"Oh, well of course you had problems, you saved it as a Word document, you idiot. Instead you should use (insert open standard that no one can read because MS doesn't support it either). Oh, and by the way, tell everyone who needs to read your document that they have to install a new office suite, k thnx bye."
It has to work with Word. Period. It has to support it perfectly. There are a handful of places in the world where you can get by without Word compatibility, but if you want to be a serious alternative to Office, you goddamn well have to support it. You can't just tell people that they're stupid for using the "wrong" software when their software is compatible with the software of everyone they know, and yours isn't.
You know, I'm tired of being told it's a problem with me when I think the software is crappy. I'd rather word process in Vi or goddamn Emacs than in Writer. I've used Wordperfect, and Claris, and Writer, and Abiword, and Word, and I just do not like Writer. period. I liked Wordperfect better, and goddamn that's saying something!
I'm not even that crazy with the word processing, and I still run into problems with Writer, and when I run into problems, given the limited nature of my needs, that's like a slap in the face.
Worst of all, I've tried to do OOo rollouts in office environments, and that is by far the most painful experience I've had in my working life. No one likes it better than what they were using before, and it doesn't matter what they were using. I tried putting people on OOO.2 when it came out, to replace their Word 97, and they hated it. Moreover, when I, in my arrogance, tried to tell them it was just an issue of learning the software, they'd pull up detailed examples of things it damn well didn't do, and I had to stand there like a retard trying to defend brand new software against EIGHT YEAR OLD OFFICE and failing.
Working with it myself is one thing. When I try to pitch it to other people, and they take it, use it, and find that it's so bad they'd rather buy 200 office licenses...They rightly think I have poor judgment, and that's flat unforgivable. Pitching OSS can be an uphill battle anyway against the MS zealots, so when I pitch something I want to sell them on the fact that its so good it makes the equivalent closed source product look like crap. If I pitch a crappy OSS product (like OOo), it makes the rest of my job that much harder.
I use GIMP, and I use Abiword, and in both of those cases, I notice a lack when compared with Photoshop or Word, but the lack is purely in extra features...GIMP and Abiword are stable, and responsive, and they do what I need them to do. OOo is a pile of substandard, bloated apps, and damn none of them make me happy.
So screw it. I'm done advocating OOo. I'm done using it. I'm sick of the space it takes up on my install disks.
No, it's not. It's about Office vs Open Office...If all you need is a mail client, your needs are simple anyway.
Outlook by itself is no great application...It's Outlook plus Exchange that's hard to top. But they're completely missing the point there, and just putting in a mail client without coming up with a backend groupware competitor. I've got no problem with them putting in a mail client, but don't call it an Outlook competitor if it's not one.
Either that or you need to find yourself a real-world math problem, something that interests you, and force yourself to find the answer.
I don't use math much in my daily grind, but I force myself to come up with problems so I can exercise my skills. There is math everywhere, so if you get in the habit of trying to find problems to solve, it's easy to stay in practice. Calculus, especially, is easy because it has so many applications...Any question that starts with "How much?" or "How fast?" is probably calc friendly. I keep my geometry skills sharp by figuring out the height of buildings by the length of the shadow they cast.
I don't consider myself to be much of a math person...I certainly never had the flair for it that everyone else seemed to. But diligence will take you farther than inborn ability, and the fact that I'm obsessed with real-world applications pushed my skills a lot farther than people who never really understood the why even though they did better than me on paper.
Jesus. How about they compete with Word first, eh? Calling Thunderbird an "Outlook Replacement" just shows they have no idea what people use Outlook for. Outlook Express replacement, sure.
The great thing about Office is all the damn pieces work together. Excel is friendly with Access, Access is friendly with Word, Everything is friendly with Outlook. To beat Office, you have to have an Office suite that works like that. Not just all the pieces in one package.
There is not one single thing in OO that doesn't have an OSS equivalent stand-alone application that is at least as good. Bundling a mail client with the rest of your apps doesn't suddenly make you competitive, especially when your whole user base could have already installed that mail client if they wanted it.
There are OSS projects that are actually making a push toward doing the things that Outlook does (like Kontact). But Thunderbird is still lagging behind Evolution imho, and neither of them play all that great with any of the groupware servers out there, open or closed.
I used to try and push OO on people, but I've completely lost faith in it. I keep thinking, maybe they'll get their crap together, but then they do stuff like this.
Nah, I know nothing about it but what I've read. Only thing I need from my phone is phone-ness, and maybe a camera.
I was that way as well, sort of. I studied what I wanted to study, in the order I wanted to study it. I usually ended up doing fine, but I remember one year where I failed 3 quarters of a class (Chemistry) before ending up with a B- after pulling a 98 for the last quarter and a curved 96 on the final. 'Course I was one of only 7 (out of 35) people to take the final, so I guess I still did better than most.
Costs me nothing to not be a prick. Anyway it was kinda interesting to really think about the value thing...Been reading economics, so it was on my mind.
Yea...When Ballmer says the word "Value" I hear "(shareholder) Value"...I've never seen any other sort of value out of him. There are people in the Microsoft machine who understand what the consumer values, but he's not one of them. That's what the whole "Developers" thing is about...Get the creative producers to drink your coolaid, and ride their coat-tails to success...I've never bought a MS OS because I liked the OS, but only because I wanted to use some software that was only available for that OS.
Ahhh, the negotiation process. My attention span for schoolwork was way too low for me to effectively pull off the "All A" gambit. I'd lose interest long before the end of the year, no matter what the prize. The peril of the iPhone is the phonebook-sized monthly bill, not the phone itself. Brrr, scary.
As a parent, you also have to factor in the amount of grief you're going to get from a pissed off kid when you get them the thing that they damn well outta want *grumble* instead of the thing that they think they need.
I agree with the GP pretty much entirely; my point is purely on the nature of "value". Saying that a kid doesn't know what value is is disingenuous...They know exactly what value is...For them. Just because your notion and their notion aren't in agreement, doesn't mean that they're wrong. It also doesn't mean that you're obligated to get them what they value.
I understand his frustration though. Damn kids don't value things for the reasons that adults who actually have to shell out the money value things, and it's annoying to see something you spent a good chunk of change on fall by the wayside after a paltry few months.
Well, I'll agree that they're definitely on different wavelengths. Ballmer, market droid that he is, isn't even necessarily speaking a human language when he uses the word "value." His kind use that word in a sense disconnnected from human ideas of worth and demand. But again, my sense of value is my sense of value, and I'm not a good person to speculate on what Ballmer values.
Still, I think that there are a lot of shiny widgets on Vista that may conform to the 13-year-old-girl definition of value, even if they don't really conform to mine, or her mom's, or hell, even Ballmer's. And peer-conformance probably has some value to the kid, and it may have status overtones, e.g. "I have the new Windows and you're using the old Windows."
And buy your kid a video iPod! He's probably the only kid at school who doesn't have one! Everyone makes fun of him, even the guy who got his mom's pink breast cancer iPod!;)
As an adult, please define value for the rest of us.
Saying a teenager doesn't understand value, just shows that you don't understand value. Value is absolutely relative to the individual, and it varies wildly based on fashion, personal experience, age, sex, race, everything.
When you say that someone of a different demographic from yourself "doesn't understand value", what you're really saying is that you don't understand them, and that, therefore, you think the things they value are meaningless.
There are a lot of people who will profit from those people and their "meaningless" values, while you sit smugly telling them they're stupid for valuing those things anyway. Microsoft has become a monopoly doing this crap. It's heart and soul why Office beats the crap out of Open Office. OSS people need to take the needs of non-geeks seriously.
Yea, because only a monopoly can afford to ignore some random schmo's uninformed opinion.
Seriously. We all agree that Vista has issues; some of them are the problems you'd expect of a windows pre-SP1 release...Bad drivers, no drivers, bugs, etc. The rest of them are either here to stay, or able to be disabled. That's the same crap we always have to eat from a Windows release.
But the fact that some non-savvy mom and her gadget-loving 13 year old daughter don't like it is supposed to mean something? When was the last time you asked someone like that for OS advice? This same chick will be doing the same whining in 10 years because she doesn't want to switch off Vista for XPII, or whatever the next release is, because she can't handle the "new" windows.
It all started going to hell before that. When people stopped having to punch it manually on to tape and run it through a machine, they got soft.
It's sad really, because it does work to just push out a slow and bloated piece of code and wait for the machines to catch up. Get a bigger, better machine, put a new OS on it, and see the complete lack of difference. Takes the same percentage of memory, pushes the processor just as high. Remember when everyone was up in arms because XP SP1 slowed down machines? Everyone who noticed had a new machine 6 months later, and it was a non-issue.
If all you need is word processing and minimal spreadsheets, sure, as long as you don't mind the load times. But I've run into situations where I've installed OO on the machines of secretaries who I confidently expected to never be able to utilize the full potential of OO, only to have them blindside me two or three days later with a list of things they needed to be able to do, for which there was no equivalent in OO.
I don't even like OO for word processing myself...Abiword beats it easily.
For something that would pixelize, I'd think it would be less reversible, because there would be a certain amount of "rock and roll" (random data) added to the effect...But for something like "swirl"...I'd imagine that effect is mostly a mathematical transform.
The only place you'd lose data is in the rounding process.
Nope. I used it just the other day. The computer is better at breaking it down, given time, but if you put enough crap behind it it'll still override their desire to attack anything but your tanks. It's still a hardcore game winner in the early game, because nothing will convince a zergling or a zealot to attack those depots if something is shooting at them. (imho, it's all part of the pathing problems that are the biggest flaw in starcraft...Block a unit, and it will circle the board trying to find a way around.)
I think what they added was a tendency for units like Ghosts and Defilers to target those buildings with their nukes and plague. The protoss use corsairs with the disruption web...once nothing is attacking the the ground units, their AI focuses on buildings.
But, in the absence of all those things, you still get the joy of watching a pair of ultralisks get killed by two marines in a bunker protected by 3 supply depots. It's pathetic.
You get the same facts in 20 dinky stories, with none of the depth of a really good, well-researched story.
Having 20 people write the same shallow story isn't "more" information. Sure, you have the resources to look the stuff up yourself. That's one of the things I like about Slashdot; everybody looks up some of it, and you actually end up with all the information.
But without a body of knowlegable people who actually give a damn, the loss of those big articles is a pain in the ass, because no one has time to look it all up themselves.
Starcraft had a similar "bug"...The wall 'o supply depots. If you were playing the Terrans against a computer opponent, you put a line of supply depots in front of your bunkers. When the vicious melee ground units that normally tore your bunkers a new one came running up, their AI would tell them that they HAD to attack the bunkers, but they had no ranged attack, and no path to the bunkers, so they'd end up running back and forth in front of the wall of depots, unable to kill the wall, and unable to attack their target.
A couple of bunkers could wipe out the sort of zealot rush that is almost impossible to stop without bunkers chock full of firebats. At it's heart, its an AI problem. The AI chooses a target it's unable to attack, and then is unable to drop it. IMHO it's one of the oldest, and worst, bugs in strategy game AI. It's easy to exploit.
I think the same types of people who wanted longer articles 20 years ago, want them today. However, since the web is currently forcing a lot of short-article people to read, I think it simply seems like the demand is higher for shorter articles.
With the advent of talking heads to read the short articles to them, they'll wander off to listen instead of read, and the average article length will increase again.
On a less sardonic note; many newspapers and magazines--the people who actually produce the longer articles--still only put cropped versions online, in an attempt to lure you into buying their paper product, so the bigger articles don't always make it online.
It's a bit interesting. AoM is a game with great scope, allowing for unusually "large" game boards by the standards of other RTS. Consequentially, the AI has had to be somewhat "toned down" from the kind of cutthroat AI you got in WarIII or even startcraft. I'm a big RTS buff, and while I _liked_ AoM I never found it all that difficult. Some games are a lot more forgiving of a failed attack, and that's one of them. You have enough resources and fast enough build times that even if your grand fleet gets crushed, you're probably okay.
Reading the article, (which is freaky low on detail) it seems more like "Neurotic" in this case is meant to signify a lack of caution. Aggressive won every match, and neurotic won every match, but neurotic did it faster. This suggests that irrational risk taking (the article mentions that the AI skews its internal numbers about how many resources it thinks it has) can beat a more cautious opponent.
In both cases it seems clear that aggression carried the day, and that the only real difference was that the AI that lacked caution won faster. To me, that suggests a big problem with the regular AI, because that lack of caution is usually pretty easy to exploit...A counterattack on a resource gathering operation would leave the crazy AI crippled, due to low reserves. The regular AI's counterattack algorithms must be pretty weak, or it's build order is too cautious or something.
I'd love to see a better description of the AI programming.
I have massively high blood pressure and cholesterol; it's hereditary, mostly...But I could still kick it by exercise and diet. But I don't. Not enough exercise. Had two fat cinnamon rolls for breakfast, instead of the half bowl of horkin fibre chunks I should have had.
Do you see me crying about the tragedy of my condition? A condition imposed by my own lack of discipline? No.
If you got type II just through sheer bad luck, you have my sympathy. If you made a bad lifestyle choice, you deal with it. People (like myself) who eat and sloth themselves into health problems don't deserve sympathy.
I understand that there are those who get Type II through no fault of their own, and this makes me happy for them...But they're the minority, and I don't have as much sympathy for the rest.
Sorry about your uncle. My grandmother died of diabetes-related cardiovascular issues. Doesn't change my belief that the vast majority of type II diabetes sufferers have brought it on themselves.
Uh huh. He's smart so he can't ever do anything stupid? I've known people so smart that they were often mistaken for being mentally retarded...Intelligence doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being able to make a good decision, and often the smartest people are hopeless when it comes to day to day decision making.
In short, smart people do stupid things all the time; if you haven't noticed this, you don't know many smart people.
He got pursued by a young, hip company, to fix a specific problem. That would ring alarm bells for me, especially if I'm upper middle aged, and I've (apparently) just left the lab environment. I personally have been hired full time to do project work...The reality of it is, that project is your job, and when it's done, so are you. It's definitely a less secure choice.
Now he's out of a job and stuck in a lawsuit against a wealthy, well-lawyered company, which probably means he doesn't have people lining up to hire him. The lawsuit isn't going all that well either...I mean, this is a victory for him, because now the suit can actually go forward, but that they got it dismissed at all suggests he's got a long fight ahead. They'll keep him tied up in it for years to come.
Just a fricking mess. So yea, I think it was a dumb decision. Mind you, if I'd been cheated out of a share of the google IPO (and fired 9 days before it is cheated, no matter how you cut it), I'd sue too.
It's as good a reason as any. I know whenever I interview someone, I try to get a feel for what they'd be like to work with. I'll pick a less qualified candidate with a better manner over a more qualified jackass. It's not just their output you have to consider...It's everyone's output.
Corporate culture is more of an ephemeral. They clearly want people to fit in and participate, and that's understandable. I think, however, that they need to be more up-front about it.
I work with a lot of people who are older than me, and it's definitely a drain. Not because they're any less competent, but more because there is enough of a generational disconnect that we can't really associate from a common viewpoint.
I don't think per se that Google is ageist, but I do think that they're cliquish and snobby, and like all such groups, rather than just saying, "Nothing personal, but you're not one of us" they invent a reason, in this case, the guy's age.
I agree with some of the above posters. The guy was an idiot to leave his university job. You chase the dollar signs, you lose.
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This kind of crap blows my mind.
"Oh, well of course you had problems, you saved it as a Word document, you idiot. Instead you should use (insert open standard that no one can read because MS doesn't support it either). Oh, and by the way, tell everyone who needs to read your document that they have to install a new office suite, k thnx bye."
It has to work with Word. Period. It has to support it perfectly. There are a handful of places in the world where you can get by without Word compatibility, but if you want to be a serious alternative to Office, you goddamn well have to support it. You can't just tell people that they're stupid for using the "wrong" software when their software is compatible with the software of everyone they know, and yours isn't.
You know, I'm tired of being told it's a problem with me when I think the software is crappy. I'd rather word process in Vi or goddamn Emacs than in Writer. I've used Wordperfect, and Claris, and Writer, and Abiword, and Word, and I just do not like Writer. period. I liked Wordperfect better, and goddamn that's saying something!
I'm not even that crazy with the word processing, and I still run into problems with Writer, and when I run into problems, given the limited nature of my needs, that's like a slap in the face.
Worst of all, I've tried to do OOo rollouts in office environments, and that is by far the most painful experience I've had in my working life. No one likes it better than what they were using before, and it doesn't matter what they were using. I tried putting people on OOO.2 when it came out, to replace their Word 97, and they hated it. Moreover, when I, in my arrogance, tried to tell them it was just an issue of learning the software, they'd pull up detailed examples of things it damn well didn't do, and I had to stand there like a retard trying to defend brand new software against EIGHT YEAR OLD OFFICE and failing.
Working with it myself is one thing. When I try to pitch it to other people, and they take it, use it, and find that it's so bad they'd rather buy 200 office licenses...They rightly think I have poor judgment, and that's flat unforgivable. Pitching OSS can be an uphill battle anyway against the MS zealots, so when I pitch something I want to sell them on the fact that its so good it makes the equivalent closed source product look like crap. If I pitch a crappy OSS product (like OOo), it makes the rest of my job that much harder.
I use GIMP, and I use Abiword, and in both of those cases, I notice a lack when compared with Photoshop or Word, but the lack is purely in extra features...GIMP and Abiword are stable, and responsive, and they do what I need them to do. OOo is a pile of substandard, bloated apps, and damn none of them make me happy.
So screw it. I'm done advocating OOo. I'm done using it. I'm sick of the space it takes up on my install disks.
No, it's not. It's about Office vs Open Office...If all you need is a mail client, your needs are simple anyway.
Outlook by itself is no great application...It's Outlook plus Exchange that's hard to top. But they're completely missing the point there, and just putting in a mail client without coming up with a backend groupware competitor. I've got no problem with them putting in a mail client, but don't call it an Outlook competitor if it's not one.
Either that or you need to find yourself a real-world math problem, something that interests you, and force yourself to find the answer.
I don't use math much in my daily grind, but I force myself to come up with problems so I can exercise my skills. There is math everywhere, so if you get in the habit of trying to find problems to solve, it's easy to stay in practice. Calculus, especially, is easy because it has so many applications...Any question that starts with "How much?" or "How fast?" is probably calc friendly. I keep my geometry skills sharp by figuring out the height of buildings by the length of the shadow they cast.
I don't consider myself to be much of a math person...I certainly never had the flair for it that everyone else seemed to. But diligence will take you farther than inborn ability, and the fact that I'm obsessed with real-world applications pushed my skills a lot farther than people who never really understood the why even though they did better than me on paper.
Jesus. How about they compete with Word first, eh? Calling Thunderbird an "Outlook Replacement" just shows they have no idea what people use Outlook for. Outlook Express replacement, sure.
The great thing about Office is all the damn pieces work together. Excel is friendly with Access, Access is friendly with Word, Everything is friendly with Outlook. To beat Office, you have to have an Office suite that works like that. Not just all the pieces in one package.
There is not one single thing in OO that doesn't have an OSS equivalent stand-alone application that is at least as good. Bundling a mail client with the rest of your apps doesn't suddenly make you competitive, especially when your whole user base could have already installed that mail client if they wanted it.
There are OSS projects that are actually making a push toward doing the things that Outlook does (like Kontact). But Thunderbird is still lagging behind Evolution imho, and neither of them play all that great with any of the groupware servers out there, open or closed.
I used to try and push OO on people, but I've completely lost faith in it. I keep thinking, maybe they'll get their crap together, but then they do stuff like this.
Nah, I know nothing about it but what I've read. Only thing I need from my phone is phone-ness, and maybe a camera.
I was that way as well, sort of. I studied what I wanted to study, in the order I wanted to study it. I usually ended up doing fine, but I remember one year where I failed 3 quarters of a class (Chemistry) before ending up with a B- after pulling a 98 for the last quarter and a curved 96 on the final. 'Course I was one of only 7 (out of 35) people to take the final, so I guess I still did better than most.
Costs me nothing to not be a prick. Anyway it was kinda interesting to really think about the value thing...Been reading economics, so it was on my mind.
Yea...When Ballmer says the word "Value" I hear "(shareholder) Value"...I've never seen any other sort of value out of him. There are people in the Microsoft machine who understand what the consumer values, but he's not one of them. That's what the whole "Developers" thing is about...Get the creative producers to drink your coolaid, and ride their coat-tails to success...I've never bought a MS OS because I liked the OS, but only because I wanted to use some software that was only available for that OS.
Ahhh, the negotiation process. My attention span for schoolwork was way too low for me to effectively pull off the "All A" gambit. I'd lose interest long before the end of the year, no matter what the prize. The peril of the iPhone is the phonebook-sized monthly bill, not the phone itself. Brrr, scary.
As a parent, you also have to factor in the amount of grief you're going to get from a pissed off kid when you get them the thing that they damn well outta want *grumble* instead of the thing that they think they need.
I agree with the GP pretty much entirely; my point is purely on the nature of "value". Saying that a kid doesn't know what value is is disingenuous...They know exactly what value is...For them. Just because your notion and their notion aren't in agreement, doesn't mean that they're wrong. It also doesn't mean that you're obligated to get them what they value.
I understand his frustration though. Damn kids don't value things for the reasons that adults who actually have to shell out the money value things, and it's annoying to see something you spent a good chunk of change on fall by the wayside after a paltry few months.
Well, I'll agree that they're definitely on different wavelengths. Ballmer, market droid that he is, isn't even necessarily speaking a human language when he uses the word "value." His kind use that word in a sense disconnnected from human ideas of worth and demand. But again, my sense of value is my sense of value, and I'm not a good person to speculate on what Ballmer values.
;)
Still, I think that there are a lot of shiny widgets on Vista that may conform to the 13-year-old-girl definition of value, even if they don't really conform to mine, or her mom's, or hell, even Ballmer's. And peer-conformance probably has some value to the kid, and it may have status overtones, e.g. "I have the new Windows and you're using the old Windows."
And buy your kid a video iPod! He's probably the only kid at school who doesn't have one! Everyone makes fun of him, even the guy who got his mom's pink breast cancer iPod!
To be fair, the kernel level hooks Norton and McAfee went nuts over were things that should have been removed anyway.
Allowing applications like Norton access at a level below the kernel is a really bad idea.
Those same people will bend over and spread 'em for Vista, when their new game/camera/printer/pda/iPod doesn't work on XP. They absolutely don't care.
As an adult, please define value for the rest of us.
Saying a teenager doesn't understand value, just shows that you don't understand value. Value is absolutely relative to the individual, and it varies wildly based on fashion, personal experience, age, sex, race, everything.
When you say that someone of a different demographic from yourself "doesn't understand value", what you're really saying is that you don't understand them, and that, therefore, you think the things they value are meaningless.
There are a lot of people who will profit from those people and their "meaningless" values, while you sit smugly telling them they're stupid for valuing those things anyway. Microsoft has become a monopoly doing this crap. It's heart and soul why Office beats the crap out of Open Office. OSS people need to take the needs of non-geeks seriously.
Yea, because only a monopoly can afford to ignore some random schmo's uninformed opinion.
Seriously. We all agree that Vista has issues; some of them are the problems you'd expect of a windows pre-SP1 release...Bad drivers, no drivers, bugs, etc. The rest of them are either here to stay, or able to be disabled. That's the same crap we always have to eat from a Windows release.
But the fact that some non-savvy mom and her gadget-loving 13 year old daughter don't like it is supposed to mean something? When was the last time you asked someone like that for OS advice? This same chick will be doing the same whining in 10 years because she doesn't want to switch off Vista for XPII, or whatever the next release is, because she can't handle the "new" windows.
It all started going to hell before that. When people stopped having to punch it manually on to tape and run it through a machine, they got soft.
It's sad really, because it does work to just push out a slow and bloated piece of code and wait for the machines to catch up. Get a bigger, better machine, put a new OS on it, and see the complete lack of difference. Takes the same percentage of memory, pushes the processor just as high. Remember when everyone was up in arms because XP SP1 slowed down machines? Everyone who noticed had a new machine 6 months later, and it was a non-issue.
If all you need is word processing and minimal spreadsheets, sure, as long as you don't mind the load times. But I've run into situations where I've installed OO on the machines of secretaries who I confidently expected to never be able to utilize the full potential of OO, only to have them blindside me two or three days later with a list of things they needed to be able to do, for which there was no equivalent in OO.
I don't even like OO for word processing myself...Abiword beats it easily.
For something that would pixelize, I'd think it would be less reversible, because there would be a certain amount of "rock and roll" (random data) added to the effect...But for something like "swirl"...I'd imagine that effect is mostly a mathematical transform.
The only place you'd lose data is in the rounding process.
Nope. I used it just the other day. The computer is better at breaking it down, given time, but if you put enough crap behind it it'll still override their desire to attack anything but your tanks. It's still a hardcore game winner in the early game, because nothing will convince a zergling or a zealot to attack those depots if something is shooting at them. (imho, it's all part of the pathing problems that are the biggest flaw in starcraft...Block a unit, and it will circle the board trying to find a way around.)
I think what they added was a tendency for units like Ghosts and Defilers to target those buildings with their nukes and plague. The protoss use corsairs with the disruption web...once nothing is attacking the the ground units, their AI focuses on buildings.
But, in the absence of all those things, you still get the joy of watching a pair of ultralisks get killed by two marines in a bunker protected by 3 supply depots. It's pathetic.
You get the same facts in 20 dinky stories, with none of the depth of a really good, well-researched story.
Having 20 people write the same shallow story isn't "more" information. Sure, you have the resources to look the stuff up yourself. That's one of the things I like about Slashdot; everybody looks up some of it, and you actually end up with all the information.
But without a body of knowlegable people who actually give a damn, the loss of those big articles is a pain in the ass, because no one has time to look it all up themselves.
Starcraft had a similar "bug"...The wall 'o supply depots. If you were playing the Terrans against a computer opponent, you put a line of supply depots in front of your bunkers. When the vicious melee ground units that normally tore your bunkers a new one came running up, their AI would tell them that they HAD to attack the bunkers, but they had no ranged attack, and no path to the bunkers, so they'd end up running back and forth in front of the wall of depots, unable to kill the wall, and unable to attack their target.
A couple of bunkers could wipe out the sort of zealot rush that is almost impossible to stop without bunkers chock full of firebats. At it's heart, its an AI problem. The AI chooses a target it's unable to attack, and then is unable to drop it. IMHO it's one of the oldest, and worst, bugs in strategy game AI. It's easy to exploit.
I think the same types of people who wanted longer articles 20 years ago, want them today. However, since the web is currently forcing a lot of short-article people to read, I think it simply seems like the demand is higher for shorter articles.
With the advent of talking heads to read the short articles to them, they'll wander off to listen instead of read, and the average article length will increase again.
On a less sardonic note; many newspapers and magazines--the people who actually produce the longer articles--still only put cropped versions online, in an attempt to lure you into buying their paper product, so the bigger articles don't always make it online.
It's a bit interesting. AoM is a game with great scope, allowing for unusually "large" game boards by the standards of other RTS. Consequentially, the AI has had to be somewhat "toned down" from the kind of cutthroat AI you got in WarIII or even startcraft. I'm a big RTS buff, and while I _liked_ AoM I never found it all that difficult. Some games are a lot more forgiving of a failed attack, and that's one of them. You have enough resources and fast enough build times that even if your grand fleet gets crushed, you're probably okay.
Reading the article, (which is freaky low on detail) it seems more like "Neurotic" in this case is meant to signify a lack of caution. Aggressive won every match, and neurotic won every match, but neurotic did it faster. This suggests that irrational risk taking (the article mentions that the AI skews its internal numbers about how many resources it thinks it has) can beat a more cautious opponent.
In both cases it seems clear that aggression carried the day, and that the only real difference was that the AI that lacked caution won faster. To me, that suggests a big problem with the regular AI, because that lack of caution is usually pretty easy to exploit...A counterattack on a resource gathering operation would leave the crazy AI crippled, due to low reserves. The regular AI's counterattack algorithms must be pretty weak, or it's build order is too cautious or something.
I'd love to see a better description of the AI programming.
I have massively high blood pressure and cholesterol; it's hereditary, mostly...But I could still kick it by exercise and diet. But I don't. Not enough exercise. Had two fat cinnamon rolls for breakfast, instead of the half bowl of horkin fibre chunks I should have had.
Do you see me crying about the tragedy of my condition? A condition imposed by my own lack of discipline? No.
If you got type II just through sheer bad luck, you have my sympathy. If you made a bad lifestyle choice, you deal with it. People (like myself) who eat and sloth themselves into health problems don't deserve sympathy.
I understand that there are those who get Type II through no fault of their own, and this makes me happy for them...But they're the minority, and I don't have as much sympathy for the rest.
Sorry about your uncle. My grandmother died of diabetes-related cardiovascular issues. Doesn't change my belief that the vast majority of type II diabetes sufferers have brought it on themselves.
Uh huh. He's smart so he can't ever do anything stupid? I've known people so smart that they were often mistaken for being mentally retarded...Intelligence doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being able to make a good decision, and often the smartest people are hopeless when it comes to day to day decision making.
In short, smart people do stupid things all the time; if you haven't noticed this, you don't know many smart people.
He got pursued by a young, hip company, to fix a specific problem. That would ring alarm bells for me, especially if I'm upper middle aged, and I've (apparently) just left the lab environment. I personally have been hired full time to do project work...The reality of it is, that project is your job, and when it's done, so are you. It's definitely a less secure choice.
Now he's out of a job and stuck in a lawsuit against a wealthy, well-lawyered company, which probably means he doesn't have people lining up to hire him. The lawsuit isn't going all that well either...I mean, this is a victory for him, because now the suit can actually go forward, but that they got it dismissed at all suggests he's got a long fight ahead. They'll keep him tied up in it for years to come.
Just a fricking mess. So yea, I think it was a dumb decision. Mind you, if I'd been cheated out of a share of the google IPO (and fired 9 days before it is cheated, no matter how you cut it), I'd sue too.
It's as good a reason as any. I know whenever I interview someone, I try to get a feel for what they'd be like to work with. I'll pick a less qualified candidate with a better manner over a more qualified jackass. It's not just their output you have to consider...It's everyone's output.
Corporate culture is more of an ephemeral. They clearly want people to fit in and participate, and that's understandable. I think, however, that they need to be more up-front about it.
I work with a lot of people who are older than me, and it's definitely a drain. Not because they're any less competent, but more because there is enough of a generational disconnect that we can't really associate from a common viewpoint.
I don't think per se that Google is ageist, but I do think that they're cliquish and snobby, and like all such groups, rather than just saying, "Nothing personal, but you're not one of us" they invent a reason, in this case, the guy's age.
I agree with some of the above posters. The guy was an idiot to leave his university job. You chase the dollar signs, you lose.