My high school teachers just wanted the papers to be legible, and had already accepted (without really letting us know) that most of us wouldn't be writing anything by hand once we left high school. In fact, by the time my sister graduated a couple years later, they accepted very little work in English classes that wasn't typed. I pretty much stopped using cursive in high school because anything I wrote quickly became nearly impossible to read in cursive. Of course, I still write notes today, usually in print, but even that has suffered over the years from lack of real use. My typing is faster, by far, than writing by hand ever was, though there are obvious exceptions that others have noted with mathematics and formulas.
It sounds like you just don't understand MMOs. There really isn't skill involved until you've already collected all of the loot and are just in PvP playing against other players that have also managed to collect all of the best equipment. Everything is an investment of time and/or money, and some people already simply pay to have their character leveled and equipped to the point at which they can jump into the end-game and compete in the only skill portion of the game. If the company gets in on the action by setting a price on these things, then the only thing it's really doing is shutting out (or reducing the profit of) the black market and legitimizing the actions of the people that do this.
Until MMOs change in some fundamental way in which the game is no longer about grinding your way to the top level and then going on loot runs 20-million times to get the same top tier equipment that everyone else on the server is trying to get, there's not going to be any significant skill involved in anything but the last 1% of the game experience. Most of what comes before that is made easier by having friends that can help you and knowing the best places to level and loot in the game, and there will always be people out there willing to sell their services in these areas to make it easier to get to that last 1%.
On the other hand, they're specifically trying to make the point that the items they're putting up for sale are going to be more about cosmetic changes than competitive changes. It's like selling decorations for the house your character may have in the game rather than buying the +5 Sword of Player-Killing.
The legalities are simple: the songs were licensed specifically to be played with those games. There is no legal way to play them outside of the context of the game with which they came. Rock Band has the exception of being able to play them, under certain conditions, with other versions of Rock Band, but that still doesn't give any legal rights to play them with other games, or as stand-alone music tracks.
Note: I don't necessarily support this method of licensing, that's just the way it is.
Not quite the same situation here. There aren't nearly as many clones, you just have Activision saturating the market all by themselves with their own clones of Guitar Hero after the creator went off and made Rock Band.
Of course, I don't really remember the Myst clones, either, but that was probably because I was too busy playing FPS games (and instead of FPS games disappearing, we just got so many Wolfenstein clones that we can't even get a decent Wolfenstein game any more).
It's amazing how painfully hard it can be to play a song with one little strum bar and 5 buttons that is quick and easy to learn with 4+ strings and 24 frets.
Seriously, though, after playing bass for most of my life and guitar for only a couple years less, it's nice to be able to enjoy music in an interactive manner with my family & friends, rather than being restricted to the handful of people I know that can play a guitar better than my 4-year-old. Not to mention carting around speakers...
I already own 2 guitars and 2 basses and some fairly expensive equipment. I can play a lot of these songs on guitar already (and that tends to screw me up when I play them in Guitar Hero or Rock Band). It's got nothing to do with the reason I play the games. My wife and daughter, friends and family all like to pick up the plastic instruments and play along with songs they know and love. I only have a handful of friends even capable of picking up a guitar and playing along with the songs I enjoy to play on a real instrument.
Not to mention the barrier to entry is a little higher with the real thing, since the crappy instruments that most people buy as cheap starters end up discouraging them as much as their inability to play them well.
How many notebook batteries burst into flames before every company under the sun was recalling them? I get CPSC recall notifications via email every day, and in most cases the recalls are due to a very small handful of incidents much less serious than something catching fire.
Personally, I carry my Blackberry Curve in my front pants pocket all the time, and often carry my DS or PSP in the other front pocket. The only time I've broken a device in my front pocket was when something else was in my pocket and impacted the screen (HTC Touch didn't break, but the screen had a dent that kept reading as an input on the touchscreen), or when I was riding a roller coaster (HP iPaq screen gained a nice diagonal crack). Your battery should not be one of the first things to give in these situations.
Except that you authorized the credit reporting agencies to collect your data (though you may not have intended or wanted to) when you signed up for credit.
This guy doesn't have anyone's permission to hold their data, and many countries have laws that make it illegal to do so.
I think he made another joke that went over a few heads. Then again, if he's over a certain age, it's not as easy to guess those numbers as you might think. My SSN, for instance, was issued in a different state from where I was born, and therefore is quite different from what people would expect.
and we all know the TV doesn't lie, especially when their biggest source was most likely the ex-wife. Then again, maybe she was doing landscaping and having her toilet paper rationed because he lost all of his money in a bad investment.
I bought MechWarrior 2 for $50 brand spanking new, and the first expansion was $35. BG and BG 2 I spent more on because I bought collector's editions that ran a little higher ($60 or 65). PlaneScape: Torment dropped to the bargain bin in a heartbeat, so I didn't even pay full price for that (sad too, since it was better than any of the other games that used the same engine).
The only time games for common home consoles and PCs have been more than $50 in the US has been when they were offering more in the packaging (the collector's editions), or when they were on cartridge-based systems and the cartridges themselves had extra hardware in them that increased their cost (Final Fantasy and Ultima: Exodus on the NES were $60 or $65 because they had extra memory chips to store saved games).
With the way the PC developers and publishers have been buying each other up lately, I wouldn't expect to find patches for old games for very long. Unless the game was developed by a company like id or Valve, not many people seem to care enough to keep patches mirrored indefinitely, so make sure to download those patches and archive them alongside your game discs if you're planning on picking up the game again in the future. You can probably backup your PS3 patches with a thumb drive, too (since you can backup most of your hard drive data that way). I'd imagine MS will let you do something similar with the 360 since the system is sold without a hard drive in some configurations.
Otherwise, if it's a big concern, don't buy games until you get some real reviews that tell you the games are broken without patches. Stop supporting companies that ship now, patch later.
Hell, at this point I'll be happy if MS/Sony still support physical media on their new consoles in 7 years. Yeah, that PSPGo is going to be great in 10 years.
Re:Software Projects vs. Traditional Projects
on
Why New Systems Fail
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· Score: 1
"Software Engineers" are one of the few types of engineers that are not liable for the failure of the systems they create. They're also one of the few engineers that usually see construction start before the designs are complete.
Additionally, software prototypes don't live in the same realm as other prototypes. You can show a proof of concept in software, and then something happens when you scale it up that you weren't expecting, or someone just screws up writing their piece of the code and it takes two years to track down a mis-placed keystroke. If it's a third-party product (as with this book's subject matter), it's even worse, because you call support and everyone's trying to determine how they can shift the blame to someone else and clear their support tickets rather than actually help someone out.
The premium, in both cases, is for a part that isn't in common use and/or demand. Touch-screens aren't made in massive numbers over the size of an iPhone, and LCD screens aren't made in 4;3 ratios in massive numbers because most of the LCD screens are made for HDTVs (even at small sizes).
That's a checkbox option in the mouse settings on Windows. I turn it off if I'm ever using a machine where I find it turned on, because it's irritating that the same physical distance suddenly becomes a different virtual distance on the screen.
I've lived in not-so-remote places where UPS and FedEx refused to deliver. They would simply call or leave a slip (really? where's my package?) and tell me where I could pick it up (and the pickup location closed at 5pm in this case). The only time I ever got UPS to deliver to one particular place was when I found one of these slips on XMas Eve and my wife called them irate that we wouldn't have coffee on XMas morning (because the package was our coffee maker), and wouldn't give in until they sent some poor schmuck out to our place at 7pm.
I once had to look up what the postal service considered too many days in a row without mail (because I was trying to find a number to call to find out if my mail had been shut off or something), and then Tuesday came, and ended my concerns about whether or not they still delivered.
Larger businesses don't upgrade to the newest operating system until it's been fully tested with their apps on their network. Many times, with Windows and Office, they don't even start that testing until at least one service pack has come down the line, just for good measure.
The previous company I worked for removed XP from their new systems and installed 98 or 2000, depending on the use. The computer I'm typing on now came with Vista and is running XP. In a few years when they replace this thing, it'll probably come with Windows 7 (or something else) and have Vista on it when I receive it.
Actually, it depends on the lender. I spent a number of years paying too much for my car insurance because I paid for the level of insurance they wanted me to have in order not to have the insurance they would buy for me. I switched insurers when I moved and forgot to tell them (and got a better rate), and by the time I found out they had already started charging me, $50 a month. I could've saved myself almost $200/month on my insurance policy if I had just asked what they were going to charge for the insurance.
Of course, it should be noted that insurance only covers them for the value of the loan, so you still have to carry whatever insurance you feel secure carrying, but you shouldn't just carry whatever they want you to unless it really is cheaper than their insurance.
It also has a lot to do with the merging of two companies to create Verizon in the first place, and GTE, at least, was already like that from buying up multiple companies in the past. When Verizon was formed, the division of GTE I worked for was sold to another company, and THAT company, also having spent a lot of time buying companies, was also that way.
The company I work for now is similar, with the specific group I work for having been part of a different company a few years ago. However, they seem to handle it a little better than either of the previous companies did.
Outlook has supported threaded mail for a long time. The feature they were trying to highlight was the ability to condense the content of the thread to a single (or small number of) message when much of the content in the replies is the same (ie the previous sender's message quoted back in a reply). Therefore you could look at the top-level of the thread and possibly read the whole thread without having to go through several messages, most of which contain the previous messages quoted over and over again.
How much value this has to most users and whether or not it actually works very well I don't know, but the idea that Outlook didn't have a threaded view before this is at best laughable, especially since a quick search would tell you how to do it in the last 4 or so versions of the program.
The fact is that Microsoft was right to ditch the traditional menus in most of the Office programs, because they were heavily bloated and every user needed to customize their toolbar to have a clean interface that they could actually use (or memorize the keyboard shortcuts, which for the most part haven't changed from 95 to 2007). Whether or not their 2007 (or 2010) implementation is any better depends somewhat on the user (and in part their willingness to adapt), but at least they're trying to do something about it, instead of just leaving everyone with 3 lines of toolbars and having 75% or more of the buttons on their screen go unused 99.9% of the time.
If I have to use Office, I prefer to use 2007, as it makes the options much more accessible than the default menus and toolbars in previous versions.
That being said, it's pretty rare that I have to use Office, which may have a lot to do with my preference, since I don't spend time customizing my menus and have to spend a lot of time looking for the options I want on older versions. My wife's actually much more familiar with the Office apps (especially Excel), and it took her a couple of months to get accustomed to the 2007 interface, but eventually it grew on her.
Most people should have known that Twitter's days were numbered when CNN and The View started harping on people to follow them on Twitter. That's generally a sign that it's over, not that it's the next big thing.
Slashdot Mirror
My high school teachers just wanted the papers to be legible, and had already accepted (without really letting us know) that most of us wouldn't be writing anything by hand once we left high school. In fact, by the time my sister graduated a couple years later, they accepted very little work in English classes that wasn't typed. I pretty much stopped using cursive in high school because anything I wrote quickly became nearly impossible to read in cursive. Of course, I still write notes today, usually in print, but even that has suffered over the years from lack of real use. My typing is faster, by far, than writing by hand ever was, though there are obvious exceptions that others have noted with mathematics and formulas.
It sounds like you just don't understand MMOs. There really isn't skill involved until you've already collected all of the loot and are just in PvP playing against other players that have also managed to collect all of the best equipment. Everything is an investment of time and/or money, and some people already simply pay to have their character leveled and equipped to the point at which they can jump into the end-game and compete in the only skill portion of the game. If the company gets in on the action by setting a price on these things, then the only thing it's really doing is shutting out (or reducing the profit of) the black market and legitimizing the actions of the people that do this.
Until MMOs change in some fundamental way in which the game is no longer about grinding your way to the top level and then going on loot runs 20-million times to get the same top tier equipment that everyone else on the server is trying to get, there's not going to be any significant skill involved in anything but the last 1% of the game experience. Most of what comes before that is made easier by having friends that can help you and knowing the best places to level and loot in the game, and there will always be people out there willing to sell their services in these areas to make it easier to get to that last 1%.
On the other hand, they're specifically trying to make the point that the items they're putting up for sale are going to be more about cosmetic changes than competitive changes. It's like selling decorations for the house your character may have in the game rather than buying the +5 Sword of Player-Killing.
The legalities are simple: the songs were licensed specifically to be played with those games. There is no legal way to play them outside of the context of the game with which they came. Rock Band has the exception of being able to play them, under certain conditions, with other versions of Rock Band, but that still doesn't give any legal rights to play them with other games, or as stand-alone music tracks.
Note: I don't necessarily support this method of licensing, that's just the way it is.
Not quite the same situation here. There aren't nearly as many clones, you just have Activision saturating the market all by themselves with their own clones of Guitar Hero after the creator went off and made Rock Band.
Of course, I don't really remember the Myst clones, either, but that was probably because I was too busy playing FPS games (and instead of FPS games disappearing, we just got so many Wolfenstein clones that we can't even get a decent Wolfenstein game any more).
It's amazing how painfully hard it can be to play a song with one little strum bar and 5 buttons that is quick and easy to learn with 4+ strings and 24 frets.
Seriously, though, after playing bass for most of my life and guitar for only a couple years less, it's nice to be able to enjoy music in an interactive manner with my family & friends, rather than being restricted to the handful of people I know that can play a guitar better than my 4-year-old. Not to mention carting around speakers...
I already own 2 guitars and 2 basses and some fairly expensive equipment. I can play a lot of these songs on guitar already (and that tends to screw me up when I play them in Guitar Hero or Rock Band). It's got nothing to do with the reason I play the games. My wife and daughter, friends and family all like to pick up the plastic instruments and play along with songs they know and love. I only have a handful of friends even capable of picking up a guitar and playing along with the songs I enjoy to play on a real instrument.
Not to mention the barrier to entry is a little higher with the real thing, since the crappy instruments that most people buy as cheap starters end up discouraging them as much as their inability to play them well.
How many notebook batteries burst into flames before every company under the sun was recalling them? I get CPSC recall notifications via email every day, and in most cases the recalls are due to a very small handful of incidents much less serious than something catching fire.
Personally, I carry my Blackberry Curve in my front pants pocket all the time, and often carry my DS or PSP in the other front pocket. The only time I've broken a device in my front pocket was when something else was in my pocket and impacted the screen (HTC Touch didn't break, but the screen had a dent that kept reading as an input on the touchscreen), or when I was riding a roller coaster (HP iPaq screen gained a nice diagonal crack). Your battery should not be one of the first things to give in these situations.
Except that you authorized the credit reporting agencies to collect your data (though you may not have intended or wanted to) when you signed up for credit.
This guy doesn't have anyone's permission to hold their data, and many countries have laws that make it illegal to do so.
I think he made another joke that went over a few heads. Then again, if he's over a certain age, it's not as easy to guess those numbers as you might think. My SSN, for instance, was issued in a different state from where I was born, and therefore is quite different from what people would expect.
and we all know the TV doesn't lie, especially when their biggest source was most likely the ex-wife. Then again, maybe she was doing landscaping and having her toilet paper rationed because he lost all of his money in a bad investment.
I bought MechWarrior 2 for $50 brand spanking new, and the first expansion was $35. BG and BG 2 I spent more on because I bought collector's editions that ran a little higher ($60 or 65). PlaneScape: Torment dropped to the bargain bin in a heartbeat, so I didn't even pay full price for that (sad too, since it was better than any of the other games that used the same engine).
The only time games for common home consoles and PCs have been more than $50 in the US has been when they were offering more in the packaging (the collector's editions), or when they were on cartridge-based systems and the cartridges themselves had extra hardware in them that increased their cost (Final Fantasy and Ultima: Exodus on the NES were $60 or $65 because they had extra memory chips to store saved games).
With the way the PC developers and publishers have been buying each other up lately, I wouldn't expect to find patches for old games for very long. Unless the game was developed by a company like id or Valve, not many people seem to care enough to keep patches mirrored indefinitely, so make sure to download those patches and archive them alongside your game discs if you're planning on picking up the game again in the future. You can probably backup your PS3 patches with a thumb drive, too (since you can backup most of your hard drive data that way). I'd imagine MS will let you do something similar with the 360 since the system is sold without a hard drive in some configurations.
Otherwise, if it's a big concern, don't buy games until you get some real reviews that tell you the games are broken without patches. Stop supporting companies that ship now, patch later.
Hell, at this point I'll be happy if MS/Sony still support physical media on their new consoles in 7 years. Yeah, that PSPGo is going to be great in 10 years.
"Software Engineers" are one of the few types of engineers that are not liable for the failure of the systems they create. They're also one of the few engineers that usually see construction start before the designs are complete.
Additionally, software prototypes don't live in the same realm as other prototypes. You can show a proof of concept in software, and then something happens when you scale it up that you weren't expecting, or someone just screws up writing their piece of the code and it takes two years to track down a mis-placed keystroke. If it's a third-party product (as with this book's subject matter), it's even worse, because you call support and everyone's trying to determine how they can shift the blame to someone else and clear their support tickets rather than actually help someone out.
The premium, in both cases, is for a part that isn't in common use and/or demand. Touch-screens aren't made in massive numbers over the size of an iPhone, and LCD screens aren't made in 4;3 ratios in massive numbers because most of the LCD screens are made for HDTVs (even at small sizes).
That's a checkbox option in the mouse settings on Windows. I turn it off if I'm ever using a machine where I find it turned on, because it's irritating that the same physical distance suddenly becomes a different virtual distance on the screen.
I've lived in not-so-remote places where UPS and FedEx refused to deliver. They would simply call or leave a slip (really? where's my package?) and tell me where I could pick it up (and the pickup location closed at 5pm in this case). The only time I ever got UPS to deliver to one particular place was when I found one of these slips on XMas Eve and my wife called them irate that we wouldn't have coffee on XMas morning (because the package was our coffee maker), and wouldn't give in until they sent some poor schmuck out to our place at 7pm.
I once had to look up what the postal service considered too many days in a row without mail (because I was trying to find a number to call to find out if my mail had been shut off or something), and then Tuesday came, and ended my concerns about whether or not they still delivered.
Larger businesses don't upgrade to the newest operating system until it's been fully tested with their apps on their network. Many times, with Windows and Office, they don't even start that testing until at least one service pack has come down the line, just for good measure.
The previous company I worked for removed XP from their new systems and installed 98 or 2000, depending on the use. The computer I'm typing on now came with Vista and is running XP. In a few years when they replace this thing, it'll probably come with Windows 7 (or something else) and have Vista on it when I receive it.
Actually, it depends on the lender. I spent a number of years paying too much for my car insurance because I paid for the level of insurance they wanted me to have in order not to have the insurance they would buy for me. I switched insurers when I moved and forgot to tell them (and got a better rate), and by the time I found out they had already started charging me, $50 a month. I could've saved myself almost $200/month on my insurance policy if I had just asked what they were going to charge for the insurance.
Of course, it should be noted that insurance only covers them for the value of the loan, so you still have to carry whatever insurance you feel secure carrying, but you shouldn't just carry whatever they want you to unless it really is cheaper than their insurance.
It also has a lot to do with the merging of two companies to create Verizon in the first place, and GTE, at least, was already like that from buying up multiple companies in the past. When Verizon was formed, the division of GTE I worked for was sold to another company, and THAT company, also having spent a lot of time buying companies, was also that way.
The company I work for now is similar, with the specific group I work for having been part of a different company a few years ago. However, they seem to handle it a little better than either of the previous companies did.
Outlook has supported threaded mail for a long time. The feature they were trying to highlight was the ability to condense the content of the thread to a single (or small number of) message when much of the content in the replies is the same (ie the previous sender's message quoted back in a reply). Therefore you could look at the top-level of the thread and possibly read the whole thread without having to go through several messages, most of which contain the previous messages quoted over and over again.
How much value this has to most users and whether or not it actually works very well I don't know, but the idea that Outlook didn't have a threaded view before this is at best laughable, especially since a quick search would tell you how to do it in the last 4 or so versions of the program.
or how about Excel's cut & paste functionality working in even remotely the same fashion as everywhere else in Windows (or Office)?
The fact is that Microsoft was right to ditch the traditional menus in most of the Office programs, because they were heavily bloated and every user needed to customize their toolbar to have a clean interface that they could actually use (or memorize the keyboard shortcuts, which for the most part haven't changed from 95 to 2007). Whether or not their 2007 (or 2010) implementation is any better depends somewhat on the user (and in part their willingness to adapt), but at least they're trying to do something about it, instead of just leaving everyone with 3 lines of toolbars and having 75% or more of the buttons on their screen go unused 99.9% of the time.
If I have to use Office, I prefer to use 2007, as it makes the options much more accessible than the default menus and toolbars in previous versions.
That being said, it's pretty rare that I have to use Office, which may have a lot to do with my preference, since I don't spend time customizing my menus and have to spend a lot of time looking for the options I want on older versions. My wife's actually much more familiar with the Office apps (especially Excel), and it took her a couple of months to get accustomed to the 2007 interface, but eventually it grew on her.
Most people should have known that Twitter's days were numbered when CNN and The View started harping on people to follow them on Twitter. That's generally a sign that it's over, not that it's the next big thing.