Well, I hire people. And I have conditioned myself not to be influenced by first impressions How on earth do you decide if people that you hire are good or not? Do you get more than one interview? Is that hour or hour and a half not a first impression? Or do you just hire anyone?
In any of the above cases it seems like a waste of time and money.
In addition to what you said: 1. PC Ports of the games are not only delayed, but also suffer in performance. This has been most visible with 1st gen XBOX with has been a plain PC under the hood and the Celeron 733 powering it, yet the PC ports of XBOX games required 1GHz + processors and much more RAM. Current example is Assasin's Creed which recommends 3GB of RAM!!! No console has that much, yet it work smoothly somehow... 2. They blame piracy and poor sales, but usually PC sales add profits to what's been made on a console. Usually the can be a shared development path for consoles and PC for mainstream engines like Unreal 3. Technically speaking it's more difficult to develop for PS3 and X360 rather than X360 and PC, yet no one admits that. 3. Top end PCs clearly have superior power and better input/output options.
Consoles have the advantage for publishers in the sense that they have much more control over how you use the content, they can extra for any mods or add-ons, but the net result is dumber users who play on their TV but don't know much about technology:(
How many times do people need to be reminded that PirateBay crew, who are being prosecuted: 1. Did not upload you game to the site. They probably don't even know it's there and they couldn't be arsed by the thousands of similar complaints they get from almost everyone in software. 2. They don't even host the content, so again you're after the wrong people. 3. If your game is popular there, then you're likely to get more legitimate purchases, because people can try everything and see if your 'premium artwork' is really worth the premium. Really good artists somehow don't need to worry about income, it's crappy ones who complain the most, so which are you?
I highly recommend http://designinginterfaces.com/. Taken purely from usability perspective, aims perfectly at developers. It introduces a set of patterns (similar to to the famous coding patters by Boch et al. - should be known to any OO developer). The patterns are easy to navigate and easy to apply - you don't have to be working 100% of your time on usability issues to be able to apply these recipies.
One minor downside, I think there is not enough focus on web side side of things in that book - the capabilities of browsers have grown recently, thus allowing much greater capabilities there. In such case I'd still recommend the book as as a start and scavenge the web for the rest.
Furthermore there are tons of resources and communities devoted to GUI design and usability issues, you may wish to start here http://www.stcsig.org/usability/ for instance.
Unfortunately plain text stores no information about the organization of the text. That's where you use DocBook for instance. But average Joe nor even programmers understand the advantages of splitting the information , meta-information and presentation, therefore they all use Word for drafting their documents.
The founders of Google, when asked to comment about the rapid growth, actually stated, that they were unhappy with the control slipping out of their hands. Also based on experiences of my friends being recruited to google, I must admit, it's a nightmarish process and HR staff is nowhere near the excellence of the engineers working there.
But I'd still say that comparison of Google and Microsoft is pointless beyond their sheer size. M$ has been growing with finance in mind, asking for money where no one used to ask for it before (think software licenses, you pay for XBOX, the games and an account and in the corporate world the fees are even higher). Google on the other hand tends to provide free service for things that used to be costly (email, data mining) and only asking money for the premium services.
Sorry for that, didn't know that it wasn't true, as the place I got the info from was Voice of America radio broadcast, which I assume is a reputable source.. Perhaps it was about urban legends and I didn't get the intro...
or stories about people driving into lakes and flooded roads "because GPS told them to"
man who went to the back of his RV while still on the highway to have some coffee, when he crashed, he sued the company for not stating in the manual that "the car does not turn by itself"
truck driver who drove his lorry into a river, not knowing that the bridge he intended to use was no longer there
etc
I'd say pass the control to the machines as soon as possible....
I think any reasonable study would also show that the best leaders are those who played just a little and have a lot of experience in real life.
Basically like with language acquisition theories we can either assume that leadership skill is either acquired during our life or we are born with it. If it's genetic, then gaming has nothing to do it. If it's not, I'd say leading a school research project or a community or anything really is better that gaming.
With all that said, it's time to head back to Portal for me (which btw is way too short and too easy).
Indeed. "The" also causes problems with TOC and any similar lists. Any folder listing, or an online shop or anything really lists massive amount of records starting with "The", so actually I'd say it's a very useful research.
For the first time there's a chance for a decent input device for a Console system, I for one wouldn't really care about any FPS games for any console unless it has a mouse support. Seriously, I've seen people play Halo on their gamepad and that's just lame, when you can be like 100x more accurate nad faster with the mouse... and that is from a console made by the same company that invented the mouse (or spread it's usage, whatever)...
Opera was one the last major browser that didn't support client-side XSL transformation. With the upgrade, Opera added the support, which in my view is more important than some milliseconds.
Now you can push raw XML to browsers along with the stylesheet(s) and let them handle the load of processing.
This introduces a lot of new opportunities, for instance, since XSL is way more powerful than CSS, you may for instance rearrange the whole content of the page ways beyond what CSS positioning tricks allow for, you cna also do some computation etc.
Unfortunately, all the browers support XSLT 1.0 for now, while 2.0 offers substantial improvements.
Could you guys quickly brief me in on how Identity Theft works in US?
I live in Eastern Europe and communism left us with so much bureaucracy, that it's impossible to arranage even the simplest thing without being there in person and signing in on a leaflet of paper and showing your ID. I'd say it's very difficult for us to do something when it's legitimate even harder for an impersonator and, not surprisingly you don't hear about many abuses of id theft in eastern Block.
Can you give some examples how personal data can be used to commit frauds in US? While I might consider a career in con art, I'm actually asking, because as well develop, we evolve to a more liberal model and I can see many oversight here already, for instance cashiers not checking the signatures on credit cards (which are a novelty here) etc..
And do you still remember the old ATorrent and BTorrent? Ah those were the days. I stopped enjoying the torrent thingie around the time GTorrent arrived, I think.
I'm waiting for a worm that exploits STUN and invalidates the whole "block any port you don't use" rule. Even if such a worm arrives on the scene it will not reverse the ISPs' port blocking policies for the simple reason that they prohibit some kinds of old vectors of attack.
This is much like the old BIOS function to notify tampering with the MBR, this vector of attack in no longer used but the function is still there (although disabled by default) and a few recent incidents show that it was a good choice to leave it there. Nowadays it's used by some of the rootkits, for instance to overcome all Vista security protection schemes.
On the other hand I agree that too strict port blocking has caused the Internet usage to evolve and nowadays a lot of traffic lives on top of HTTP traffic or in UDP, whereas it could have been implemented in it's RFC dedicated port range if it weren't for the port blocking.
I find that Marketing departments are completely unfit to provide a secure platform for fun & just competition. It usually is a very talented guy, who however has his focus on the looks, not the engine. I once, for curiosity's sake took part in one contest. Scoring poorly, I began to analyze the inner workings of that FLash site. I have quickly found that the answers to the trivia question were stored in plaintext in my browser cache! I notified the organizers, but no actions were taken, I also soon began to notice how people bagan to score more than it was possible according to the game's rules. Eventually, they didn't change a thing, except banning people beyond certain score, in the end all my friends got the prizes, CD players, cups etc. One year later there was a new contest, almost identical glitches, this time however I decided not to get my friends in trouble, just in case.
It depends how you see this management this. If by managing you mean control (I tend to agree with this approach), then, yes it is hard to manage geeks because it's more difficult controllling intelligent people, it's not as easy to feed them with bullshit. In my view the sole reason middle management exists, is that they make you do more for less, which is profitable for the company. Now if you think logically, this obviously means that engineers are more valuable assets to company than middle managment (if they weren't, it'd more cost-effective to not to hire management and have geegs slack off all day). Now what I fail to understand is why such managers get paid more and get the cut and the credit for what the engineers did, but that's just me whining...
Ad 1) I simply disagree. If the IT people weren't there to solve IT problems, they wouldn't be called IT. That's the managament's role, to get input from a customer and deliver a business solution. Otherwise they are useless (and they should learn IT slang, if they work in such industry). It's the management that gets paid better so they should have a broader knowledge.
Ad 2) Many companies allow for that already and with that statement, you sort of contradict point 1)
Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself.
My only experience with DeusEx 2 was: I really enjoyed DeusEx, it's non-linear endings etc, so I really was eagerly waiting for years for a sequel. In the meantime, I've been playing all FPP games, mainly Counter Strike like crazy. So as soon as I started playing DeusEx 2, I sneaked like a pro, carefully aimed, and while crouching, quickly fired three consecutive shots straight in the back of the guards cranial area from a point blank distance. I've seen his brain literally getting blown out, but after a second he turned back, hit my with a prod once and incapacitated me immediately, furthermore he raised the alarm as well. I uninstalled and returned the game almost as fast.
There will be plenty of similar reviews, but I recommend the article at Firingsquad.com, http://firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aero _glass_performance/ which shows that Vista, with the most CPU/GPU?Mem intensive Aero GUI enabled, is not negatively impacted as far as gaming performance is concerned. Everyone just assumes that Vista is going to be a bloatware, but according to the numbers, it is going to be a great OS for gaming as far as the performance goes. If you add nice GUI, taking advantage of the powerful GPU, that you, as a gamer, already have, security enhancement etc, it looks like a pretty decent OS for gamers.
The article and the slashdot post fail to mention that most of the Cabbies in UK are from Eastern Europe now. The job of a taxi driver isn't regarded highly, even despite the high wages + even more through tips. Plus you can simply earn more by driving more, the job is very flexible and has some more perks. Anyway, the funny thing about those foreing drivers is they all have to learn the streets and routes of a given city, before even going there. I did IT for one recruitment company and they would train all the wannabe cabbies just by giving them a street list, a map and few others items. The the prospective employer would interview them about few routes and if they passed they flew to UK. It all works out pretty well for quite a few years now.
Is it really a good expectation, to have designers do only the design? In my view the designers absolutely need to know at least a little about the underlying technology. On a little scale I tried having an artist draw a picture of a webpage, which took him like 10 minutes and then I had to encode it into CSS, gifs etc., shouldn't this be a designers role to know that a wepage is not a picture, but it's constructed of the elements like headings and that it's pulled from DB and it has to be formatted? That's why I say that every designer should have at least a little insight into the code aspect. What's your view?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you get more than one interview?
Is that hour or hour and a half not a first impression?
Or do you just hire anyone?
In any of the above cases it seems like a waste of time and money.
In addition to what you said:
:(
1. PC Ports of the games are not only delayed, but also suffer in performance. This has been most visible with 1st gen XBOX with has been a plain PC under the hood and the Celeron 733 powering it, yet the PC ports of XBOX games required 1GHz + processors and much more RAM. Current example is Assasin's Creed which recommends 3GB of RAM!!! No console has that much, yet it work smoothly somehow...
2. They blame piracy and poor sales, but usually PC sales add profits to what's been made on a console. Usually the can be a shared development path for consoles and PC for mainstream engines like Unreal 3. Technically speaking it's more difficult to develop for PS3 and X360 rather than X360 and PC, yet no one admits that.
3. Top end PCs clearly have superior power and better input/output options.
Consoles have the advantage for publishers in the sense that they have much more control over how you use the content, they can extra for any mods or add-ons, but the net result is dumber users who play on their TV but don't know much about technology
How many times do people need to be reminded that PirateBay crew, who are being prosecuted:
1. Did not upload you game to the site. They probably don't even know it's there and they couldn't be arsed by the thousands of similar complaints they get from almost everyone in software.
2. They don't even host the content, so again you're after the wrong people.
3. If your game is popular there, then you're likely to get more legitimate purchases, because people can try everything and see if your 'premium artwork' is really worth the premium. Really good artists somehow don't need to worry about income, it's crappy ones who complain the most, so which are you?
I highly recommend http://designinginterfaces.com/.
Taken purely from usability perspective, aims perfectly at developers.
It introduces a set of patterns (similar to to the famous coding patters by Boch et al. - should be known to any OO developer).
The patterns are easy to navigate and easy to apply - you don't have to be working 100% of your time on usability issues to be able to apply these recipies.
One minor downside, I think there is not enough focus on web side side of things in that book - the capabilities of browsers have grown recently, thus allowing much greater capabilities there. In such case I'd still recommend the book as as a start and scavenge the web for the rest.
Furthermore there are tons of resources and communities devoted to GUI design and usability issues, you may wish to start here http://www.stcsig.org/usability/ for instance.
Unfortunately plain text stores no information about the organization of the text.
That's where you use DocBook for instance.
But average Joe nor even programmers understand the advantages of splitting the information , meta-information and presentation, therefore they all use Word for drafting their documents.
The founders of Google, when asked to comment about the rapid growth, actually stated, that they were unhappy with the control slipping out of their hands.
Also based on experiences of my friends being recruited to google, I must admit, it's a nightmarish process and HR staff is nowhere near the excellence of the engineers working there.
But I'd still say that comparison of Google and Microsoft is pointless beyond their sheer size.
M$ has been growing with finance in mind, asking for money where no one used to ask for it before (think software licenses, you pay for XBOX, the games and an account and in the corporate world the fees are even higher).
Google on the other hand tends to provide free service for things that used to be costly (email, data mining) and only asking money for the premium services.
So any comparison between the two is pointless.
Sorry for that, didn't know that it wasn't true, as the place I got the info from was Voice of America radio broadcast, which I assume is a reputable source..
Perhaps it was about urban legends and I didn't get the intro...
I agree that they were too restrictive.
Seeing the vidoes on YouTube like these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh-B3rysxIA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7La09EBLf-Q
or stories about people driving into lakes and flooded roads "because GPS told them to"
man who went to the back of his RV while still on the highway to have some coffee, when he crashed, he sued the company for not stating in the manual that "the car does not turn by itself"
truck driver who drove his lorry into a river, not knowing that the bridge he intended to use was no longer there
etc
I'd say pass the control to the machines as soon as possible....
I think any reasonable study would also show that the best leaders are those who played just a little and have a lot of experience in real life.
Basically like with language acquisition theories we can either assume that leadership skill is either acquired during our life or we are born with it.
If it's genetic, then gaming has nothing to do it.
If it's not, I'd say leading a school research project or a community or anything really is better that gaming.
With all that said, it's time to head back to Portal for me (which btw is way too short and too easy).
Indeed. "The" also causes problems with TOC and any similar lists. Any folder listing, or an online shop or anything really lists massive amount of records starting with "The", so actually I'd say it's a very useful research.
Posting the info and having people slashdot the mentioned sites is not going to help them either :)
For the first time there's a chance for a decent input device for a Console system, I for one wouldn't really care about any FPS games for any console unless it has a mouse support.
Seriously, I've seen people play Halo on their gamepad and that's just lame, when you can be like 100x more accurate nad faster with the mouse...
and that is from a console made by the same company that invented the mouse (or spread it's usage, whatever)...
Opera was one the last major browser that didn't support client-side XSL transformation.
With the upgrade, Opera added the support, which in my view is more important than some milliseconds.
Now you can push raw XML to browsers along with the stylesheet(s) and let them handle the load of processing.
This introduces a lot of new opportunities, for instance, since XSL is way more powerful than CSS, you may for instance rearrange the whole content of the page ways beyond what CSS positioning tricks allow for, you cna also do some computation etc.
Unfortunately, all the browers support XSLT 1.0 for now, while 2.0 offers substantial improvements.
Could you guys quickly brief me in on how Identity Theft works in US?
I live in Eastern Europe and communism left us with so much bureaucracy, that it's impossible to arranage even the simplest thing without being there in person and signing in on a leaflet of paper and showing your ID.
I'd say it's very difficult for us to do something when it's legitimate even harder for an impersonator and, not surprisingly you don't hear about many abuses of id theft in eastern Block.
Can you give some examples how personal data can be used to commit frauds in US?
While I might consider a career in con art, I'm actually asking, because as well develop, we evolve to a more liberal model and I can see many oversight here already, for instance cashiers not checking the signatures on credit cards (which are a novelty here) etc..
I highly recommend seeing the Robot Chicken remake:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=OGNCWxWTGFg
And do you still remember the old ATorrent and BTorrent? Ah those were the days. I stopped enjoying the torrent thingie around the time GTorrent arrived, I think.
This is much like the old BIOS function to notify tampering with the MBR, this vector of attack in no longer used but the function is still there (although disabled by default) and a few recent incidents show that it was a good choice to leave it there. Nowadays it's used by some of the rootkits, for instance to overcome all Vista security protection schemes.
On the other hand I agree that too strict port blocking has caused the Internet usage to evolve and nowadays a lot of traffic lives on top of HTTP traffic or in UDP, whereas it could have been implemented in it's RFC dedicated port range if it weren't for the port blocking.
I find that Marketing departments are completely unfit to provide a secure platform for fun & just competition.
It usually is a very talented guy, who however has his focus on the looks, not the engine.
I once, for curiosity's sake took part in one contest. Scoring poorly, I began to analyze the inner workings of that FLash site.
I have quickly found that the answers to the trivia question were stored in plaintext in my browser cache!
I notified the organizers, but no actions were taken, I also soon began to notice how people bagan to score more than it was possible according to the game's rules.
Eventually, they didn't change a thing, except banning people beyond certain score, in the end all my friends got the prizes, CD players, cups etc.
One year later there was a new contest, almost identical glitches, this time however I decided not to get my friends in trouble, just in case.
It depends how you see this management this. If by managing you mean control (I tend to agree with this approach), then, yes it is hard to manage geeks because it's more difficult controllling intelligent people, it's not as easy to feed them with bullshit.
In my view the sole reason middle management exists, is that they make you do more for less, which is profitable for the company. Now if you think logically, this obviously means that engineers are more valuable assets to company than middle managment (if they weren't, it'd more cost-effective to not to hire management and have geegs slack off all day). Now what I fail to understand is why such managers get paid more and get the cut and the credit for what the engineers did, but that's just me whining...
These are my personal opinions as well:
Ad 1) I simply disagree. If the IT people weren't there to solve IT problems, they wouldn't be called IT. That's the managament's role, to get input from a customer and deliver a business solution. Otherwise they are useless (and they should learn IT slang, if they work in such industry).
It's the management that gets paid better so they should have a broader knowledge.
Ad 2) Many companies allow for that already and with that statement, you sort of contradict point 1)
Ad 3) True, but how can that be done?
Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family.
Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars,
compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good
health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed
interest mortage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your
friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a
three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics.
Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning.
Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing
game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose
rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable
home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up
brats you spawned to replace yourself.
Choose your future.
Choose life.
My only experience with DeusEx 2 was:
I really enjoyed DeusEx, it's non-linear endings etc, so I really was eagerly waiting for years for a sequel. In the meantime, I've been playing all FPP games, mainly Counter Strike like crazy.
So as soon as I started playing DeusEx 2, I sneaked like a pro, carefully aimed, and while crouching, quickly fired three consecutive shots straight in the back of the guards cranial area from a point blank distance. I've seen his brain literally getting blown out, but after a second he turned back, hit my with a prod once and incapacitated me immediately, furthermore he raised the alarm as well. I uninstalled and returned the game almost as fast.
There will be plenty of similar reviews, but I recommend the article at Firingsquad.com,o _glass_performance/
http://firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aer
which shows that Vista, with the most CPU/GPU?Mem intensive Aero GUI enabled, is not negatively impacted as far as gaming performance is concerned.
Everyone just assumes that Vista is going to be a bloatware, but according to the numbers, it is going to be a great OS for gaming as far as the performance goes.
If you add nice GUI, taking advantage of the powerful GPU, that you, as a gamer, already have, security enhancement etc, it looks like a pretty decent OS for gamers.
The article and the slashdot post fail to mention that most of the Cabbies in UK are from Eastern Europe now.
The job of a taxi driver isn't regarded highly, even despite the high wages + even more through tips.
Plus you can simply earn more by driving more, the job is very flexible and has some more perks.
Anyway, the funny thing about those foreing drivers is they all have to learn the streets and routes of a given city, before even going there.
I did IT for one recruitment company and they would train all the wannabe cabbies just by giving them a street list, a map and few others items. The the prospective employer would interview them about few routes and if they passed they flew to UK.
It all works out pretty well for quite a few years now.
Is it really a good expectation, to have designers do only the design?
In my view the designers absolutely need to know at least a little about the underlying technology.
On a little scale I tried having an artist draw a picture of a webpage, which took him like 10 minutes and then I had to encode it into CSS, gifs etc., shouldn't this be a designers role to know that a wepage is not a picture, but it's constructed of the elements like headings and that it's pulled from DB and it has to be formatted?
That's why I say that every designer should have at least a little insight into the code aspect.
What's your view?