I have yet to find a forum on the Internet that was open to all comers and less rabid than/. The modding tech isn't perfect but it tends toward moderation. If you think your POV is not being seriously considered in THIS environment, perhaps you should reconsider your POV.
>CO2 greenhouse effects are lost in the noise....Which models do you think get the air time? The funding?
You offer a conspiracy theory of Global Climate Change, in which Global Climate Change is a fiction promulgated by money-hungry scientists.
According to you, these scientists are smart enough to create phoney computer models to get grants out of the small pool of available funds, but not smart enough to get grants from the vastly richer petroleum industry.
There is an alternative theory of science: observation, theory-forming, testing and refinement. All observations strongly support recent Global Climate Change; all credible theories point to human impacts on the environment; Greenlands' glaciers are furnishing us with a natural test; and no doubt the theories will continue to be refined as we learn more.
If your calculations of CO2's impact do not agree with the observations, then your theory of CO2 impact is faulty. Go refine it... if you are into science and not polemics.
So what if water "accounts for the majority of the green house effect" ? That's like saying, "I get the majority of my calories from meat and potatoes, so having another candy bar doesn't matter."
We must replace google, yahoo, msn et cetera with a Patriot Search Engine to ensure that Government-Approved Information is delivered to your desktop!
It can also that your search terms are automatically submitted to the government for analysis, without the risk of judicial oversight, congressional enactments, or probable cause. This will make your even more secure from terror, terrorism and terrorists!
Surely if you are a true patriot with nothing to hide and interested only in The Truth As Patriots Know It To Be, you will use Patriot Search today. If you don't, then surely in the interests of security someone will have to find out why.
A new Patriot Search Engine has been developed to make us all more secure. Use Patriot Search to ensure that your search terms are automatically submitted to the government for analysis, without the risk of judicial oversight, congressional enactments, or probable cause. This will make your even more secure from terror, terrorism and terrorists!
Surely if you are a true patriot with nothing to hide, you will use Patriot Search today. If you don't, then surely in the interests of security someone will have to find out why.
Growth may be a less important concept than that of a convergence of music, video, social and educational activities, with online gaming technology as a core.
Effective Techniques vs. Pointy-Haired Bosses
on
Know Thy Bosses
·
· Score: 4, Funny
From the Article:Keep moving. Whatever you do, don't stand still. Even for a second. This is the only cue an end-of-level boss needs to swipe at you with a giant fist or...
...assign you to a doomed project.
>Scan for weak spots. Every boss has one...
... usually vulnerable to the Sycophanty Manouevre, but occasionally old-fashioned blackmail can work, too.
>>the creation may last longer than humanity itself.
>
How could that be? Somebody needs to sysadmin Google's datacenters or man the powerstations that supply Google's power
Think where our tech will be in 100 years. Petabytes of data will be as easy to handle as post-it notes. At the very least, today's web archives will be poured over by scholars, compulsive horders, and seekers after classical porn.
Certain artifacts, such as deep space probes are likely to survive tens of millions of years. Whatever humanity may be after that span of time, it won't be humanity any more than we, today, are Cro-Magnonity.
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization....The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person. In one individual it may take the form of the desire to be an ideal mother, in another it may be expressed athletically, and in still another it may be expressed in painting pictures or in inventions.
Technology facilitates these needs in two ways.
Technology lowers the transaction costs. It's easier for me to write with a keyboard (and, ahem, spellcheck) than with a quill pen. Also to the degree that communicating with other people helps in the creative process (e.g./. encourages me to think and to write about subjects like this, which might otherwise pass me by.)
Technology makes it easier to more broadly disseminate the products of creativity, both in space and time. The near-annihilation of geographical limits is obvious, but what may be of greater interest to persons seeking self-actualization is the knowledge that once something goes into the Internet Archive and its various commercial analogues, e.g. Google's database, the creation may last longer than humanity itself. That's not immortality, but perhaps as close as we can get with current technology!
... I just keep thinking back at the Brits' attempt to subdue Ireland in the 1800s. They had vastly better technology (...and you better BELIEVE that Private Smith discharged his Weapon at the pike-wielding Paddy when ordered...) but, as a contemporary stated:
"...the half naked peasants of a few counties of Ireland, without arms or ammunition, or any other leaders than those there was not wisdom to deprive them of, their misery and their despair, could wage war and gain victories over the most costly army of Europe."
Sure it's better to have better-trained troops than not-so-well-trained troops, but America's problem right now is at the strategic, not the tactical, level.
It's probably just as well I didn't discover X-Com. One game addiction was plenty for me. I'd burned many a dinner taking "just one more turn"!!!
Civilisation ... and other Turn-Based Games
on
What Game Do You Love?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
... I'm a turn-based gamer. Reaction-time games are just not as compelling for me. That promise of "just one more turn" just leads me on... there's no accounting for taste, I suppose.
Civ 2 had a lot of improvements but the basic concepts were in Civ 1. I found Civ 3 to be boring...
Similarly, Heroes of Might And Magic 1 was wonderful; I skipped 2; HoMM 3 was an improvement in every way but still basically the same concept; HoMM 4 wasn't worth the upgrade, to me at least.
Perhaps there's some basic "fun" concept at the core of any game that you can mess with, and you HAVE to mess with if your income depends on continued sales, but messing with doesn't necessarily mean improvement.
From The Article:> It would have been easy to get lost in the development process and let production slip away from us if we hadn't addressed our priorities at the very beginning and throughout the academic year. So for every production decision we made, we asked 'is this going to get us higher marks at the end of the year?' and if the answer to that question was 'no' then we didn't focus on it.
It sounds like the learned the most important lesson in any large project!
> We ran into institutional barriers within the University, with the IT department loathe to install certain software and vehemently opposed to giving us access rights to install it ourselves. We often found that they did a bad job and did not test the software they installed, leaving us to wait for a week or two before they would come down and try to fix the problems.
>Using Bluetooth, I think you're allowed to send some sort of SMS-type message to the phone (if they're allowed). "Hay, you're leaving the theatre. Did you turn your ringer back on?"
OK, but take it a step further... more useful would be a Bluetooth (or whatever) message sent when you ENTER the theater saying:
Your suggestion makes massive sense although of course there are issues.
To the extent that a technological solution can be helpful, there are many benefits to letting the owner of a location specify that it is a "quiet place". It can be turned ON or OFF as the situation demands, e.g. after the movie lets out, the theater's CellPhone property could be re-set to "Normal". It could be integrated with the property owner's provision of cellphone signal, to attact customers who want to talk during Normal Time and to have quiet during Quiet Time.
I would have concerns that the facility would need some sort of GPS location of the cellphone, to determine for example whether the phone is in the theatre (Quiet) or the adjacent lobby (Normal). There's all sorts of privacy issues there.
In the alternative... I'd love to have a personal cellphone disrupter. I suppose it'd be illegal, but other that little drawback, it sure would be handy to be able to enforce peace & quiet around me.
Re:People with a plan encourage staff quality
on
How Not To Make An MMOG
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Sorry, but I agree with what you say about everyone you mention except the programmers. As a programmer (retired) myself, my experience with respect to the programmer's role has been the opposite of yours.
Certainly, the marketing and design people and all that have their job. No disagreement there; they're supposed to be the experts. And lots of coders are no good at public interactions or at least need to have their interactions with customers managed... that's one of the things managers are supposed to do.
But building great stuff in general is more than just being a code bureaucrat in a cubicle following instructions in the Plan... no matter how good the Plan may be. Some people work best that way, and there's plenty of need for that sort of person, but for those who go beyond that function, the ability of people in all project specialties to communicate with other people in the other specialties... when needed, and using appropriate mechanisms... to be extremely important. Read the aricle on "Scaling the Cabal" in November '05 issue of Game Developer. Going one step further, into customer fora would seem to be the natural step!
Naturally people who run off at the mouth need to be managed, and also naturally, a hierarchy of decision may have to be enforced... but again, that's what management is supposed to do, and blinding the programmers to the customers is necessary only when management can't do their job. If a programmer is just not interested in the customers, well fine, then what you've got is a programmer working for just for the dough, which is different motivator than that for those others do better work when they can reach out & touch the customer base.
I had nothing to do with WoW's development, so I can't answer your questions about it. But in about 20 years of developing software, the most frequently common element in the disasters was the excessive playing of the "telephone game".
> "programmer" and "game designer" are not generally synonymous
I was being perhaps a little too concise.
In the olde dayes, it was all programmers doing everything to produce software. Nowadays, the work splits among a gazillion specialties, which is reasonable enough, but does not change the essential points: (a) makers who communicate with customers make things more like what customers want, and (b) people who get between customers and makers (e.g. system analysts, designers, whatever) may do so with the best of intentions, but have to work hard to avoid playing "telephone"... and often fail.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't have hierarchies of development, designers, systems analysts, et cetera... but as the article points out and many projects I've worked on demonstrate, keeping the customers/gamers/end-users away from the coders/programmers/designers/makers is a common management error. Many craftsmen don't really care to interact with customers, and probably all of them need to be closely managed so they don't overpromise or otherwise get out of control - that's fair enough.
But makers who are good at communicating with customers produce work that more closely matches what the customer seeks. (Whether that is "better" or not depends on the sponsoring organization's goals.)
> we didn't have a design document and as such we could not deliver.
That's the biggest of many difficulties pointed out in the interview. I think it's just as important that the HR process sucked; they eliminated a qualified applicant in favor of an unqualified friend, didn't take action when the friend verbally abused the staff, etc.
It was also a bad sign that the programmers (game designers) were not allowed to talk to the customers (fanbase). While of course there has to be a limit on everything, a certain amount of customer/programmer interaction is important to developing a project that pleases the customer, rather than the designer.
It doesn't bother me that this interview got a bit personal at time. Better that than happytalk-B.S.!
Slashdot Mirror
>This place has just gotten too rabid.
Compared too ...?
I have yet to find a forum on the Internet that was open to all comers and less rabid than /. The modding tech isn't perfect but it tends toward moderation. If you think your POV is not being seriously considered in THIS environment, perhaps you should reconsider your POV.
>CO2 greenhouse effects are lost in the noise ....Which models do you think get the air time? The funding?
You offer a conspiracy theory of Global Climate Change, in which Global Climate Change is a fiction promulgated by money-hungry scientists.
According to you, these scientists are smart enough to create phoney computer models to get grants out of the small pool of available funds, but not smart enough to get grants from the vastly richer petroleum industry.
There is an alternative theory of science: observation, theory-forming, testing and refinement. All observations strongly support recent Global Climate Change; all credible theories point to human impacts on the environment; Greenlands' glaciers are furnishing us with a natural test; and no doubt the theories will continue to be refined as we learn more.
If your calculations of CO2's impact do not agree with the observations, then your theory of CO2 impact is faulty. Go refine it ... if you are into science and not polemics.
Are you worried that melting glaciers may raise ocean levels, inundating coastlines and triggering massive damage?
Fear Not! NASA scientists have discovered a glacier that is not only not melting, but actually growing!
It is, of course, the glaciation on Mt. St. Helens. It had been blown away a few years ago, but it is now growing back!!!
So Panic Not! All we need to do is detonate a few thousand volcanos in Greenland, Siberia and Antarctica: problem solved!
So what if water "accounts for the majority of the green house effect" ? That's like saying, "I get the majority of my calories from meat and potatoes, so having another candy bar doesn't matter."
We must replace google, yahoo, msn et cetera with a Patriot Search Engine to ensure that Government-Approved Information is delivered to your desktop!
It can also that your search terms are automatically submitted to the government for analysis, without the risk of judicial oversight, congressional enactments, or probable cause. This will make your even more secure from terror, terrorism and terrorists!
Surely if you are a true patriot with nothing to hide and interested only in The Truth As Patriots Know It To Be, you will use Patriot Search today. If you don't, then surely in the interests of security someone will have to find out why.
A new Patriot Search Engine has been developed to make us all more secure. Use Patriot Search to ensure that your search terms are automatically submitted to the government for analysis, without the risk of judicial oversight, congressional enactments, or probable cause. This will make your even more secure from terror, terrorism and terrorists!
Surely if you are a true patriot with nothing to hide, you will use Patriot Search today. If you don't, then surely in the interests of security someone will have to find out why.
>>...or maybe it's the drunken 24 year old who hates black people, gays and anyone who isn't in his frat.
> Why is a 24 year old in a frat? Are these 7 or 8 year college students the target demographic for the XBox?
Delta House now features Xbox instead of keggers.
Growth may be a less important concept than that of a convergence of music, video, social and educational activities, with online gaming technology as a core.
From the Article: Keep moving. Whatever you do, don't stand still. Even for a second. This is the only cue an end-of-level boss needs to swipe at you with a giant fist or ...
...assign you to a doomed project.
>Scan for weak spots. Every boss has one...
... usually vulnerable to the Sycophanty Manouevre, but occasionally old-fashioned blackmail can work, too.
>I think it would be more accurate to say it was built with the help of mice
... insert "Hitchiker's Guide To the Galaxy" reference here
So ... ENIAC was the first computer using a mouse?
----
(See ENIAC VR Simulator ... also using a mouse)
>>the creation may last longer than humanity itself.
> How could that be? Somebody needs to sysadmin Google's datacenters or man the powerstations that supply Google's power
Think where our tech will be in 100 years. Petabytes of data will be as easy to handle as post-it notes. At the very least, today's web archives will be poured over by scholars, compulsive horders, and seekers after classical porn.
Certain artifacts, such as deep space probes are likely to survive tens of millions of years. Whatever humanity may be after that span of time, it won't be humanity any more than we, today, are Cro-Magnonity.
>self actualization
Well said! As Maslow put it in A Theory of Human Motivation:
Technology facilitates these needs in two ways.
Technology lowers the transaction costs. It's easier for me to write with a keyboard (and, ahem, spellcheck) than with a quill pen. Also to the degree that communicating with other people helps in the creative process (e.g. /. encourages me to think and to write about subjects like this, which might otherwise pass me by.)
Technology makes it easier to more broadly disseminate the products of creativity, both in space and time. The near-annihilation of geographical limits is obvious, but what may be of greater interest to persons seeking self-actualization is the knowledge that once something goes into the Internet Archive and its various commercial analogues, e.g. Google's database, the creation may last longer than humanity itself. That's not immortality, but perhaps as close as we can get with current technology!
... I just keep thinking back at the Brits' attempt to subdue Ireland in the 1800s. They had vastly better technology (...and you better BELIEVE that Private Smith discharged his Weapon at the pike-wielding Paddy when ordered...) but, as a contemporary stated:
"...the half naked peasants of a few counties of Ireland, without arms or ammunition, or any other leaders than those there was not wisdom to deprive them of, their misery and their despair, could wage war and gain victories over the most costly army of Europe."
-- Memoirs of William Sampson (1817).
Sure it's better to have better-trained troops than not-so-well-trained troops, but America's problem right now is at the strategic, not the tactical, level.
It's probably just as well I didn't discover X-Com. One game addiction was plenty for me. I'd burned many a dinner taking "just one more turn"!!!
... I'm a turn-based gamer. Reaction-time games are just not as compelling for me. That promise of "just one more turn" just leads me on ... there's no accounting for taste, I suppose.
Civ 2 had a lot of improvements but the basic concepts were in Civ 1. I found Civ 3 to be boring ...
Similarly, Heroes of Might And Magic 1 was wonderful; I skipped 2; HoMM 3 was an improvement in every way but still basically the same concept; HoMM 4 wasn't worth the upgrade, to me at least.
Perhaps there's some basic "fun" concept at the core of any game that you can mess with, and you HAVE to mess with if your income depends on continued sales, but messing with doesn't necessarily mean improvement.
From The Article: > It would have been easy to get lost in the development process and let production slip away from us if we hadn't addressed our priorities at the very beginning and throughout the academic year. So for every production decision we made, we asked 'is this going to get us higher marks at the end of the year?' and if the answer to that question was 'no' then we didn't focus on it.
It sounds like the learned the most important lesson in any large project!
> We ran into institutional barriers within the University, with the IT department loathe to install certain software and vehemently opposed to giving us access rights to install it ourselves. We often found that they did a bad job and did not test the software they installed, leaving us to wait for a week or two before they would come down and try to fix the problems.
And ... the second most important lesson too!
>Using Bluetooth, I think you're allowed to send some sort of SMS-type message to the phone (if they're allowed). "Hay, you're leaving the theatre. Did you turn your ringer back on?"
OK, but take it a step further ... more useful would be a Bluetooth (or whatever) message sent when you ENTER the theater saying:
DOLT! TURN YOUR PHONE TO SILENT!!!!
Perhaps we should ban a few more things, to encourage people to be more creative in getting what they want.
Your suggestion makes massive sense although of course there are issues. To the extent that a technological solution can be helpful, there are many benefits to letting the owner of a location specify that it is a "quiet place". It can be turned ON or OFF as the situation demands, e.g. after the movie lets out, the theater's CellPhone property could be re-set to "Normal". It could be integrated with the property owner's provision of cellphone signal, to attact customers who want to talk during Normal Time and to have quiet during Quiet Time. I would have concerns that the facility would need some sort of GPS location of the cellphone, to determine for example whether the phone is in the theatre (Quiet) or the adjacent lobby (Normal). There's all sorts of privacy issues there. In the alternative ... I'd love to have a personal cellphone disrupter. I suppose it'd be illegal, but other that little drawback, it sure would be handy to be able to enforce peace & quiet around me.
Sorry, but I agree with what you say about everyone you mention except the programmers. As a programmer (retired) myself, my experience with respect to the programmer's role has been the opposite of yours.
Certainly, the marketing and design people and all that have their job. No disagreement there; they're supposed to be the experts. And lots of coders are no good at public interactions or at least need to have their interactions with customers managed ... that's one of the things managers are supposed to do.
But building great stuff in general is more than just being a code bureaucrat in a cubicle following instructions in the Plan ... no matter how good the Plan may be. Some people work best that way, and there's plenty of need for that sort of person, but for those who go beyond that function, the ability of people in all project specialties to communicate with other people in the other specialties ... when needed, and using appropriate mechanisms ... to be extremely important. Read the aricle on "Scaling the Cabal" in November '05 issue of Game Developer. Going one step further, into customer fora would seem to be the natural step!
Naturally people who run off at the mouth need to be managed, and also naturally, a hierarchy of decision may have to be enforced ... but again, that's what management is supposed to do, and blinding the programmers to the customers is necessary only when management can't do their job. If a programmer is just not interested in the customers, well fine, then what you've got is a programmer working for just for the dough, which is different motivator than that for those others do better work when they can reach out & touch the customer base.
I had nothing to do with WoW's development, so I can't answer your questions about it. But in about 20 years of developing software, the most frequently common element in the disasters was the excessive playing of the "telephone game".
> "programmer" and "game designer" are not generally synonymous
I was being perhaps a little too concise.
In the olde dayes, it was all programmers doing everything to produce software. Nowadays, the work splits among a gazillion specialties, which is reasonable enough, but does not change the essential points: (a) makers who communicate with customers make things more like what customers want, and (b) people who get between customers and makers (e.g. system analysts, designers, whatever) may do so with the best of intentions, but have to work hard to avoid playing "telephone" ... and often fail.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't have hierarchies of development, designers, systems analysts, et cetera ... but as the article points out and many projects I've worked on demonstrate, keeping the customers/gamers/end-users away from the coders/programmers/designers/makers is a common management error. Many craftsmen don't really care to interact with customers, and probably all of them need to be closely managed so they don't overpromise or otherwise get out of control - that's fair enough.
But makers who are good at communicating with customers produce work that more closely matches what the customer seeks. (Whether that is "better" or not depends on the sponsoring organization's goals.)
here
> we didn't have a design document and as such we could not deliver.
That's the biggest of many difficulties pointed out in the interview. I think it's just as important that the HR process sucked; they eliminated a qualified applicant in favor of an unqualified friend, didn't take action when the friend verbally abused the staff, etc.
It was also a bad sign that the programmers (game designers) were not allowed to talk to the customers (fanbase). While of course there has to be a limit on everything, a certain amount of customer/programmer interaction is important to developing a project that pleases the customer, rather than the designer.
It doesn't bother me that this interview got a bit personal at time. Better that than happytalk-B.S.!
The best way to increase the findability of something is to write a book about it: