I sometimes worked with American outsourcing companies
before outsourcing went offshore and I can tell you that
American companies do the exact same thing (attempt to
handle all customer interaction with scripted idiots). That's
fine for home users with a problem with their printer but
customers reasonably expect better than that when they are
in for a couple hundred thousand and are 5 months into a
project.
The only real difference with an offshore outsourcing
company is that cultural differences and language make
the problems inherent in outsourcing even worse. The fact
that cutting costs is the most essential thing to both parties
makes things worse yet, you get stuck talking to a low level
support droid when you need to be discussing a missed
requirement with a program manager.
Everyone involved in development has customers, at the very
least IT will be talking to the customer somewhat regularly
regarding design, requirements, and QA. The program manager
and manager will be spending a lot of time with customers,
the programming team leads will probably be in fairly regular
phone and email contact with at least one customer, grunt
programmers will probably only deal with customers if they
are in a shop that gets a dedicated test user or they are called
upon to do a dog and pony show to management from another
department.
You may not understand this but we over here are glad that Nazis are proscribed and Nazi paraphernalia is banned.
Collecting Nazi paraphernalia is not an overt act. I can think that
Joe Dickhead is a jerk and wish he was dead - I can even share
my opinion with others, it only becomes
illegal if I act on that wish or incite others to act on that wish.
Prohibiting the collection of Nazi paraphernalia is an ostrich
policy, the sentiments and tactics of the Nazi
party are alive and well in Europe - avowed racists are regularly
elected in Europe (and not just the east), sometimes on an
anti-immigrant platform and sometimes with a wink and a nod
with a declared "return to old values" platform.
If you're so thin-skinned that you can't handle seeing the merest headline that indicates politics simply exists, then you probably would be happier unplugging the computer and TV, and simply watching the paint crack.
What the hell are you babbling about? He mentioned that he
would like to have more ability to filter, he didn't complain about
the very existence of such articles - merely that they were
presented to him to read despite the fact that he had indicated
that he was not interested in the subject.
Uhm no, Raistlin is a popular character for the same that every
wizard in a MUD is mysterious and powerful. Raistlin speaks
to the 12 year old boy in all of us who loves Batman and
Wolverine and wants to be a ninja.
The character of Raistlin does not explore any sort of moral
boundary, he is adventure story wish fulfillment in raw form.
Maybe the mass market is looking for simplicity, but the best
of both SF and Fantasy has typically been heavy on metaphor,
abstraction, ambiguity, and often features the sort of
conspiracies that would made Machiavelli proud. I think it is
more that people are looking for the strange and wonderful,
non-thinking simplicity can be found anywhere - the
intentional simplicity of a well crafted story world provides
a stage to present ideas you can think about for quite some
time.
I'd say Footfall and The Mote in God's eye are both better
than Ringworld, Oath of Fealty is close. A lot of his short
fiction is pretty good too.
I liked Ringworld, but if you didn't read it as a young kid
back in the 80's you probably won't connect with it as well.
A lot of technology, techniques, and ideas that Niven
invented/perfected have become part of mainstream SF now
(which means the originals are no longer exceptional) and
the hard science his stories are based on has not aged
well - even when it is correct science it is no longer as
interesting.
After the previous book in the series? I believe the Publishers
Weekly review.
This book would have to be really bad to be worse than
Ringworld Throne.
There are few things more painful to read than an aging
author trying to participate in the pop culture of
10 minutes ago (those awful vampires). I've never agreed
with the entire Niven worldview and his habit of having "repentant" liberal characters spout neo-con bullshit
occasionally sickens me, but at least his books are written
with a distinctive voice and I've always enjoyed them.
The last Ringworld book was like a midlife crisis in book form
and I found very little to like about it - I'll give this one a pass.
A message to the tinfoil hat crowd: you're not that interesting.
Ba-Zing!
You got mugged so now I should just ignore the possibility
for abuse in a constant surveillance system? Moron.
People worried about these kinds of plans are not
all paranoids opposed to any surveillance or law
enforcement technology, some of us want real answers and
details on storage duration, conditions under which footage
is stored, what right we have to access live and archive footage,
and so on.
School has to deceive students about the nature of the
workplace, most of us would never join it if we were fully
aware of what it would involve.
It fills the student with theory and visions of how things "should" be done, and informs them not at all regarding how things ARE done. Pity the poor medical student on their first hospital placement.
There are always has to be a point at which the student is
first exposed to the reality of their chosen field of study. I
think this should be fairly early in the process, but you need to
understand the idealized model before you can appreciate the
reality - which demands that students learn theory.
Like a Certified Microsoft Engineer has a clue why XP screws up on one PC but not another.
The thing is that IT work in the current scheme of things would
not be improved by workers knowledgeable about hardware
and operating systems. PCs are powerful because they are
interchangeable and disposable.
A CME is gonna learn by rote the steps to take with a problematic machine and follow company procedure to simply
swap things out, someone with theories and knowledge about
computers would waste a lot of time trying determine causes
and fix things.
I'm gonna be an elitist here for a second and say that most
people don't care about intellectual fulfillment or lifelong
education - they want enough money to buy the stuff they've
been told will make them happy, or they need to provide for
their family and don't have the luxury of living on reduced
income to follow their interests, or a million other situations.
I think the freedom and desire to become truly educated is
somewhat rare and that no amount of dinking with the school
system is going to change that.
no multiplayer support - i recall the rockstar developers specifically saying that they could not get it working from a technical perspective...
A technical perspective or a gameplay perspective? A game that
provides a fun experience for one person is very different from
one that is fun for 2-50 other people at the same time. The 1
second window of differing positions perceived by you, the
server, and the guy you are firing the uzi at make the
considerations on resolving combat very different from those
of a single player game.
The red scare in the US was barely over (whipped to witchunt
levels by Nixon and other opportunistic scallywags) and the
USSR had absorbed half of Europe - we did not want to see the
same thing happen in Asia - the Vietnam War was the result.
Vietnam was a stupid mistake, but Cuba was justified - just
poorly executed.
Carter and Iran?
A botched hostage rescue does not a war make.
Clinton and Bosnia and Iraq?
Stopping genocide early in Bosnia, responding with limited
force to repeated targeting of our planes in the case of Iraq.
Roosevelt and Japan?
Atrocities in China, rabid expansion all over Asia, and
they did attack us first.
Or did you mean like Nixon and China?
Nixon was responsible for some of the worst parts of Vietnam
and the spillover into surrounding nations.
Reagan and Palestine after the bombing?
US trained and funded terrorist squads. Dead human rights
workers. Gave Saddam the chemical weapons he used on his
own people.
Nixon and Reagan have been posthumously rehabilitated, but
read the Nixon tape transcripts and review some of
Reagan's speeches before you decide how to view them.
Nixon was smart and ruthless and
Reagan had charisma but aside from that they were hardly
the rulers of a golden age that they are currently being billed
as.
Someone sends you porn... you have a serious desire to kill them.
It is the same sort of rage that you feel at someone who cuts
you off in traffic, or listens to their voice mail with the volume
cranked up. Hatred is a common reaction to extreme rudeness
and spam is rudeness taken to the nth degree.
The gut reaction of hatred caused by spam has very nothing to
do with logic. When I think about spammers logically I think they
should be fined to the point at which their business case is
destroyed and in extreme cases (fraud, illegal merchandise)
they should go to jail. When I waste 30 minutes filtering mail or
miss an important mail because of spam then, just for a second,
I'd like to bloody the nose of the assholes responsible for it.
I don't think current computing power is up to this task yet, but it is coming, wait for it.
I expect we will see something like this about the same time we
see permanent death in a mainstream MMO, not very soon. The
problem is the Internet - players are still on modems, have
broadband providers with poor peering, software still glitches
and crashes, games still have exploits around any feature
involving server boundaries, and so on.
What I think is more likely is that more alternatives will be
given to low level characters. Rather than auto-attack and hack
away allow special moves that attack specific weaknesses of
whatever you are fighting - like combos in the fighting games
maybe. Rather than click click click to craft
things having a choice of materials to design the item to build,
provide interactive design with automated building. Meaningful
items for low level crafters to build are a necessity - rather
than paying off the guy who build 3000 widget part A's to get
to the good stuff there should be low level good stuff that
is fun to build and improve.
SWG tries to do many of these things, but their live team seems
to fail to think through the consequences of their choices. I
point to holo-grinding, solo-groups, targeted mind attacks,
unbalanced always hit attacks, FRS griefing of non-jedi,
super armor, and ridiculous buff levels as things they
introduced because players said they wanted them but have
destroyed the game for casual players. you may not recognize
the jargon of that particular game, but if you have played any
MMO I'm sure you would recognize those problems if you saw
them.
The one basic thing SWG got right was cap character
advancement fairly early. Once the character has learned a
certain level of skills they no longer "level up" and you need
player knowledge to be effective, the sad
part is that the player knowledge is all too often how to exploit
the holes created by poorly thought out features and
sometimes badly tested implementation.
I'm convinced that before we see any great improvements in
interfaces we need a set of improved input devices. I
imagine something along the lines of a programmable virtual
keyboard and pointer as a first step.
The drive seems to be toward false simplicity in Windows
and that MS will likely miss out on early advances in new types
of input devices because of this. I think many ui designers
underestimate how much learning people are willing to do
about an environment if they see a real benefit to it. An entire
generation of word processor users learned interfaces that
would give emacs a run for its money wrt complexity, and in
the online games I've played I see users who would never
"program" learning to use macroing and shortcut systems
that are somewhat complicated.
Well yeah that is what I meant. We would have a ui available, but
programming and use of computers would have remained a
black art and growth would have been much slower than what
was experienced. Computing power and availability only started
its exponential rate of increase once computers could be used
by normal human beings and programs useful to such people
could be built. Prior to the command line computers where
little more than very clumsy calculators.
I was pointing out to the original poster that patents on
command line interfaces would have set computing back at
least 15 years from where we are today and that his glib "they
would have come up with something else" is ignorant rubbish.
Then you'd have to come up with something different.
Some old SF novel had a quote that applies to this: "When it
is railroading time you build railroads". The 70's were the time
of the command line - computing power would not allow any
other sort of ui.
So no, they wouldn't have come up with something different.
And I'd debunk the Usenet/IRC/WWW etc. stuff but you've already determined that you can't be convinced.
I can't be convinced on the subject because I've been reading
the same political rants, technical flamewars, holy wars, stupid
jokes, urban legends, trolls attacks, hoaxes, scams, spam, and
a light sprinkling of wonderful gems for more a bit more than
10 years now.
In all the junk I've encountered on the Internet there have been
a few exceptional moments, but overall people are rude and
stupid in real life and they carry that with them into their
communication on the Internet.
I remember the days of great switching too, I was running an
ISP and had to watch the vast majority of my users switch to
IE, often on my advice. I'd go so far as to say that IE was the
best browser available from the time of NS 4.0 through the
availability of Mozilla 0.6
My take on it was that NS 4.x sucked in ways that made users
unhappy (slow, crash-prone, rendering bugs), while until
very recently IE security bugs just haven't made
users unhappy enough to switch.
In all seriousness I don't understand why Mozilla hasn't taken over the browser market already.
Because, as the article pointed out, it is very difficult to get
someone to change their browser. Once IE was integrated into
Windows most users became very resistant to using anything
else, they'd as soon adjust their virtual memory settings as
use a non-standard OS component.
The fact that people are switching despite the barriers (perceived
and real) means that the constant publicized security failures
on the part of IE has irritated people enough to make them
change.
90% of everything is crap, but the Internet is worse.
I like the Internet, really. But look at the level of usefulness and
information available by technology.
Usenet - there are some great discussions,
excellent, informative, funny, all sorts of stuff, but the vast
majority of it is trolls, warez and porn.
IRC and IM - fun, but seldom used for
anything beside shooting the shit with your friends.
MUDs and MMOs - IRC with orcs.
email - an important communication tool
being made almost useless by parasites.
WWW - pretty much the same as Usenet
with a stronger commercial presence.
A book (even No good liberal smartypants hate america!
) is more likely to be edited and researched, if only
because of the permanent nature of medium. You can't convince
me that a rant about why Bush is a bad president is going to be
as important as a book by Chomsky detailing and documenting
exactly why Bush is a bad president.
The modern view of nothing being better than anything, seems
specious.
It's not even a view, it's a platitude. Plenty of people say it, but
their behavior shows that they don't believe it. Even though
preference and opinion are subjective they are still a part of
reality that influences everything we do. To pretend like quality
doesn't exist is silly, but to actually believe that nothing is
better than any other thing is beyond human ability.
What? Oh come on, some things are better than other things.
You could subsist on a nutritious paste, water, and vitamin
supplements. You must some kind of food elitist to care about
texture and taste.
TV Guide, video game reviews, factoids, and political rants are
not as good as an actual book written with thought,
research and care. Nothing wrong with reading on the Internet,
but most (99.99+%) of it is junk food.
Slashdot Mirror
The only real difference with an offshore outsourcing company is that cultural differences and language make the problems inherent in outsourcing even worse. The fact that cutting costs is the most essential thing to both parties makes things worse yet, you get stuck talking to a low level support droid when you need to be discussing a missed requirement with a program manager.
Everyone involved in development has customers, at the very least IT will be talking to the customer somewhat regularly regarding design, requirements, and QA. The program manager and manager will be spending a lot of time with customers, the programming team leads will probably be in fairly regular phone and email contact with at least one customer, grunt programmers will probably only deal with customers if they are in a shop that gets a dedicated test user or they are called upon to do a dog and pony show to management from another department.
Collecting Nazi paraphernalia is not an overt act. I can think that Joe Dickhead is a jerk and wish he was dead - I can even share my opinion with others, it only becomes illegal if I act on that wish or incite others to act on that wish.
Prohibiting the collection of Nazi paraphernalia is an ostrich policy, the sentiments and tactics of the Nazi party are alive and well in Europe - avowed racists are regularly elected in Europe (and not just the east), sometimes on an anti-immigrant platform and sometimes with a wink and a nod with a declared "return to old values" platform.
What the hell are you babbling about? He mentioned that he would like to have more ability to filter, he didn't complain about the very existence of such articles - merely that they were presented to him to read despite the fact that he had indicated that he was not interested in the subject.
No thanks, I'll keep the broken system we have rather than the awful mess that would result.
Uhm no, Raistlin is a popular character for the same that every wizard in a MUD is mysterious and powerful. Raistlin speaks to the 12 year old boy in all of us who loves Batman and Wolverine and wants to be a ninja.
The character of Raistlin does not explore any sort of moral boundary, he is adventure story wish fulfillment in raw form.
Maybe the mass market is looking for simplicity, but the best of both SF and Fantasy has typically been heavy on metaphor, abstraction, ambiguity, and often features the sort of conspiracies that would made Machiavelli proud. I think it is more that people are looking for the strange and wonderful, non-thinking simplicity can be found anywhere - the intentional simplicity of a well crafted story world provides a stage to present ideas you can think about for quite some time.
I liked Ringworld, but if you didn't read it as a young kid back in the 80's you probably won't connect with it as well. A lot of technology, techniques, and ideas that Niven invented/perfected have become part of mainstream SF now (which means the originals are no longer exceptional) and the hard science his stories are based on has not aged well - even when it is correct science it is no longer as interesting.
After the previous book in the series? I believe the Publishers Weekly review.
This book would have to be really bad to be worse than Ringworld Throne. There are few things more painful to read than an aging author trying to participate in the pop culture of 10 minutes ago (those awful vampires). I've never agreed with the entire Niven worldview and his habit of having "repentant" liberal characters spout neo-con bullshit occasionally sickens me, but at least his books are written with a distinctive voice and I've always enjoyed them. The last Ringworld book was like a midlife crisis in book form and I found very little to like about it - I'll give this one a pass.
Ba-Zing!
You got mugged so now I should just ignore the possibility for abuse in a constant surveillance system? Moron.
People worried about these kinds of plans are not all paranoids opposed to any surveillance or law enforcement technology, some of us want real answers and details on storage duration, conditions under which footage is stored, what right we have to access live and archive footage, and so on.
It fills the student with theory and visions of how things "should" be done, and informs them not at all regarding how things ARE done. Pity the poor medical student on their first hospital placement.
There are always has to be a point at which the student is first exposed to the reality of their chosen field of study. I think this should be fairly early in the process, but you need to understand the idealized model before you can appreciate the reality - which demands that students learn theory.
Like a Certified Microsoft Engineer has a clue why XP screws up on one PC but not another.
The thing is that IT work in the current scheme of things would not be improved by workers knowledgeable about hardware and operating systems. PCs are powerful because they are interchangeable and disposable. A CME is gonna learn by rote the steps to take with a problematic machine and follow company procedure to simply swap things out, someone with theories and knowledge about computers would waste a lot of time trying determine causes and fix things.
I'm gonna be an elitist here for a second and say that most people don't care about intellectual fulfillment or lifelong education - they want enough money to buy the stuff they've been told will make them happy, or they need to provide for their family and don't have the luxury of living on reduced income to follow their interests, or a million other situations. I think the freedom and desire to become truly educated is somewhat rare and that no amount of dinking with the school system is going to change that.
A technical perspective or a gameplay perspective? A game that provides a fun experience for one person is very different from one that is fun for 2-50 other people at the same time. The 1 second window of differing positions perceived by you, the server, and the guy you are firing the uzi at make the considerations on resolving combat very different from those of a single player game.
The red scare in the US was barely over (whipped to witchunt levels by Nixon and other opportunistic scallywags) and the USSR had absorbed half of Europe - we did not want to see the same thing happen in Asia - the Vietnam War was the result. Vietnam was a stupid mistake, but Cuba was justified - just poorly executed.
Carter and Iran?
A botched hostage rescue does not a war make.
Clinton and Bosnia and Iraq?
Stopping genocide early in Bosnia, responding with limited force to repeated targeting of our planes in the case of Iraq.
Roosevelt and Japan?
Atrocities in China, rabid expansion all over Asia, and they did attack us first.
Or did you mean like Nixon and China?
Nixon was responsible for some of the worst parts of Vietnam and the spillover into surrounding nations.
Reagan and Palestine after the bombing?
US trained and funded terrorist squads. Dead human rights workers. Gave Saddam the chemical weapons he used on his own people.
Nixon and Reagan have been posthumously rehabilitated, but read the Nixon tape transcripts and review some of Reagan's speeches before you decide how to view them. Nixon was smart and ruthless and Reagan had charisma but aside from that they were hardly the rulers of a golden age that they are currently being billed as.
It is the same sort of rage that you feel at someone who cuts you off in traffic, or listens to their voice mail with the volume cranked up. Hatred is a common reaction to extreme rudeness and spam is rudeness taken to the nth degree.
The gut reaction of hatred caused by spam has very nothing to do with logic. When I think about spammers logically I think they should be fined to the point at which their business case is destroyed and in extreme cases (fraud, illegal merchandise) they should go to jail. When I waste 30 minutes filtering mail or miss an important mail because of spam then, just for a second, I'd like to bloody the nose of the assholes responsible for it.
I expect we will see something like this about the same time we see permanent death in a mainstream MMO, not very soon. The problem is the Internet - players are still on modems, have broadband providers with poor peering, software still glitches and crashes, games still have exploits around any feature involving server boundaries, and so on.
What I think is more likely is that more alternatives will be given to low level characters. Rather than auto-attack and hack away allow special moves that attack specific weaknesses of whatever you are fighting - like combos in the fighting games maybe. Rather than click click click to craft things having a choice of materials to design the item to build, provide interactive design with automated building. Meaningful items for low level crafters to build are a necessity - rather than paying off the guy who build 3000 widget part A's to get to the good stuff there should be low level good stuff that is fun to build and improve.
SWG tries to do many of these things, but their live team seems to fail to think through the consequences of their choices. I point to holo-grinding, solo-groups, targeted mind attacks, unbalanced always hit attacks, FRS griefing of non-jedi, super armor, and ridiculous buff levels as things they introduced because players said they wanted them but have destroyed the game for casual players. you may not recognize the jargon of that particular game, but if you have played any MMO I'm sure you would recognize those problems if you saw them.
The one basic thing SWG got right was cap character advancement fairly early. Once the character has learned a certain level of skills they no longer "level up" and you need player knowledge to be effective, the sad part is that the player knowledge is all too often how to exploit the holes created by poorly thought out features and sometimes badly tested implementation.
The drive seems to be toward false simplicity in Windows and that MS will likely miss out on early advances in new types of input devices because of this. I think many ui designers underestimate how much learning people are willing to do about an environment if they see a real benefit to it. An entire generation of word processor users learned interfaces that would give emacs a run for its money wrt complexity, and in the online games I've played I see users who would never "program" learning to use macroing and shortcut systems that are somewhat complicated.
I was pointing out to the original poster that patents on command line interfaces would have set computing back at least 15 years from where we are today and that his glib "they would have come up with something else" is ignorant rubbish.
Some old SF novel had a quote that applies to this: "When it is railroading time you build railroads". The 70's were the time of the command line - computing power would not allow any other sort of ui.
So no, they wouldn't have come up with something different.
I can't be convinced on the subject because I've been reading the same political rants, technical flamewars, holy wars, stupid jokes, urban legends, trolls attacks, hoaxes, scams, spam, and a light sprinkling of wonderful gems for more a bit more than 10 years now.
In all the junk I've encountered on the Internet there have been a few exceptional moments, but overall people are rude and stupid in real life and they carry that with them into their communication on the Internet.
My take on it was that NS 4.x sucked in ways that made users unhappy (slow, crash-prone, rendering bugs), while until very recently IE security bugs just haven't made users unhappy enough to switch.
Well shit, that explains the high-larious Gallagher screen saver I have running.
Because, as the article pointed out, it is very difficult to get someone to change their browser. Once IE was integrated into Windows most users became very resistant to using anything else, they'd as soon adjust their virtual memory settings as use a non-standard OS component. The fact that people are switching despite the barriers (perceived and real) means that the constant publicized security failures on the part of IE has irritated people enough to make them change.
I like the Internet, really. But look at the level of usefulness and information available by technology.
Usenet - there are some great discussions, excellent, informative, funny, all sorts of stuff, but the vast majority of it is trolls, warez and porn.
IRC and IM - fun, but seldom used for anything beside shooting the shit with your friends.
MUDs and MMOs - IRC with orcs.
email - an important communication tool being made almost useless by parasites.
WWW - pretty much the same as Usenet with a stronger commercial presence.
A book (even No good liberal smartypants hate america! ) is more likely to be edited and researched, if only because of the permanent nature of medium. You can't convince me that a rant about why Bush is a bad president is going to be as important as a book by Chomsky detailing and documenting exactly why Bush is a bad president.
It's not even a view, it's a platitude. Plenty of people say it, but their behavior shows that they don't believe it. Even though preference and opinion are subjective they are still a part of reality that influences everything we do. To pretend like quality doesn't exist is silly, but to actually believe that nothing is better than any other thing is beyond human ability.
You could subsist on a nutritious paste, water, and vitamin supplements. You must some kind of food elitist to care about texture and taste.
TV Guide, video game reviews, factoids, and political rants are not as good as an actual book written with thought, research and care. Nothing wrong with reading on the Internet, but most (99.99+%) of it is junk food.