose the guy was a software developer, and before he left, he zapped all the source code for the project he was working on. You think the company wouldn't have a case?
Folks on slashdot are always talking about how it's possible to make money on free/open source software, and that F/OSS is the wave of the future. Well, if you *really* believe this, why are you shocked that large companies agree with you? Or that people who start open source projects agree with you?
My guess is that a lot of the people who talk about making money off of F/OSS don't really believe it in their gut. They really believe that F/OSS is always going to be a volunteer activity, not a business model.
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer
on
World of Queuecraft
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· Score: 1
That's how it works now - nothing is sticky.
Not true. I don't know the details but there was just an event in WoW that had a permanent impact by opening up new content.
It's true that you may have to wait to get in (although I've never waited 40 minutes) but you aren't staring at a WoW screen that whole time. If you want to, just alt-tab out, doing something else, check it occasionally. I try to remember that if I'm signing on after 8:30pm eastern or so I should start WoW a little early.
It's annoying but it's not the end of the world (of warcraft).
I would say what was really needed was print clarity on par with paper
What is REALLY needed is that when you leave your book in a bathroom at LaGuardia airport, take about 5 steps out the door, realize you've left it, and retrace your steps, and it's gone, you haven't lost $400 (and by the way, this actually happened to me... I hope whoever got the book enjoyed it)
The main flaw in this product, as I see it, doesn't lie in the product itself but in the available media. DRMed content that you can't share with others, for the same cost as a hardcover book?
Of course you can share it... just loan your ebook, just the way you would loan a book. Oh, that's right, when you loan an ebook, you've lost your ability to read *any* book. Hmmmmm...
eBooks is an idea whose time may come... someday. In the meantime I'll use paper.
So you are saying that I need to ask the permission of the sender before forwarding their email?
I would guess that everyone who is reading this right now has, at one time or another, forwarded an email with the comment "look at what a doofus this person is" on it.
Non-criminals won't walk into your home without permission.
See, here is where you are wrong. For example, one morning many years ago I got up, wandered out into the living room, and saw a body lying under a blanket. Pulled back the blanket. Guy looked up at me and asked if I was "George" (or whoever). Turned out he had shown up in the middle of the nite and was actually going to be visiting the next door neighbors. In this case, he certainly wasn't a criminal, and had I locked my door (even a screen door) he wouldn't have wandered in.
Another case: I've known people whose friends or relatives felt perfectly comfortable wandering in whenever they felt like it if the door is unlocked.
As a parent post somewhere up the chain correctly pointed out, there are degrees of privacy / security. The "locked screen door" doesn't keep the Hillside Strangler out but it does serve a purpose.
As somebody who played EQ for about 5 years and WoW for about a year, I'd have to say WoW can be just as complex as EQ. Blizzard didn't "dumb it down", they took out the "camp this location for several weeks on end until blah spawn" nonsense. As far as I'm concerned, the dummies are the ones who mistake endless tedium for complexity.
I'm tired of people who think they are better than someone else because of their knowledge of a particular technology. I'm tired of people whose only way of feeling big is by stepping on someone else. Who cares whether someone is a 50 year old housewife or a 19 year old snot-nosed kid? One of the most amazing people I know is a 96 year old great-grandmother.
Ok, here's the deal. My parents use AOL. They are in their 80s. They've had computers going back to the Apple II, but they aren't geeks. They just want to communicate with their kids via email and look at an occasional web page.
So they are comfortable with AOL. I've occasionally told them they ought to look into an ISP and DSL. They've muttered a little and then gone on with their lives.
You know what, THEY ARE RIGHT TO USE AOL. It's what they want. They are happy with it. It does what they need. Why the frack should they change? To please you? You don't like how they access the net? Well, maybe I don't like the car you drive, but guess what, I don't get a veto on your car, you don't get a veto on my parent's AOL. Deal with it and move on.
but War2 wasn't balanced - the races were practically clones of one another, yet the ability for humans to micromanage the paladin's heal ability wasn't interfaced well enough for it to compete with the fire & forget nature of bloodlust.
Blizzard has learned since then, but their best balance was probably hit in Starcraft at or after the time of Brood Wars, but it certainly wasn't balanced at release
Balancing the races is clearly extremely difficult. It's interesting that you bring up the micromanagement issue with War2 Paladins, and then say that Starcraft was well balanced. In Starcraft, I tended to play Protoss, which probably weren't the strongest but required the least "micro-management". I always wanted to play humans, but there was just too to do to take advantage of their abilities, certainly more micromanagement than Warcraft.
As far as the classes in WoW, I've only played a few classes, and only two up to high levels, but as far as I can tell Blizzard has done a superb job of balancing the classes. Certainly far better than EQ did on first release. I started a rogue in EQ shortly after it was released and gave up after a few months because he basically couldn't do anything. I know rogues have been improved enormously since then, but we are 6 years down the road now with EQ, and people are STILL complaining about balance there.
This is hilarious... one thing Blizzard is well known for, back to the first days of Warcraft, is producing polished, well-balanced games. Having played EQ1 for many years, I can guarantee you that WoW classes are FAR more well-balanced.
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But Blackberries seem to invite abuse. It's true that people who are jerks (such as my former uber-boss) would be a jerk with any technology, but there were other people who might have paid attention if they didn't have this device strapped to their hips that was constantly bothering them.
At my last job, people in our parent office were addicted to various forms of "multitasking" including reading their email during meetings, answering the blackberries, etc. The only problem was that they weren't multitasking, they were unitasking and not paying attention to the current situation, which meant that the meeting was useless. They seemed to be incapable for focusing on a single topic for more than a couple of minutes.
The funniest thing was when the uber-development boss, who was the worst offender, both in showing up late to meetings and not paying attention, decided that his particular meeting was critical and that laptops, blackberries, etc would be forbidden. Of course, then he pulled out his blackberry at the first meeting.
He is not a criminal. He's a child. The parent is responsible for him. The rules are different when you are a child than when you are an adult.
Right. His kids would have a much better chance of surviving if he just ignored them and let them do whatever they want, because teenagers know everything and don't need any adult supervision.
Cue the black helicopters...
Sounds like the CEO of the last place I worked at. He thought he was a genius and was constantly dipping into low-level design and coming up with crap that would have barely worked for one customer and would have broken 300 other customers. I actually saved an email from him where, after the 4th or 5th meeting, he started asking how something worked, instead of assuming that he knew it all by intuition.
They weren't just considered high-end, they were high end. I had a machine that had been top of the line 3 years earlier. I had upgraded it with a new video card and gotten 1gb of memory, and EQ2 was still just barely barely playable. In town it was slideshow. WoW, on the other hand, played just fine.
In fact, my wife and I were planning on doing EQ2, and just bought WoW as a stopgap while I was getting a shiny new machine. By the time my new machine came, I was hooked on WoW and never looked back. I suspect that EQ2 lost a lot of potential business by just being unplayable on most existing machines.WoW wasn't "groundbreaking", but it gets an amazing number of things, both large and small, just right. For example: no zoning (not quite true, but pretty much). As you move about the world, you are passing from zone to zone, but aside from a few places like travel between the continents, or entry into an instance, you don't get a "zoning" screen. Gives you a much higher sense of immersion in the game.
Correction: you think you can carry on multiple conversations at the ame time without negelecting any conversation. My last company was filled with techno-hotshots who thought they could do that. Turned out they had an attention span of 10 seconds. Everyone at my office finally realized that when we sent email, we couldn't write more than 3 sentences, and the first sentence had to be the critical one. Anything beyond the first paragraph wasn't even noticed.
EQ may have been a "stepping stone" but it was a pretty huge step. For about 5 years it was the unchallenged leader in online gaming. It really created the mass MMO market. I would be VERY surprised if any game, including WoW, has the staying power of EQ now that so many games are following in EQs footsteps.
I agree that mixing experience and youth can work. It's true that when I was younger, I was more willing to come in and work weekends, etc. If you mix talented young developers who are willing to listen and learn with experienced people who can guide that energy you're in a good situation.
What I disagree with is the grandparent poster's comment about "Most of the ground-level coders (folks who code full time or more) are very young and work crazy hours" as a model for doing development. The results at the parent company that I worked for were:
. Massive turnover, so they continually had to hire new people and get them up to speed. Often developers were leaving before they were even productive.
. Lack of attention to customer needs.
. Quick generation of untested crap code. As a result, they were always busy fighting fires.
. As a consequence of fire fighting, there was no time for building in code quality that would avoid future fires.
. Burned out programmers who would "rest on their oars" after an intense spurt of work.
In my last job, two of the programmers I worked with were in their 50s, and were two of the most talented, thoughtful, productive developers I've ever worked with. Anyone who thinks that once you hit 40 (or 50) "it's all over" is nuts.
I worked in a company with lots of programmers in their 40s and 50s. We got bought out by a company with lots of young coders working crazy hours. And you know what? After 6 years of running as fast as they can, they've produced almost nothing. In fact, the core product they were working on was just tossed, along with the programmers that were working on it.
Meanwhile we've been trying to keep moving and developing, but with all the "rush rush rush internet time must code and release right now!!!" it's pretty tough.
So right now it looks kinda bleak, but if companies wise up there will still be interesting programming jobs when you hit the ripe old age of 40 (or 50).
When a company "gives" you a laptop it is still the company's laptop. The data that is on the laptop is still the company's data. Think of it this way: suppose the guy was a software developer, and before he left, he zapped all the source code for the project he was working on. You think the company wouldn't have a case?
Folks on slashdot are always talking about how it's possible to make money on free/open source software, and that F/OSS is the wave of the future. Well, if you *really* believe this, why are you shocked that large companies agree with you? Or that people who start open source projects agree with you?
My guess is that a lot of the people who talk about making money off of F/OSS don't really believe it in their gut. They really believe that F/OSS is always going to be a volunteer activity, not a business model.
Not true. I don't know the details but there was just an event in WoW that had a permanent impact by opening up new content.
It's true that you may have to wait to get in (although I've never waited 40 minutes) but you aren't staring at a WoW screen that whole time. If you want to, just alt-tab out, doing something else, check it occasionally. I try to remember that if I'm signing on after 8:30pm eastern or so I should start WoW a little early.
It's annoying but it's not the end of the world (of warcraft).
What is REALLY needed is that when you leave your book in a bathroom at LaGuardia airport, take about 5 steps out the door, realize you've left it, and retrace your steps, and it's gone, you haven't lost $400 (and by the way, this actually happened to me... I hope whoever got the book enjoyed it)
Of course you can share it... just loan your ebook, just the way you would loan a book. Oh, that's right, when you loan an ebook, you've lost your ability to read *any* book. Hmmmmm...
eBooks is an idea whose time may come... someday. In the meantime I'll use paper.
So you are saying that I need to ask the permission of the sender before forwarding their email?
I would guess that everyone who is reading this right now has, at one time or another, forwarded an email with the comment "look at what a doofus this person is" on it.
See, here is where you are wrong. For example, one morning many years ago I got up, wandered out into the living room, and saw a body lying under a blanket. Pulled back the blanket. Guy looked up at me and asked if I was "George" (or whoever). Turned out he had shown up in the middle of the nite and was actually going to be visiting the next door neighbors. In this case, he certainly wasn't a criminal, and had I locked my door (even a screen door) he wouldn't have wandered in.
Another case: I've known people whose friends or relatives felt perfectly comfortable wandering in whenever they felt like it if the door is unlocked.
As a parent post somewhere up the chain correctly pointed out, there are degrees of privacy / security. The "locked screen door" doesn't keep the Hillside Strangler out but it does serve a purpose.
As somebody who played EQ for about 5 years and WoW for about a year, I'd have to say WoW can be just as complex as EQ. Blizzard didn't "dumb it down", they took out the "camp this location for several weeks on end until blah spawn" nonsense. As far as I'm concerned, the dummies are the ones who mistake endless tedium for complexity.
It works even better if the RKVs are inertialess (free) planets that are inerted right before they smash into the target (see EE "Doc" Smith)
I'm tired of people who think they are better than someone else because of their knowledge of a particular technology. I'm tired of people whose only way of feeling big is by stepping on someone else. Who cares whether someone is a 50 year old housewife or a 19 year old snot-nosed kid? One of the most amazing people I know is a 96 year old great-grandmother.
Ok, here's the deal. My parents use AOL. They are in their 80s. They've had computers going back to the Apple II, but they aren't geeks. They just want to communicate with their kids via email and look at an occasional web page. So they are comfortable with AOL. I've occasionally told them they ought to look into an ISP and DSL. They've muttered a little and then gone on with their lives. You know what, THEY ARE RIGHT TO USE AOL. It's what they want. They are happy with it. It does what they need. Why the frack should they change? To please you? You don't like how they access the net? Well, maybe I don't like the car you drive, but guess what, I don't get a veto on your car, you don't get a veto on my parent's AOL. Deal with it and move on.
Balancing the races is clearly extremely difficult. It's interesting that you bring up the micromanagement issue with War2 Paladins, and then say that Starcraft was well balanced. In Starcraft, I tended to play Protoss, which probably weren't the strongest but required the least "micro-management". I always wanted to play humans, but there was just too to do to take advantage of their abilities, certainly more micromanagement than Warcraft.
As far as the classes in WoW, I've only played a few classes, and only two up to high levels, but as far as I can tell Blizzard has done a superb job of balancing the classes. Certainly far better than EQ did on first release. I started a rogue in EQ shortly after it was released and gave up after a few months because he basically couldn't do anything. I know rogues have been improved enormously since then, but we are 6 years down the road now with EQ, and people are STILL complaining about balance there.This is hilarious... one thing Blizzard is well known for, back to the first days of Warcraft, is producing polished, well-balanced games. Having played EQ1 for many years, I can guarantee you that WoW classes are FAR more well-balanced.