All you are saying boils down to "Having a degree is becoming a requirement for getting a job". That's really not relevant. Businesses are parasites on the ass of society that at times have selective and self-debilitating attachment criteria. One such criteria is applicants needing to have a piece of paper, regardless of their general competance. That's an argument for another place and I do not entirely disagree.
The argument is that those individuals that actually want to be educated about something, also need access to the resources that will enable them and access to those resources in China is so competitive that people are injuring themselves to stay ahead. The combination of professors with a good grasp on subject matter, lab space/tools for experimentation on concepts, and quality text books are usually important, at least in science and technology. Building more schools would enable more people. Apparently the original post felt otherwise, he didn't care to explain why.
The value of that education, across a larger number of people, should be pretty evident. We're building more new, useful things faster than we were 100 years ago. It has to be related to the education opportunities available to more and more people. Our Ivy League schools are not producing the only sources of innovation, in fact not even the majority.
If you print more dollars, all dollars become worthless. Education increases in value as more people have it. There may be a threshold where building another school would only appeal to those whose commitments to education are so low that they wouldn't receive any benefit, but clearly that's not the case in China if people are hurting themselves just to get admission.
Some may just be cheating for a free ride, but I clearly remember the SATs here. The ones I remember trying to come up with the most exotic cheating methods were the ones religiously doing the "1600 SAT questions" guides and were the people that would already have scored better than 90% of their peers. The difference between a 1600 and a 1500, in their minds, was going to mean the difference between MIT and a serving fries at Micky D's.
Well one idea would be to fork Warcraft into the (at least) 3 different games it encompases. There's the raid game, the pvp game, the quest to 60/storyline game. That'd let them all play differently. WoW sometimes suffers from trying to be too many things to too many people anyhow.
But still, any one of those currently is a life sucking event requiring almost all your free time to achieve any of the more challenging goals.
- If a person has no viable and realistic alternative that puts food on a table than to obey the whim of their employer, they have no choice. All this bullshit about how people are free to go is exactly that, even in the US. I may elect to leave my employer, but I will have to go to another one that is equally bad. Unless demand outweighs supply, employers are free to behave as badly as they'd like. The best alternative of a lot of shit, is still shit, and should be fixed. The western world went through this already at the turn of the last century, we should not allow our corporations to subject anyone else to that.
- Apple is not alone, another large computer manufacturer I know of uses Foxconn and no one is yelling at them, in fact they expect it of them. Apple is no more or less evil than any of their competitors who are also engaged in this behavior. They're all wrong and should all share the burden of making it right.
- All companies selling products in the US should feel obligations to support the ideals of the US, regardles of where they are hiring their labor. It is immoral for our companies to take jobs and money out of the "expensive" US and invest it elsewhere, when a primary reason for our expensive labor are these same laws designed to protect employees.
This is significantly more important than raw business pragmatism. What we value here must be ingrained in how we interact with others or we'll lose it. Competition works both ways, it can raise the bar, or it can force it down. Given that money is always concentrated in the hands of the wrong people, it is the job of governments to step in and fix the problem.
I'm not sure but MIT and Standford are pretty good considering they cater to the over-privileged. A lot of other Ivy League schools are really not at all that good. Harvard, Yale and Princeton come to mind as schools I'd encourage my child not to go to. Having helped a few of them get there, I'm none too impressed when a resume floats across my desk with those pedigrees. Once there you are often lucky to get an actual professor (esp. who speaks english) to teach the class, often it's some graduate lackey who may either not understand the material or be too distracted with his own academics to be a useful educator. Sure, teaching yourself is 95% of learning, but one asks what the tuition check is useful for.
State Universities on the other hand I think are one giant advantage the US has over some other places. It brings college level education to a significant fraction of the population that would otherwise not have the money or opportunity. It's true because there are so many, that they do not have the elite, but more often than not that's OK too. Those that performed well in life when mom and dad were there to force them to behave often are not the high performers afterwards. Most of the best engineers I know came out of state universities (note: I went to a private university that I was disappointed with). To a large extent it's what you make of it, but it's a great deal better than nothing at all.
Now if you go to any school at all and study: Art, 18th Century French Literature, Physical Education, Nature Studies, or my favorite, Art History...well you really can't blame any school if you are subsequently useless to society. Those are degrees for athletes with pro-sponsorship, or prospective house wives.
The more useful observation is that the economic advantages for doing business with China are so significant that even a company that has often put morality above economics in the US, can't help but compromise its morality. We already know that almost every other large corporation compromises it's american employees and consumers to do business with them.
If you've established a business in selling upgrades every 3 years, you want to make it clear to someone who is purchasing that the current generation is better than the last generation. You don't want him to educate himself, because in that process he's going to learn that very little has changed, or worse, that his competitor is actually better.
If I bought a pentium 3 a few years ago, I expect to be buying at least a pentium 5 this year. This is marketing, NOT engineering. It doesn't have to make technical sense, it has to make emotional sense. What Intel is actually afraid of is competition and their current strange and confuzzlated branding scheme makes it unclear what's what, allowing for a lot of benchmarking type tests to be discounted for not "comparing apples to apples".
Pfft they could make a fortune by showing Lost without commercials but making people who want answers to 2 year old plot points call a 1-900 number to get them. I'd never watch another TV show again, but I'd have to finish off this particular pile of crack.
Sorry. Frustrated viewer.
EQ converged. All good guilds were in the same few instances, usually fighting with one another (until wow came out, then they had to ally). If you weren't raiding you were grinding xp, usually into AA points because you weren't allowed into your guild until you were max level.
Couldn't do many quests without raids. Couldn't do much that was useful but grind as a group, that wasn't fun. PvP in eq was horrifying, you couldn't really do that.
I agree on the time thing. The only comment I have is that in WoW sometimes "Skill" and "low latency" go hand in hand, which is all wrong for a MMOG I think, but the PvP crowd of course loves it.
In EQ, skill was more of a strategic/tactical sort of ability, and you could be quite effective with latencies as high as 1 second as long as you were playing smart. That particular aspect of EQ I miss, and I think WoW raids suffer as a result.
Plenty of people will weigh in on real time combat versus other mechanisms, probably it's moot for a multiplayer online game, but there's twitch skill and then there's chess skill. A mmog seems like it should be more of the latter than the former, especially since it's just not technically possible right now to ensure all players are on the same field.
Ok so roleplay has nothing to do with MMOGs. WoW, EQ, Vanguard, no. The hardcore EQ group, which I used to fraternize with has no use for it either. It may mean that you fill the functional role of your class (cleric heal, warrior tank, wizard nuke, etc.), but that's it. The setting is just for eye candy.
The question is how hardcore you have to be to get to the top. In EQ only really good guilds made it. They gradually relaxed a bit so less hardcore guilds could stand a chance (but only that), but that was EQ. In WoW I see marginal guilds farming from AQ40. They often play badly, characters do stupid things, half are PVP specced yet in raid guilds, but often they win anyhow. In EQ anything less than a flawless performance from canonical character roles on hard content is a wipe.
They want something more hardcore than EQ ultimately is right now (many see PoP and similar expansions as impure concessions). Yet the only feature of EQ that may appeal to a broader and less hardcore audience is that EQ's raids are very much superior to WoW raids (mostly do to more refined but narrow character roles). By that I mean the encounters were more challenging and required better coordination (before anyone had vent or team speak). Otherwise they're making a game that maybe only a few hundred people will play. Good luck on that, I'll be on Gilneas.
Almost every mechanic in WoW that people like, are things hardcore people would hate. They're convenient, but too easy. Getting an epic in EQ required figuring out what you needed, never mind where it might be or how you might get it. In WoW it's spelled out. Hell in EQ it was a bitch just to figure out how to trigger a quest, you had to come up with the right string. In WoW...just click. I could go on.
I'm happy with WoW. I wish the raids were better, even if they had to eliminate PvP...but >50% like to PvP so I'll cope. I wouldn't go back to EQ or something worse if I were paid to, life is too short.
I wouldn't waste my free time supporting Java EITHER. The world needs something that is platform agnostic, like Java, but it needs to be free of corporate interests. If Sun won't release it, then it makes sense to duplicate it. It WILL be hard to convince the millions of schoolkids whose college professors decided to put Java on the curriculum to use anything else, but perhaps if you build it they will come.
What they meant wasn't "reliable and dependable", they meant "supported". Unfortunately if they use that word, people would think "Support, that I have to pay for because stuff is broke". It's a hard word for the corporate world to use with a straight face in light of recent support developments, covered in often humorous detail elsewhere. Support has connotations of non-english speaking helpdesks, monthy or access based fee's, never ending patches, etc. The word "dependable" just sounds happy, like a warm blanket on a snowy night.
Not many designers of any sort (HW, SW, etc.) like doing support, even when paid to do so. Most feel some level of obligation, but that obligation is proportional to how much food it puts on the table. Those who use open source feel like (and often are) they're mostly on their own. Those who buy commercial feel entitled to top notch support (and I tend to agree).
Reading corporate jargon requires the right set of beer[LSD]-goggles.
Let's not delude ourselves, because that is the #1 problem with Microsoft and why Windows sucks. Linux is hard to use. X does not suddenly make it "simple" because it's "clicky". All that configuration stuff is near impossible unless you've dedicated serious time in learning about it (at which point it seems trivial and easy). It's much, much easier to pick up OSX and use it as well as you used windows. It takes some time, but not nearly as much.
Linux is not ready for Joe Sixpack, in this case FUD is not helping. It needs to be dealt with. Not at the Linus level, but at the distro and app developer level. Makefile and configure scripts are great, but opaque to users who do not understand their contents. There Must Be A Better Way.
To say it another way, cutting out the middle man is an obvious benefit that Dell was just the first to be able to do. Some of the older companies had various agreements and contracts with those middle men preventing them from doing the obvious.
Time has passed and now everyone can offer direct sales. There has never been a time when all "middle men" were all useless pure-resellers. Often they value add, often they hit markets that the mfg can't reach. This is particularly true for corporate accounts. Dell uses any channels that make sense to remove excess cost to the end-user...how is this "cheating" or bad?
It seems people are wondering why Dell's guidances are falling. The answer should be obvious: the upgrade-upgrade-upgrade cycle is broken. Other than games (largely being answered by consoles, for the worse IMO), people just don't need the constant upgrades anymore.
I think he's saying he doesn't want to "get over it". We're consumers, we don't own enough stock to care what nVidia decides is in its own best interest.
The world DOES need more competitors and open drivers. The latter will remove one really big tether to win32.
To qualify to use an HOV lane, you must have the requisite number of people in your car. You're given entitlement to use this lane because you are trying to help reduce congestion, help save gas, help reduce pollution, etc. There's no extra charge and no vendor lock in. It works mostly because many people would rather get to work fast, even if it means sharing their car with others.
It's not at all a parallel situation with what AT&T wants to do. Your analogy may call attention to the one value of tiered interenet, but completely ignores that they way in which a greedy monopoly will use it as a weapon to lock down consumers. The government, the only authority for HOV lanes, may be a useless bureacracy but we can control the proliferation and governance of HOV lanes easily with our votes and angry protests. We have absolutely no control at all over AT&T...unless we want to live without a phone or internet.
I'm not sure why we're down on one of the few intelligent things that came out of France lately. Apple is in the wrong here...but I guess we like our pretty, overpriced boxes more than we like personal freedom.
In fairness, there's always a finite probability that you will be fucking shot, stabbed, run over, horsebit, snakewhipped, mugged, mutilated, rape, gagged, bound, drowned, cornholed, blown up, crashed, hit with a frikken jet, crushed by a falling building, or forced to train cheap foreign replacements in any lifestyle.
The military forces you to confront this early, it's a great level set for the rest of your life.
Slashdot Mirror
All you are saying boils down to "Having a degree is becoming a requirement for getting a job". That's really not relevant. Businesses are parasites on the ass of society that at times have selective and self-debilitating attachment criteria. One such criteria is applicants needing to have a piece of paper, regardless of their general competance. That's an argument for another place and I do not entirely disagree.
The argument is that those individuals that actually want to be educated about something, also need access to the resources that will enable them and access to those resources in China is so competitive that people are injuring themselves to stay ahead. The combination of professors with a good grasp on subject matter, lab space/tools for experimentation on concepts, and quality text books are usually important, at least in science and technology. Building more schools would enable more people. Apparently the original post felt otherwise, he didn't care to explain why.
The value of that education, across a larger number of people, should be pretty evident. We're building more new, useful things faster than we were 100 years ago. It has to be related to the education opportunities available to more and more people. Our Ivy League schools are not producing the only sources of innovation, in fact not even the majority.
No no no. If it was *that* guy from Lucent he'd have an RV that he parks in the parking lot of whoever is employing him.
If you print more dollars, all dollars become worthless. Education increases in value as more people have it. There may be a threshold where building another school would only appeal to those whose commitments to education are so low that they wouldn't receive any benefit, but clearly that's not the case in China if people are hurting themselves just to get admission.
Some may just be cheating for a free ride, but I clearly remember the SATs here. The ones I remember trying to come up with the most exotic cheating methods were the ones religiously doing the "1600 SAT questions" guides and were the people that would already have scored better than 90% of their peers. The difference between a 1600 and a 1500, in their minds, was going to mean the difference between MIT and a serving fries at Micky D's.
Maybe, but there are plenty of people in real life who spend their time harming easy prey.
Well one idea would be to fork Warcraft into the (at least) 3 different games it encompases. There's the raid game, the pvp game, the quest to 60/storyline game. That'd let them all play differently. WoW sometimes suffers from trying to be too many things to too many people anyhow.
But still, any one of those currently is a life sucking event requiring almost all your free time to achieve any of the more challenging goals.
- If a person has no viable and realistic alternative that puts food on a table than to obey the whim of their employer, they have no choice. All this bullshit about how people are free to go is exactly that, even in the US. I may elect to leave my employer, but I will have to go to another one that is equally bad. Unless demand outweighs supply, employers are free to behave as badly as they'd like. The best alternative of a lot of shit, is still shit, and should be fixed. The western world went through this already at the turn of the last century, we should not allow our corporations to subject anyone else to that.
- Apple is not alone, another large computer manufacturer I know of uses Foxconn and no one is yelling at them, in fact they expect it of them. Apple is no more or less evil than any of their competitors who are also engaged in this behavior. They're all wrong and should all share the burden of making it right.
- All companies selling products in the US should feel obligations to support the ideals of the US, regardles of where they are hiring their labor. It is immoral for our companies to take jobs and money out of the "expensive" US and invest it elsewhere, when a primary reason for our expensive labor are these same laws designed to protect employees.
This is significantly more important than raw business pragmatism. What we value here must be ingrained in how we interact with others or we'll lose it. Competition works both ways, it can raise the bar, or it can force it down. Given that money is always concentrated in the hands of the wrong people, it is the job of governments to step in and fix the problem.
I'm not sure but MIT and Standford are pretty good considering they cater to the over-privileged. A lot of other Ivy League schools are really not at all that good. Harvard, Yale and Princeton come to mind as schools I'd encourage my child not to go to. Having helped a few of them get there, I'm none too impressed when a resume floats across my desk with those pedigrees. Once there you are often lucky to get an actual professor (esp. who speaks english) to teach the class, often it's some graduate lackey who may either not understand the material or be too distracted with his own academics to be a useful educator. Sure, teaching yourself is 95% of learning, but one asks what the tuition check is useful for.
State Universities on the other hand I think are one giant advantage the US has over some other places. It brings college level education to a significant fraction of the population that would otherwise not have the money or opportunity. It's true because there are so many, that they do not have the elite, but more often than not that's OK too. Those that performed well in life when mom and dad were there to force them to behave often are not the high performers afterwards. Most of the best engineers I know came out of state universities (note: I went to a private university that I was disappointed with). To a large extent it's what you make of it, but it's a great deal better than nothing at all.
Now if you go to any school at all and study: Art, 18th Century French Literature, Physical Education, Nature Studies, or my favorite, Art History...well you really can't blame any school if you are subsequently useless to society. Those are degrees for athletes with pro-sponsorship, or prospective house wives.
The more useful observation is that the economic advantages for doing business with China are so significant that even a company that has often put morality above economics in the US, can't help but compromise its morality. We already know that almost every other large corporation compromises it's american employees and consumers to do business with them.
If you've established a business in selling upgrades every 3 years, you want to make it clear to someone who is purchasing that the current generation is better than the last generation. You don't want him to educate himself, because in that process he's going to learn that very little has changed, or worse, that his competitor is actually better.
If I bought a pentium 3 a few years ago, I expect to be buying at least a pentium 5 this year. This is marketing, NOT engineering. It doesn't have to make technical sense, it has to make emotional sense. What Intel is actually afraid of is competition and their current strange and confuzzlated branding scheme makes it unclear what's what, allowing for a lot of benchmarking type tests to be discounted for not "comparing apples to apples".
And all us geeks know that the poly sci, business and law students had the best parties.
Pfft they could make a fortune by showing Lost without commercials but making people who want answers to 2 year old plot points call a 1-900 number to get them. I'd never watch another TV show again, but I'd have to finish off this particular pile of crack. Sorry. Frustrated viewer.
EQ converged. All good guilds were in the same few instances, usually fighting with one another (until wow came out, then they had to ally). If you weren't raiding you were grinding xp, usually into AA points because you weren't allowed into your guild until you were max level.
Couldn't do many quests without raids. Couldn't do much that was useful but grind as a group, that wasn't fun. PvP in eq was horrifying, you couldn't really do that.
I agree on the time thing. The only comment I have is that in WoW sometimes "Skill" and "low latency" go hand in hand, which is all wrong for a MMOG I think, but the PvP crowd of course loves it.
In EQ, skill was more of a strategic/tactical sort of ability, and you could be quite effective with latencies as high as 1 second as long as you were playing smart. That particular aspect of EQ I miss, and I think WoW raids suffer as a result.
Plenty of people will weigh in on real time combat versus other mechanisms, probably it's moot for a multiplayer online game, but there's twitch skill and then there's chess skill. A mmog seems like it should be more of the latter than the former, especially since it's just not technically possible right now to ensure all players are on the same field.
Ok so roleplay has nothing to do with MMOGs. WoW, EQ, Vanguard, no. The hardcore EQ group, which I used to fraternize with has no use for it either. It may mean that you fill the functional role of your class (cleric heal, warrior tank, wizard nuke, etc.), but that's it. The setting is just for eye candy.
The question is how hardcore you have to be to get to the top. In EQ only really good guilds made it. They gradually relaxed a bit so less hardcore guilds could stand a chance (but only that), but that was EQ. In WoW I see marginal guilds farming from AQ40. They often play badly, characters do stupid things, half are PVP specced yet in raid guilds, but often they win anyhow. In EQ anything less than a flawless performance from canonical character roles on hard content is a wipe.
They want something more hardcore than EQ ultimately is right now (many see PoP and similar expansions as impure concessions). Yet the only feature of EQ that may appeal to a broader and less hardcore audience is that EQ's raids are very much superior to WoW raids (mostly do to more refined but narrow character roles). By that I mean the encounters were more challenging and required better coordination (before anyone had vent or team speak). Otherwise they're making a game that maybe only a few hundred people will play. Good luck on that, I'll be on Gilneas.
Almost every mechanic in WoW that people like, are things hardcore people would hate. They're convenient, but too easy. Getting an epic in EQ required figuring out what you needed, never mind where it might be or how you might get it. In WoW it's spelled out. Hell in EQ it was a bitch just to figure out how to trigger a quest, you had to come up with the right string. In WoW...just click. I could go on.
I'm happy with WoW. I wish the raids were better, even if they had to eliminate PvP...but >50% like to PvP so I'll cope. I wouldn't go back to EQ or something worse if I were paid to, life is too short.
I wouldn't waste my free time supporting Java EITHER. The world needs something that is platform agnostic, like Java, but it needs to be free of corporate interests. If Sun won't release it, then it makes sense to duplicate it. It WILL be hard to convince the millions of schoolkids whose college professors decided to put Java on the curriculum to use anything else, but perhaps if you build it they will come.
What they meant wasn't "reliable and dependable", they meant "supported". Unfortunately if they use that word, people would think "Support, that I have to pay for because stuff is broke". It's a hard word for the corporate world to use with a straight face in light of recent support developments, covered in often humorous detail elsewhere. Support has connotations of non-english speaking helpdesks, monthy or access based fee's, never ending patches, etc. The word "dependable" just sounds happy, like a warm blanket on a snowy night.
Not many designers of any sort (HW, SW, etc.) like doing support, even when paid to do so. Most feel some level of obligation, but that obligation is proportional to how much food it puts on the table. Those who use open source feel like (and often are) they're mostly on their own. Those who buy commercial feel entitled to top notch support (and I tend to agree).
Reading corporate jargon requires the right set of beer[LSD]-goggles.
Let's not delude ourselves, because that is the #1 problem with Microsoft and why Windows sucks. Linux is hard to use. X does not suddenly make it "simple" because it's "clicky". All that configuration stuff is near impossible unless you've dedicated serious time in learning about it (at which point it seems trivial and easy). It's much, much easier to pick up OSX and use it as well as you used windows. It takes some time, but not nearly as much.
Linux is not ready for Joe Sixpack, in this case FUD is not helping. It needs to be dealt with. Not at the Linus level, but at the distro and app developer level. Makefile and configure scripts are great, but opaque to users who do not understand their contents. There Must Be A Better Way.
To say it another way, cutting out the middle man is an obvious benefit that Dell was just the first to be able to do. Some of the older companies had various agreements and contracts with those middle men preventing them from doing the obvious.
Time has passed and now everyone can offer direct sales. There has never been a time when all "middle men" were all useless pure-resellers. Often they value add, often they hit markets that the mfg can't reach. This is particularly true for corporate accounts. Dell uses any channels that make sense to remove excess cost to the end-user...how is this "cheating" or bad?
It seems people are wondering why Dell's guidances are falling. The answer should be obvious: the upgrade-upgrade-upgrade cycle is broken. Other than games (largely being answered by consoles, for the worse IMO), people just don't need the constant upgrades anymore.
I think he's saying he doesn't want to "get over it". We're consumers, we don't own enough stock to care what nVidia decides is in its own best interest.
The world DOES need more competitors and open drivers. The latter will remove one really big tether to win32.
I second that. I still play Wasteland every so often.
I'm still dubious about "snake squeezin's", but it's probably better to not think about it.
To qualify to use an HOV lane, you must have the requisite number of people in your car. You're given entitlement to use this lane because you are trying to help reduce congestion, help save gas, help reduce pollution, etc. There's no extra charge and no vendor lock in. It works mostly because many people would rather get to work fast, even if it means sharing their car with others.
It's not at all a parallel situation with what AT&T wants to do. Your analogy may call attention to the one value of tiered interenet, but completely ignores that they way in which a greedy monopoly will use it as a weapon to lock down consumers. The government, the only authority for HOV lanes, may be a useless bureacracy but we can control the proliferation and governance of HOV lanes easily with our votes and angry protests. We have absolutely no control at all over AT&T...unless we want to live without a phone or internet.
I'm not sure why we're down on one of the few intelligent things that came out of France lately. Apple is in the wrong here...but I guess we like our pretty, overpriced boxes more than we like personal freedom.
We WANT Linux/Unix shells...they work just great, and have lots of tool support...and have lots of good documentation...and have 20+ years of abuse.
I'd think in lapboard design, particularly with Phantom exec's being what they are, cheeto's are the least destructive substance to contend with.
In fairness, there's always a finite probability that you will be fucking shot, stabbed, run over, horsebit, snakewhipped, mugged, mutilated, rape, gagged, bound, drowned, cornholed, blown up, crashed, hit with a frikken jet, crushed by a falling building, or forced to train cheap foreign replacements in any lifestyle.
The military forces you to confront this early, it's a great level set for the rest of your life.