Also for a general advocacy protest (where civil dissobedience is innapropriate -- as it generally is unless you are attempting to directly interfere with a police or state action) register your event. If you're large enough, the cops have every right to break up your demonstration for obstructing traffic.
Tables might be a good way of solving the problem of poor designers who don't understand that the web isn't, won't be, and shouldn't be print media but they don't solve many others.
It sounds like your designers need to aquiant themselves with the reality of their medium.
Ok, now is the time for someone... IBM, Google, rogue billionaires, someone, to put together a commercial desktop linux. Push the fucker like OS X. Work out deals with OEMs. I'm not one of those people who thinks Linux will only be a success when I'm playing Rainbow 6 on it, Linux is a success because it's already working quite well for millions, but taking away the "assumed platform" status from Windows would be good for EVERYONE, including windows users, who right now have to put up with this kind of "innovation."
Majority and popular adoption are fine ways of advancing language. My original comment was this: media marketing and the on-the-spot-invention of the technology industy create crappy language. Buzzwords are best, therefor, when they're sufficiently ugly and unwieldy that they'll stick around in popular usage only as long as the term they're describing is popular as well.
I work in internet design and programming, and I am constantly amazed at the amount of horrible bullshit that has to come out of my mouth in order to communicate ideas.
quick turn on your favorite game from 2006 and your favorite game from 1996 and your favorite game from 1986. how long does it take to get from power on to running around the first level and not being in a "tutorial" or cutscene. the giant and very profitable hardcore gaming fanbase is killing gaming for everyone else. for all the attention the growth of the gaming industry has gotten, the games themselves had more mass-market appeal 10 and 20 years ago.
To understand the dangers of granting the government "wartime powers" when the war in question is not a war against any one particular organization, nation, or government, but is in fact like the "War on Drugs," a vague and mutable set of policies dealing with a persistant problem, one need only read Orwell.
The only end condition for the "War on Terror" is the day that "terrorism" no longer turns the heads of voters. Call me a pessimist, but there will never be point when some small non-governmental group of ideologues isn't assymetrical warfare and violence aimed at media coverage rather than strategic targets to interact with the global political community.
Even in Israel car crashes kill a lot more people that car bombs. Obviously there's a difference, but we're not really getting a lot of extra safety in exchange for our freedoms here. I'm pretty worried.
just because the word is from somewhere doesn't mean it isn't a silly word coined to describe a hollywood (kinda lame) special effect that means "change" or "transform" in any other context.
Just as meta- is a perfectly legitimate prefix, its new use as a standalone adjective is silly, and dumb.
I'm going to take the completely opposite opinion of everyone here:
"web 2.0" is a great buzzword. why? it describes something legitimate -- the confusing rush of new internet ideas from the past few years, and it's ugly as sin.
good buzzwords should hurt to say. "blog" is a great buzzword. it won't be in the english language in 30 years, except to talk about this time. it's just too hideous of a word. "morph" on the other hand, is going to fucking stick around for ever. it's just passable enough, and just generic enough to enter into common usage, and it just rots away at the beautiful and giant beast that is english.
i'll accept the reality that most of our new words are coming from technology and marketing, but let's pick neologisms that won't outlive their usefulness, and take the place of perfectly good old words that rolled into the language over the tongues of centuries of farmers and poets, not 15 minutes in a meeting before lunch.
and yes, it's funny i have some spelling errors in this post, i'm tired and my contacts are out, shut up.
They did this in late 19th century warfare as well, loading cannons with "grape" (thousands of pellets) to knock out a row of advancing infantry at close range.
Would have sucked to be at that station though, you wouldn't get to run until they were just a couple hundred feet away.
Also, they're using *Craigslist* are the spies looking for Futons of Mass Destruction? Does Al Quaeda need 2 pet friendly roommates for summer sublet ASAP?
And this is why a 12 gauge is the best gun for home defense. It makes a noise when you cock it that people generally recognize, and it doesn't take a particularly well-aimed shot to knock a fucker down. A criminal might not be scared of a granny with a pistol, he'll rush her assuming she won't have the guts to fire or the nerve to fire straight, but anyone with a survival instinct respects a 12 gauge at close range, even if they're also armed.
Surveilance technology in public is a big deal. Take the example of those cameras at large sporting events, that scan faces in the crowd, match against license plate photographs, and run through a database of criminal recrods and FBI files. Sure, before the technology the police could have set up a whole bunch of tables and required everyone to stand in line and present their papers, but then we'd feel like we lived in an authoritarian state. Technology allows for a greatly enhanced police presence without altering my day to day interaction with the public space. You don't get used to officers on every corner and having your records checked every time you engage in routine activities, but you do if it is done in a way to be ubiquitous and invisible.
The argument for this kind of surveilance (in general not just the border cams) is that "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I won't be troubled, we need to do this for safety." And that is a valid philosophy, it's just not one shared by the people who founded our country.
Designers should have some flexibility with the display of text. Proportional sizing is a good compromise, far better than the much more common practice (I'm guilty here too) of just overriding things completely.
There are varying theories about this. On the one hand, not having the fear of blame is nice, but on the other, anonymity can do to development what it does to spelling, grammar, and politeness...
Here here. Independant cenema is as expensive as all but the most expensive big-budget games. The better question to ask is "why does independant gaming lack the financial backing and infrastructure of independant cinema, publishing, music, etc.?"
My initial reactions to business are usually the same as yours, but you have to remember, without these businesses, the videogames we're discussing don't exist. "Business" represents a lot of people doing a lot of different things. I'm an independant software developer, I work on a contract to contract basis. While I usually consider clients to be bosses of sorts, I'm self-employed. Am I "business?" Do I want your share and the other guys too? Well sure... I'd like to make more money, I'm not a rich man, and it would be nice to travel more and live better.
The left is generally correct in the belief that allowing market forces to work unfettered creates excellent markets, but they will only be optimized along a limited number of parameters, and that business does need to be kept in check if values that don't easily translate into a bottom-line are to be preserved in our society. However, the recurring error of the left is to treat business as a criminal element merely for being business. Like it or not business is the cornerstone of our society. Nobody is employed without it. Food doesn't get grown without it, the internet doesn't exist without it (the internet mind you, the multi-trillion dollar communications infrastructure, not the web, a vague collection of data stored and transmitted on that network) etc. etc. etc. If you make yourself the enemy of business, you're making a pretty powerful enemy. The challenge for the left in the globalization era is to come up with creative approaches to dealing with modern problems that utilize the forces of capitalism without succumbing to their excesses. Seven-times watered down Marxism isn't really serving us very well, and the public rightly finds little resonance in a class debate cloaked in the language of the Industrial Revolution.
The natural market for indie games is the PC, the structure of console gaming assumes large publishers; back in the day console games were either first party titles or arcade ports. In the 80s and 90s the majority of PC games were "indie" studios like Maxis, Id, and Sierra: small-staff affiars that occasionally produced mega-hit games, but also subsited quit well on sleepers and more nich titles.
This all changed after the indroduction of dedicated graphics processing and of online gaming, and the resulting arms race for whiz-bang excite-the-fanboys-with-screenshots features. The arcade culture moved online and onto PC gaming, and the idea of PC games being something that an adult might want to play on their office machine began to die. Megapublishers moved in, purchased the formerly independant studios, and homoginized the industry.
And now you have an absurd situation where Nintendo is seen as being some sort of guiding visionary for thinking that video games could be intertainment for people who aren't hard-core gamers, when, in fact, before recently, PC gaming had been serving a diverse audience for over 20 years.
Anyway, I'm of the opinion that video games have become much more narrow and catering to a specific audience, one that no longer includes me. I'm no luddite. I appreciate good graphics and advances in technology, however games that use all these new features in ways that actually interest me are few and far between, and I find myself looking toward abandonware for new (to me) games.
I have a kind of generic critique of capitalism as a mode of cultural production that relates to this. It seems that commercial art is best when it is part of an immature market. The genre of the summer blockbuster saw a lot more creativity and inventiveness in the 70s and 80s, while the parameters were still being explored. Once Hollywood figured out the basic formulas of that game (e.g. "Die Hard" is a reproducable success, "E.T." is not, etc.) creativity dropped through the floor and you start seeing more and more sequels, licensed adaptations, and such. I'm not saying that profit is incompatible with art, just that it doesn't scale infinitely, when the producers get too greedy and refuse to accept the risk of not having a hit, the fun dies out.
Not if you're hours away from a deadline and every little thing makes your blood pressure tick up just a little higher. I don't think it's unreasonable, in 2006, to expect an Office Suite to be zippy.
The cluelessness of modern business is what's motivating me to move out to startup land. I'm heading out to the bay area this fall. I've been pissed that I missed out on the 90s, but really I'm expecting things to be better this time around... people are much more grounded and understand how to turn an online service into money. The 2.0 business plans are a lot more realistic, and the advertising revenue model is much more locked-down.
It takes thousands of lines of assembly to do what one line of Perl will do, I promise you my Perl input validator is going to have many many fewer bugs than your C or ASM input validator.
And Fowler's "Refactoring" has pretty well closed the case on any n lines of code being as modifiable and as bug free as any other n lines, even within the same language.
"Marketshare" is one of the most overrated concepts in the tech biz... at least among people who comment on it.
Think about cars. BMW doesn't have one fourth Honda's or Toyota's marketshare. They haven't put a dent in the bigger players in years and years. Should BMW be worried? Of course not. Theyr'e in a different market than Honda and Toyota. There's certainly overlap, and such, but there are enough cars being bought and sold that there are distinct ecosystems within the car marketplace, and companies can succeed and fail semi-independantly from each other. Just because people don't all own three cars, doesn't mean that all car companies are in direct a-gain-for-me-is-a-loss-for-you competition.
Videogames have become that way. Back when I really played a lot of video games, there were two consoles the Super NES and the Genesis more or less competing with each other on a feature for feature basis for an identical market. Few people owned two consoles. PC games were what your dad or older brother played, nerdy stuff like Simcity or Sierra games (which I of course loved as well -- I'll never forgive EA and the armies of l337 graphix fanboys for killing PC gaming) The market doesn't look like that any more. Many people own multiple platforms. The demographics of the industry have spread way the hell out, and a lot more people are buying video games than they used to.
Nintendo doesn't need more than 33% of the market to make a profit and secure an ironclad market niche for itself. Anyone can come along and do what Microsoft and Sony are doing, it's just stuff the most specs in the box as you can, and then shake hands with the right developers, cross your fingers and pray things come together before christmas of 20XX. Nintendo is in the business of creating demand rather than blindly meeting it. It's a bit like comparing Apple to Dell. While Sony might have a bigger piece of the pie, Nintendo is going to have a much easier time holding on to the piece that it has.
The N64 and Gamecube were both significantly flawed designs. But because there's a certain type of gaming that you get with Nintendo (and you used to get with Sega... never forget the Dreamcast...) so the fans of that style of gaming stayed on board.
Sony is going to have to drop their price fast, frankly. I don't see why anyone would buy a playstation this holiday season, and if you want that kind of gaming, Xbox 360 is giong to have a much more mature product line and not terribly deficient hardware. The idea that the PS3 is giong to be able to launch with a slow start is rather puzzling and contradictary to recent video game history.
"All the reasons are tied up in one truth: every time you fix a bug, you risk introducing another. Don't we all start out with the belief that software only gets better as we work on it?"
Holy shit! I can't imagine being on a team with that attitude? Do you people write tests? There are dependable ways of insuring that changes don't re-introduce old bugs, and if you can't fix one thing without causing a seemingly unrelated problem, you're working with some pretty smelly code.
There's definitely truth in the statement that the need to use software and the need to eliminate bugs can be at odds with each other once the bugcount is low enough that the product is usable. But... isn't that obvious? How many open source projects out there (without version numbers approaching a known irrational number that is...) can really brag of being bug free?
BUT this article is a good reminder of why I'm glad the boxed-software days are coming to a close. Software should either be written with a client present or by people who intend on using the product themselves. Trying to come up with a featureset for some vague "target market" is a horrbile way to write software. Software is unique because it is both engineering and design at every phase of its creation... and without set feature requirements and feedback, there's really no way to know if what you're making is well engineered or not. Anyway, don't work in a closedsource / many customers environment... it's bad for the brain.
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Also for a general advocacy protest (where civil dissobedience is innapropriate -- as it generally is unless you are attempting to directly interfere with a police or state action) register your event. If you're large enough, the cops have every right to break up your demonstration for obstructing traffic.
Tables might be a good way of solving the problem of poor designers who don't understand that the web isn't, won't be, and shouldn't be print media but they don't solve many others.
It sounds like your designers need to aquiant themselves with the reality of their medium.
Ok, now is the time for someone... IBM, Google, rogue billionaires, someone, to put together a commercial desktop linux. Push the fucker like OS X. Work out deals with OEMs. I'm not one of those people who thinks Linux will only be a success when I'm playing Rainbow 6 on it, Linux is a success because it's already working quite well for millions, but taking away the "assumed platform" status from Windows would be good for EVERYONE, including windows users, who right now have to put up with this kind of "innovation."
Too bad my first life takes up too much time for me to give SL a good try, it looks pretty interesting.
Majority and popular adoption are fine ways of advancing language. My original comment was this: media marketing and the on-the-spot-invention of the technology industy create crappy language. Buzzwords are best, therefor, when they're sufficiently ugly and unwieldy that they'll stick around in popular usage only as long as the term they're describing is popular as well.
I work in internet design and programming, and I am constantly amazed at the amount of horrible bullshit that has to come out of my mouth in order to communicate ideas.
quick turn on your favorite game from 2006 and your favorite game from 1996 and your favorite game from 1986. how long does it take to get from power on to running around the first level and not being in a "tutorial" or cutscene. the giant and very profitable hardcore gaming fanbase is killing gaming for everyone else. for all the attention the growth of the gaming industry has gotten, the games themselves had more mass-market appeal 10 and 20 years ago.
To understand the dangers of granting the government "wartime powers" when the war in question is not a war against any one particular organization, nation, or government, but is in fact like the "War on Drugs," a vague and mutable set of policies dealing with a persistant problem, one need only read Orwell.
The only end condition for the "War on Terror" is the day that "terrorism" no longer turns the heads of voters. Call me a pessimist, but there will never be point when some small non-governmental group of ideologues isn't assymetrical warfare and violence aimed at media coverage rather than strategic targets to interact with the global political community.
Even in Israel car crashes kill a lot more people that car bombs. Obviously there's a difference, but we're not really getting a lot of extra safety in exchange for our freedoms here. I'm pretty worried.
How about a big "Not a CD" sticker. Let the manager explain.
Hmmm... maybe I'll just print a bunch of these up...
"Verbing weirds language" - Calvin & Hobbes
just because the word is from somewhere doesn't mean it isn't a silly word coined to describe a hollywood (kinda lame) special effect that means "change" or "transform" in any other context.
Just as meta- is a perfectly legitimate prefix, its new use as a standalone adjective is silly, and dumb.
I'm going to take the completely opposite opinion of everyone here:
"web 2.0" is a great buzzword. why? it describes something legitimate -- the confusing rush of new internet ideas from the past few years, and it's ugly as sin.
good buzzwords should hurt to say. "blog" is a great buzzword. it won't be in the english language in 30 years, except to talk about this time. it's just too hideous of a word. "morph" on the other hand, is going to fucking stick around for ever. it's just passable enough, and just generic enough to enter into common usage, and it just rots away at the beautiful and giant beast that is english.
i'll accept the reality that most of our new words are coming from technology and marketing, but let's pick neologisms that won't outlive their usefulness, and take the place of perfectly good old words that rolled into the language over the tongues of centuries of farmers and poets, not 15 minutes in a meeting before lunch.
and yes, it's funny i have some spelling errors in this post, i'm tired and my contacts are out, shut up.
They did this in late 19th century warfare as well, loading cannons with "grape" (thousands of pellets) to knock out a row of advancing infantry at close range.
Would have sucked to be at that station though, you wouldn't get to run until they were just a couple hundred feet away.
Damn Fashion Gestapo, I hate those guys.
Also, they're using *Craigslist* are the spies looking for Futons of Mass Destruction? Does Al Quaeda need 2 pet friendly roommates for summer sublet ASAP?
And this is why a 12 gauge is the best gun for home defense. It makes a noise when you cock it that people generally recognize, and it doesn't take a particularly well-aimed shot to knock a fucker down. A criminal might not be scared of a granny with a pistol, he'll rush her assuming she won't have the guts to fire or the nerve to fire straight, but anyone with a survival instinct respects a 12 gauge at close range, even if they're also armed.
Surveilance technology in public is a big deal. Take the example of those cameras at large sporting events, that scan faces in the crowd, match against license plate photographs, and run through a database of criminal recrods and FBI files. Sure, before the technology the police could have set up a whole bunch of tables and required everyone to stand in line and present their papers, but then we'd feel like we lived in an authoritarian state. Technology allows for a greatly enhanced police presence without altering my day to day interaction with the public space. You don't get used to officers on every corner and having your records checked every time you engage in routine activities, but you do if it is done in a way to be ubiquitous and invisible.
The argument for this kind of surveilance (in general not just the border cams) is that "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I won't be troubled, we need to do this for safety." And that is a valid philosophy, it's just not one shared by the people who founded our country.
Designers should have some flexibility with the display of text. Proportional sizing is a good compromise, far better than the much more common practice (I'm guilty here too) of just overriding things completely.
There are varying theories about this. On the one hand, not having the fear of blame is nice, but on the other, anonymity can do to development what it does to spelling, grammar, and politeness...
Here here. Independant cenema is as expensive as all but the most expensive big-budget games. The better question to ask is "why does independant gaming lack the financial backing and infrastructure of independant cinema, publishing, music, etc.?"
My initial reactions to business are usually the same as yours, but you have to remember, without these businesses, the videogames we're discussing don't exist. "Business" represents a lot of people doing a lot of different things. I'm an independant software developer, I work on a contract to contract basis. While I usually consider clients to be bosses of sorts, I'm self-employed. Am I "business?" Do I want your share and the other guys too? Well sure... I'd like to make more money, I'm not a rich man, and it would be nice to travel more and live better.
The left is generally correct in the belief that allowing market forces to work unfettered creates excellent markets, but they will only be optimized along a limited number of parameters, and that business does need to be kept in check if values that don't easily translate into a bottom-line are to be preserved in our society. However, the recurring error of the left is to treat business as a criminal element merely for being business. Like it or not business is the cornerstone of our society. Nobody is employed without it. Food doesn't get grown without it, the internet doesn't exist without it (the internet mind you, the multi-trillion dollar communications infrastructure, not the web, a vague collection of data stored and transmitted on that network) etc. etc. etc. If you make yourself the enemy of business, you're making a pretty powerful enemy. The challenge for the left in the globalization era is to come up with creative approaches to dealing with modern problems that utilize the forces of capitalism without succumbing to their excesses. Seven-times watered down Marxism isn't really serving us very well, and the public rightly finds little resonance in a class debate cloaked in the language of the Industrial Revolution.
The natural market for indie games is the PC, the structure of console gaming assumes large publishers; back in the day console games were either first party titles or arcade ports. In the 80s and 90s the majority of PC games were "indie" studios like Maxis, Id, and Sierra: small-staff affiars that occasionally produced mega-hit games, but also subsited quit well on sleepers and more nich titles.
This all changed after the indroduction of dedicated graphics processing and of online gaming, and the resulting arms race for whiz-bang excite-the-fanboys-with-screenshots features. The arcade culture moved online and onto PC gaming, and the idea of PC games being something that an adult might want to play on their office machine began to die. Megapublishers moved in, purchased the formerly independant studios, and homoginized the industry.
And now you have an absurd situation where Nintendo is seen as being some sort of guiding visionary for thinking that video games could be intertainment for people who aren't hard-core gamers, when, in fact, before recently, PC gaming had been serving a diverse audience for over 20 years.
Anyway, I'm of the opinion that video games have become much more narrow and catering to a specific audience, one that no longer includes me. I'm no luddite. I appreciate good graphics and advances in technology, however games that use all these new features in ways that actually interest me are few and far between, and I find myself looking toward abandonware for new (to me) games.
I have a kind of generic critique of capitalism as a mode of cultural production that relates to this. It seems that commercial art is best when it is part of an immature market. The genre of the summer blockbuster saw a lot more creativity and inventiveness in the 70s and 80s, while the parameters were still being explored. Once Hollywood figured out the basic formulas of that game (e.g. "Die Hard" is a reproducable success, "E.T." is not, etc.) creativity dropped through the floor and you start seeing more and more sequels, licensed adaptations, and such. I'm not saying that profit is incompatible with art, just that it doesn't scale infinitely, when the producers get too greedy and refuse to accept the risk of not having a hit, the fun dies out.
Not if you're hours away from a deadline and every little thing makes your blood pressure tick up just a little higher. I don't think it's unreasonable, in 2006, to expect an Office Suite to be zippy.
The cluelessness of modern business is what's motivating me to move out to startup land. I'm heading out to the bay area this fall. I've been pissed that I missed out on the 90s, but really I'm expecting things to be better this time around... people are much more grounded and understand how to turn an online service into money. The 2.0 business plans are a lot more realistic, and the advertising revenue model is much more locked-down.
This has been a fascinating thread.
It takes thousands of lines of assembly to do what one line of Perl will do, I promise you my Perl input validator is going to have many many fewer bugs than your C or ASM input validator.
And Fowler's "Refactoring" has pretty well closed the case on any n lines of code being as modifiable and as bug free as any other n lines, even within the same language.
Web aleph-null is one thing, but I wouldn't count on aleph-one...
(pure math just has to be the greatest possible useless humanities major, don't you agree?)
"Marketshare" is one of the most overrated concepts in the tech biz... at least among people who comment on it.
Think about cars. BMW doesn't have one fourth Honda's or Toyota's marketshare. They haven't put a dent in the bigger players in years and years. Should BMW be worried? Of course not. Theyr'e in a different market than Honda and Toyota. There's certainly overlap, and such, but there are enough cars being bought and sold that there are distinct ecosystems within the car marketplace, and companies can succeed and fail semi-independantly from each other. Just because people don't all own three cars, doesn't mean that all car companies are in direct a-gain-for-me-is-a-loss-for-you competition.
Videogames have become that way. Back when I really played a lot of video games, there were two consoles the Super NES and the Genesis more or less competing with each other on a feature for feature basis for an identical market. Few people owned two consoles. PC games were what your dad or older brother played, nerdy stuff like Simcity or Sierra games (which I of course loved as well -- I'll never forgive EA and the armies of l337 graphix fanboys for killing PC gaming) The market doesn't look like that any more. Many people own multiple platforms. The demographics of the industry have spread way the hell out, and a lot more people are buying video games than they used to.
Nintendo doesn't need more than 33% of the market to make a profit and secure an ironclad market niche for itself. Anyone can come along and do what Microsoft and Sony are doing, it's just stuff the most specs in the box as you can, and then shake hands with the right developers, cross your fingers and pray things come together before christmas of 20XX. Nintendo is in the business of creating demand rather than blindly meeting it. It's a bit like comparing Apple to Dell. While Sony might have a bigger piece of the pie, Nintendo is going to have a much easier time holding on to the piece that it has.
The N64 and Gamecube were both significantly flawed designs. But because there's a certain type of gaming that you get with Nintendo (and you used to get with Sega... never forget the Dreamcast...) so the fans of that style of gaming stayed on board.
Sony is going to have to drop their price fast, frankly. I don't see why anyone would buy a playstation this holiday season, and if you want that kind of gaming, Xbox 360 is giong to have a much more mature product line and not terribly deficient hardware. The idea that the PS3 is giong to be able to launch with a slow start is rather puzzling and contradictary to recent video game history.
Reading this made me cringe:
"All the reasons are tied up in one truth: every time you fix a bug, you risk introducing another. Don't we all start out with the belief that software only gets better as we work on it?"
Holy shit! I can't imagine being on a team with that attitude? Do you people write tests? There are dependable ways of insuring that changes don't re-introduce old bugs, and if you can't fix one thing without causing a seemingly unrelated problem, you're working with some pretty smelly code.
There's definitely truth in the statement that the need to use software and the need to eliminate bugs can be at odds with each other once the bugcount is low enough that the product is usable. But... isn't that obvious? How many open source projects out there (without version numbers approaching a known irrational number that is...) can really brag of being bug free?
BUT this article is a good reminder of why I'm glad the boxed-software days are coming to a close. Software should either be written with a client present or by people who intend on using the product themselves. Trying to come up with a featureset for some vague "target market" is a horrbile way to write software. Software is unique because it is both engineering and design at every phase of its creation... and without set feature requirements and feedback, there's really no way to know if what you're making is well engineered or not. Anyway, don't work in a closedsource / many customers environment... it's bad for the brain.